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good evening everyone i'd like to um welcome you to the tuesday may 25th meeting of the dartmouth school committee equality and diversity subcommittee um per governor baker's order suspending certain provisions of the open meeting law glc 30a section 20.
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Hello. Welcome into the top of the fourth. As um Oh, hey Kevin McGee. How's it going? That guy still doesn't like me. As Izzy and Nina and Falvo are here. That should be fun. As Pope pieces one of the first fair ball. Nice play on that. Good pick by Stein. As there's one down the inning. As the only kid's name I know on Pope and I don't know if it's his first or his last name is Ham. I'm going to guess his last name. This person's Ham. I'm going to love that. I mean on rail. Ooh. Oh, but um Not a ball you want to swing at for the first pitch. Those Louisville bats are clean. That was the one that Dylan had. Not a fan of Louisville. I'm a DeMarini girl. That was my bat that I had. Uh Look at that, Diane. Diane.
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as the pope kid puts it into play but chico knocks it down but it looks like pope's gonna score a rune throw over to third kid safe it's all right it's all right as rich bedard trying to get his team fired up looks like pope takes an early lead here in the first inning dialed in here kid's one of the best pitchers in western mass and i stand by that just the basket i get going for the spartans sending as bradley thoughts on their first strike [Music] oh one page a little outside good cash by kb luck spartans here trying to get out of this and try to limit the damage a little bit pope has first and third as kids going kyle doesn't even give him the time of day while rabbi's up and they count one to be a big strikeout here as pope has two men in scoring position ball hit the second base oh and it's bobbled a little bit and it looks like pop's going to score another run looks like it pops up to nothing again brian mclaughlin here got late seems to be a good crowd here though [Music] this pitch gets behind the catcher and it looks like pulsing is going on the run kid goes to third pope takes an early three-nothing lead not to start the spartans we're looking for it's just unfortunate because pope really hasn't got any plays into the outfield it's kind of just been knocked down ground balls that hasn't been any played at first kind of unfortunate but spartans will bounce back rabbit throws them all outside good stop by kyle robbie puts on the strikes down kid gets a piece of it count being one two as an off speed pitch robbie gets him for the third out spartans gotta figure something out to get back into this game as we go into the break pope up three nothing hey uh [Music] uh as in like the meat right we're back here bob kids name pitch against pam that's honestly sick but yeah as kyle is already down 0-2 very interesting to see a catcher batting lead off but that's just me as ham does a ball this one up into the tennis courts but as being a guy that played baseball here ninten this team's not bad this team has a lot of potential yes you have kyle for another year you got chico she goes gross he got sam feliciano as kyle swings one pops one up in the
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but [Music] [Applause] [Music] you [Music] do [Music] [Applause] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] good afternoon parents family members students staff and dignified guests welcome to the 2021 gilbert high school and aohsd independent studies commencement ceremony my name is anthony tony atala and i will be your master of ceremonies before we officially begin our ceremony we would like to take a moment to remember our family and friends who have lost a loved one this past year due to the endemic let us share in a moment of silence together as we remember them thank you please stand and welcome ari alfaro and crystal murillo as they will lead us in the pledge of allegiance please remain standing for the national anthem oh okay put your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god and indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you please be seated oh i'm sorry about that please remain [Music] standing [Music] so hmm [Music] um [Music] [Applause] now i'd like to welcome elijah benitez as you will read the decorum statement oh also one more thing everyone can remain seated now hi everybody today is a special day and one we are excited to celebrate together this ceremony is both a joyous and solemn occasion please let us remember to be courteous to those around us we need to be respectful to all our graduates so no air horns or noise makers face masks must be worn at all times and please maintain a social distance of six feet unless with someone of your same household or family remain in your assigned seat while filming and taking pictures keep your recording device at chest level and do not impede the vision of others who are seated do not stop in or block the aisle today's ceremony is being live streamed and will remain on this district's youtube channel to view at your convenience i would like to recognize special individuals joining me on stage today from the anaheim union high school district board of trustees i would like to introduce to you board of trustee clerk anne-marie randall trejo [Applause] board of trustee member al jabbar and also assistant superintendent dr jaron freed we would like to thank our teachers administrators and our counseling staff who have supported the graduating class of 2021 please give a warm welcome to our first senior senior class speaker shaylee babashov good afternoon class of 2021.
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uh okay good evening we will reconvene the meeting of may 24th with the pledge of allegiance and the closed session report out it'll be my privilege as president to lead in the pledge of allegiance to the flag and to promote a moment of silence and i have some flags right here so if we all stand and do our pledge okay on hands on your heart i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god individuals with liberty and justice for all um a moment of silence i would like for us all to think of this um week that we are going to have the privilege to graduate many of our youth who have gone through a very unusual senior year and it will then be terminated by memorial day which we should all keep in mind all of those people all those men and women who devoted a good share of their life to the the service of our country to keep us the great free country that we are okay thank you now the clerk of the board of trustees will now report the actions taken during our closed session i just want to thank you anna for your uh quote thank you so much 4.1 the board of trustees unanimously voted to make the following transfers effective july 1.
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okay and my last question have either one of you posted anything negatively on any social medias about the board of education or the administration no sir um the only thing i've been critical of is the graduation rate of the school which is below the state standard which is currently at around 70 to 75 percent maybe even less and that's pretty much anything i've been critical is there anyone else some questions um my question don't take this the wrong way um is why now there was an election very recently where quite honestly nobody read i ran on a post for three open seats why what has changed from then to now that that is hopefully i mean in a very good way hopefully gotten you charged up and energized to do this yeah if i missed you know my personal circumstances have changed recently in terms of both work and home life um i mentioned to you last meeting that i have a relatively large but young family so as my youngest starts to mature and becomes a little bit more independent my wife and i both find that we have time to pursue other activities both professional and volunteers so uh with the opportunity uh the time capacity and the availability i thought that it was the right time to put in an application yeah so for me i have one child in the le mans school right now i have another that'll be starting in september of this year both of my students will be i'm sorry both my sons will be in or have gone will be going through the early intervention one is currently probably going to be going into kindergarten and the other will be doing early intervention at the age of three so one of the issues that got me really um motivated and very passionate is the lack of support i feel for special ed kids and for children in those special needs and case in point what i found earlier this year when we first started going into virtual is that the teachers were not very well prepared and the course material that was prepared was a little substandard and not just myself but other parents other moms and dads i was talking to felt the same way now i being a parent obviously i let my emotions get the best of me because i was still learning the world everything around and what i found was i communicated with the teachers and they were open to suggestions because they realized they confided to me that they weren't getting some of the support that they needed so and i understand that because of my work that happens you don't always get the support that you need but you have to go think outside the box and that's what we did we working together with my son's teacher we were able to make the necessary changes to in fact where you know i kept everything quiet and let them take all the credit and the feedback was very positive with the changes in the material now if that can be done for one i can only imagine what's going on with everybody else so that's what pretty much got me involved uh you know great question um i think uh in terms of uh assets uh like mr thomas ellie pointed out probably the single greatest asset that we have as an organization here is our personnel uh and so finding the brightest among them empowering them to do what they do and do it the best i think really is uh the key strength and in many ways um in terms of what we could stand to improve i'll be perfectly honest with you i'm not intimately familiar enough to know at this point and it would be remiss of me to suggest uh what we would need to be able to do however uh if appointed i've worked very hard to understand what their strengths and weaknesses are and ultimately help create plans that will change one thing to the other so the benefits i mean the strengths are definitely the community i mean just look behind you look at everybody here you know they're not that passionate about their kids and what's going on here then then why not and you're obviously the person over here you know you have some really great teachers we have wonderful parents here that are extremely passionate passionate to words that you can even describe um what i'm sorry what the second part of your question the challenges the challenges is that synergy the synergy to find out it's very easy to go on social media to complain it's very easy but that's only one side of the point you know and as you all know there's two sides for every point there's two sides to every truth and i think that's what's missing is obviously there's roadblocks that red tape there's things hindering us from providing the things that we need for our teachers for our students and it's a matter of working together to try to mitigate those issues and to rectify them assess within the resources that we currently have and i think we can do that thank you is there anyone else what kind of relationship should the district um i think it actually fits with your last answer um it's definitely gotta be a one-on-one you know as a board you i'm gonna hear one side of the story you know the community the parents they're gonna tell you the other side and somewhere in the middle of this truth you know and we need that level of communication obviously there are some things that you can't disclose very for whatever reason and there are some things that actually there's some things that parents are a little nervous about exposing world because they don't want retaliation from their teachers or from the board or from the mother so this is the problem and this is also where we need to come to that level because you know we had a group of people here with these signs you know and they weren't here if they weren't unhappy for the last couple years you know it was just one year six months they wouldn't be here so if you guys are not listening to them then i don't know what's going on that's your problem so i think i might take it in a slightly different direction it actually goes along uh something mr ball brought up a little bit earlier which is uh perhaps maybe some of the issues that exist are because we're not doing enough to engage the community and kind of bring them into the fold in terms of what the board of education priorities are and what uh they could be doing to positively contribute towards those ends i think that could have a two-sided not only approach but effect uh not only to offset some of the recruitment issues that you may have at the board level but also to get the community engaged to foster that communication and ultimately to amplify the results that you guys can produce so in terms of communication i think getting the community engaged to that degree might be an opportunity to take it to the next level are there any other questions all right well thank you so much for uh answering the board's questions [Applause] [Music] all right so as far as i mean i think either one of the gentlemen i know but we need to make a decision you know like i said it's it's a very unusual situation because most of the time there is one position and one person and we've never had to really pick between two candidates we've never had this we've had elections where there were more people in the seats which was unusual in itself the public said that we didn't have to appoint so now we have to have a discussion based on uh another resume letters um based on the answers you've heard tonight is there a particular candidate that if you would like to put forward more than another yes well yeah i mean whoever replaces miss stevens she is up for re-election this november so whoever is put on the boards tonight will have to run in november regardless so yeah and you can vote in november but we do need someone this evening because otherwise the county will come in uh at the beginning of june and they are allowed to then appoint whoever they choose and so i don't think that's a i don't think any thoughts i think that i want to congratulate both of our applicants i think it's important to understand and see that you know between the board the district the community it's a symbiotic relationship we all need each other i think that both [Music] um i'm just throwing thoughts out there agencies or you know groups such as you know the work what we are here with for children so um it's really a this is a tough one just putting those thoughts up here so we can let this of interest is [Music] in the sense that time wise that he would then leave the recognition to then focus more on more was that is that okay i just i didn't want to say that's what you're saying how did you really do that okay all right so i mean obviously if it becomes a conflict of interest or where he would need to focus on the board he's willing to make that make that adjustment like i said i i think both candidates have their have the strength i think they're both good candidates and now someone just have to put forth uh like you're saying we're just you know motion can i get stuck all right so mr zuppko made a motion um so at this time all right so at this time we're gonna move like i said like we've never had to do it before but we are going to affirm that yesterday if that is not your is um let's see what happens no [Music] is [Music] yes [Music] yes [Music] yes [Music] yes [Music] all right so congratulations and thank you [Applause] um [Music] other comment i wanted to make before we began anything as i was looking over the agenda and there are numerous donations made to our district before um i saw a donation from mrs connor and her family um to have uh spaces for outside for the children to sit and i think that's awesome so thank you to her and her family um as well as a numerous donations as far as to help aid with our food bank and i saw those came in as well thank everyone that was donating for that cause as well um at this time i would like to bring forward uh the principles so that they can give out a student of the month award so can i get the principal for lalonda so good evening congratulations to alex batista may student of the month congratulations and avion rosado school lafayette's first student of the month is kenya gomez okay [Applause] [Music] palderon why don't good evening everyone our first recipient is [Applause] our second recipient is avapa [Applause] our next recipient is juan pablo chavez reyes and our final recipient is christian daniel pervez [Applause] [Music] hello everyone community middle school is proud to recognize for its student of the month daniel gonzalez aguilar [Applause] community middle school is also proud to recognize the student of the month diego escobar [Applause] and for the high school good evening in recognition of students demonstrating positive crusader citizenship traits such as responsibility respect kindness integrity cooperation tolerance and perseverance we have four recipients the first recipient is awarded to daniel cisneros our second recipient brooke cooper our third recipient jeremy suarez belisaro [Applause] i will take the award on his behalf and then last but certainly not least angel the last place [Applause] thank you um so congratulations mr caballo who is by day a teacher and by night a jedi always going the extra mile and supporting the students and families and creating an engaging learning environment when you enter his passion there's always fun learning activities going on and it's clear how excited the students are to be in your classroom i truly appreciate how welcoming we are when we pop in to visit um he always ensures um i can participate to participate in the activities the energy that mr creates between students and a growing love for education is amazing he motivates them and fills them with love of learning bringing humor continuous enthusiasm to everything he does i am so grateful to have you part of the peaceful team your passion for preschool education and japan and the results you get speak for themselves um thank you for all that you do congratulations i may look forward to be with you [Applause] answer lafayette's done for the month of may is mrs janine kinney my mantra falafel is teamwork makes the dream work and mrs kinney is a key player for us her impact on the students is quite evident as she is able to get them to self-reflect during times when others might find it difficult to do so the students are not only able to find a calm in mrs kinney but often leave her office feeling reassured and with a much more positive outlook to carry them through their day staff often look to her as well as she is a true confidant with a keen listening ear that is not only free of judgment but ready at any time to offer advice that advice is usually paired with her unique sense of humor that lightens any mood the same rings true for myself as often there are times i need a different perspective and mrs kinney is always ready to provide one she is consistently consistently willing to support my crazy ideas and does what she can to help me see them through most impressively with her health at the start of the school year we were able to bring lafayette's attendance rate to pre-culvert numbers within three weeks after seeing a 100 percent increase the first month of school families especially our virtual ones were struggling and understandably so with her knowledge of resources where she is truly second to none we were able to either directly support families or refer them to organizations that could provide assistance there is no doubt that with her extensive knowledge we changed many lives to the better thank you mrs kinney for not only all of your help but for your dedication to our students staff and families um mrs pellegrino is the new face of smalling school but not to the difference he is kind caring understanding professional and just a wonderful person and a teacher she cares about building relationships with her students and forming a strong rapport with them another third grade teacher quoted she always stops what she is doing to help other colleagues he always answers grade level texts regardless of the time of the day she remembers all of the important dates and sends emails to keep us informed and quote mrs pellegrino has made smalling school a better place and i'm excited to continue to work with her throughout the years and years of coming accusing special parts of team small [Applause] congratulations [Music] hello the community middle school is proud to recognize ron lee as his gem award recipient for the month of may i've had the privilege of working with mr lee for the past 12 years as a 7th grade teacher science teacher mr lee has inspired hundreds of students many of whom have gone on to careers in the fields of senate on june 10 mr lee will be hosting a virtual college and career vet with our friends at students to science and our corporate partner insmed a local somerset county-based global pharmaceutical company when i researched internet i came across the company's purpose statement which reads in part a purpose to find solutions where there were none before a purpose to do what's right even when it isn't easy both are profound statements that can easily be applied to school and certainly the mr lee's class as i mentioned mr lee works closely with our friends and students to sign to deliver virtual labs to the students in down brook this year more than ever our partnership with students the science and our corporate partner cenopy has had a tremendous impact on learning by providing a safe hands-on lab experience to our students during this pandemic mr lee has helped select coordinate and distribute individually packaged materials for approximately 30 virtual labs this school year over the last few years mr lee has become a bit of a celebrity with the students the science people and has been asked to contribute to their newsletter and attend annual working lunches in order to provide input on the program's implementation mr lee is a middle school robotics advisor over recent years mr lee and mr nowicki have helped to grow the robotics club into the most popular and highest attended after-school activity in the middle school our robotics club partners with the high school robotics team picatinny arsenal and ethicon engineers this year the middle and high school robotics club co-hosted a zoo meeting with u.s army major aaron hoyce who discussed the various roles robots play in our military as both a tactical and operational tool although the robotics program has been modified this year due to the pandemic i would like to thank mr lee for keeping it going and for ensuring students continue to have this avenue to explore their love of science and robotics thank you mr lee for all that you have done and for all the wonderful experiences you will provide our students in the future [Applause] yes good evening again it is with great pleasure that we recognize mr lee casperson as the gem recipient for bound brook high school lee is such an amazing person to work with he works so hard for all of his students constantly checking in with them and ensuring they are sure of what they need to do in his class he communicates with his students diligently to have them turn and work on time and helps them when they struggle um in their studies students really love him and seek him out for advice and guidance he has been an integral part of extracurricular activities as well coaching multiple sports and as the advisor for both project graduation and the senior class that being said lee's work in setting up the senior trip ensuring all seniors that want to go can attend and following up with students for detentions fines etc has been instrumental in determining and implementing a way for the seniors to celebrate the end of the year and their last year in high school with all the changes that pandemic has brought lee has stepped up to the challenge and demonstrated his care and concern for the well-being of students at ebhs planning and setting up trips is not easy especially for roughly 135 students he has really taken control over the process as well as following up with students which as we all know is a challenge all within itself not not to mention parent communications as well on top of this he continues to effectively teach his students without loss of rigor mr casperson's level of involvement and willingness to be there for his students especially during these times proves he is well deserving of this award mr casperson you were limitless congratulations okay at hello everybody our district gem award winner is mr jeff salmeri mr sal mary is a social studies teacher at the high school he teaches advanced placement united states history and he does a wonderful job how i got in contact with him is mr salmeria is one of my advanced placement exam proctors right now we are in the middle of advanced placement exams and mr style mary stepped up uh for me and did a wonderful job uh proctoring an exam um for me mr salmero is very capable uh proctor who's always willing to help and is not afraid of a big challenge as a teacher mr salmeri is very well regarded his colleagues say he's very good at teaching students how to debate and how to make this strong point that is based on evidence they also say his classes are rigorous but he is fair and extremely helpful to his students in learning the content they also say he's very helpful helpful to his teacher colleagues in setting up the vertical alignment within their curriculum and mr salmeri is the interdisciplinary studies chair at the high school school when i spoke to mr salmeri last week i was impressed when he told me that when he feels the energy going down in his classroom he will drop down and do some push-ups in front of his class to try to get the energy back up so i'd like to congratulate mr salmero for the district job award um [Music] this would be the time to address them um but we could certainly write them down and make sure that between now and the next [Music] um so i just have a question because i was late for the meeting um because i noticed that it's different than what's on the website am i correct uh what's what exactly an agenda i'm sorry that the agenda is different than well okay well um the agenda item that i put in online um i guess is there's because dr gallagher isn't here tonight correct he's not i believe oh okay so i guess there would be somebody else um going on the online questions well that's what i was just talking to our tech person um we don't have and there is no access for us to those questions so to anyone that's watching this evening we will note those questions down because they still exist because they're there in the virtual world somehow but we have no access to them because dr gallagher is not here so what will happen is anyone that asks questions that are online we will then hold those and carry those over to the next meeting okay okay so so anyway the question that i posted online is not on this um but it was about the high tops grant and they said mentioned 4 000 um so i just wondered because i i know they did the uh the meeting with the parents i wasn't sure there's anything else they did you know i don't think they would spend four thousand dollars just to have an online meeting so i'm just wondering [Laughter] the whole program itself cost like seven thousand dollars it wasn't just a parent piece there was three pd's for staff there was three um student things that happened like starting october maybe january or december and then february it was like three times so it was actually nine sessions total with different people it was already done um i didn't realize it wasn't the grant pieces from youth services commission like municipal alliance so this is just the technicality it was our program was already done it was just that who was paying for the program so there's nothing else already been done it's just now that we're reimbursing the district for paying for parliament okay so because i mentioned it looks like it was already happened so that's why i feel confused about that okay um yeah so then um and then i guess we maybe this would be revised this agenda uh because everything says that the superintendent will approve all of these so you in order to get these things passed so at this point he had recommended them through to putting them on the agenda and then it is just up for us today to approve them or not all right thank you by the way the first question was based on 10.9 i guess they rewarded it but it's 10.9 says approve the submission acceptance of the grant application for some accounting municipal youth services commission for high top professional services for 4 like um to get a motion to approve the minutes from both regular and executive meeting of may 10th 2021.
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i am so happy to be here today in person with all of you your family friends and the faculty and staff of greenway high school i have missed you all so much so what does one say to a class that is graduating more than a year into a global pandemic well i'm going to try but don't worry mr barnes has asked me to keep it short here's the bottom line you all have persevered this has been a trying year for everyone and the fact that you are sitting here today is a testament to your fortitude and your drive and i hope that you will take this unique experience with you into the future in a positive way we all know that book learning is important but so too are the skills that you had to learn and refine during the pandemic patience perseverance tolerance self-motivation self-care caring for family and friends and communication skills these are the skills that will help you throughout your life in both your career and personally everyone has challenges and makes mistakes in their lives having these skills will help you navigate and help you when you inevitably have to pick yourself up brush yourself off and move forward everyone's path will be filled with unforeseen twists and turns being flexible and willing to change course or overcome obstacles is vital to your continued success and finally i would like to touch on the importance of being part of a community for the past four years guhsd and greenway high school have been your community now you are moving on to different communities whether that's college work or the military wherever life takes you be an active member of your community and work to make that community better vote be an informed voter and vote in every election for every race and every item on the ballot school board members are at the bottom by being involved in your community and voting in elections you will make your community your city your county your state and your nation a better place for everyone graduating from high school during a pandemic is a milestone to be sure but i hope that it is only the first of many many milestones in your life on behalf of the guhsd governing board and the administration of the glendale union high school district we wish you all much happiness and a bright and successful future ready yep okay mrs kennedy is my pleasure to certify that these students have met the requirements for graduation as set forth by the state of arizona and the glendale union high school district i respectfully request that you accept these graduates and that you and mr bowler confirm diplomas upon them as a member of the governing board of the glendale union high school district and by the authority vested in me by the constitution and the laws of the state of arizona i accept and confirm that the greenway high school class of 2021 has met the requirements for graduation mr barnes please present your graduates to receive their diplomas [Applause] before we present the graduates with their diplomas i would like to echo the comments made earlier by our senior class president we want the ceremony to belong to every graduate sitting here this afternoon we do ask that our guests act with restraint when names are called so that each graduate's name can be heard clearly by everyone including and especially their family members we ask that you please re remain in your seats um i know you want to move to get that perfect picture but you'll notice that we do have photographers here this afternoon and we don't want you to try to get that perfect shot and block the view from someone else as we read the names we will be reading the names following the physical graduates that are here we will have announced the names of some of our students who were unable to join us this afternoon and we'll identify when those names will be read so at this point mr jarrell and miss lang will you please join me or please direct the first row of the graduating class of 2020 to rise and prepare to receive their diplomas okay you guys go down emma elizabeth schwartz diana jasmine moniquez t helen marie white harmana tv avery isabella richard rita benjamin danica ashley young tana zendeja duet brianna mckenzie wheeler taylor susan brown hayden olivia tofti janet manuel orcades annika marie olson rachel lynn avila rhys madison tate kelsey noel hi jayden isaiah rodriguez ethan thomas bourdar logan scott roper michaela nicole tang abby lynn rafael [Music] maddie lila donner rebecca kathleen weedman [Music] gavin allen richards jade sandoval almante jaden cade carsey stephen granados flores amy cruz delgado tien newt ciao cameron sophie frager jeremiah noble crawford chloe noel ray fox kevin jordan rodriguez ramirez river raeanne alexander ann zelda chavez gwendolyn rose cheatham mercedes marie smith benjamin robert nunez austin alfonso morales gage mason dunn efren perez daniel kyle craig christian james anthony scali christian kane brent thomas kenyon richard james salant dylan charles baltzer emma darlene inman trayvon lamar miller [Applause] [Music] ann lauzon nolan anthony thompson [Music] jamie ann clark daniel jin [Music] dylan lee godman jose antonio tajeda [Music] christophe santiago borientos alexis adrian molina marquez [Music] miguel angel derasco [Applause] sydney christina osborne benjamin michael forsyth kenna nicole van der nord kevin ulysses hakuna gonzalez kamat [Music] [Applause] richard d'ambrosio sophia janelle martinez [Music] spencer kenneth straddling ariana lynn russ anthony merle rex hastings christie nicole smallwood [Music] phillip land hunter lee moore kalyn brook heath jacob anthony reem skurlock allison danielle bustamante quentin charlie kendall yazzie kayla ann kerba caleb troy warner emma riley morrison damond lewis neal rafael barreo jake tyler rathbun bradley william glass [Music] natalie paulina padilla noah kai brosman bernice ornelas alfieri fernando caprile rodriguez brian alexander riconco cruz [Applause] rachel nicole myers ashlynn brianna johnson javier ocampo aguirre [Applause] hayden michael gilsdorff [Music] lillian adeline west hannah elizabeth madrill jocelyn marie tiarina mackenzie lynn beasley elizabeth grace ward julia lorelei garrison caitlin nicole rendon [Music] elena lofa lam yuen [Music] allen wayne windsor the second jackson marinello hammer nicholas christopher rother [Music] michael david freeland alan parra natalie cabrera danny chico pena junior angelina rose finocchio matthew gabriel teofilo [Applause] tanisha nikki begue keaney rodriguez meza lyanna morgan duran isabella marie martinez luis octavio gonzalez diaz raymond manuel robles eduardo santos mendes evan cole kinsler tyler james poole hunter scott clapp brittany voo aiden scott joe bear chanel airy walker [Applause] ryan michael hoff emily elizabeth villalobos [Applause] jacob allen haugen [Applause] joanna judith vasquez-perez shayla faye doyle jeanette isabelle marie holly monica cynthia olia lindsey page lafon daschellis maria martinez [Applause] [Music] [Applause] leland thomas blank jillian rayne wright ava lida mckenzie husk athena peyton ruiz logan wickson lonnie [Applause] jade amani cheyenne scott modesto emmanuel gamez carly torres desiree monique lovely borrego sarah lynn roland brodie dalton bobzien allen roland manuel bersna camargo d [Music] dale lee james thomas jacob matthew eversole zachary james pena david alexander cordes isabelle vergara [Applause] luke adam doyle diego muriel santian damian xander gutierrez nadia martin del campo henry dong ashley lynn wilson anthony leroy kennedy alan dang tran [Music] william robert allen pence dominic alexander martinez jason yeah no [Music] joseph tyler cappio alexa may samora [Applause] christian eduardo beltran gracia elena vinolai flores marcos luna avilas matthew dale mcculloch damien jamal davis silas richard olsen renzo ivan luviano gonzalez [Applause] john jeffrey randall
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joining me on stage for this ceremony are patti kennedy glendale union high school district's governing board clerk and mr brian capistran superintendent of the glendale union high school district please welcome governing board member clerk patty kennedy and mr capistran this class of 2021 is thunderbird high school's 47th graduating class today is a special one for families and friends however these graduates are now the young men and women of the hour they have richly added to the traditions of and the greatness of thunderbird high school each graduate investment in his or her future we will commence with the honor of receiving a high school diploma at this time i ask that you silence all personal devices to preserve the dignity of the ceremony tradition dictates that the audience remains standing during the processional ladies and gentlemen i now present to you the class of 2021.
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at this time please rise for the national anthem [Music] so [Music] tradition dictates that the audience stand during the processional however due to enable all of our guests to view the incoming graduates we ask that you remain seated ladies and gentlemen i present to you the graduating class of 2021 [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] okay it gets stuck in there good morning ladies and gentlemen my name is kimberly castro your student body president [Applause] class of 2021 are you proud to those of you sitting before this arena that conquered a global pandemic to those of you that lost someone close to you to those of you that stood by each other's side not only for yourself but for the people around you to those of you that persevered are you proud because i am here to tell you why today and for the next decades to come i want you to look at yourself in the mirror and see a survivor we're being recognized not only for accomplishments in our education but our willingness to live our willingness to stand your ground to survive this world of unexpected turns let's set our academic achievements aside for a moment and reflect on the greatest accomplishment of all we're alive in fact every one of you in this room contributed to the strength of another you may be the reason for someone's happiness and health at this very moment if you are amongst those that were greatly impacted i want you to reflect on those that helped you through this rough time i want you to love them dearly to appreciate them for they have taught you patience and hope for a better tomorrow 2021 graduates as you walk out of this room today i want you to stand big and proud because years from now when history is told we will not be referred to as a pitiful pair we will be referred to as an indestructible generation that lived to told this one single sentence if i was able to face a global pandemic what is stopping me from facing more you're the face of this generation use it wisely and remain proud your existence is the greatest accomplishment of all congratulations class of 2021 long laid the survivors thank you [Applause] the most important responsibility of a public school is to promote academic excellence apollo high school confers its highest distinction on students in the top one percent of the graduating class i am pleased to present four students who hold the highest academic ranking for this graduating class please stand as i call your name cal amprin [Applause] noel hernandez [Applause] he trong aubry wells [Applause] students who are ranked academically in the top 3 percent please stand and be recognized for achieving the status of high distinction finally i wish to acknowledge those students who are ranked academically in the top 10 percent of this class and have earned honor status while i will not present them to you individually let me draw your attention to their names which are marked in your commencement program and ask you to applaud their accomplishments [Applause] now you will hear from our students who are graduating with highest distinction cal will speak first followed by noel hernandez he trong and aubry wells following their remarks brenna wasson your senior class president will make a presentation on behalf of this senior class [Applause] hey everyone before i get going i want to thank some of the people who helped me along the way thanks to every one of my teachers my coaches and of course to my parents especially my mom although my mustache may suggest otherwise i am graduating on time and without them that would not have been possible thanks aside i feel or at least i felt a strange lack of accomplishment in graduating one percent this is largely because i never really saw what i was doing is very impressive for me it was just work the challenge was maintaining consistency but i think that in itself is a major achievement after all most major accomplishments are only made possible by consistent even tedious grind and having the grit to do it really isn't easy being willing to do this work and having people to keep me at it is why i was able to succeed and it will continue to be that way so if i could leave my graduating class with any advice it would be to not be afraid of the grind the necessary work is after all necessary and all of you have enough talent to achieve at something if you put the work in good morning it is my pleasure to welcome students family and faculty to the graduation day of apollo high school's class of 2021 i would have to say that the class of has had the most unique but also the most difficult path to graduation the world took a drastic turn in the beginning of 2020 with the coven 19 pandemic it left people around the world scared for what was to come and as we and we as students felt that to another level are we going to have school are my parents going to lose their job what if i get sick people tend to assume that our generation is lazy not hard-working that we can't do things for ourselves but i am here but i think our i think our generation exemplifies the exact opposite to all the generation to all the graduates in front of us today and around the country we overcame obstacles that no other previous generation in recent times had to overcome but the obstacles are not over as we leave here today as graduates our new beginnings will not all be sunshines and rainbows most of us will go on to college and get into mountains of debt others will go straight to work while few others are still deciding what their next move is whatever route you take after today will challenge you and push you down constantly the system is made so that you fail there will be obstacles after obstacles and many just simply give up but i'm here today before you to tell you that anything is possible if you put your heart and soul into it at a young age my father was deported in 2012 i had a sister passed away my mom was a single mom for most of my childhood and i grew up most of my life hiding my true self as someone that is lgbtq but here i am today [Applause] but here i am today as valedictorian of my high school class so whatever your heart desires in life i encourage you to put 110 in and achieve your goals we are only on this planet for a limited amount of time so treat your life as a gift because you only get one thank you and have a wonderful day hello everyone my name is he i am absolutely honored and excited to be speaking this morning and i hope we're all doing fantastic class of 2021 all i can say is gg that means good game we did it the years of high school are now forever beloved memories today we celebrate a remarkable milestone in life today will we as graduates begin to fly to our dreams here's a quick story 12 years ago i was graduating from kindergarten as a little little boy i remember also wearing a fancy cap and a fancy gown and you know what i thought when they handed me that little paper diploma i thought life was done in the same way even though we've worked so hard to finish high school there's still a lot to achieve in life especially our dreams it's going to be a lot of work yes but the future doesn't scare us the future welcomes us because we are now ready to confront real challenges the fact that you and i persevere through more than a year of quarantine and still graduated whether you're here or at home listening means that we're all heroes of the 21st century each of us is definitely capable of making the world a better place in one way or another be confident and determined and let your hard work pave the way to the greatest dreams start today as we move forward into new horizons i pray that god will be with all of us as he has helped me achieve success throughout high school and will continue to guide me as i attend princeton university starting this fall [Applause] i would like to thank every parent teachers staff faculty and administrator who have worked so tirelessly to ensure an unforgettable and remarkable experience at apollo no students could fathom to be here without your help once again huge congratulations to the class of 2021 for taking w's and graduating i wish you all the best of luck and let's show everyone that we are the heroes that the world needs thank you [Music] good morning class of 2021 friends families teachers and staff all my apollo family the day has finally come for us to graduate high school these last four years have been challenging for all of us especially this last year with the pandemic and online learning however throughout all of it we are still here today about to graduate from our home away from home apollo has become a home for many of us the teachers offering their infinite wisdom about life athletic events where in blue or gold could truly shine spirit weeks that got us excited about our hawk pride creating friendships that will last a lifetime and becoming a great big family although we may be scared to leave this family that does not mean we should be scared of what lies ahead these past four years have prepared us for for the next chapter in life and the people who prepared us are none other than the dedicated teachers and staff at apollo without them we would not have been able to learn new skills that will prepare us for our life after high school without them we would not have been able to define our strengths and find our voice the teachers and staff at apollo challenge us to improve where we were weak so we can learn and grow as people on behalf of the class of 20 20 21 i would like to thank the teachers and staff for an amazing past four years furthermore i would like to thank all the families of the class of 2021 who are here with us today and those who cannot be but are watching from home each of you provided us with your own lessons and teachings that shaped us into the young adults we are today we look up to you we appreciate you we love you thank you for always pushing us to our greatest potential thank you for being our number one cheerleaders finally i would like to thank the class of 2021 for making the last four years some of the most unforgettable times i can say without a doubt that without you wall as classmates high school would have been a very dull place to be for me personally some of the most special times came through the sense of belonging that i was provided here at apollo and of course all the inside jokes we have all shared these past four years memories we will hold on to to forever to the apollo family thank you for everything and as you leave class of 2021 always remember our school vision to see all students graduate empowered for a lifetime of success may the future hold great things for each and every one of you thank you good morning to our friends family faculty and to the graduating class of 2021 my name is brenna watson and i have been honored to serve as your senior class president this year has been a chapter of our lives that we will never forget we have survived a pandemic school closure cries of social injustice and so much more it has been exhausting but we got through it and are stronger for it now we are moving on to the next chapter of our lives as senior class president it is my honor to present our senior class gifts these are things that will mark our chapter around the apollo campus forever our first gift will help beautify apollo and add extra shade around campus with 10 new full-grown trees trying to offset global warming our second gift is to the junior class this is a little out of the ordinary but because of the impact of the pandemic our juniors weren't able to do their normal fundraising so we decided to help by donating funds to their class after all this has been a year of learning and reflecting upon how to help each other lastly we will be contributing to a concrete lettering initiative that will feature large ahs lettering that will be placed between the two gyms so that visitors remember their ad apollo these gifts will help commemorate our legacy here at apollo someone once said lives are made of chapters after one is written it cannot be revised but we can write a new chapter with each new day as this chapter closes we begin a new chapter of our lives as graduates of apollo i'm excited to see the way the rest of our book unfolds congratulations class of 2021 brenna on behalf of the students and faculty of apollo high school i want to thank you and the senior class for these thoughtful and generous gifts at this time i would like to introduce two special guests mr brian kapestrand superintendent of the glendale union high school district and mrs petty kennedy governing board clerk patty kennedy is a long time resident of the guhsd and was elected in november of 2010.
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congratulations again guys well done coaches would you like to make a comment or speak about this team um well we certainly like state championships around here so and well fantastic we know that this uh these honors don't come without much hard work so thank you for representing crown point school district so well and your team your coaches and your family so well we really appreciate it let's give it up to him [Applause] this is exciting i have the uh i'm gonna pull this down i have the honor of announcing reading accommodations for our you know teacher of the year our administrative year and player of the year and i know that uh with just teacher preacher appreciation week a couple weeks ago and um you know reading the well what we got as board members that you know educator these familiar faces out there just caught a smile to say hello um educator appreciation week and you know as a corporation everything that all of you do in all the different roles that you play is so much appreciated so this is quite an honor for the individuals that um have been voted on by their peers this evening to receive this award uh so do we have room all the way back to mr walker that doesn't look like there's too many of you would you be able to fit inside or could could you come on you could guys go in the free you could come up in front of the board members try to space if you'd like well we read through some of it earlier but i'm i'm gonna you know go through it again this evening we have the 2021 and 2022 teacher of the year administrator of the year in play of the year award presentations we're going to begin with mr walker the teacher of the year at the secondary level we could go through everybody individually but mr g and fermi would you mind taking an opportunity to say a few words i i will for sure mr merchant couldn't make it so being director of secondary ed and working with mr walker for the last 15 years he's a special educator for sure in the fact that not only does he just motivate kids to do things fantastic things latin club state championships year after year after year but he also motivates adults and gets them through some really tough work and in no way was that ever more abundant than this year when he really led a lot of our secondary folks in jumping into e-learning and blended learning and just being as creative as they could to kind of keep the education going when we were hit with a pandemic that nobody was prepared for so beyond everything that mr walker has done for crown point schools over the course of many many many years this year was just one of those years that he really uh picked up his game when we thought how can he do that and he and he did so all the the candidates we had at the secondary level were amazing um it's really really hard to pick but uh mr walker you are more than deserving of this award and honor for sure also this evening we have our teacher of the year at the uh out at the elementary level miss jennifer paulette mr chiquino you're here this evening would you mind sharing a couple words for us please please just got here from my daughter's preschool graduation but uh it's my pleasure to talk about jennifer pilot any chance i could but um jen i i've known her for five years um since i got to timothy ball she was a kindergarten teacher our kindergarten team leader and the first day i met her she said nick welcome to t-ball i'm ready for a new challenge please move me to third grade and i did we moved some people around that year and jen rose to the challenge in third grade and uh teaching kindergarten and third grade both i think every grade has its own challenges but those two grade levels come with unique challenges and jennifer is just a fantastic teacher in every way she connects with her kids most importantly great relationships with their students knows what they need on a social emotional level an academic level um a great communicator with parents she's willing to drop whatever she's doing to help a teammate or a colleague at timothy ball and just couldn't ask for for a better leader or a better teacher so congratulations jennifer proud to work with you and very proud of this accomplishment for you i want to give mr g and fermi and shakeen an opportunity to say a few words for uh mr walker and i say pilot yes pilot um but now i'll read the i'm going to read the accommodation awards and um while some of you were in the hallway i'll read the award for everybody else that we have this evening and then uh i think we have a couple special moments when we're finished resolution accommodation the crown point board of school trustees is honored to commend these individuals this evening as exemplary employees administrators teachers secondary level elementary level we hereby resolve that the board of school trustees for the crown point community school corporation wishes to express sincere congratulations to these individuals for being named the 2021 2022 employees teachers of the year the board of school trustees publicly recognizes this achievement renders it permanently to its minutes to be preserved for public posterity day this this date the 24th day of may 2021 so i will go through this we have dana and please help my if i toriano okay dana i want to give with it what you were acknowledged for obviously um and these are a teacher your finalist joe wagner [Applause] better teacher finalist scott reed at taft and we had sarah fritz from eisenhower [Applause] daniel moulder lake street [Applause] melissa melissa donaldson macarthur congratulations [Applause] uh katie rice robinson [Applause] melissa did you get the right uh okay and uh nicole is it cicalewski is nicole here okay thank you flinsley and we have jamie edgington in the learning center and our employer of the year finals for chantel pierce from administrative service center mrs pearson [Applause] and mr carnahan i don't believe he's here yet right oh i'm gonna i want to hand it over to dr terrell i know we're going to want to get some pictures of all the finalists and with also the the winners this evening thank you before we go on i just want to we had others give just a little blurb if you will about the teachers of the year um artie would you mind with our employee of the year if you could kind of just give us a little bit of information background on uh that individual i'd love to we're glad that dana is here with us this evening hi dana how are you feeling really good up there right now aren't you you should uh dana toriano is our health coordinator she's uh our leader of all of our nurses i think it goes without saying how important that role has been here in the last just over a year uh we spent countless hours uh planning but then dana was literally the lead person to launch and and make sure that you know safety protocols were followed now keep in mind in addition to leading a nursing staff that is in charge of clinics for day-to-day operations uh for school functions which is you know millions of band-aids and cuts and scrapes and all the things that go beyond with schooling so dana um we are so proud of you and so happy for you and so thankful uh for who you are and and what you've given to the crown point community school corporation so um love you all right and and uh thanks so much for all that you do for us [Applause] and then we also missed uh amanda from winfield we appreciate you being here as well so this year we have a couple of additional awards uh we are now going to begin recognizing an administrator of the year um and look at our administrators as well and recognize them for the hard work that they put in and this individual tonight was brought here on um misinformation as to her reasoning for being here this evening but our first uh administrator of the year is karen toth karen and our conversations that take place at 3 30 to 4 30 in the morning uh on weather related days but i want to ask artie if he would just talk she was brought here thinking that she was going to give you all in a report on our electric bus which we are getting an electric bus and it's going to be really cool but we don't want to hear about your question yeah i'm gonna pay for this one ladies and gentlemen so but it's worth it it's so worth it um karen wow i know i'm gonna have to say i'm gonna have to say some things right now okay um and i had to write them down so i could stay focused um but karen started as a substitute teacher in 1996 with the crown point community school corporation from there guidance secretary in 1998 principal secretary in 2001 and eventually the director of transportation karen told us viewed the operations of this school corporation through unique set of lenses while we can't help but celebrate karen's history as she prepares to retire we're honoring her as administrator of the year for the efforts she has put forth over the past 12 to 14 months a year filled with countless adjustments and changes while still supporting the needs of our homeless sheltered fosters students needing rights to school from a myriad of locations all done with a calm voice professional demeanor when a certain sort of chaos was all around her this year i've had the great pleasure of working with karen toth in all of her prior environments and i must say she has been her genuine self through it all congratulations and a heartfelt thank you karen toth our administrator of the year [Laughter] hello oh join us right here [Applause] our last award that we want to give out this year is a new award that may be handed out annually it may be every couple of years just depending on the situations that arise as we go forward with it and this year this this award is going to be called the spirit of a bulldog award and because it is the inaugural award this is going to bear the name of the individual who is receiving this award and we'll give you more of that information uh as we go through this this time but this award is going to be the mike carnahan spirit of a bulldog award [Applause] and mike let me i'll read this before i present it to you in the middle and i want you to know that you are a hard individual to convince to get to things like this much like somebody else we all know and love resolution of commendation the crown point board of school trustees is honored to commend mike carnahan for meritorious achievement be it resolved by the board of school trustees for the crown point community school corporation wishes to express sincere congratulations to mike carnahan douglas macarthur head custodian as the first recipient of the mike carnahan spirit of a bulldog award for exemplary display of pride determination perseverance kindness reliability humility and selflessness the board of school trustees publicly recognizes this achievement and renders it permanently to its minutes to be preserved for public posterity dated this 24th day of may 2021 mike mike surprise huh well i i have to share the story so i've i've had the great fortune of being on the interview committee for all of these wonderful individuals in front of us and i must say that it was such an enjoyable experience listen to everybody's commentary we've got phenomenal educators employees in crown point community school corporation um and just so thank you but mike you know during your interview something was happening um you know katie dowling was on the interview panel with myself along with last year's winner uh for employee of the year um and that was uh sherry toakley and we just felt this thing happening while we were talking to you um and words and stories were coming out of you um you know how dare i go back and say you know hired april 11 1975 as a crown point high school custodian appointed july 11 1995 as the head custodian macarthur elementary school safety awards cpi certification carnahan's helpers and you have also been an employee of the year all the exemplary examples of of attributes you know dr terrell uh so eloquent eloquently stated i could tell you that the impact on students and staff that mike has generated transcends generations not to mention your job description the stories you were telling were concrete examples of how you impacted not only those in your building but those in the entire school corporation over years mike um this is this is truly truly special um quotes from the interview i wanted to try to be a teacher but in another way i wanted to let them know there was someone who cares i always wanted to make sure teachers know they can depend on me for anything anytime anybody that knows you knows that these statements are absolutely 100 true um do you want to throw anything in here because i i can say that you've advocated for the underdog um you've gone out of your way to make connections with students that maybe don't have the advantages that other have other individuals have and you've made a point to make sure they knew someone was there that cares for them that loves them that they could depend on um we just cannot thank you enough and this particular award it it needs your name on it because of all that you've done for the crown point community school corporation so thanks mike thank you and i should mention all of you the teachers of the year employees of the year ministry of the year mike we will have your trophies for you in the year of covid shortages we were not able to get those by tonight so we will have those for you and we'll present those to you at another time as well but before we let you escape from here we need to do a couple of things one is a group photo of all of you and then if we could get a group photo of the actual teachers of the year employee of the year administrator of the year so brooke i'm going to turn it over to you for directions and please follow brooks david we have lost the room and we literally have lost them yes just letting everybody settle in we'll get we'll get right back to it here in a second okay back to serious item three is the public hearing uh 3.01 suspend a regular meeting and open for public hearing of emotion do i have a motion to suspend the regular meeting and move to the public hearing second moved by mr hoffman and second by mr angel i was in favor signify by saying aye aye opposed most curious 5-0 and we have patron comments for the public hearing we don't have any this evening unless anybody's come in late but nothing is on the sign up sheet nobody's out there uh 3.03 is the 2021 capital project bonds ms dowling thank you mr president um today this is a hearing on the lease that required a 30-day advertisement the school corporation is funding the the 2021 capital projects through lease financing it's as it has done with the past in the past with other construction renovation projects such as crown point high school and the wheeler middle school lease financing is used by school corporations across the state of indiana in order to borrow for renovation and construction the building corporation which mr bates mr geisen and miss katich are members of will purchase all our portion of the existing staff middle school macarthur elementary and real estate on which the new taft middle school is on as well as lake street and essentially the building corporation will purchase those from us and in return we will sell the bonds that will be the revenue that we're using for the construction projects also a part of this are making sure also part of this are resolution several resolutions related to this if you remember from last month uh we started the process with reauthorizing the building corporation approving the hearing the lease hearing being advertised etc the next step today uh is resolution 800 which is authorizing execution of the physical lease agreement between the crown point community school corporation and the crown point community holding building corporation resolution 801 is a resolution assigning the construction bids and contracts to the building corporation once they are received resolution 802 is a resolution approving the fourth supplement to the master continuing disclosure undertaking and issuing of bonds uh baker tilly files that for us annually for continuing disclosure to legal compliance a piece resolution is approving amended and restated post post-issuance compliance procedures which essentially appoints me as the person responsible for making sure that those are completed and resolution 804 is approving issuance of bond anticipation notes or bans if they're necessary i would tell you as you're aware we are funding the early stages of the project out of out of cash on hand that will be reimbursed once we sell the bonds but for every drill do you want to take this part for every 30 days that we're able to delay issuing the bonds we save 750 000 and capitalize interest so this is you know benefit um to everybody um so mr president that ends my comments i would ask for an approval of resolutions 800-804 move to approve each of those resolutions and waive the reading not business available so moved second moved by mr angel in second by mr hoffman i was in favor signify by saying aye aye aye opposed motion carries 5-0 now we'll resume the regular business meeting we'll resume with item four patrons comments we don't have anybody registered to comment this evening so go to item five we have the consent agenda for dr terrell your consideration this evening we have 5.01 which is the minutes from the different meetings that are listed 5.02 the biomed purchase 5.03 the wheeler middle school robotics club purchase 5.04 the apply for the grant from the challenger center from this challenger center and then also 5.05 our 2021 2022 school year meal prices uh 5.06 is our personnel agenda and then 5.07 the voucher registered checks as listed thank you dr carroll for the consent agenda as presented we have a motion to approve no move second as moved by mr hoffman and second by mr smith have any questions or comments for dr terrell consent agenda not all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye opposed most carriers 5-0 thank you dr terrell we go to action items this evening we have 6.01 textbook and resource adoption for 2021-22 mr hartman thank you mr warning the next three items that are on the action items kind of are tied together first of all we have adoption of materials and then we're going to look at textbook rental and supply fees for next year and we're going to follow that up with disposal of obsolete materials also 6.001 is looking at textbook and resource adoption in the list that is provided to you we have materials for multiple disciplines uh including our core subjects and also our subjects that would not be in the core area that would be in the uh areas of uh band choir and orchestra would be in the areas of info technology as well as project lead the way and also they're varied from high school middle school and the elementary school so this evening seeking your approval to adopt these materials for the crown point community school corporation thank you mr harvey he heard a recommendation to approve the textbook or resource adoption for use beginning in the 2021-2022 school year do we have a motion to approve so moved second moved by mr angel on second by mr babjack do we have any questions or comments from mr hartman if not all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye opposed motion carries five zero and again mr harbin at 6.02 we have textbook rental and supply fees for the 2021-22 school year thank you very much mr warning this evening we're going to bring to you textbook rental and supply fees these are middle school is complete so when we take a look at that you'll see that it's complete you get an idea what the tbr is because we are still working on quotes from some of the companies you'll see in the high school part of the tbr there's some things highlighted and we're waiting on uh quotes and we'll bring that to you in in june at your june meeting and the same thing with the with the new adoption of some of the elemental materials which you'll see on the previous list you're going to see some blanks right now in that but to move forward in the purchase of materials uh with quoted prices that we have you can see in the elementary that there are uh prices for or quotes for the uh for the resources and materials uh in that area so this evening seeking your approval of what's presented to you and then knowing that there will be additions coming to you at the june board meeting to complete the uh the process as well as our exceptional learners textbook rental and supply fees seeking your approval on what is presented to you this evening thank you mr harbin here excuse me for the recommendation to approve the current textbook rental and supply fees for 2021 2022 elementary middle and high school motion to approve move to approval is requested moved by mr hoffman is second by mr angel any questions or comments jim because our people on the live feed don't get to see these numbers can you briefly summarize how these fees compare to prior years actually the at the elementary level uh when we do finish this off i expect it to be very comparable we've been we've maintained around the fee so i think we're going to see very comparable amount there if you look at the uh the middle school component of this and you compare 2021-22 to this this current year we're right at the the amount and at the high school level so difficult to predict because depending on the courses that students take it impacts the their fees and so it's very difficult and challenging although we know that resources uh um they do cost more uh as we uh continue we adopt each and every year so uh so we can expect that we probably would see an increase in in course fees at the high school or overall for students thank you you're welcome any other questions or comments from mr hartman if not all those in favor signify by saying opposed emotion carries five zero and we're moving to 6.03 the disposition of obsolete curricular materials mr harmon thank you again with the uh adoption of new materials therefore there's materials to be disposed of uh that were adopted that these are replacing uh and so there is a list of of elementary middle and i believe there might be a few high school items that are on the disposal list normally what we'll do with those is we do offer those to students first for to take and then if there is opportunity to donate the materials or we would dispose of those materials uh uh appropriately i also would note that if there are any fees for disposal we have included that as part of the recommendation for you so seeking your approval this evening to dispose of the materials that are in are in the list thank you mr sherman good recommendation to approve to dispose of the curricular materials listed in the most economical manner that best meets the requirements of the ic 5-22-22 and ic 20-26-5-4 and administrative guidelines 7310 which may include sale donation or deeming of deeming it worthless and disposing of it as a normal refuse do a motion to approve second move by mr smith and second by mr hoffman any questions or comments for mr hartman not always in favor signify by saying opposed motion carries 5-0 thank you and thank you again mr hartman and um 6.04 the soul robinson generator project ms dowling thank you mr president there is a need for us to be able to install a generator at solen robinson elementary school mississippi worked with gibraltar design for the project specifications uh advertised those went out to bid we were fortunate we received five bidders the low bit on this thank you sorry particular project uh was from sweeney electric and the amount of three hundred and eighty four thousand seven hundred and fifty dollars and the last at least last five years since i've been here we've had an increase in outages in terms of frequency and length of time and so on which is sort of what drove this to begin with to provide them with some normalcy i guess with because it just disrupts the whole day for the students for the school and so that's the reason for this this here before you today so the administration would recommend that the contract be awarded to sweeney electric and the amount of 384 thousand and 750 dollars for the installation of generator service at solen robinson elementary school thank you mr i'll repeat that recommendation to approve the contract to be awarded from sweden electric amount of three four thousand seven or fifty dollars for the installation of a backup generator service for solan robinson elementary school if you have a motion to approve so moved second moved by mr angel and second by mr smith any questions or comments from ms dowling do we have generators in any other schools three other buildings these generators inside the building are outside so no additional structural stuff needed just fits outside somewhere okay thank you what's the reason for the additional outages is that just the infrastructure around those schools has the unfortunate situation of being on the same transformer by the fairgrounds okay and there are a ton of power outages in that area there's a long history of that those of you that grew up around like us and those that have a ton of power outages so we've lost food out there you know and when they lose it they can't lose it for longer stretch of time but we lose things in the coolers in the freezers and now in this day and age um we're able with a generator like this where really the kids won't miss a beat because we have wi-fi in the buildings we can keep the wi-fi going as well as for safety purposes in the main office the communications won't be lost at all thank you thank you any other questions or comments i was in favor signify by saying aye hi hi opposed motion curious 5-0 thank you miss dolly and mr moleski thank you information items super superintendent discussion groups do we have anything to report this evening from any of our winfield cedar lake the construction project on parish avenue which i don't think really impacts our schools but that might help the flow of trafficking and around the cedar lake area getting in off of 231 other than that there are just a lot of applications for you know building improvements and things like that but nothing that impacts the schools that i've been following thank you mr smith anything else from crown point rdc uh mayor indicated that they'll be going into another phase of the improvements on 109th near i-65 uh there'll be another shutdown over there for a period of time um other than that the business pretty much as usual for the crown point rdc winfield has not met in some several months so thank you just to add to that mr warren it looks like june 1st through november 15th is that shut down not that it'll affect my daily traveling another plus to karen told how she's handled even getting buses out to winfield at some point during the day and back and without disruptions or kids being late to school or except she's retiring she heard about that construction and said that [Music] scott's going to be applying for the for the position so we can improve traffic in winfield that bus safety rating would go down in a heartbeat how about we move forward to the mr harmon chief academic officer would you like to go absolutely we'll uh let's move over to the director who would like to go first director of elementary education ms ramirez thank you mr president and board members i would just like to take this opportunity as we're closing out the school year to really thank our elementary principals as you saw all of them here tonight they have really continued to show up every day for our teachers and staff for our students and for our families and they have been creative dedicated and i think what is really exciting in kind of finishing out these last four days with students and even starting into last week are the opportunities for some kind of normalcy for celebration that i hope that you're seeing either through their social media through their newsletters hearing about as your children maybe are participating they've made everything successful from ilearn administration that when we were thinking about ilearn back in october we thought how in the world will this work and they made it work and i think that's a true testament to everybody pitching in to make sure that kids were in school that teachers were flexible with kids who might have to miss kind of creating schedules recreating schedules it's been exciting to see dare graduations happening kind of grade transition celebrations that have occurred and the involvement of families again our principals have gone um i'd say into the technology realm of zooming families in so that they could feel like they were part of these special moments in our children's lives so i just want to thank them and thank our students too for continuing to stay steadfast in being good citizens um there's been lots of fundraising that's been going on and has been highlighted in um newsletters and i just think it really just is a true testament that despite all of the negative that we've stayed positive and have kept our kids learning and growing and working together director of secondary education mr g fermi thank you mr president um i just want to take this time to share with the board an interesting dilemma we had at the high school and how the middle schools have helped to solve this diploma we've talked a lot about graduation pathways and how that's changed quite a bit for our high school students one of the things that a student can do now is travel through a cte pathway and graduate that way well one of the things we were running into in order to really be able to get into that pathway and do it legitimately through your four years you have to kind of do an introductory course a preparing for a college and career course well it was really difficult to fit that into our kids schedule so we we brought that problem to our our principals in the middle schools and mrs seibert and mr rodriguez brainstorming with uh the associate principal at the high school miss hellcar came up with the idea that really a lot of the standards that are covered in that course are the same things we're doing with our 8th graders in their resource period time so what we are going to be able to do is offer every 8th grader at colonel wheeler and at taft middle school a high school course in preparing for college and career where they will receive a credit all all taking it the first first semester of their eighth grade year a lot of safeguards in there for them to make up things in the second semester in case you know they missed due to things this will not take away from the things that are happening in resource class because you do not have to spend each and every day in the cte course we have also worked with eighth grade teachers and we'll be building us a special buzz course which will be address it towards the eighth grade um and it works really well with what we've always done in eighth grade with the crossroads chamber of commerce and their chamber town when we bring in all those employers and people from the community so all these things kind of came together and the collaboration between the middle schools and the high schools will really afford all of our eighth grade students uh going into high school kind of a head start and a good opportunity and that's for every every one of them you know traditionally we've had our high ability kids be able to get a high school credit now every single eighth grader will be able to start off with that so it was really a it was really great work between the the buildings and and we think it's going to be a great great opportunity for the 8th grade students moving forward it is a course that's on the books that's why we didn't have to send it through for approval so this is why i want to take this time to share so the board is fully aware of what that opportunity is for 8th graders and i would be amiss if i didn't finish up with if anyone picked up the northwest indiana times this sunday they noticed that the region's best crown point high school was voted once again the best high school in the region which we we all would agree upon i would say so that's what i have any questions or concerns that's a repeat correct yes it is thank you thank you thank you mr gene for me chief academic officer mr hardman oh i'm sorry all right we'll do uh director director director of exceptional education mrs pasquez you see she was trying to highlight maybe i'd get out of this yeah good evening mr morning and board of trustees uh tonight you approved the addition of several new positions to our department we have an elementary coordinator andrea avila who is currently a sixth grade resource teacher at wheeler and our secondary coordinator is coming from another district with over 10 years of experience three master's degrees a director's license and then two diagnosticians dominique bowman who's currently a resource teacher at our high school but has served in a similar role at another district and then also from another district someone that had worked here previously in another role she's coming back to assist with some of our preschool diagnostics has tons of experience in that area so we're just looking forward for those folks to help our teachers out our principals out with case conferences and just help us as we move forward with our inclusive practice thank you miss passes now i'm ready all right mr hartman is ready director sorry chief academic officer thank you all mr hart very much um i'm gonna uh just comment uh similar to heather um we did uh you approved tonight anne vasser as a blended instructional design specialist she'll join jeremy walker and susan valentine as a as a team this is thanks to you for adding that additional position tomorrow we begin interviews for instructional specialists four of them two in the elementary and two at the secondary level so again i want to thank you for that we just on the 19th of may preliminary results came out for ilearn which is the three through eight testing it it is evidence first of all that those students that uh uh achieved the proficient score at or above proficient uh is uh is below what uh it was in 1819 which uh um as we looked at the question was how far below would it be but on on a good good site of that there are four levels of the proficiency there's above proficient there's at proficient and then there's approaching proficient and then you have those that are below proficient when i look at the below proficient number it's very similar to what we would have seen in so so when you look at it from a standpoint of approaching at and above it's a matter of we lost time you know we lost time i think we did lose some uh opportunity with the with the distance as we were you know adjusting and making those kinds of adjustments the connections with kids as we know wasn't there so so there's a there's a there is a positive in this that that the students that were approaching at or above doesn't seem like we lost as much ground just from that percentage but when you do see the results that will come out july when they're finalized you will see that the at and the above were were lower than what and i cannot give you a comparison as to how that is to other school corporations because these are preliminary and they're not finalized yet and in july we'll be able to compare and see how we compare to other school districts like us and also in the area jim you you say 18 19 isn't that back when we had the one-room schools and we're i look forward to seeing the pie charts bar graphs all the awesome excel spreadsheets in the near future for a year and a half i've done those for mr hardin about chief human resource officer mr akiwa thank you mr president board members we've had a just an aggressive furious hiring season um i mean a number of interviews and and screenings that we've gone through to to onboard uh just a tremendous amount of skill and talent uh it's been amazing hats off to all of our administrators for the time they put in i mean we've been here until six seven o'clock at night at certain times interviewing folks and we really do appreciate it and that's just not teachers that's support staff um across the board people have really really put in the time um but i i think as i was writing it all started with a cubs game last night i started to reflect a little bit and then kind of looking over karen paul's comments and mike carney's comments i started to think back like where were we i couldn't even watch a cubs game at this time last year right so let's roll that back a little bit farther like to january february of last year we're on the precipice of a change in crown point community school corporation that we couldn't have even begun to appreciate um and to think we've gone through everything we've been through to today right on the end of closing out a school year and i don't want to jinx this but hopefully close it out very successfully i just want to thank you for all you've done to support us as leaders in working with us so closely and having great conversations to to minimize the bump uh that we've experienced here over the last you know 16 months so thank you thank you mr akiva and uh before we get to 7.07 instruments so i don't forget brooke last week you had some information items for us and you apparently you don't have this evening but i just want to acknowledge your work that you've been continuing to do as a director of communication and you know thank you for that and also continue to put the pressure on you to keep it rolling because we all appreciate it quite a bit so just want to slip that in there as we're going through our directors to acknowledge what you've done and like we said summer's coming but we're looking forward to keep that communication rolling so thank you on 7.07 we had chief financial officer ms dowling um just so you're aware the first bids packet will be appearing in the newspaper for publication for the first set of bids for site work at taft middle school for the new top middle school so that'll be happening here soon i think we anticipate having the award of that coming to the june school board meeting um those are the things that we're funding out of cash that we're using right now for rainy day so that's you know exciting thing it's starting to move and we continue to uh be in close communication with gibraltar skillman the town of winfield everybody there and in between because obviously we're on a schedule and there's a lot of moving parts but everybody's getting it done so it's just exciting to watch it you know move forward at the same time there's still a lot of project development happening for the high school elementary playgrounds technology uh dr terrell and i both are included on those meetings just to keep an eye really it's i'm the one that's like wait a minute how much was that and dr terrell's like would you stop it we need to update the technology in these classrooms that's kind of like what our conversations go maybe because our goal katie is to be what the best okay we could debate that later about if you need money for that anyway really your goal isn't to be the best no no it's that i don't need money to be the best oh well hey but it helps it does help uh so those things are moving and you'll see them because of the way we've staggered this the projects the way that they'll come in it'll it'll they're all stair steps so it's almost like the first domino falls and they're just going to start coming and then you're going to be amazed at all the approvals we're asking you for the last thing that i have with regard to food service did a wonderful job i know mr warnie mr angel were at the retirement breakfast that we had for staff 409 years i believe of years of service retiring it was a great event but as you approve tonight the meal prices for next school year the usda has extended free breakfast and lunch for students through the end of next school year so that means all of next school year all of our students will be eligible for free breakfast and lunch our food service department has been working tirelessly to keep tirelessly too to keep up with that but also i think they're really happy that we have that opportunity as that's new for us to be able to go community-wide um so if you run across any of them give them a thanks because they've been working really hard thank you miss dolly other business of the border school trustees let's just skip right past dr terrell huh i'm all over the map this evening all right i'm sorry we got superintendent schools dr terrell thank you um you know as i reflect back even over this evening what a great board meeting we had at the beginning to be able to spend all that time recognizing so many but in looking at our teacher of the year employee of the year administrator of the year spirit of the bulldog with mike carnahan just really emphasizes even more so why we look at our teacher appreciation week as educator appreciation week i think mike just epitomizes what that is all about in his approach to this you know it's been a challenging year but it's also the end of a great year we've had a lot of things that have really continued to move on you know sabrina mentioned that in her comments mark mentioned it you know as we look at all these different things and the additional supports that we're adding for our kids for our teachers for administrators where we are with the progress that is being made in the classrooms it has been a challenging year and nobody would ever question that but anytime anybody asks that i always try to follow up as quickly as i can with but it's been a great year too and a lot of great things have happened throughout our district uh great examples of those that you've seen come before you construction update as katie said we continue to see all these different things that are going on the design the input that we're getting from our administrators from our teachers from our central office people has just been second to none and when you talk with gibraltar and what they're doing they're so impressed with our district and how quickly we're able to gather information and keep that moving forward we really appreciate that as well we are still right on schedule for that july ground breaking out on gibson street and for taft and that's what we are really trying to hold skillman's feet to the fire with that and getting through everything we need to with the town of winfield to make sure that that happens last thing just we're already getting into our summer activities just as quickly as the school year ends so summer activities begin from athletics to the different camps that are going on to summer school and looking forward to that full array of activities that are taking place but also realizing that there's a lot of challenges that go with this we have many people who are just ready to take a break from it all and after the year the experiences we've been through over the last 12 16 months we can understand that we appreciate that but again we look forward to a full slate of summer activities and providing additional opportunities for our students as well thank you doctoral okay now we have the other business of the board of school trustees just a reminder to everybody i know mr smith won't forget but graduation is next thursday at the high school so um good call didn't want to make sure the rest of us all didn't know that so uh six o'clock i believe starting time and we're not going to talk about the rain date because it's going to happen on that day i didn't say that that's all i had anybody else yeah i'd take the opportunity real quick i you know wasn't there myself but i sure did hear um sure did hear enough in the community to know that um the friday night the friday you know the pseudo prom friday under lights whatever that was the activity that was arranged for the the students i from i heard it was a great success so i think you know everyone that was involved in thinking of the concept putting the concept together um deserves to be commended for their efforts to get that done it's a really nice for the students to have a bit of normalcy as they end their high school career um anything else if not let's move forward to board statements of appreciation recognition we can start with mr smith yeah thank you just want to compliment all you for for today that was exciting um honoring all those individuals and well done i mean it was really really well done so good job to the team in doing that that was fantastic and uh artie i appreciate your comments and sentiments about sticking together i think for all of us at the end of the year you know i again just want to compliment each of you and the effort and hard work that you've all put in over the last year year and a half or so i mean that the transition and change uh is just off the chart that the school corporation seen in 18 months and we couldn't foresee it coming but you have adapted well i mean this whole half of the side of the room i think has a new job description got a new superintendent on top of we had covid and changes so i want to compliment our teachers and our our students and our parents and i i think it's a privilege to be on this board serving but what an honor it is to have the opportunity to live in crown point and it's really a blessing because we do have a community i feel like our all things considered our community pulled together and we're very blessed and fortunate for that where others maybe that's not the case and so i think we all we have a lot to be thankful for but certainly want to wish you all some time away and let's hope we get back into some normalcy next year i want to honor the best buddies the schools that raised funds for the best buddies program this last month raised over ten thousand dollars between the five schools what a great program that is and in particular eisenhower itself raised over five thousand dollars that's a lot of money for for a program so well done to all the families the kids and uh that's awesome that our that our school corporation would rally around the best buddies program that way so just want to come in and recognize those schools that did that and then lastly just want to wish i know we're going into sectionals and i think regionals and everything else this week so someone wish all those teams that are competing this week the best of luck as they go forward and hopefully have a lot of success thank you mr smith mr babjack uh i would like to recognize taft middle school and uh congratulate the sixth and seventh grade boys um track team on winning a winning conference um it was i think oh god has it been a week i think it was like a week ago uh the event was held at the crown point high school a very well organized event um did take some time it was many hours my first uh conference track meet as a as a parent you did you did and i did not a lot enough time for the event but uh it went through one of those you do every it should be mandatory so i just wanted to uh recognize them the coaches and everybody that helped put that event together um everybody did a great job thank you mr baby you have anything new i want to echo mr smith's comments and uh you know was was kind of enjoyable when we had the breakfast for the employees a couple weeks ago to get to visit the schools and talk with people and be reminded how great the people are that work in this school corporation and live in this community so thank you all for that uh just a couple things here um the crown point high school had a special uh ceremony for our graduates that are going into the military and it was a wonderful thing and i'm gonna actually uh make sure those names are put in minutes with diana green here but we have jonathan nuzzo for us army national guard logan zelaych for u.s army national guard joshua holbrook for the u.s air force jeremy murphy for the u.s marine corp madison edelman u.s marine corp evelyn colvin for the u.s army sebastian hoshbach for the u.s army west point military academy so congratulations to all those students and for russ and the staff at the high school for putting that on and thank you for serving our country moving forward to those individuals we greatly appreciate it um because i'm such a math geek sometimes after i heard mr aquila mention about all the changes i'm remiss to just think of what's transpired and it is actually last 465 days since us as a board decided that we're going to have a different direction with the school corporation and in those 465 days within 30 days of making that change and getting help from mr hartman mr akiwa mr uh g and fermi to make sure we transitioned uh covet head and so we throw three people into probably a position they didn't think we're going to be in on february 12th and by march whatever was 15th or something we were in full pandemic mode so uh everybody else that fit into that as well ms dowling was obviously part of the cabinet and our other two new members were still part of this school corporation and dealing with their own individual aspect of that and to think of where we've now come knock on wood finishing the school year and to say that it was a success would be an understatement in my opinion as a now no longer parent of a crown point school but as a citizen representative on the school wow just wow i mean to think of it and our teachers deserve credit i bet they're our union we want to make sure we pass that along to them as well diana greene behind the scenes of all this and in a row we're trying to keep five board members in line and making sure they don't miss meetings and then dealing with that turmoil um thank you diana for making sure we didn't miss any of that or a deadline or whatever might transition so we're grateful to have dr terrell on board and moving us forward hopefully we're going to keep our fingers crossed and pray to wherever you need to pray to that starting in august we are in full board regular school mode and getting our students back to where they belong and what they deserve as a regular school year so that's all i have thank you mr radio i'd like to also go to the retirement breakfast not so much the well the event was excellent the food was excellent the coordination of it all um thanking lori for what she you know doesn't put it together and i just thought that as you sit there and while we can't think of how many individuals but we know is about 400 409 years of service what was really neat was to listen to them be spoken about you know as each one of the and we had second grade teachers third grade lifelong we had people who were subs in this district in that district and uh but at the end of the day uh just hearing the stories and how proud all those individuals should be to have done what they've done for the community and not just the the school that they're in but the community around them is a pretty impressive um i'd also i had another uh another thought i'd mr angel you said something i wanted to piggyback you but i'm sorry i'm i'm that'd be a first yeah yeah i know it's something's going on sleepers yeah he's little guys too and he's a handful um no but so i guess that'd be it for me thank you to everybody and i hope we look forward to a enjoyable summer like i will say you know the the emails have come across every now and then to the board asking for the plan and uh part of me reaching out or mentioning ms allen earlier brooke is just the communication is something we need to continue and continue to to work on um i know what the the last uh my other thought um i think you go back to for me as someone grew up from crown point scott badger was the first time you remember to chant we rcp uh what's your first memory uh the first time i remember it was um 1984 when the girls exactly what i was doing exactly right exactly exactly what i was thinking you know the we rcp chant and my memory goes back to the lady bulldogs winning the state championships and mr kiewa knows that all too well um back to back and i remember seeing the videos of it whatever we rcp and i think something as a as a board and cabinet in all of us it means it means a lot to us when you hear that we are cp and we don't want to lose sight of we are cp we need to stay focused we and this past year has proven that we can do that we can stay together as a team a community as buildings and i think it's just really important that we all think it's important that we keep that focus moving forward that we don't get off on islands and that we're going to be always stronger together so that that was my other thought is that we rcp and continue to go down that road is uh important to all of us and everyone's doing a great job okay is it for me anybody else uh any other comments before we look for motion to adjourn motion to adjourn still moved moved by mr hoffman is second by mr smith i was in favor sigma five by saying aye aye aye opposed the most curious five zero well you called you
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um there's really nothing unusual on here did anyone have any questions about any prepays this month no no okay total prepays for the month of april 2021 354 416.50 and then lastly for the claims for april will be dated today may 24th 2021.
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the public will not the public will not be allowed to physically access the school committee meeting members of the public can access the meeting via live stream at youtube.com dhs tv meeting participation procedures and will notify the public of these procedures as soon as practicable um per open meeting law great i'm getting that dreaded um internet connection is unstable so i apologize if i go in and out just wave at me or i don't know if i um if i lose you here um kathleen if you lose me um you will go ahead and be the boss i'm going to start off with a roll call per the uh online open meeting uh rules so ross tebow i see you're here yes uh rks here uh kelly bloom here billy chamberlain here diane masari here uh shelly scott here elizabeth murphy here kathleen amaral yeah and i will call my own name shannon jenkins i'm here um next we have our two new members jada walker here all right and julina pamphile is that how you say your last name today last year yes thank you all right so um because we have our two new student members here what i'd like to do is to just all maybe briefly introduce ourselves first and then we'll have jada and julina introduce themselves to us um since uh since we missed that part so i will start and then i'll call around i'm shannon jenkins i'm a chair of the dartmouth school committee um kathleen can you go next hi kathleen ameral i am a member of the school committee and a parent to a few kiddos who have gone through dartmouth schools to remain i should say i think you know mr tebow but we'll ask him to introduce himself anyways i'm mr tebow i am the principal of dartmouth high school and i had the pleasure of meeting with each of our two student representatives um you know i think they'll be excellent choices for the committee fabulous mr hayes hello i'm mark hayes assistant principal at the middle school thank you miss bloom hi i'm kelly bloom i'm a social worker at the quinn school and i'm a parent of a couple of students in the school system chamberlain hi i'm mrs chamberlain i teach spanish i've had the pleasure of teaching julina but i haven't had the pleasure of taking teaching data yet hopefully i will fabulous uh miss missari hi i'm diane masari seventh grade guidance counselor at dartmouth middle school thank you miss scott welcome jada angelina i am a parent of three kids one that's graduated from dartmouth high and two that are currently at the middle and elementary school and i've lived in dartmouth for about 15 years thank you miss murphy hi i'm elizabeth murphy i am a parent of two students in the middle school and high school right now all right so now jada and julina you know all of us so we'd like to ask you to maybe take a minute or two and just introduce yourselves to the rest of the committee um so jada can i have you go first please yeah so hi i'm jada i'm 17 i'm a junior at dartmouth high school and i'm excited to be here so thank you for having me welcome we're excited to have you julina [Music] hi i'm julina panfield i'm 17 as well and i'm a junior at dartmouth high school and i'm very grateful to be here awesome thank you so much so um i will at first i want to apologize to all of you i'm a little bit even though i've been on the school committee for a while i'm a little bit rookie at running subcommittees so i've forgotten some of the routines and such that come with i'm complying with open meeting law so we were supposed to meet last week but i forgot to ask for a meeting to be posted and we cannot meet unless the meeting has been posted so we're meeting tonight i apologize for that i also apologize that i forgot to put approval of the minutes from last meeting um on this agenda dr gifford did take excellent minutes but since that's not on the agenda we will not be approving those minutes i will send those around for you um and ms amarill has agreed to be my backup um to uh to see all those things that um that i have missed because i'm apparently missing a lot at this point in our um pandemic school year but i did remember we did manage with the help of ms genther to get the agenda um posted and one of the things we had talked about at our last meeting um was people wanted to know some of the things that the schools are already doing around diversity um and so i asked dr gifford um to to put something together and she has invited miss oliveira but i'm going to hand it over to dr gifford first um to introduce miss oliveira in the presentation and we can get started and then ask questions about that dr gary great thank you so um exactly miss oliveira is a director of teaching and learning and with that role because she you know comes a lot of responsibilities to see what our curriculum is using the textbooks or extra reading books how our libraries are um equipped with various books and and i have to say we've done uh i think and we'll we'll hear from the group as time goes on but a nice job of adding various um selections to our libraries our school libraries in the elementary school as well um bringing forth the ideas about different cultures etc but we do a lot more than that so miss oliveira did give a presentation to the school committee at a recent meeting so we thought we would be able to bring that forth tonight and um talk about some of the things that we feel the school district is doing to address some of the issues that we might be talking about as time goes forth so mr oliveira tracy we need you to unmute sorry she usually does that very well you know it's been a long year for everyone i know there she goes thank you miss alamera sorry about that it has been a long year so i am unmuted i believe now correct yes you are and i am sharing my screen you can see the presentation we can all right perfect so once again my name is tracy oliver and i'm the director of teaching and learning for the district and i am here to present uh i kind of framed it around being culturally responsive education so thinking about what are we doing uh in our classrooms and i just want to highlight by saying at first this is certainly not uh inclusive of everything that we are doing but i was trying to truly just highlight um the big stuff that we're doing and also um look at where we're trying to make some changes and where we're trying to do better and and increase what we're doing around diversity in our classrooms so this presentation is broken up into two pieces like i said one currently what we're doing and one increasing our work around uh diversity and trying to um bring more um more more opportunities for our students to experience in our classrooms so i titled this a culturally responsive education and if you think we had to stop and think what do culturally responsive schools and classrooms look like and we kind of wanted to establish that kind of shared vision around all of our schools so we want our schools and classroom environments not only to be equitable and bias free but also reflect students and their cultural identities in order to foster feelings of safety belonging engagement and motivation we want all of our students to feel safe at our schools and we're looking at that it's critical to recognize that the goal of educators is to have knowledge and capacity to serve all of our students well and in order to be highly effective educators we must develop authentic understanding of students and adults that are in our communities we must also ensure that students experiences in schools are affirming to who they are and what they bring to the school community and unpack our own cultural impacts and our world views and approaches so we're trying to strive to validate students experiences as well as their values include curricula that celebrates all community members and actively reflect on our curriculum to ensure that we're reinforcing ideas that celebrate members and also reinforcing those ideas that celebrate all all members of our community and empowering all students so once again i am the director of teaching and learning so curriculum is key to what we do and we want to make sure that all of our curriculum the whole package of our is encompasses all of our learning goals and standards so units and lessons that lay out what teachers teach each day and each week assignments and activities and projects that are giving to students and also includes the books materials vid videos readings everything that's used in class we want all of that curriculum to be a key component of a cultural responsive teaching and we want that to be filled with stories activities assignments and illustrations and illustrations that influence how young people understand the world and contribute to all of our cultural and cultures and values so one interesting thing that desi came up with a couple of years ago was actually 2018 time goes by quite quickly but was um the history and uh social studies frameworks and they really built them on three pillars and it was about the standards for history and social studies the literacy standards and content standards but what they certainly did home in on was civics choices and how students should assume responsibilities for strengthening equality and justice and liberty uh across the united states and so i it's really helped us especially here in dartmouth to kind of pull in a lot of a civics education from k to 12 because the standards where feature design helps students develop skills to participate and lead society and uh to be more culturally diverse and one great thing that they did was our eighth graders will be experiencing a civics project and it's a homegrown civics project so it's something that they feel they need to go out and do for our community and it's completely student run so it's it's kind of tough for teachers because they were always thinking you know they set this the stage and they kind of try to plan for things but it kind of can't be done because it's all the ownership is on the students to come up with what they want to change what they want to do and where they want to go with the project so when we look at our standards especially for social studies and health and our social emotional learning this is just a wordle um where it really talks about all of the words in there that help for our diversity and and civics uh learning it's filled throughout and we try not to look at these as being very separate issues that we need to kind of look at but kind of fill them in with what we do each and every day we want it to be centered around culturally responsive education but also feel like it's part of what we are doing social emotional learning is something that we have played a impact in and we've traded a big part about for the last couple of years so here's just some examples of some of the things that have been real highlights in dartmouth um some of our initiatives of you matter i matter and kindness matters which has taken over the last three years um of making everybody feel inclusive and part of our community our second steps program which is a k-5 program and we're looking to bring it into the middle school this year really talks about getting getting along and including everybody pbis buddy benches and of course our unified sports which is um just a great program in dartmouth that kind of highlights all of what we are doing whoops one thing i just want to highlight that we've talked about with staff members across the district is this idea of windows mirrors and sliding glass doors i'm just going to play for you this video here where it talks about kind of um where we get that from this comes from reading rockets and it just pulls in when we think about the books and our literacy standards of what we want to give to students each and every day this is something that helps frame our thinking of what we want our students to experience so i'm just gonna it's only about a minute and now we need diverse books because we need books in which children can find stem cells see reflections of themselves i wrote a piece maybe 1990 it was published which i called mirrors windows and sliding glass doors and and i think that's that's really why we [Music] children need to see themselves reflective but books can also be windows and and so you can you can look through and see other worlds and see how they match up or don't match up to your own but the sliding glass door allows you to enter that world as well and so that's the reason that the diversity needs to go both ways and it's not just children who have been underrepresented and marginalized who need these books it's also the children uh who always find their mirrors in the books and therefore get an exaggerated sense of their own self-worth and a false sense of what the world is like because it's it's becoming more and more colorful and diverse as as time goes on so i think that's why so as we stopped and we looked at our literacy standards and as you know when a big push that we do is getting authentic literature into students hands from our preschool classrooms right up into our high school classrooms we really tried this year uh even amongst the pandemic of truly getting books that include the windows the mirrors and the sliding glass doors so we want students to see themselves to see people who are different and then also to kind of have that sliding glass door feeling where they can go in and kind of have a chance to experience what it might look like so in elementary ela we use units of study from teachers college at columbia university to teach reading writing and phonics and an interesting thing is in 2019 columbia university began a re-examination of their curriculum to emphasize the importance of this cultural responsive classroom so their work to achieve equality inclusion is front forefront and what they do uh they've done a ton of supplemental read alouds and as you can see in front of you some of the books that they've included in the diverse text uh that it within our reading and writing workshop in all of our classrooms um if we go on to the to the middle school sorry we've tried to increase the diverse text many of the stories and novels here in the sixth grade deal with issues like bullying the treatment of others based on social and cultural and economic class they read the bridge home which focuses on a group of homeless children in the streets of cheyenne and a long walk to the wada by linda sue parks which tells a story of conflict in south sudan and the quest to bring water to a small african village in seventh grade the conflicts of class distinction self-worth and cultural bias go deeper with the exploration of stories like thank you ma'am by langston hughes and the scholarship jacket by martha simmons and on an eighth grade ela as a layer of complexity by challenging the trustworthiness of sources such as the telltale heart by edgar allan poe a novel studies featuring a wide range of authors and they explore arthur backgrounds on how these backgrounds affect the voice and style of their writing eighth graders finished their year with the in-depth study of argument analysising the speech what the slave is in the 4th of july by frederick douglass at our high school starting last year uh nights yeah last year they rearranged the literacy readings for all classes and dartmouth high school uh eliminated the structure of classes around american and british literature and they moved to a more thematic system which allows for the increase of more voices in reading and hopefully we're hoping to get more engaged readers as part of this uh shift each grade level a novel has a play added that has diversity in mind so in ninth grade they read dear martin by nick stone ninth and tenth grade have been exposed in the english classes to eva davari's 13th a great documentary about the black incarceration in america in greater now in grade 11 power authority by tony morrison and grade 12 they do identity less by andrew john greer so once again this year and we are always growing uh and always trying to add some diversity um to around what we are doing this was two years ago but it's worth noting that the def grant celebration of self de mello diversity so they esta de mello school established a diversity library thanks to the def grant which was used by both students and educators their goal was to create a portrait wall at the entrance of the building where family pitches uh where it's going to be um displayed i think the the pandemic put a little bit of a stop to some of this work but um they still hope to pick it up and move on uh next year when we're all in person the other thing that the pandemic kind of put a stop to but adolf brown was supposed to be our kick keynote speaker this year for a back to school pd day in september but since we couldn't meet in person we really felt like it wasn't worth uh seeing him virtually because the power of his presentation is really seeing him speak uh and letting those words of his presentation and his actions on stage uh kind of seep in so he will be coming this year in on october for our staff and he really talks about he calls it real talk and implicit bias and what do our actions really mean and the staff will really have a great pd centered around that we spent some time last year really increasing diversity text in our libraries so we gave all of our elementary school libraries that middle school library and our high school library library media specialists um some some monies and they went out and found lots of great text to do that windows uh sliding glass doors and mirrors to increase their um their collections the ap english course uh mr higgins switched it up a little bit so that all um 80 english language competition students read um the book t nah coats between uh by tina coates between the world and me uh and it was a it's a lengthy letter written by a black journalist to his son and this was the first time that that cl that class had uh kind of did a book study on that book and then at elementary schools if i go back to it here are just a few samples of books that we've kind of pulled in more in our social studies curriculum so talking about refugees migrations and even looking at holidays and why we have different holidays in our countries and what we celebrate the middle school once again added some more books around diversity and their book clubs reading uh refugee and ghost boys this year coming up and parents have already uh gotten this information uh elementary grade uh level teachers which we call our cia team our curriculum instruction and assessment team of teachers reviewed our summer reading choices and uh they really dove in to find books at each grade level but that include more diverse characters in the titles for this year so we were really happy that we uh got a chance to kind of take a peek at that and really look and providing opportunities for more uh diverse reading for our students and um that about closes it up i'm gonna turn it over to questions but i'm just gonna stop sharing my screen because i had to do that presentation without seeing anyone which i always find a little difficult while looking at body language thank you miss oliveira yeah it can be hard i i try not to share screens because then you only see a few faces um anybody have any questions or comments for miss oliveira or dr gifford about that presentation about other issues the the schools are working on right now jada go right ahead yeah go ahead jada sorry that's okay um so from my understanding a lot of the um diverse i'm gonna say diversity points um come from the library like investing in books and stuff but i think that's tricky i know at least as my experience as a teenager like going to the library and picking books is not something i choose to do on my own time like if that makes sense and i i can't assume many other teenagers see that too like on top of like schoolwork in general so like do you think there's like a way maybe to work around that because i feel like there's a lot of investment and diversity into the library but not a lot of students actually utilize that so that that's a great question and first of all we we should always take time to read i certainly understand students high school students don't have time to read um but what we've done in a lot of like what we did in iap comp in a lot of the classrooms is we adding the books into our curriculum so even though we've increased the titles within our libraries a lot of the books that you saw were books that were added into our curriculum so books that you would be i want to say required to read but part of the curriculum that everybody was reading and also a big um push that we're trying to do and i i think we've done a pretty really good job of is adding what we call voice and choice for students so they have a lot more voice in what books they want to read so instead of saying the whole class is going to read this book we say this is the what we're trying to learn so the skill we're trying to learn but also here are some books you can choose to read that will still get you practicing that skill and talking about that skill so those are a couple of things that we've done to increase um the reading and choices for students but you do make a great point i understand kids don't go not everyone goes to the library so we are that's why i'm saying trying to pull it into our standards and what we do in our in our documented curriculum yeah thank you i'd love to follow up on on that question i was on a um a seminar about higher education recently and i heard one of the speakers who was fabulous was was talking about um how this needs to be sort of a lens for our whole curriculum and he gave the example i can't remember his last name now but i remember his first name was jose um and he talked about how he went through his entire you know k-12 education and there was never like a word or a math or a science problem that used jose as an example of the story that was being told so in addition to thinking about right the integrating sort of diverse books into our english curriculum our history curriculum to what extent do we use diversity metrics to evaluate the other curriculum materials that we use i mean i'm looking at mr hayes because i knew he used to be a math um teacher right math uses a lot of word problems do we evaluate textbooks um with some diversity metrics looking at that um to what extent is that part of the district's plan when we purchase those materials so we do have a textbook adoption policy and it does it that the we have a rubric for it and it does have that but one thing we're looking at doing and hopefully we will get it rolled out for september is to train more teachers on looking at that because when we my major kind of thoughts in a way is is we give out curriculum and we have our basic textbooks and stuff but it's also all the supplemental material that comes in and that's plays a much bigger part in what students are exposed to and opportunities that students have which is why i was really happy with seeing the mirrors windows and sliding glass doors philosophy because i think it just helps people to wrap their head around it so after adolf brown comes and we kind of do a little bit more pd around that we're going to be rolling out a supplemental material um policy which will have a rubric which will hopefully get our teachers thinking more about you know the the name exactly what you're saying the jose's the names the places the the thoughts the what we're putting in kids hands uh in a true confession when we looked at our elementary summer reading books um i just happened to be looking at them and i was pretty shocked to be honest with you about how many were white male characters in our books and we immediately put it out and i said let's switch this up and i just left it out to the like i said that team and i said thinking back at our windows you know that kind of sliding glass doors again and um the books that we came back with was was much better we're richer we're um more inclusive we're more diverse and i have to be honest it you know has a reflection on me when i looked at it i was kind of like wow someone should have called this out in a way or looked at it again so i think we have a much better options now for our students which is going back to what jada said it's another opportunity for students to have those choices where it's built into the curriculum they don't have to go to the library and get it and it's a nice chance for parents to see it too because we put that flyer up for parents to look at all the grade level choices so i just want to say i i appreciate your comment about reflecting on how we haven't been doing well but we're trying to do better because i think one of the important things here too as we work together and try to create a better better at more welcoming atmospheres we have to be willing to acknowledge our shortcomings um and just do better right we can't change the past but we can't change the future um so i definitely appreciate you acknowledging that and that that sort of effort that we're making um other questions from people here miss scott uh thank you ms oliveira for that presentation i i haven't read all those books and so i hope you'll uh help me a little bit i wanted to ask if things like native peoples um differently abled folks and um glbtqi communities are represented in those materials as well i couldn't tell by the titles and i'm not familiar with all of them so i'm just wondering what the breadth of the diversity is i guess like the visible and invisible diversity so i'm going to go back to the slide with the flower and it says we're growing i think after the to be honest with the joy floyd incident we really went out with our library media specialist who really have a good handle on these books and they went and picked a lot of books and we said to them same thing we want to try to really increase our collections so um i was just looking at that a couple of days ago um i can't think of explicit titles to be honest with you but yes we are extremely mindful of making sure we include all the protected classes if we want to say and make sure that they have representation in our uh literature that we have available for students thank you i had one other question but i'll wait if someone else wants to raise their hand now why don't you go ahead and then we'll we'll open it up to someone else if they need to go ahead ms scott all right i was also wondering about um in addition to reading if there were uh activities and i know that's part of the curriculum that there are different things that are happening that teachers are approaching it in different ways but there are like one of the most basic examples i can think of as not a teacher um would be like a debate team or opportunity in social studies class to debate um so that as topics come up the students can sort of get a little bit passionate about something and at first it may not be diversity issues it may be you know what what doritos flavor is the best doritos flavor but eventually you know we can engage them in things that are more diverse than that so i was wondering are we doing anything or what you know are we doing enough in your opinion in that way or are there other ways that we can be improving as we move forward so i think we can always be improving as we move forward and i think sometimes if i go back to the summer reading choices it's things that were intentional in a way but we just have to be reflective and look at things differently we've done a lot and i i sometimes think that parents out there probably i don't want my name out there because there's probably a lot of pets that have been bought over the last few years in elementary schools because we do teach persuasive writing and we have kids come up with what do you want what do you want and what what do you want to be passionate about what do you want to do and so um we've had a lot of kids write great persuasive essays to get pets and then we get the parents writing i just had to go buy a dog because it was so good and uh or we had a group of students at the middle school this was going back a couple years but changed styrofoam trays because they felt it wasn't good for the landfill so we are we do teach that and we move up far we move up across the grade levels for our persuasive writing and i think the eighth grade civics project is another great example of that of giving students ownership and making a change and saying that they can really make a difference in this world and uh the other part i really like about it what jesse came up with it's a it's a um collaborative thing so kids have to work together to to make that change so we're teaching a lot of those skills in there thank you dr gifford you wanted to add something along that line yeah thank you i just wanted to say that you know and and i wanted the principles to sp um we have mr tebow as well as mr hayes but also our teachers are here um that certainly include various projects in their curriculum um but can speak to some of those things to enlighten everyone here what's going on i'm sure our students can speak about either things that we're doing or things that we might be able to do but i just wanted to mention a couple of things um maybe small but i think it it speaks volumes for what the district is trying to do about being inclusive and i think about our buddy benches that we um have at our schools our unified um athletic program is humongous if you will um the attention it gets the support it gets the peers that um cooperate and collaborate with our students with special edu special needs um the programs that we run i just think that it's it's our basic philosophy and our core belief and our true north if you will and i i would say that anyone here our teachers as well as our administrators would um be able to speak to our emphasis on that throughout the last few years about really um promoting the rights of everyone the inclusiveness of everyone and and you know lgbtq whatever it might be we are here to support all of those students and um again i have we have a social worker here we have folks and again we might be able to increase and enhance what we're doing but i would i would welcome any of their voices here on things that they're thinking about that our schools promote because and and i see mr tebow's hand up so yeah go ahead mr chibo thank you so i just wanted to say uh a few things actually so um to ms scott's point um about do they you know students get to debate and different things like that i will share that our advanced placement program this year um the research in particular the research course um there were a number of student presentations students who did you know um uh unique research into areas uh you know they get to choose their topics that they conducted the research and then put together a 15 to 20 minute presentation on in fact uh jelena um one of the reasons julina was recommended um for this committee was her ap presentation around um issues of equality and the use of um you know indigenous people as a school mascot you know so we have um and she was just that was one presentation there were others of our ap students who did presentations around that topic i'm thinking of another one was around looking at issues of um you know uh gender inequity in stem related fields so there's a lot of these presentations and a lot of these different projects that our students are very much engaged in which i think is um you know it's just so it's really it's inspiring because it shows the degree to which our students are passionate about making the world a better place which i think is great um so that's one thing uh i want to circle back to jada's point around reading and and certainly um you know i i understand her point about the library and um i think our advisory program is an area that we could certainly look to do more around the issue of diversity equity and inclusion one of the strands of our advisory program which is fledgling it's only in its second year so it's really we viewed the advisory program as a four year build and unfortunately the pandemic hit when it did so that's made advisory a little bit tricky this year but one of the overarching strands of our advisory program is community building and so what better way to build community than to interweave issues of diversity equity and inclusion into those into that program and have really meaningful discussions with our teenagers with our students at the high school level also our english department this year identified kind of different social justice topics that aligned with their curriculum at different points um so that they could interweave that discussion around the the texts that they were reading at the time um you know so whether that was food scarcity or whether it was you know issues of of race relations or you know it was a different topic you know um depending on what was what they were reading at the time um you know so there are a number of areas and certainly the other thing i would say to dr jenkins point and you know i i don't even think necessarily that it's a matter of bad or good with how we're doing but it's a matter of continuous improvement and looking to to continuously you know um improve how things are doing and to continuously build a community that is more equitable um you know and celebrates the diversity it includes all i think uh is our goal so thank you thank you dr tebow i also i would add to that you know i'm glad to see where we're doing some professional development in the fall around this issue because it's not just two about giving people tools it's about you know teaching people how to do this sort of properly um talking about issues of injustice race gender inequality you know sexual orientation gender identity can be difficult conversations and people need to know how to use those tools and so it's about sort of both of those things happening hand in hand um so that the conversations that we have are are meaningful right um and so i'm glad to see we we're both you know working on the curriculum and the professional development around that because i think both of those things are are are really important um other questions or comments um okay so julina first and then uh elizabeth second [Music] a lot of kids did go out their way to talk about racial um christian puzzle gender i know colin zoo he talked about uh during his research about the gender that is dealing with um courses because many females are most likely to do ap than male and he realized that he was less than many kids who were doing ap so that was an interesting topic to bring that as well about identity during those type of situations as well going back to the um i feel like i don't know if you guys ever considered it or ever done this before um maybe like maybe like having like this similar to like college fairs like having exchanged those books that they picked out and like intriguing the kids i remember when i was in middle school i used to have book fairs and wanted to like buy books and all those type of stuff so maybe this educating kids on the book instead of them reading it for themselves because many teenagers aren't really they're just picking it just because i have to pick [Music] me virtually [Music] you're breaking up a little bit and i don't know if that's me or did you hear any i got i got it but towards the end i think you were breaking up just a little bit but i think we got we got some of the stuff again presentations okay and then you're talking about maybe ways to introduce to students rather than waiting for them to come in is that correct yes okay yeah that's like book fair right are great great ideas all right uh miss miss oliveira did you want to respond to that i know miss murphy had a question or comment too was that well i think yes i think that's a great idea about when we have books that um we want kids to read i know a lot of teachers and maybe this is something we can put out there to do more about diversity they do what we call book buffets and they set up just actually a buffet table of books and kids can come in and look at them and talk about them and kind of then pick what they like and we can maybe maybe do um you know something centered around diversity and a diverse book buffet if you may i don't know if that makes sense but do something like that so that is something that you know a little tweak that we could probably easily do i our teachers are very creative about going about things like that so we can something we can work on probably pretty quickly uh ms murphy thanks um yeah to build on that quickly i would just say that having looked at the high school summer reading list that came out already last week that was to me was an example like there were so many choices i think there were over 60 books um but also it really looked like a pretty diverse mix without being explicitly saying these are our diverse selections they were just in the mix and the categories were actually you know non-fiction memoir fiction young adult etc but there were definitely i assume a conscious decision made in how those shaped because it did it did show a variety of perspectives which looks great the question i had kind of actually ties a little bit some of the other comments i'm wondering though i love hearing about when we talk about all the kindness and the buddy benches and the different things over the years particularly the younger levels i wonder how we're connecting from elementary through high school and ap in terms of i think we know that not not the majority of students that are taking those ap classes so if that's where a lot of this really deeper stuff is is going what's what's happening at the middle school level how are we particularly taking all this focus on kindness and inclusion and also tying that explicitly to diversity right and diversity of all shapes and sizes not just cultural um i i believe in the work that i do especially it comes out a lot you know kindness is wonderful and super important but we also have to learn how to be kind when we disagree with people and sometimes there is a tendency to focus our efforts on kindness on the things that it's easy for everyone to agree upon and we know what's what's right and what's wrong and i think sometimes we have to start to kind of push things a little bit further when it comes to teaching these younger or early adolescent kids what it looks like to disagree but still be kind and giving them ways of modeling that type of thing so i'm wondering how we're doing professional development and maybe looking towards things for the future where we're not just presenting this book and its perspective but also helping kids to see and learn to discuss different things and stuff like that in a an environment where they can have structure and guidance you know sort of like debate but also be learning that there is a way to think differently and also think critically and and learn from others perspectives instead of just be exposed know so to and anyone can chime in on that if you'd like but um i think you know as as a part of what we have going i do think um in general this is an area where we are growing at the middle school and where we need to continue to grow um the debate process is something you know as our age ranges it can be a little bit sensitive um you know a little bit fragile in our in our viewpoints we do it with eighth graders they work on debate uh in their social studies classes um as well as you know as we move to the the new civics standards and um the civics project you know the um alternating viewpoints you know will be a part of that um and i think you know just in general we're probably a little bit closer to the elementary school model of teaching kindness um and teaching empathy because you know we're a little bit closer to that age and kind of growing out of that as as our students progress through the middle school um and you know and it's really about developing an environment of inclusivity we have you know a number of a number of students who are really in a in a stage of trying to understand where they fit you know how to be um how to be included if they don't necessarily feel so and and so i think in this case you know and this is kind of some of you know hearing about you know having adolf brown who i'm a little bit familiar with come i think it's a a huge step in the right direction for for our you know building staff who you know will then lead our students to to be more inclusive i think you know the understanding's got to start at the top and work its way down to our students so i think um that's a big area for group of growth for us i think we have opportunities to do wonderful things and as we you know as we get trained more as our building staff gets trained more i think we can really help our students along in creating an inclusive environment for for themselves and for their peers now something that elizabeth said just sort of got me thinking about that transition from the message of kindness to sort of that deeper thinking right because you know being anti-racist and focusing on social justice sometimes i i don't mean we want to be unkind to people that we disagree with um but individual behavior and systems of oppression right don't change systems and so it's like moving that step beyond kindness right that that that that being truly committed to social justice to being anti-racist requires more action than that and i don't think they're necessarily quite ready for that at middle school but i think that's what you're getting right that if we're going to make an elizabeth i don't want to put words in your mouth but i was thinking that as you're saying this that kindness is a start but right as we develop we need more we need more than that right you need you need we need some behaviors to to disrupt the status quo and to challenge right sort of conventional ways of doing things because of sort of some inherent problems um built into those structures i don't think that's going to happen in the middle school to mr hayes's point right i'm not sure developmentally developmentally ready for that but i think it's also important right to help kids make that transition right um i don't know if that makes sense or if that was but it made me think of that when you were saying that um elizabeth right that it's we've got to get them to that next step as well other questions or comments i don't see i mean i think i see today i think we appreciate this presentation it's the start of the conversation and the start of sort of learning um what we're doing um you know i think as we go we might start to and i've already started jotting notes and developing lists we might start thinking about well what are the other things that we want to learn about um and what are the other things that we want we might want information um from the schools about i think we got a nice presentation about like curriculum today and i think that was good um you know one of the things a couple of the things that came to my mind that i sort of wrote down to think about and again i don't want to say we all need this by you know next week or whatever but as we keep continuing our work what are the policies right around official policies around that invoke diversity like how do we select texts right tracy you talked about you know we're developing about policies about supplemental materials um we need to think about this in other areas too our hiring right our professional development all of that sort of stuff so i think at some point we may want to look at some of the policies that we already have around this um you know one of the things that also struck me i think maybe ms chamberlain asked us at our last meeting i think you asked some a question maybe about what other languages are spoken in our school am i right about that lily yeah um and that sort of falls under the umbrella to me well what data are we collecting around diversity because i'm doing a summer reading on this campus it's about um using data to move from an equity talk to an equity walk um and the idea is if we're not measuring things we don't know that we need to improve them right um so what sort of data are we collecting around diversity one of the things that i know our faculty did on campus was we started looking at some of the rates of um police interaction and disciplinary procedures by race and there are huge disparities which may not be surprising but i also think it was surprising to a lot of people because we'd never looked at that data that way so you know we have some idea of curriculum now but i'm thinking you know some policies are things that we need to learn about and also what data do we collect um and where do we want to be collecting data are some things that we might want to know more about as a committee i guess i might ask you all as we sort of wrap up the presentation part are there and again this is not necessarily for next week or next meeting but long term this sort of list of things we might want to go to are there other things that you think you might want to learn more about from the administration the schools around these issues jada you have your hand up go right ahead so um i made some notes before um the meeting started and i think um my biggest point is like building allyship because at least my experience in the dartmouth public schools is everybody is predominantly white whether it be the staff and the student body and i know the student body is out of your hands but like especially the staff like if i had someone who was out like looked like me maybe in middle school like i would have worn my hair curly earlier and stuff like that i wouldn't have felt like ashamed of those things because i never really had a person who looked like me i think there was two other black girls in my grade growing up um just i think that just shows how white dartmouth is not only as like a school system but as a community and i think we need to focus on building allyship because we're building like a lot of programs that promote diversity where people can learn about other cultures but i don't think individuals are learning how to support them if that makes sense it does absolutely and i think um you know one of the things that we did talk about last meeting was perhaps maybe next fall one of the things that we're doing on our campus but might be good in the schools is doing a climate survey um both about how how people experience um being in our schools around issues of diversity um both for the people who work here and you know for the students we're sort of age-appropriate um because i think that helps us also think about where we're not doing well and where we can do better um i think allyship is is a big one but i think there's lots of probably we might find others in doing that that climate survey um other comments questions suggestions miss aloe vera so i'm just going to put out there that i felt as we were putting together the presentation on curriculum that i did sell a lot of things short so i i know the school adjustment council is the guidance counselors i don't want to speak for mrs missouri mr bloom but they do an awful lot of work around this um i did not even touch upon a second step program and what they bring in so i i i just i don't have a guilt or anything but i kind of sold that part of it a little bit short the great work that they do around this so yeah and i do want to say that was really a presentation about curriculum right and so that's like i'm saying like maybe in a meeting or two we might have a presentation about policies right and maybe in a couple of months we might have a presentation about data um so yeah i think that was i think that's a very valid point and i think it's important to emphasize um that it's not everything and that that also might might um you know be a good presentation to have from guidance both at you know the high school and the middle school to talk about the work that our guidance counselors and our social workers are doing around diversity because they interact so closely with our students so that might be something that we add to that list i feel like we're going to have a process of information gathering right and so these are we there's lots of people i think that we might want to hear from over our next set of meetings so we've got some things about policy maybe looking at data maybe looking at guidance and social work mr tebow you have your hand up go right ahead so i i don't wanna you know i'm hesitant to bring it up um but i do think it's the elephant in the room um you know the mascot was an issue that came up at our first meeting uh yes we're going to come back to that can i put you on hold on that one absolutely sure because okay so here's what i want to do we're getting into a little bit of then looking at our agenda we have the presentation um the second thing on our agenda was the review of the charge and then the last thing on our agenda is the continued discussion of what our priorities are so i think i'd like to come back to the mascot issue if it's okay with you mr tebow under item three would that work absolutely okay so if we're done sort of with if does anybody have any other questions for miss oliveira or dr gifford about that presentation all right so let's take a quick look um last time i circulated we had we had talked to the meeting about the charge i'm not really sure that there's anything any changes that we want to make to the chart at this moment but because of open meeting law right i had to show it to you last time and now is really when we can discuss it um and so this charge that i sent the email to you i have all sorts of notes here so i'm trying to find it myself um i sent the email to you all um i think you know we don't have to change it now we can always go back to the school committee if we want to change it um but i'm wondering if anyone saw anything here that they thought you know they would want to change anything they thought was missing anything they would add we can always keep it as it is for now and come back to it later but since we did bring it up at last meeting i wanted to give anyone a chance to provide any input on that that charge now so does anybody have any thoughts about that charge i think it's pretty broad i think it allows us to do a lot of different things but again we're going to make changes to it we need to do it in an open discussion in an open meeting with all of you so if everyone's okay with that for now now we can come back around to that issue um that mr tebow brought up and let me say a couple of things one um i see as we go along right we're all starting to get to know each other we're all learning um and so we may be collecting some data with a presentation from miss oliveira we might learn about policies like maybe every meeting we're having a little bit of a presentation for someone that teaches us and we learn some things about different aspects of what the school is doing um but at the same point in time right we are we were convened to do um some work and um one of the issues that the school committee right wanted our committee to look at was the mascot mr tebow now i will open it up and bring it back to you for any comments you wanted to make around that sorry to put you off no no worries at all thank you um i was going to say kind of a little bit of what you just said which is that i i just want to make sure that i mean because we could have people report to us all day every day i mean there's a lot of work around diversity equality um and inclusion and so i think it would be easy to get lost in just continuously having folks you know come to present to us and you know um being someone who often has to present i appreciate that tracy has had a full day already today and so is dr gifford and and everyone really on the committee but i guess my point is um i just wanted to make sure that we both have any kind of presentation but also realize that um you know i don't think any work this committee can do will move us forward if we don't honestly and authentically address the issue of the mascot um and so i just want to make sure that that doesn't get put to the to the back burner that was all yeah i appreciate that mr tebow and you know we had some conversations about a bunch of different things um last um our last meeting but i was gonna say you know sort of as a member not necessarily as a chair of this committee when we as a school committee talked about convening this committee um the mascot issue was central to the convening of this committee but we also wanted to make clear that wasn't the only thing this committee can do but i think it was central and for that reason i i would argue that i would like for us to to tackle that issue first um because i think it's a conversation that many people want to have right now um and there's other things right we can continue to do presentations and do climate surveys and work on other really important issues like jade abroad of allyship and how do we cultivate that that work will be ongoing but i do think we should um tackle um that mascot issue to that and i want to share with you i received a number of sort of different emails um in inputs um i'm sure some of you may have but i have as well so i want to just let you know a few things um first the chair of the dartmouth democratic town committee um jim griffith emailed me and said um that he recommended the dartmouth committee democratic talent committee recommended an open and public hearing on the matter and they volunteered to host that forum i have not yet responded to him because it's not my job it's our job as a committee to chair this um my inclination would be to say to mr griffin griffith um i agree with you we should have an open forum on this um but i believe that the committee should organize that forum um and it may be more than one forum i don't believe that we should have a a political party hosting that forum um but that's not my decision to make so i wanted to consult with you before i responded to him um to hear your thoughts about that um offer that was extended to us as a committee any thoughts uh miss chamberlain personally i feel like we're a ways off from being ready for a meeting like that yeah i think that we want to be very well prepared and have lots of information at hand before we would consider something like that but i agree with you that i think it's something we we should organize ourselves and you know publicize ourselves but that was nice of them to offer very nice i just want i agree i don't think we're ready to have that yet um but i he i haven't responded to him yet so i do want to say yes i think i think it seems everyone's naughty yes we do want to have some sort of forum but when we do it it's going to be us hosting it does that seem about right for everyone okay email number two um that i want to share with you i also received an email from kempton campbell who is an alumni of the dartmouth schools and who is now chair of the town's youth commission he has been doing a um directed reading or a study project um about native american mascots uh and while he's been at college this spring um and he offered to make a presentation to us and then email number three um i have an email from miss laurel davis delano who um participated in an naacp forum about the mascot who also offered to help for us to arrange to have some native american speakers come um speak to us about the issue so i'm i'm i'm raising that because i'm i'm wondering whether how well how we want to tackle this do we want to do our own research first do we want to have people come present us research um how would the committee prefer to tackle that because i think maybe miss chamberlain your my point maybe we need to learn some about the issue before we do an open forum on that issue would that be fair to say okay julina and then i think jada both had their hands up so so go ahead please share your thoughts can you hear me i can yes thank you um i agree with miss chamberlain for like us educating ourselves first before going into it without knowing and then being rampaged by information that we didn't know about um i feel like we should educate ourselves as well be educated by the native americans that would talk to us about it to have an understanding of their perspective so we can have our own background but their background as well so i feel like we should do both at the same time i don't feel like we should just go into listening [Music] we lost you jelena sorry selena we lost you there at the end so we didn't hear i we got the point that we think that we should do some education first um we might perhaps ask mr tebow has some great things to say about your ap project so perhaps you might be willing to share some of that information with us we could have um uh mr campbell share some information perhaps as well based on his research um and i do know miss delano also does her scholarly research is in this area as well so we might do that uh jada you wanted to add um something to uh your comments yeah i was gonna kind of say the same thing as julina i think we need to educate ourselves because i think it's wrong to set the indigenous peoples to educate us um but i think it's so important to have their representation here when talking about indigenous issues because i think it's kind of wrong for us to just speak over their voices because essentially if they are not represented i feel like we're just talking over them and yeah i really think we should have the indigenous people come in and talk so yeah i will follow up with that uh jaden miss walker by saying that miss delane davis delano suggested and what has been done in some other communities in hanover and pentucket and winchester was to invite a panel of of native american speakers to speak um and to not just have one or two to engage in tokenism um right um and also to not necessarily have shortened time limits that we might have in a in a more public forum so i'm wondering if perhaps maybe our first step might be to have an informational meeting um where we can have some presentations from perhaps julina if she's willing to share some of her ap research but also um mr kempton um and then maybe talk with miss davis delano too about um inviting some some native um speakers to speak with us would that be a good first step what is the committee's thoughts on that mr tebow so there was a um so julina's presentation she can speak up and correct me if i'm wrong was focused on racial bias in high school and i think that i think that certainly applies you know to our com our work as a whole but we also had we had another student who did one specifically about um the use of a native you know native as a mascot um and so i could certainly reach out to mr higgins and to that students and see if they'd be willing to i think you know what a great learning opportunity that is for the student and it really again you know in an authentic way kind of elevates the research that they had done um and the presentation they put together you know i'm 100 percent for um back to ms oliveira's comment about students sort of leading and driving on these issues so to the extent that we can get students and former students to give presentations i i think that's fabulous um so i guess we're thinking about this in terms of discussion of our plans um would it be okay with the committee if i go ahead and start making some try to figure out a date where we could have an informative meeting like this um we would record it we'll post this um i'm just thinking that if we're bringing speakers in we may have to be flexible about when they are available as opposed to saying this is when our meeting date is who can make it um so if it's okay with the committee i think maybe our next step might be to make arrangements um for that type of meeting informative meeting for us i'm featuring some people talking about research and and featuring some tribal leaders to talk a little bit about that as as a first step in this process related to that and i would work um if anybody wants to help me with that work um i would i would welcome that but maybe that's our first step miss chamberlain i see your hand up i'm feeling like maybe um we should do a little work on our own before we have any of um the native americans come in and speak with us i don't know if if you if it would be appropriate or if it's something we can do under open meeting law if we there would be a sorry my cat if there would be a way um for us to maybe share some resources with each other like maybe just nothing that's going to take a super long time for anybody to read not a whole book or anything like that maybe there are some videos or short articles or something that we could just educate ourselves a little bit and then maybe have some of those other like the students that you were talking about coming and speak just so that we raise our level of education more before we have any of the tribal leaders to come in does that sound yeah so that's a good point um i would say two things to that miss chamberlain one i have some resources that miss davis delano um shared with this and i can share that with you but i also feel like in terms of thinking about this an open meeting this should be something we want to share with the community as well right to make available um to the community so um let me think about that maybe i'm i'm looking at dr gifford i might talk to maybe mr galashaw about some way that we could set something up like i'm thinking something like a google doc or something like that but that committee members could add stuff to right um so we would be authors on that um other people outside of the committee would not necessarily be authors but they would be able to read and view the resources that we posted on there um so i think maybe creating that sort of resource page not just for us but for the entire community would be a good thing so i think if we did it in that way right it would one be sharing of information because we wouldn't be discussing that information and i don't think it would violate open meeting law particularly if we made it available to the entire community right so i'll i'll look into finding some solution that i can share with you that you all i will start adding some of the stuff i have but as you all sort of learn and find stuff let's start building that up does that sound good to everyone okay so i like that idea so her miss chamberlain's comment then maybe our first step of the process is gathering information both on our own and then maybe um mr tebow might get that student i might ask mr um campbell to to present to us so we do some presentation about sort of the research on that step two then might be having a panel of tribal leaders um talking to us about the issue and then perhaps step three that would be down the road then we may be ready to talk about having a more public slash comment about that does that seem about right to everyone okay i see lots of head nodding this is good all right we're doing good stuff so i think i know it's been a long day for everyone we've been here almost an hour i think we have a path here that sounds like everyone's moving forward um but i don't think we want to set our do we want to set our next meeting date um i'm thinking about this maybe we want to do this i it's the end of the school year so it's a little crazy so i'm hesitant to say let's meet two weeks from now because i think all of the administrators and teachers on here might like keel over and die if i said that um so i'm thinking maybe like three weeks from today we could have that meeting three weeks from today so bonnie's got a three up that seems to be three okay good so that seemed to be good that would be i'm trying to look at my calendar here i think that's like middle school graduation time it is all right so we'll do four weeks we can't go shorter tuesdays seem to work 6 22 does that work for everyone okay and so over the next week or so i will get us technologically set up we can add to this as we go and then hopefully on the 22nd um mr tebow can you um try to coordinate with the student who did that project i will talk to miss davis delano and mr kempton about giving us presentations i will give you all one bit of bad news though and maybe dr gifford might have more information on this though um as we all know governor baker is going to be suspending um pandemic related sort of provisions in the law and it's not entirely clear what things are going to stay around and by what things i mean zoom meetings um you know i understand why it's great that we have school committee meetings that are public and open you know and everyone can come but sometimes for things like this it's really nice to be able to meet via zoom i do not know if we will be able to do that i'm gonna cross my fingers if we can i think it might be nice to do our informational meeting continue to do it through zoom if we can i i can't promise that to you yet is that that's correct dr gifford right we don't know if we'll be able to continue to do this right we're still checking waiting for the uh the official word okay so fingers crossed that we can continue to meet presume i'm in my like leggings i'll tell you underneath right i'm like i've seen that commercial with leslie jones where she says oh it's only the second date the camera's up top love to be able to continue to meet with you all in my leggings but that may be the case um if it is i think we should continue to meet on zoom i think that works better for everyone if not we'll figure out where we're going to meet and how we're going to arrange that um so with that i will ask if anybody has any other questions comments concerns before we get started before we all go okay fabulous so dr jenkins i just want to thank the students for coming as usual they so represent the student body and they are always articulate i've never been disappointed i've always been impressed and enthused by the kiddos if we call them our our young people thank you very much we appreciate having you guys here i also say um thank you to miss oliveira for coming uh to do the presentation and also thank you to to to all of you for for coming um you know showing up to our meeting here on a night to mr tebow's point after a long day's work um we're all tired but this is important work and i'm i'm really thankful that you're all willing to show up and do that with us um that having been said i will entertain a motion to adjourn i make that motion at the end of motion mr tebow are you seconding that i will yes i will second it okay and so now i technically have to do a roll call the one downside of a zoom meeting so i'm gonna vote yeah shannon jenkins uh ms amaral yes uh mr tebow yes mr hayes yes if you're muted a thumbs up too is good we can also confirm that miss bloom yes miss chamberlain yes miss missari yes uh ms scott yes ms murphy yes ms walker yes and miss panfield yes thank you so much everyone for coming um i will um be sending you some emails hopefully soon and we'll see you in a month all right thank you good night bye all right thank you good night everyone you
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I used to know what I used senior year. Oh, I used Rawlings. Rawlings was far. Also, I do not miss spending like $450 on bats, to be quite honest. Did you spend it or did your parents? No, I did. Wow. My parents do. Actually, my coach does. No. As Ravi sends the kid packing. Watched that one right down the middle, but swung at the one in the dirt. No, yeah. No, I bought my own baseball gear. Wow. My parents are like, "We'll drive you there." Just I was like, "Okay." Even though in high school they would take a bus, and then I got my license. So, it really kind of just screwed everything up. Just mad. The year I actually got athletic, I didn't get to play baseball. I remember before COVID all happened, I saw Coach DeFranco. DeFranco looked at me, he goes like, "Oh my god." And then like half the person you were.
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if we have yet to meet my name is shea babashoff and i'm an early graduate from kennedy high independent studies also known as polaris i began attending polaris halfway through sophomore year and with then through hard work and good fortune i managed to graduate the year after before beginning i would like to greatly thank my teachers for deeming my story worth sharing and providing me with this unfathomably special opportunity to speak my truth a core fundamental i was raised on was expanding my mind thank you mom and dad for that by the way i remember always being outside studying rocks flowers insects all you could imagine feeling so curious about the unspoken knowledge nature could teach us in fifth grade my older sister was accepted into oxford academy she has always been my biggest inspiration and i wanted to do nothing but follow in her footsteps that goal of expanding my mind became very tangible when i realized it was impossible for me to attend oxford alongside her despite my burning passion towards learning i began experiencing an overwhelming burnout at a pretty young age after much deliberation my therapist and parents suggested i take a break and try independent studies two days later i completed my official transfer to kennedy is and after a short while i couldn't imagine doing anything but that the teachers immediately welcomed me so openly and confidently pouring so much faith in my ability to graduate early i never expected to form such a bond and such a genuine and pure bond with my teachers a special one that exists beyond my academic success they believed in me and us not only as amazing scholars but as talented artists hard-working athletes selfless tutors strong-willed confident young adults and so so much more we can never thank them enough for the single most important lesson that independent studies has taught me is that we as individuals can set our own course and that we are in control of our own success i finally feel curious again when i think about my future and these teachers played such an overwhelming role in that this gratefulness in me will last forever as it will in all of us all of us have been through so much we have lived through a historical crisis of truly global proportions we have had to learn how to adapt and flow with so many unprecedented changes but we have persevered and now here we are ready to take on so much more congratulations class of 2021 we have so much to look forward to thank you [Applause] thank you shaylee now please welcome aaron and gary good morning to the graduating class of 2021 we have arrived at our destination here in the middle of a global pandemic and worldwide outrage for the census actions being performed under racial injustice despite personal and academic struggles we've experienced we've still finished strong with the entire country looking for answers this new generation of graduates have initiated the turning point in our society today each of us will be honored for our perseverance and individuality therefore we must recognize the importance of investing in ourselves stepping out of your comfort zone is the prime action to take for self-discovery i can assure you i know how difficult it is to step out and to achieve that goal there was the pivotal pulling in my life when i chose to use my communication skills and passion for making a positive difference to impact not just my campus but the anaheim union high school district as a whole gilbert high school serves as a community of students and faculty with diverse ethnicities cultures and backgrounds some of us may have critical needs for these for example employment during campus hours family obligations etc with the uncertainty of receiving proper schooling through virtual learning and the lingering fear of being incapable of completing our educational pathway we students were able to prove what we deemed impossible as possible we are the answer to a generation of prayers i would like to take this opportunity to thank the many people who helped us who specifically helped me realize the value of education awareness and how to be authentic in actions to my family and friends who've not only had to deal with my academic setbacks but my emotional turmoil as well and for empowering me to conquer through even my toughest misfortunes to my teachers faculty and the esteemed district board members who've always been in support of my academic achievements and who've helped me gain an understanding of self-righteousness and individuality specifically my specialized academic instruction teachers mr pearson and mrs r and my friday night live advisor miss rash to my fellow student ambassadors asb members and asb advisor mr sushain who never underestimated my cooperative skills and reminded me that communication empathy and the ability to delegate are all essential characteristics to being a successful leader to my ambassador to my ambassador advisors mr hoshi mrs brown and mrs b houston who've endorsed my comforting demeanor and assisted me through my educational pathway and participation in the auhsd ambassador program and finally to my independent studies teacher miss lee who has stuck with me for the entirety of my high school career her patience dedication quick wittiness are a few of the many reasons why she's one of my greatest inspirations my name is erin and gotti gilbert high school student ambassador and your student body president for a handful of you this is the first time we're seeing each other face to face and for the majority of you this is the first time you're hearing my name unfortunately with the events occurring from kova 19 and the transition to virtual learning i was incapable of establishing a good enough communication with you all my peers and making my presence known i take full responsibility for being unable to make a long lasting impression with the majority of you and i sincerely apologize your first impression to me may be that i'm an ambitious student with a smallish gpa that lives the ideal lifestyle with no obstacles hence why you take on multiple leadership roles nevertheless it's important that i preface that i am no different from you and that these are merely expectations i have struggled with self-identity academic setbacks lack of motivation and fighting my life purpose among many other obstacles gilbert high school's independent studies program was my turning point working diligently at my own pace gave me the opportunity to complete the credit requirements i fell behind in and the ability to reevaluate my outlook on education a man by the name of nidokuben once said your present circumstances don't determine where they go they nearly determine where you start cuban implies that who we become in life doesn't depend on the qualities we possess rather the choices we make sometimes fear of an untrue belief or limitation stops us from moving forward the unfortunate reality of life is that we will be denied more times than accepted once we receive our diplomas each of us could be faced with an abundance of rejections many of us won't get past the application process of attending the college of our dreams and some of us will be let down in neither ways whether it be our educational or occupational pathway other candidates with the same qualifications as us will get the jobs that we applied for each of us could sit in a hundred different interviews and still be denied in each one of them what i ask you today is to not take no for an answer don't be afraid of no's be afraid of a yes that you sabotage because you decided to quit instead of carry on you must accept failure so that you may persevere after facing challenges each obstacle we face is an additional reason to work harder so we must jump over each hurdle break each barrier to achieve nothing short of greatness celebrate how far you've come and how much you've contributed to this community today i challenge you to face your challenges head-on and to break those barriers and to believe so heavily in your aspirations because you know you have the potential to succeed to the graduating class of 21 i wish you all the best congratulations thank you aaron now please welcome janelle clemente good afternoon i'd like to start off by congratulating our graduating class of 2021.
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david dabrowski from lexington junior high school to ball junior high school cynthia lundgren from catella high school to magnolia high school lorena stout from magnolia high school to catella high school the board of trustees unanimously voted to make the following appointments effective july lauren choi assistant principal lexington junior high school quark wynn assistant principal dale junior high carly rasmussen assistant principal south junior high school allison brunner assistant principal walker junior high school 4.2 the board of trustees unanimously voted to make the following appointment effective july 1. charles kuh program administrator 1 4.3 the board of trustees unanimously voted to make the following appointment effective july 1. amanda bean certificated director 4.4 the board of trustees unanimously voted to make the following appointment effective july 1. scott reindell coordinator 4.5 the board of trustees by a vote of five to zero approved the settlement agreement in oah case number two zero two one zero four zero two three one resolving all issues in students due process complaint by reimbursing residential treatment costs and a privately obtained assessment as well as other reimbursements in the amount of six thousand five hundred dollars and four point six the board of trustees by a vote of five to zero approved the settlement agreement in oah case number resolving all issues in students due process complaint by providing compensatory services and reimbursement in the amount of 3750 okay thank you kathy now we'll take a moment to try to get to meet all of you who are our new hires or we have moved around let's give them a round of applause to start with but um we'll have to do this virtually usually we'd like to have you come into the boardroom and we get a chance to shake your hands and say welcome aboard so we'll have to do it virtually for right now and then sometime during the summer maybe get to meet you in person uh let's start with carly rasmussen hi can you all hear me yes thank you awesome um good evening board of trustees superintendent masuda cabinet members and the whole au au hsd community i'm joining you all from the san francisco bay area right now where i've been for the past nine years as a as an educator but i am really excited about making my way back home to southern california where i was born and raised and i'm incredibly humbled to have the opportunity to serve as assistant principal at south junior high in the past week i've been able to speak with miss mejia and mr swans and other district leadership and in all my conversations a common theme emerged which was that south is a really special place doing some amazing work and has an incredible school community so it's going to be such a privilege to be able to serve the students the families and the staff at south and an honor to be joining the district so thank you so much for the opportunity thank you and welcome aboard okay um our next new hire is allison brunner good evening board of trustees superintendent matt souda and everyone in anaheim unifi anaheim union high school district my name is allison brunner and i have spent the last 16 years working for tustin unified i am thrilled to be joining walker junior high to be a viking in the last two weeks i've been collaborating with principal jennifer brown and just had some wonderful conversations my father is a graduate of savannah high school and my grandparents lived in anaheim for over 50 years so truly it is a second home to me and i'm just thrilled to be a part of it i am a mother of two daughters uh greta is an eight-year-old um sassy wonderful girl and georgia is a first grader who's quiet and sweet my husband is currently a teacher in tustin unified where he's taught for 22 years so i'm just so thrilled to be joining anaheim union high school district thank you very much all right well welcome aboard allison okay okay our next uh one is lauren choi hi everybody can you hear me yes hi everyone um good evening superintendent michael matsuda uh members of the board board of trustees and any staff and community members it's with absolute joy that i look forward to becoming a lexington lion woohoo and i'm joined here tonight by my family uh we're all huddled together here on the couch uh this is my husband robert this is my daughter sophia my older daughter hi and my other daughter madeline hi they're not hello girls they're not twins they just look a lot alike um so i come from norak lonrada unified school district i've been the assistant principal there for two years and then i served for four years as the assistant principal at southlands and i am just really thrilled to be a part of the lexington team i've had really great conversations with the principal and um i just want to be a member of a community and i know i will be that connects students education with their passion and purpose in life you know i want to be a part of a leadership team that that makes school a meaningful place to be and so i'm really excited to join lexington junior high school and to serve all of the families and staff and the community members of anaheim high school district all right thank you and welcome aboard okay and our last but not least new hire is quote new year hello good evening everybody uh just want to say thank you to uh superintendent masuda for the board of trustees cabinet members and all the different community members that are here today i'm just really excited to be part of the uh union district um you know i've been at uh north london unified as well for the last five years as an assistant principal out of high school um so i hope to you know bring a little bit of my personality which is the belief that all students can be successful and in my conversations with the principal moreno uh we've had good conversations about what that means and what um it's gonna take to to make sure that every student is successful and i'm just really excited to be a part of the dell junior uh middle junior high school um i'm just ready to kind of jump in and i'm hoping that we can have more conversations in the next couple of weeks to really get started because i do really want to you know get the ball rolling in there and i'm here with my my beautiful wife who puts up with my uh then i have my daughter here who is my world but also very sassy as well so yeah and i have my son my my my only son ethan knox who uh you know is the sweetest little boy you'll ever meet but i'm just really excited uh to be a part of this and thank you so much for the welcome today as well thank you all right well welcome aboard and nice to meet you all now i failed to have the board introduce themselves so that you could get to know who we are or see who we are so i'm anna piercy and presently i'm the president of the board uh anne marie do you want to go next hi everybody welcome anne-marie randall trejo former president and i'm just so delighted to meet all of you today and uh you're um you're in for a treat we are a wonderful district if i may say so myself so thank you for putting in your applications and congratulations okay brian hi i'm brian o'neill i've been on the board for almost 20 years i want to welcome all of you to our district i know that uh we provide a wonderful atmosphere for the students and the staff and i'm so happy that you are joining us and we look forward to having you uh continue on the mission of giving our students the best education possible so welcome to bar hi i'm al jabbar i've been on the board for i think now 13 years probably i've stopped counting after 10.
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can i get a motion motion mr bell second second mr morris any questions about the minutes hearing none can i get a roll call yes uh 6.1 the superintendent recommends for approval of the resolutions as outlined in personnel resolutions under district and high school 6.2 through 6.11 can i get a motion motion mr battalion can i get a second second all right mr zucker or any questions i have a question on six two the big one that everybody's here for if we agree to this we're accepting that we're not going to renew and that we're allowing pumping rights um by law by law it's in the contract and the 10-year law okay so basically yes if we vote more then we are affirming that we are mutually agreeing to not uh reading dr gallagher's contract so people hear from the attorneys he i know you said that people may have to because of he's to do certain things can we hear from the board attorney in terms of what our options are say we didn't want to i mean not just keep them in the position but keep them in the district you mean all right well first of all has he been right yes at that point if he chooses to stay then it would be up to the new superintendent to make that choice so maybe again the new superintendent would make the recommendation uh to the board that's what they would do with dr so then it would be it would be his recommendation and the board would review it or their recommendation rather than superintendent it would the new superintendent would have to recommend where to the only thing we have control is either to renew a superintendent's contract or to not with a super attendance contract beyond that um we do not have the ability to tell the new superintendent coming in and where to place dr gallagher when he steps down i mean we could tell if he puts him in and they put him in a position that we all disagree on we could vote on um when it comes as a motion but that's he continues for the next year because his contract doesn't end until june of so the idea would be to start this search for the superintendent fairly immediately to have yes yes and then because of the tenure that he does decide to stay because he would i guess assume seniority over everyone that's yeah that's like i said um ten year rights allows someone in a tenured position which he was in to be an administrator and then it would be up to the new school superintendent to decide where he fits best um we can't really we think we can't really say what that person is going to do going forward it would be up to them to make recommendations to us and we would either approve that recommendation or not improve the recommendation at that time i can't speculate at this point nor do i want to because there's an area of possibilities that could happen between now and then um so i wouldn't just wait till by law he maintains rights to employment in the district has the uh has a district ever terminated someone with tenure and so for what reasons [Music] all right any other question any other questions yeah i'll still be sorry uh i think just given [Music] what does that look like and what is what is a process and then you want to know what does it look like if you say we don't actually want this person in the district i know you're saying yes i just want to know what a situation would look like that way you can explain what dr gallagher's rights are what if we were to make the move to terminate him completely what the ratifications of such decisions [Music] that forward [Music] to certify the tenure charges against any individual usually between six months of the year and then when that costs um that whole process what types of things are superintendents because that's obviously what we're talking about of removing someone for tip like what types of actions would need would be actionable by the board to even remove someone in that position like what would you say to bring a case what kind of cases have you seen where people have been removed or administrators had their tender removed i'm very security computers what exactly would rise to the level of trying to take someone's tenure away because i'm assuming that that's a pretty high threshold it's a very interesting idea yeah i mean performance is now after the three other than that for disciplinaries the teachers engaged [Music] uh tenure charges and then another entity would decide whether that's correct that that's right right we would have to put together a body of evidence and which areas would have to have the right to dispute that as well and to see whether or not that even goes to the level where someone else would another end beyond boundary then decide whether or not we could even move forward to say something at the end okay all right um so here we know um okay at this time [Music] can i get a wrong ball for 6.2 through 6.11 yes i actually have another question i just want to be sure does it matter whether this uh emotion is yes abstaining from 6.2 but yes to everything else the resolutions as outlined in personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools 7.2 7.5 can i get a motion mr bomb any questions or comments yes abstain [Music] as outlined in education resolutions under district high school 8.2 8.4 i think the addition of these programs i think it's awesome um an enrichment program during the summer and then hispanics is well received and uh let's have one question do we know what three books they'll be reading it's not on the presentation no i think you would have to ask um the teacher in charge just validate it no okay that's something uh yes yes yes number nine resolve the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in education resolutions under middle and elementary schools 9.2 and 9.3 can i get a promotion i get a second second mr any questions or comments hearing none may i get a roll call yes is muffin yeah [Music] yes there's more yes yes let's see can i get a motion [Music] yeah we're on the donations right all right the last donation uh from staples is this staples on the circle because that's summer yeah because it's that's the staples on the circles not summer votes i don't know if that matters okay because if it's the actual store it's it's rare and it's not something but i do want to find all of those especially mrs connor and family for uh for the outdoor bench i think that's awesome um um hearing no other questions or comments can i get a roll call but then yes for everything else yes hearing none we are now open to the public for discussion just please come [Music] hello lauren paxton president of the bbea when did you know that you would not have access to the online entries for the uh board meeting about 20 minutes ago okay um so who who makes the agendas in minutes uh that's basically done through the business office i believe um because the write-in stuff goes on to the minute so does uh mr steinmetz have access to that no he doesn't know no doctor if it doesn't he's not here so we will make sure that anything that was on the online then um it can't be reflected in the minutes necessarily for tonight's meeting because they're not something that we saw but we will certainly bring them forward and make sure that any comments that were made online we will make sure that we have access to those things and then we bring those forward at the next meeting and at the next meeting you're going to have access to the ones yes that doesn't happen again okay thank you you're welcome i'm delores off i worked here from 1970 until 2012 as a classroom teacher and i still have an interest in a love for this community and i want to see it going in the right direction the last time i addressed this panel this group we were in a little different situation i see you're making progress i'm happy to see that but i have a question can you tell the audience how you will be going about the selection process for the successor superintendent um that i i'll be honest none of us have participated in that the last superintendent there was no i was we were on tour there's a process i mean we've now not renewed our superintendent uh all of ten minutes ago so there's a process that we have to go through uh it will be ready and then he'll bring us with you know different avenues there's the what is it called agencies school boards or outside agencies will have to determine which is the most financially uh best for the district to go through they take charge of the process to make sure that we follow the proper protocols and procedures and then i'm sorry go ahead and then anyone that's on the board that wants to be part of that committee and that's election process uh you know would make it known and then we would go forward that way but is it possible that you could include community members parents staff they would have [Music] like what does that process look like so going forward what does that process [Music] and they'll try and um you know get a sense of what the district's looking probably says as well when you're looking for the next superintendent and they go about a process of kind of designing [Applause] as far as trying to include uh more because i know they spoke earlier even the candidates that are finding more a greater role in the community and teachers could it be something as simple as a survey i mean ahead of time um you know a lot depends on your timeline because you know obviously you're trying to get communities yeah a lot of times as far as the input from from the faculty uh yeah as well okay we can certainly put together uh you know community committee as far as that's concerned as well i feel like we've never done that so um [Music] i think if you're willing to do that yeah and listen to the people you won't find yourself in the same mess that are out of now in the future so i'm happy to hear that you're open to that sure okay like i said we've never ever been in this position before so uh we're new to it as well so we will we will learn together and certainly would love to make uh the faculty and the community at large a part of that process right here thank you erica clarke's principal of lafayette um i know it's the only reason i'm speaking right now is because it's formally public knowledge that dr gallagher will not be renewed for next year um obviously the process of selecting a superintendent is an arduous one it is time consuming um i taught in this district for 10 years i'm now an administrator from what my opinion is worth i do believe community members students staff and administrators should be part of the process um michelle i know when i worked with you on ed council a couple of months ago you stated that we should speak publicly but we have concerns absolutely so i'm just publicly letting it be known that if you do choose to have a committee as an administrator i would like to be considered to be a part of it so thank you can i remove my mask yes thank you hi my name is josephine laity i live at 121 cherry app good evening board members parents educators and vanbrook community what if i told you a story tonight about passion you're probably thinking what does passion have to do with the board of education meeting well i haven't lived in bound brook for too long and i certainly knew nothing about this counter its people yet these past few weeks i've seen such intensity and working together from our community that i have never seen before and i'm certain many of us here agree it really makes you wonder if people work together with passion in a common goal in their everyday life in their workplaces you could really achieve change and make someone's life better i want to believe that our school system here in bamberg is focused on intensifying relationships between students and teachers teachers and parents between staff and educators but we all know at this point that that is not the case it's very upsetting and shameful for our community to be here today mourning our school system the fact that we feel the need to show you in actions that we are not pleased is the biggest problem all around we shouldn't need to resort to actions you as the board should be listening to us is that not why you are here because you care about this town you care about the children you have a passion for teaching leading and being a part of something more please listen to me now we need more we need a change and we need it today the number of teachers staff parents and even students that have shared their stories with me these past two weeks have been disturbing to say the least the common denominator in these stories is absent today dr daniel gallagher but maybe that's best because you can focus more clearly on our problem at hand our ship is dying at the hands of a captain and we are drowning the way we can stand stay afloat and reach short is by swimming together in the same direction this is our plea to you tonight help us get ashore because i promise you if you work with us instead of against us you will not be left to drown you know that our superintendent is a bully he intimidates he manipulates and he harasses to get what he wants when he wants and how he wants it this is not the profile of the leader and even though we now know he will step down from his current position as a superintendent we will like to make it clear as day to you board we do not accept him in any other position in the district a great superintendent must have a clear vision for the district but also needs to be a good listener a good manager and leader that follows through with values and ethics a superintendent that lets excellent teachers leave or pushes them out is none of these a superintendent that does not defend his teachers from homophobic bullying from students is unworthy of his position and the superintendent that is racist homophobic and sexist to others has no space in any district as you may all know by now we have started a petition and roughly 800 people have signed it in less than two weeks 800 people that are telling you that he is unfit to hold any position in this district now let me ask you a question before i wrap up do you know what the anti-bullying bill of rights act is the act is concerning harassment intimidation and bullying in school settings the fact that this board is not taking action against the toxic superintendent that we have is alarming we are here we are aware and we will not stop until you take action against dr daniel gallagher he is not welcome in our home his contract needs to be terminated for a neglection of duties and responsibilities incompetence immorality incapacity of maintaining healthy and effective working relationships with parents staff and our community and lastly the most important of them all he has failed to provide for the safety of our students and teachers my goodness he has been their assaulter the bamboo community will be here again next meeting to hear your decision on this matter either it be the board taking action and terminating his contract or him resigning found our story will be heard far and wide because we love our town and our community has the passion to continue fighting until we feel like our school system is safe again thank you good night [Music] good afternoon my name is [Music] 311 mountain avenue today we want to talk to you about uh our daughter rebecca and small and a problem and a situation that we have with her or not rebecca was diagnosed or she has six diagnosis bilingual disorder hdhd dyslexia writing learning disorder learning difficulty involving reading learning difficulty involving math [Music] when rebecca was in kindergarten we were called to a meeting at the school because they wanted rebecca to repeat the kindergarten for the fact that she was immature in reality on the escondidas in honest on all honesty this is the moment where several teachers uh behind doors approached us and they suggested that rebecca will be evaluated psychologically and educationally which gave the result of the diagnosis that i had just mentioned to this point it was a happy moment knowing that we had the diagnosis and that we were going to have the the help that rebecca was needing [Music] and this is where the fight began year after year against the schools trying to have rebecca eggman to maintain her ip los maestros consejos [Music] um the teachers every year have given us under the table advice with the fear the fear that they said that it will come back to them if they if somebody realized them that they are the ones telling us to fight for the the needs that rebecca has because it will financially affect the school lunder we don't understand why teachers have to hide to help for the well-being of a child when the board of education was created for that certificate we managed to obtain the certified ips and supported by all the medical diagnosis and surprise surprise it was not immaturity she had six medical diagnosis ever since we have been fighting as her parents to have her ip being respected and to have it better against a system that has fired us as enemies in everything to accomplish that our daughter learned the way in a manner that she will be able to learn multiple vessels many times we have come to mark dimarco tardia and all the time his answer has been poor late and without interest is one of the examples is that during this class year she has missed 23 classes of orton gilligan which is her special education and 11 classes for math renovation class remedial classes [Music] yes and many of the classes that she has missed is because mr dimarco has called for a meeting for all the staff during the time that my daughter has to have the remedial classes um after a month four emails in one meeting we have still not being able to obtain that mr demarco gave us a record of the classes for her no we believe that he doesn't know or he doesn't have it because he is unable to give us an answer todd our concern is that everything related to this has brought to our daughter to a point of frustration and our weight on her de camanera for example such as the case that during the summer to the fact that she has to attend her remedial classes she also has to catch up with the 23 classes of burton gilligan and the 11 classes of math that she lost during a period of time where a child has to be resting and recharging a [Music] and the way we see it is that with the fact that the state wants to change the pull-out for the classes that she is receiving on our meeting with mr barco on may 20th he told us that the ip for our daughter is going to change without our consent as you know the ip iap is a legal contract between the parents the school and the state that's right elephant also player comparison and the ip cannot change without our consent that's correct he can also tell us that all the teachers are being trained within this new process and that is a lie because we have search and we find out that none of the teachers are being trained for this process they have attended some meetings but training they have not received no esta el significado del iep the purpose of the iep is an individual education process individuals making a general change without the consent is violating the needs of every child with different needs when they make a general change my daughter's another 21 student class classes and she should be on a smaller class according to the doctor's suggestions 25 of the students in the class where my daughter is have a some type of necessity for learning learning necessity learning necessity have it under consideration why are we here yes and we want to ask you that all the teachers will be able to help us with their knowledge with their suggestions without fear of fighting fire or being reprimanded and we also want to ask you that rebecca's iep should be respected and reinforced instead of weakness so she can learn like any other child especially if we also wanted to ask you that a special education in bamboo should not be the reason why we have to leave the town to obtain the need the needs for our child instead we should reinforce it to not leave our towns amigos from specialists i do have a lot of friends with the special needs children and they have told us that this is a losing fight jonolo creola i don't believe so i do believe that a special education is very important inside and the school and within that district we also want to ask you that giving all the facts and all the things that we have gone through that the people in charge of a special education investiga that they should be evaluated or investigated to make sure that they have the requirements to fight and to help the children progress according to their needs basically as parents and we have been fighting for four years it's very tiring but also to fight for that to be obtained and for her benefit from and it's also very painful to ask parents to look at our children not to be able to obtain what by law they deserve they need yes this is our request to do we thank you for any help that you can provide us information and we're here for you if you need us can i just get your last name okay i don't think there's anyone that's sitting on this board that would disagree with anything that you said to i want to honor you and your wife to come up here and speak publicly about such a private issue it takes tremendous heart and i know it's difficult so i want to say thank you for that second booklet in that booklet in the back of the booklet there's a number for this spn spam network it's a network that all of my deals my parents i tell them if you have a problem with anything [Music] the thing is with an iep the board is limited what we can do because what's happened is that it's a document between the school system and yourself which you had just said but the guise of what you are talking about comes under the department of education and i think that coming here i again is tremendous but go right to the source so you can get answers that would be my suggestion so if you don't have that booklet you know the child aesthetically is difficult it's a hard situation and you have their own things that you're dealing with but under the law you're allowed so you know i would say you know if you don't have it by the next meeting please come at the next meeting and let us know okay thank you thank you very much like like we say before we went through with a lot of people and if we are here it's just knocking another door and we weren't gonna stop for my daughter i wasn't gonna stop i'm never gonna do it but what we we are coming here just trying to to see if like i say we can get some help in here because always what really worry or is really worthy for us is to listen the teacher saying oh please go there trying to get this but please don't say my name because i'll be on problems i don't want to be on problem i don't get fired i want to get my pensions that kind of things then that's that's weird they they are afraid to what is if we are not selling drugs we are trying to get school school education for my daughter that i don't understand the part but i guess maybe there should be should be some information that maybe you guys don't know this happen if something is happening or like i say maybe doing an evaluation of the people in charge of these kind of things because definitely some something is wrong there do we have an audit that is not presented to us about the child study special especially yeah [Music] just just something else to finish is i post something in favor and we receive so many calls of parents spanish spanish speakers trying trying to say oh i have this problem and my daughter is repeating grades and grades and grades and and she may have a problem and and we are trying to help those people to go to the right person and get the right diagnosis and get the right help but we know for sure because that happened to us eventually we they're going to have another fight with another process then that's where we are trying to help the people in that in that way [Music] advocacy network and it [Music] thank you very much for listening hi my name is victoria giada 244 chestnut street so i want to prep this by saying obviously you see where i'm sitting so you know that i'm part of the fight to change our district if our children are not allowed to bully i don't think any of the officials in the district should be allowed to bully so maybe the board can um you know take action as we are asking take action and hold the person accountable for what he's done so far i don't know if you're familiar with any of the stories that have uh come out about what has happened and his you haven't uh we can print copies for you because we have we have plenty of stories they're from people a lot of them are anonymous because they're still scared of retaliation which i think is despicable that a a teacher has to be scared to help our students that's that's their job right like i shouldn't have to have my daughter's teacher saying yeah i'll give you this but don't tell anybody just like the last gentleman was saying teachers their passion is teaching our children so why should we not allow them to do so why should they be scared of retaliation against what it makes no sense whatsoever and the stories i mean she's got copies of the story so she'll print them for you so that's just what i wanted to start with is if our children are not allowed to bully none of the school officials including the superintendent should be allowed to bully that's his job is to protect our children another thing is what is the board planning to do to hold him accountable what is the board planning to do to to he works for you so uh do you ask questions about all the the concerns that come up from parents does the board uh plan to to have the what are the results of the the the teacher what was that called the teacher review the evaluation teacher evaluation the teacher survey we generally get the results of those when they come out we haven't seen one when was the last time we saw one last year two years so from what i understand yeah i can't like i said he's not here to answer but i know at the last meeting um someone asked a similar question as far as the end i know the end of the survey was recent and i think he said we should have that by the end of this year before summer vacation so that should be something that we should before before that so then the board can use that to make their decision and hopefully it's in good time my other question is i see in the last two weeks when we you know gathering stories gathering evidence gathering facts uh i i've learned that there are so many students that are moved out of this district either parents sell their house and move away or they're sending them to private schools which is to be honest with you something that i've considered because the schools are not improving so maybe we should move we've thought about that as well what is the board's plan to improve this district to keep kids in our district to keep taxpayers in the district over the last several years i mean i'd have to go through a list there's there's different programs that they've tried to their data driven instruction where they're trying to target students that need that help and give them additional services either after school or during the summer so there are things that are in there obviously it's not going to be something that's going to happen overnight but they're certainly aware of that and each year there are different recommendations that are made and tried and that's what making i believe no one on this board i tell you want us to improve in school you know testing my last question is about covin so every week we get these surveys where are those results are they posted somewhere do we get a copy of those results the coven the covenant survey the parent survey every week we get a slew of questions of how do we feel mental health um you know are we happy with what our kids are going through and i've never seen any of those results he's not here to answer that so [Music] now so he's the only one that knows the facts behind those surveys well that's i mean he doesn't someone isn't another company that runs the actual survey thank you that's the best kathleen kleindeck 518 daily play stone brock um i think you really need to get a forensic auditor to look at the special education funds something's wrong and i i mean this seriously i don't know if it's criminal i don't know if it's just um mismanagement i don't know if it's that far underfunded that things are operating the way they are but there's no way their school district following a law that's been in place for almost 50 years can have what is called a violation of the continuum of placement options i'm so angry mr demarco cannot tell parents we don't have that here we do this we don't do that we don't have this program that is a complete violation in the first sentence of continuum of placement options the word must is in the law you cannot say that we have resource room but we don't have in class support we have in-class support but we don't have resource rooms we have we don't have out-of-district placement we don't have this we don't have physical therapy we we have consulting services where in the law does it say that you can do that why are parents being extorted told that if you don't like it pay 500 an hour for an attorney that is the due process i've been through that with this district that's his answer we are paying taxes the taxes are getting used to pay attorneys by the district to take rights away then to fight that we have to either get a pro bono turn attorney or pay an hour to an attorney to go to court which i've had to do in this district i've had to leave this district i came back to this district i can't even tell you the intimidation tactics that went on when i left initially i know it was illegal i know it was borderline criminal i did not file charges with federal regulators who would have investigated it i left i was told by a 500 an hour attorney if you go through this it will cost you 30 000 you are better off sleeping in someone's basement in another district you have a big civil rights problem in this district right now i suggest you take it seriously i suggest you get the evidence and you compile it and you do something and it goes back years i suggest you get a forensic auditor and look at the books not somebody from the district somebody who does this for a living a forensic auditor who knows how to find things things that are not where they should be something is drastically wrong secondly i suggest that when you look for a new superintendent you become aware that the state just passed legislation to integrate all the districts into county districts and that across the entire state that is what the state is trying to do they want to cut aid to all districts that don't become um regional districts so you have that also when you look for a new superintendent but this superintendent you have to consider the possibility and this is for the attorney what is the evidence required to suspend somebody while an investigation is pending that is what you need to know you have major problems civil rights problems in this district and you need to do something quickly thank you [Applause] hello i want to say i'm very nervous so if i cry and whatever you know um just give us your name my name is karen sandy cicada i grew up in bamboo since i was three years old i dropped out of high school 10th grade and i live in cherriov in the garfield park apartments i have a lot of things well a small list of things major things that i would like to address oh sorry i am 20 years old i believe i was 17 when i dropped out and i was not going to speak on my experience in the brown brook district because i am also here to speak on two other things but i have heard a lot so far and i've wanted for so many years to express myself i want to start a little bit positive first so um i am i love bamboo i came here from costa rica as an immigrant and um i have dreams and i want to own a home in this town one day i want to be a teacher in high school one day and i want to raise kids one day here i want to grow and i want to help the community i have always looked for a home as someone who never had a permanent home in this district i want to say some fun things that's happened to me you know being in this district for example i've had some great teachers um i have some fun memories um sorry to start it first positive because it's going to help me be able to continue sorry uh i see some people here that i have memories with teachers that i've seen that i have memories with when i was in kindergarten um i used to go to recess and pretend that i bumped my head so that i could go to the nurse and see mr kaplan's mom and so she could give me a lollipop and i could just sit there and speak with her in sixth grade mr santa cerma he taught me how to properly shake a hand in fifth grade mr paxton did the dare program with us and i learned the dangers of drugs i learned a lot and i was so proud when i got to stand on this stage in the fifth grade and say the essay that i wanted to miss wisneski i'm not sure if she's still in the district but she was also amazing with music i ended up learning how to play drums as i grew up there's so many more memories that i have of wonderful teachers but um when i got to high school i never thought that i would be a cheerleader i was always like a tomboy and i ended up being a cheerleader because my friend wanted me to and i got into varsity my freshman year and i was so excited with the high school experience or whatever and um i had pretty good grades you know maybe here and there i get to see um i was active i volunteered in the salvation army i i had a good time i went through a sexual assault experience when i was 16 years old and i brought the attention to someone in the district one of the counselors that i will not name they had sent me to a therapist in zoo fall and i'm here to explain to you guys and the reason i'm here to say my experience is because i believe that so many more of me come out of this district or drop out of this district i didn't i never wanted to leave high school but i did so because i stayed back in kindergarten because i was too too immature to go to the first grade i did not want to have to stay back again because i was going through depressive episodes and with sometimes i would skip school and sometimes i would be late grades were going down and someone knew in the district what i had gone through i had clear signs of someone under distress and no one was monitoring me as someone new no one was monitoring me no one none of the counselors were coming to me hey you did this are you okay you're not doing that in your grades you did a whole 360 from one year doing great to another year failing i'm also a woman of color i'm mixed i'm thick and i would get dress coded a lot one occasion i got dress coded for the multiple but i was told no i was i had to stay in the principal's office from 11am i had just gotten my lunch until 3pm because the nurse did not have a change of clothes for me and my parents were working and i did not have a change from clothes for me so i missed my classes from 11 to 3 p.m until school was out and i had to sit humiliated in an office while i waited to leave the school on top of that i had my period as a woman i had my period and i got really bad cramps i was suffering and they would not let me go 10 feet across the hall to go and get a pill so that the pain would go away i had to beg i had to cry and i had to seem extremely mature for someone to give me the attention that i needed so that i could feel some elite feel believed until finally they called my parents and they gave me that pill in that school district none of the teachers knew what was going on they didn't even know something was remotely wrong with me and looking back all of them were confused none of them could have at any point feel empathy for me or move forward with me or encourage me because no one knew that i was not okay no one communicated that hey one of your students is not okay i believe now there's more help in the district i haven't been here for almost three four years yes and i believe that now there is help but what concerns me is that all this happened and i don't believe that the help came because of my story or i believe that i was almost hidden i was just a little piece just a little piece in the puzzle of a district and i am here because i really care and i want what's better and i'm very happy that things have improved i believe that there's a trauma crisis team now and i'm so happy about that however um [Music] improvement there's always room for improvement i've always learned that there's room for improvement i have had to improve myself alone and i'm here because when i wanted to share my story a brief amount of it because i don't want more of me to go through these districts i want you guys to be careful as a 16 year old going through what i was going through i was not going to come to a board of education meeting and stand here and tell you guys what was wrong with me i'm 20 years old now and i could do and tell you what happened in the past and congratulate you from what you've changed and hope that you will continue to do better i'm here to speak on three things for other people you guys i i just heard that you haven't heard many stories and etc so i want to share a teacher who's no longer here a female gym teacher um in brownbrook high school there was a meme of her posted on the internet and with joking accusations of her being in the women's locker room for gym because yes yes however i would like to say what i would like to speak for her real quick says i was in the gym and the teacher came in to tell my kids and to tell me kids were talking about me posted about me i asked the student to show me and that student did i took a picture of the memes and brought it up to mr smith who was there with gallagher they called the student in who said he posted it and mr smith made him delete them called his parents and then suspended him 10 days kids found out about the suspension started chanting to free the student every time they saw me after realizing that the student was going to be suspended for states and wrestling and that he wouldn't be able to wrestle the wrestling coach told the family to fight the suspension dr gallagher told me behind me meet with him mr smith the parents and the board president i was then told that it was my fault for seeing it because it was on a private account that because of me the student was now in therapy the next board meeting would have been after states the father of that student went to the board members that he is friends with and his suspension was overturned he was given iss and allowed to return and wrestle i went to the board meeting because i was told it was going to be brought up the board let it slip that gallagher told them to they tried to backtrack their statement but it was already put out there he actually came up to me after the meeting to try to say quote you heard them take it back it wasn't me i ended up in therapy because i was so scared those memes were going to be out there and i was coaching at a catholic school i couldn't find anything because of that male students then started writing that i was a pedophile in the boys bathroom in the locker room to add to that there was a black student who i believe played basketball at the time and after practice i believe he got a free breakfast he was humiliated and i believe arrested for doing so now i don't know about you but it does not sound right for a black student who took free breakfast outside of school hours after his practice to be humiliated and arrested while whoever posted this of the teacher was able to get away with a suspension i also have a friend who i will not name she graduated here last year she isn't she's african-american these are her words i am deeply disappointed that this is to be discussed again i'm deeply disappointed that this topic is constantly overlooked by a board who seems to continuously allow racist rhetoric to be voiced throughout baumbra schools if you aren't familiar with who i am or my story this refresher may help in fact this isn't my story anymore it is the story of many students too many students in the bahamas school district and we are tired of the harassment racism transphobia misogyny and so much more bamboo is a diverse district but it fails to protect all students from various cultures and ethnicities during my senior year in 2019 in class i was directly sent a racist meme via airdrop which allows iphone users to send other iphone users close range documents i found a hip report i followed up with the director and never heard anything back there have been too many incidents where inappropriate and hurtful remarks have been said aloud students have not been held accountable and some teachers have allowed this to happen continuously while others have to help in silence despite all the efforts i made to bring this to the administration's attention some students who have been attacked in the past have felt hopeless during that time specifically because they knew the administration would not address it or hold the student accountable before the board gets into the blame game they should know i know these bullies are not kids anymore they know the difference between right and wrong and they continuously belittle others because administration lets them get away with it it's time for the board to open their ears and take action we need to create a safe space for all now i'm not going to stand here and say that you guys want these things to happen in the district but i am going to say i hope more effort goes into listening to us to the people to the community i'm not the first to say this up here but it's so important when things are said more than three times especially when they're not good things that they're said once it needs to change people want change in this town not because we are some people that just want to complain we want change we want to help we want to better and if you guys can't do it what can we do so you can as a community because we all want the best for everyone we want the best for my future kids for the current kids for me when i was little we want the best we don't want to fight you we want to help you and we want you to help us that's all i have to say for today is already signed in um so one thing i think you desperately need is like a peace and reconciliation commission in the school district um and i mean i was touched by a lot of these stories and i cried for for her um i think um well first of all you know you have complaints about the superintendent um i would and you know he said she said a lot of people have different things that they had encountered with the superintendent um i can only speak for myself personally that um one thing that i sorely missed last year was the coffee with the superintendent and that was two years ago and a lot of times it was just me or like two other people um i think that dialogue is very important and not just on social media [Music] so i understand that there's a perception that a lot of the board members are um i guess very amicable with the superintendent and i think that it's in part because you directly talk to him so that there is that direct back and forth um i know for myself when i did the coffee with superintendent seemed like a great guy i mean he you know answered all our questions he might be showing one face to me um you know an enter a motivated parent he might be showing one face to me i don't know but i think that it would be good because he's going to be a superintendent until um june 2022 um that he does reinstate those coffees with the superintendent um because i think that is invaluable that's why the same okay at this point i'm going to need a motion to go into executive to [Music] uh those are the only things that we are removing after the meeting so uh we will be back all in favor [Music] so foreign so all right we are back in session so at this point i need a motion to approve all done i gotta repeat it resolve it down on vacation the approval of the resolutions is outlined in the approval of cases under high school 15.2 can i get a motion yes yes 16.1 resolve the valid order of education approval of the resolutions is outlined in the approval of hit cases under middleman elementary school 16.2 and point three can i get a motion is that you yes it was i'm sorry roll call yes yes [Music] yes can i get emotion to adjourn motions
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let the processional begin [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] okay please remain standing good afternoon i am cadet lieutenant commander emilio ortiz the company commanding officer of thunderbird high school's navy jrotc please remain standing for the presentation of colors national anthem and the pledge of allegiance left face [Music] so [Music] ready please join me for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all you may be seated wait when i was told that i would be the first student speaker at our graduation i was overwhelmed with how i would start it off well this is what i decided hello graduates parents of the graduates and all staff if you don't know me my name is ana maria erelia alvarez and i am your senior class president of 2021 this year has been incredibly hard and you all know that honestly it's sad to see our year come to an end in this way but i'm grateful for everything i want you to know that through every interaction i've had i've learned something new even if it lasts a few seconds and i hope that through our interaction today that we can learn something together like maybe you don't know what anti-disestablished tenerism means well it means a position that advocates that a state church should continue to receive government patronage rather than to be disestablished but you really don't need to know that i hope i can teach you something new in the few last minutes we have before we never have to see each other again technically i believe that there is something we should live by and consider especially now that we are moving on from high school and becoming adults who will start their career soon and plan out their lives the following quote is from one of my favorite people ever mr harry styles it goes no one can tell you you're not successful if you're happy doing what you're doing i'm telling you this because i want you to know that your happiness should come before anything else what good is it to be dedicating your life to something if you are not content success can't be measured by anyone but yourself and at the end of the day no one truly knows if you are happy doing what you're doing that being said out of everything i hope you choose happiness which brings me to this our senior gift our staff dedicates a lot of their time to helping us achieve our goals and helping our campus be the best it can be that is why the class of 2021 will be giving our school money in order to redo the floors on the practice gym they've been looking a little rough for a while now as you all know and it's finally time to help out the floors will include senior class of 2020 and senior class of 2021 written on them lastly i want to thank my friends and teachers for being there for me tirelessly throughout my high school years i want to start off by thanking one of my best friends chloe for never leaving my side anissa and maddie for introducing me to student council and getting me to the stage today to make this speech i want to thank mr unsworth who has always been so kind to me and other students and truly represents what a teacher should be thank you to my parents who came to this country with nothing but a few dollars and still manage to give me everything i'm graduating here today because you never had the chance to and as soup dog once said last but not least i want to thank me thank you class of 2021 congratulations and i hope all of you get to be as happy as you deserve at this time i have the pleasure of presenting those students who have earned the highest academic honor to be received by a graduate that honor is graduates with the highest distinction these students have achieved academic excellence which ranks them in the top 1 of their graduating class patty kennedy glendale union high school district governing board clerk will present these honored [Applause] elliott hull elliott st claire ladies and gentlemen i would like to present the top one percent of students for the graduating class of 2021. good afternoon noon friends family teachers administration and fellow graduates my name is cora lee the augustino and i am honored to be one of your three esteemed valedictorians for the past year i didn't know if we'd be able to come together to commemorate our success but i'm glad to be here now and while i could stand here and drone on about things you've heard a million times like look before you leap and don't ride in the back of trucks that's not why i'm here i'm here to welcome congratulate and bid farewell to the class of 2021.
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she graduated from moon valley high school and her two children also attended moon valley high school miss kennedy and her husband brendan own a business evaluation firm in phoenix and are active in the rotary youth exchange program please join me in welcoming our governing board clerk patty kennedy to the podium good morning apollo high school class of i am so happy to be here today in person with all of you your family and friends and the faculty and staff of apollo high school i have missed you guys so what does one say to a class that is graduating in the middle of a global pandemic well they told me i had to keep it short but i'm going to try here's the bottom line you all have persevered this has been a trying year for everyone and the fact that you are sitting here today is a testament to your fortitude and your drive i hope that you will take this unique experience into the future with you in a positive way book learning is important but so too are the skills that you had to learn and refine during this pandemic patience perseverance tolerance self-motivation self-care caring for family friends and your communication skills these are skills that will help you throughout your life both in your career and on a personal note everyone has challenges and makes mistakes having these skills will help you inevitably when you have to pick yourself up brush yourself off and move forward everyone's path will be filled with unforeseen twists and turns being flexible and willing to change course or overcome obstacles is vital to your continued success in life finally i would like to touch on the importance of being part of your community for the past four years guhsd and apollo high school have been your community now you are moving on to different communities college work military wherever your path takes you be an active member of your community work to make your community a better place vote be an informed voter and vote in every election for every race and every item on the ballot by being involved in your community and voting in elections you will make your community your city your county your state and your nation a better place for everyone graduating from high school in the middle of a pandemic is a milestone to be sure but i hope that it is only the first of many milestones in your life on behalf of the guhsd governing board and the administration of the glendale union high school district we wish you all much happiness and a bright and successful future [Applause] as a member of the governing board of the glendale union high school district and by the authority vested in me by the constitution and the laws of the state of arizona i accept and confirm that the apollo high school class of 2021 has met the requirements for graduation ms parsons please present your graduates to receive their diplomas seniors will those of you seated in the front row please rise and prepare to receive your [Music] diplomas is wendy priscilla torres [Music] brenna lillian watson bruseda melissa lopez bajorkas aubry lynn wells [Applause] luis raul rodriguez [Applause] [Music] isabella angelina in sunset noelle david hernandez katie ramirez kale paul amperin benjamin lewis wilhack kimberly castro [Applause] adrian ruiz steven tyler golden sabrina francine kleinman [Applause] jacqueline anderson [Music] [Applause] joel andrade diana paula flores navarro alex sempolt thank you donna escobar castaneda paulina xavier mendoza [Music] jennifer gonzalez xavier ray ramos [Applause] [Music] yesenia lisbeth [Music] [Applause] timothy carr abraham joseph andrade benjamin ruiz andrew paul amarillas nicholas david ryan merkling maria garcia jose mendoza [Applause] thank you emily garcia stefani elisa salazar carlos fernandez carlos sanchez beltran enrique diaz taylor [Music] [Applause] vue bonnie alexandra hawk inet naive louisvano palomera mia rose folks [Music] [Applause] [Music] nancy antonia rodriguez gusman thank you triana lynnae harper carolina lopez castillo olivia renee irvine yaxi rios amaya naily angelica garcia melanie moreno alicia marie cameron [Music] cameron adam stopper emma moon anderson [Music] destiny morris jasmine rebecca block [Applause] d'angelo rico soto hakeem abraham timothy whalen jordan bambolis [Applause] marina palencia luis angel estrada lindsay dakota rhodes anthony baesteros alexander james tsutapka jesse javas gonzalez alexis rodriguez matthew derek jarembo victor jodourni masarigos [Music] elizabeth almada queen aubry akala medina jillian angeles espinosa [Applause] karina whalen [Music] andrea estrada aguilera tyler shane watson robinson albert joyner gonzalo paulo fox macy lane chrisman maximo hernandez luis felipe morion ivan alonso jimenez elijah zedekiah young joseline carranza perez eric silva thank you sid lali garcia figueroa luis alfredo para cabrera [Music] ephraim hernandez kennedy tran [Music] juan carlos antonio zane lee whitney joshua thomas jones [Music] alan silva eric abdier fierro mendoza rahel perez [Applause] joshua galvez garcia eduardo puebla rodriguez hugo hernandez angel ordaz perez [Applause] samuel sanchez [Music] marilyn amaro chang [Music] [Applause] everett clark tillman stephen alexander echeverria ashley ramirez burrito [Applause] george gomez brianda perez montoya anthony espinoza fabian antonio lisardi moreno victor xavier chavez [Applause] [Music] gabriel resendez brenda valeria castro [Music] ricky marquez ruiz [Music] [Applause] mary jo gallegos moreno fernanda vasquez alice carolyn baptisto mali ethan king [Applause] [Music] irma irene aguilar ernesto salazar olivia renee dutcher xavier martinez [Applause] gwyneth abigail johnson hickman lodeen [Applause] [Music] cristiano flores ruiz reuben pisano the third [Music] alexis jesus camargo ordaz ivan mancillas asorno [Applause] jonathan asher green jonathan lopez hinas theisman talis daley ateen [Applause] claudia monserrat martinez [Applause] daisy cardenas alberto artoro montesquinones [Music] michael lee hayes eileen orton navarro jacqueline marie iniguez [Applause] miguel angel luna seven hill lyanna joslin lama brianna janae gums jose enrique lara sanchez [Music] manuel angel aguirre jr [Music] fabian shea mclean iii odales flores blanco priscilla anna martinez adriana ruby anaya jade chanel porter [Music] mina odisho israel karen rodriguez lucero natalie jasmine flores [Music] kenya rodriguez rodriguez [Music] [Applause] yakari escarsiga fiero ephraim edward mckee eduardo jesus gonzalez john sanchez [Applause] sebastian garcia melanie sanchez [Applause] edwin ivan santiago [Applause] camal alemrani donna nicel soto gallegos ahmad stefan hayes [Music] [Applause] giselle azul madera juan carlos herrera garcia jackson james reed [Music] joseph samuel flores [Applause] esther christian perry itself fernanda flores gilbert ruelas jr [Music] lydio jimenez [Applause] [Music] abril ortega dominguez [Applause] [Music] flores chavez haley victoria weathersby [Applause] josue barrera adriana martinez reyes [Music] miguel angel contreras juan medina [Music] kevin cuevas angel cantino alejandro galvez carolina olivas marufo [Applause] giovanni gomez asia renee marine [Applause] jacob leonardo hernandez jennifer naday valenzuela and cena's eric garcia gonzalez braden kennedy [Music] [Applause] fabio ivan gutierrez eduardo payas alexa guerrero hernandez joseph keanu rivera rock [Applause] neyland escarsiga madrid [Music] gage watkins [Applause] isabella danae brazil [Applause] jeremy damon alstat jr juan jose bera noah christian arsinoe aureliano soto sebastian noah gonzalez edgar ramirez [Music] shelby k r mendes jamie rodriguez morales [Applause] aaliyah rose cruz [Applause] monica laurel barrientos savannah leanne howard leonel rolandi [Applause] braden david coburn [Applause] eileen salcido valverde monica john saldana [Music] reyna reyes [Applause] victor gabriel flores ariana elizabeth montulfar [Music] angelo caleb avila kelly lee lee dalton isaiah renteria [Music] [Applause] melanie amber diaz adelie pilar rivera ariana marie chavez jade elyse rios daisy uriah victoria schmidt [Music] susanna gutierrez anissa francisca miranda [Music] [Applause] abel jeremiah kidzia valeria and susan riley faye beckett emily valerio hernandez sielo preciosa gallegos [Music] oscar mendoza miranda joy harker dahlia alisa loher [Music] julia lee bricks jocelyn rodriguez [Music] [Applause] jasmine celeste wilpaya jessica rodriguez [Music] adriana devin gero eileen yadira ugalde alvarez [Music] fernanda garcia pena alexia wills [Applause] [Music] rihanna b olivia price nicole garcia hernandez jessica ramirez isaac xavier reynoso kiana gloria arriaga viviana esther ramos flores montoya alyssa marie rendon diana gonzalez cruz persephone unique lopez [Applause] [Music] leandro ruben gonzalez jahira moreno ramos luis raul garcia moncayo anisia robles jonathan andrew rubio denise garcia katrina zetta williams [Applause] [Music] laura marie contreras mark andrew ruelas melanie leseth galindo shelby plagger [Applause] [Music] jimena herrera catherine giselle tabora stefania ruby casanova [Applause] santana donnie jerome rushing michelle fuentes christopher gabriel ortiz [Applause] samantha apodaca angel eduardo hernandez [Applause] [Music] ann tran ivan gonzalez [Applause] marcus bolino jonathan daniel hernandez ramon daniel jesus [Applause] [Music] sharif sanchez [Applause] jesus manuel sanchez cortez [Applause] joseph andrew castellanos rainey mary olivas robert jacob harrison giselle rodriguez zoraya zuri acosta isabel christina sanchez devin nicole hernandez rita ilda rascon [Applause] eric aaron garcia shahila muhammad ashraf jacob nicholas aragon fatima ortiz isaac casares esmeralda ramos thayer marie dozer andrew devin munoz joshua israel herrera jr jacoby lee dwayne miles vivian andrea gomez aziza [Music] [Applause] gracie paul marine [Applause] mark anthony flores brianna bella lisaraga xavier ramsey hayward brooklyn jade ramirez cody william james castro michael timothy olvera adrian jaciel jose eduardo silverio bonfield [Music] jonas velasco corona angel corbin bruno [Music] nathaniel ezra saracino richard jaina sanchez cristobal eduardo quijara [Applause] jorge felipe cruz [Music] [Applause] damares eric felipe cruz sheila robles joelle alfredo figueroa [Applause] nelson medellin elena brielle jimenez [Applause] sadie corelli rentaria [Applause] thomas ariza jr stephanie vasquez [Applause] ernie gustavo hernandez lemus eileen sandovals mejia [Music] mauricio lagunas francisco garcia jr ricardo gabino madero [Applause] victoria maria garcia trinity catrera rosa marie perez justin era kaiser [Music] dan lachuga eric sierra john austin slater marlene sosa graduates the faculty and staff of apollo high school are extremely proud of your perseverance and grit as you tackle this school year your accomplishments today showcases that you are destined to achieve greatness remember you are a hawk hawks are focused and hawks possess intensity that will keep you from backing away from any challenge soar high and congratulations [Applause] during the recessional we ask that all spectators remain at their seats until the class of has exited the building your graduate will meet you in front of the arena so to conclude this commencement ceremony kimberly and brenna would like to ask the senior class one last question all right guys i want you guys to be very excited for this can you please stand remember this is the last time you're doing the class chant let's give it our all okay are you ready i said are you ready okay we can't all right when i say apollo you say hearts apollo [Applause] above [Applause] congratulations class of 2021.
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if i could i'm just going to point out a couple to you on the first page it would be voucher number 406 to cloverdale community schools and once again that would be pertaining to the gear grant that would be for mobile hot spots that type of thing green castle schools is the lea to help file reimbursements for all the putnam county schools so that would be why we've got something for cloverdale you'll also see on voucher number 410 for csi leasing that would be a device payment which would be once a year and that's for the dear meadow and the red path ipads and then the final one that is not something normal would be voucher number to hendra's hendricks regional health that would be for the athletic athletic trainer we actually pay that four times a year and this would be for winter services that we're paying to to hendrix did anyone have any questions about regular claims no okay so regular claims dated today may 24th 2021 for a total of 321 991 and 27 cents if we're ready for the finance report okay next in your board packet you'll see a fund report this would be month end for excuse me uh april month end 2021 balances for all accounts balance in educational as of april 30th 2021 866 712 dollars and 66 cents excuse me 68 cents operations would be fun 300 balance the end of april 2021 619 300 and 35 cents if you turn to the last page you're going to see total for all accounts fund balance for all accounts 5 million 69 000 746 57 and lastly in your finance packet you should see the depository statement balance for all banks is 5 million 273 603 77 outstanding checks as of the end of april 2021 203 857 20 for a total fund balance in all accounts 5 million 69 thousand seven forty six fifty seven if you match that number against the ending balance for your fund report you'll see that those match perfectly okay thank you very much thank you thank you and the last item on the concentration is personnel reports part one and two which are online and posted on the door to central office so can i get a no all right um yep yep i'm sorry i thought there was another thing i get a motion to approve the consent agenda so moved second you have a motion in a second all in favor all opposed motion passes next item on the agenda is reports first from the assistant superintendent dr french hi good evening so i thought i would give you an update um i know last time i talked a little bit about summer school so just to keep you updated with that since we are doing it so differently with our jump start program so k to eight jump start will happen at the beginning of the school year right before school starts so from july 19th through the 30th students will come half day to get instruction in programming that way and so right now we're projecting about a hundred students from k to eight so that's a really good turnout we're hoping to to see all those students attend that and then i also wanted to give you an update about our after school program i know we've been discussing quite a bit so we're working on planning and staffing that program right now but i'm really excited because we had some good conversations this past week with depauw university who's going to be our major partner in this in this program so we're going to be partnering with the school of music through depauw and they're going to provide their music majors are going to come to our site and at least three days a week hopefully five days a week they're going to provide music instruction or music exploration for our k-3 students and then for our students in grades four and five they're going to be able to revive the strings program and provide violin lessons with the ultimate long-term goal of creating a community children's orchestra strings orchestra so that's a long-term plan but it's great to start having those conversations and kind of reviving some of those programs we've had 40 violins sitting in the closet and 80 down sitting on the square so there's all these instruments we have these resources that we haven't been able to actually utilize so we're excited to get those those going we're also partnering with the hartman center for civic engagement i believe that's that's a wordy title i believe that's it though um so they're going to be filtering their volunteers into our program so anyone that gets a scholarship through depaul is required to fulfill so many volunteer hours so we're going to scoop up their volunteers and we're going to pair those with some of our students for tutoring and we're also going to prepare them or pair them with a high risk or a high need student for weekly mentoring sessions so i'm going to ask the principals too to help identify some of those students that could use that extra support and pair them with a university student and then we're also going to be bussing our students once a week to elite skyhawks gymnastics for gymnastics and ninja programming so we're developing a lot of really cool activities that are going to really set our program apart along with trying to you know build in reading instruction and stem activities and and things like that along the way so we're really excited about this and um can't wait to get it all staffed and ready to go but continue that planning throughout the summer so any questions and i'll just try to keep you guys updated as as things emerge okay sounds great great thank you thank you next is the superintendent report yep so i just have a few items obviously first like to thank all of our staff and all the departments across the board for making it through the 2020 2021 school year i know we're two two days out but i think that's quite the feat and i think we've been pretty successful in having and having a school year and you know hearing uh many of the accomplishments that have been shared and with the culmination of uh graduate or the students last day on wednesday and then graduation um on friday night which is always one of the most enjoyable times of the year so thank you to all of our staff members who are leaving and those who who are also retiring thanks for your your service to our students and staff in your board packets just i included a couple of items for your review one of them which is on the normal size paper right there was just a financial review and the one underneath your packet was a financial review and presentation that i gave a state of the overall finances to the entire school district just kind of update them on where we are and what we have to continue to do in order to get to where we want to be and so that was just a very good informative meeting and i think that was appreciated by staff so i just wanted to kind of see um kind of which not what kind of what knowledge was shared with the rest of our staff and then i included some cash flow summaries for the education fund and operations fund and so just through the first four months of the year we're continuing to kind of make progress and kind of dig ourselves out of the hole that we were in our spending plan is right on track with where we need to be for the 2021 budget year cash balance has grown 25 roughly 25 000 since january we obviously want to see that continue to grow more to get to where we need to be that can kind of be artificially inflated somewhat because we transferred some staff salaries out of the education fund and we're paying for roughly 400 000 worth of education fund expenditures out of rainy day this year but we are we are making progress and chipping away at it overall for the year uh year to date compared to the end of april in 2020 expenditures are roughly two a quarter of a million dollars less so while we know our revenue also went down we've up right size with our expenditures too and those things are all key um to helping us to recover and and build that 10 to 15 percent cushion in the education fund so we're on track with that a little bit less on the operations fund side again just cash flow summary um year to date this time versus calendar year 2020.
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And then he looks at And then I remember I'm trying to remember. It was at um what do you call those spring sports night? Is that what it was That's what those things were called. Made me run a dash in the gym, and he saw me running, and he's like, "Oh my god." Cuz I got told before I looked like I had a piano on my back every time I was running. As Ravi tells I can just sit down again. It's a quick inning. As this kid running out, I look at the guy, I don't know who Who in the world bookkeeper bottom of the fourth, we'll be right back. You called me and said that. Sean Jack Morales downtown. Jack Morales? Antonio Rob Becca Jake Oh god. Dylan Devin Owen Peter Lyle We'll just go to the beach all day. Oh my god. Welcome back.
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