so i understand that the department of education held a meeting on friday june 4th to start communicating the requirements of the sr3 school grants to the school so i need to know for full transparency did bcse participate was the board present for that meeting does the board fully understand the implications of bcse accepting the sr3 grant and how it might restrict your ability to make decisions regarding in-person learning for the next three years will all of that be explained in today's presentation on the grant which is up for approval i do believe i so i am asking you to delay voting or approval proving anything on that grant until after the school board makes their decision and they can take all the information into account so school board after july 1st whatever we've heard it's your responsibility for implementing measures and restrictions deemed necessary and prudent with regards to in-person learning so is per student worth giving up that responsibility of the decision to do what's best for our students for the next three years so i just asked that you would give families the freedom to choose what is best for their children by making an informed decision and if all of that's really hard to remember just remember don't get in a pickle for a couple of nickels so for clarification i can't decide if this person crossed their name out or not jessica manuel okay thank you um tracy west board thank you for letting me speak today my name is tracy like you said um i have three sons two of which attend a bcsc school and i will say that we love our school we love our school so much the teachers are amazing if it wasn't for excuse me getting emotional if it wasn't for all the extra effort that the teachers had put into this school year we would not be here we would not be part of the bcsc program um with that being said there are two things i want to talk about tonight the first being that i am here for parent choice i think it's i think it's very important that the parents have a choice in what goes on in the school we are the parents and that is the first thing when it comes to the mask i think we should be able to decide the second reason i'm here is for my son um he right now is playing uh in a semi-final baseball game that's why i'm wearing this shirt he is obsessed with baseball he loves baseball he wants to do everything baseball play every night practice play video games watch it on tv you get the point he loves baseball so i talked to him and was letting him know i have a hard decision to make um i can come to the bcsc board and tell them you know i want to have a choice you know to whether or not mask my child i he and he understands that he gets it or i can come to your game which will probably be your last game of the year and he said mom i want you to go to that school board and look them look in the night and tell them i don't want to wear a mask next year i don't want to do it and i said you're right you're right i'm going to go to the board and i'm going to tell them that you don't want to wear a mask i am up here sorry about this i am up here for all the parents who are too scared to get up here as you can tell i am a little bit i'm up here for the students who can't speak out they can't they can't come up here and do this i'm here for the rights of the parents so they should be able to decide what is best for their families and each family is different we all know that i'm here because i want to make mass optional going forward thank you thank you ian mcgiffin did i do that right that's great awesome hello um my name is ian mcgiffin from hartsville area i've been here working for cummins since 2009.
the purpose of this this report has two purposes first provides a rich source of feedback to the superintendent as part of an ongoing improvement cycle and thus should inform a reflection of the current year's efforts as well as goal setting for the upcoming school year second the report provides the basis of the school committee's deliberations and decisions regarding its evaluation of the superintendent's performance which is tied by contract to the superintendent's salary following receipt of the support the berlin royals regional school committee will discuss the compiled evaluation results in a public meeting striving to understand committee members varied perspectives and to reach consensus on the superintendent's overall performance range the committee then reports two votes or two votes that have already discussed thus this report as presented here does not represent the committee's final declarations or decisions and may undergo revisions before it's accepted school committee a couple of things i want to make mention we had a number of changes in school committee seats of positions over the last year we had a school committee member who was on the committee until december who had an opportunity if he wanted to to provide his evaluation in his feedback he chose not to we had a school committee member who joined from january whose evaluations from january to may and that will be that portion is reflected as their evaluation from that period of time and that person will vote and evaluate based on their period time on committee and we have a committee member who's joined as of today who will have an opportunity to evaluate uh if you're not able to from a formal evaluation but has an opportunity to vote and discuss and we'll participate in the deliberations to the extent as possible that they have okay so uh four school community members right in superintendent's overall performance 2021-22 was provisioned while the remaining two members evaluations fell on either side with ratings that needs improvement or exemplary so what i quickly read is committee members commerce pertaining to overall performance suggests that superintendent's leadership thrived despite a year filled with unprecedented challenges and change while perspectives of goal attainment different the committee's consensus was that mr zany always advocated for varying needs of the student staff and district keeping at the forefront of safety and well-being he was commended for unifying stakeholders treating all with respect for sometimes putting his personal opinion aside to enjoy the district's progress so what i want to make sure is discuss today and we'll go into deliberations right when jeff is reviewing his evaluation right some of the uh it's important to take the good the lack of better terms and keep it good with the bad right take the constructive pieces not criticism but ask right and to make sure that we evaluate not only the positive pieces of the evaluation but also those constructed pieces of evaluation right so i want to share just a couple of things some folks said both on the positive side as well as as well as on the constructive side committee members noted the superintendent worked respectfully with a wide range of stakeholders while remaining focused on the best interests of our district's children and staff another school committee member wrote many felt that mr zhang's leadership never faltered in the face of challenging mandates fluid expectations and apprehensive stakeholders as one member noted the 2021 school year was a continuation of challenges and demands first introduced during the pandemic of the previous year of spring semester another memorandum of demand for to continue more often than not demoralizing the superintendent's team provided steady force that got students and families through an unforgettable year some of the constructive pieces of the feedback that we write so there was some disagreement among members of whether or not the superintendent met his goals or if they were working progress while committee member's comments go to the unusually demanding times not all of the status of the superintendent's goals one member stated appreciation of mr zane prioritize student staff well-being however when reviewing the specific focus and effectiveness the specific focus and effectiveness measurements of the three goals it was difficult to rate pause proficient another goal accomplishment should never be evaluated simply on accomplished or not accomplished but should be assessed in context this year in the context of the pandemic the person concluded the supernatural correlation skills were more important epidemic than meeting the benchmarks for global performance one member noted i believe jeff has the best interest of students and staff at the top of his mind in all cases but reviewing the specific focus and effectiveness measurements of the three goals it was difficult to rate false proficient the biggest improvement coming from more not less communication to parents in the community with various means the member went on to talk about the use of social media uh and in context uh have a difference of opinions with jeff and use of social media but the importance around in today's nature where we're at the importance of social media and that's an area that jeff in the school community needs to grow the same member also said i agree on that the work and the presentation skills is needed a better job can be done to keep school committee meetings more tasks but disagree that four hours a month is too much for the community and public to get a good sense of direction where schools are heading i think community and parent involvement and school committee meetings should be welcomed not discovered special services of this past year so again it's constructive uh ideas and thoughts around and i agree with that right when i came on uh when i came on board and i took came aboard when i took over as uh chair of the school committee one of the things the feedback that i got quite often from previous school committees was that there was a sense of overall management inquiry and quieting lack of ability to let the public speak and speak and i said when i become chair one of the things i'm going to do uh is make sure that everybody has time to speak and everybody's allowed to speak uh we're not coming into that now sure but i managed that probably a little bit better and those are all things to learn from but again all constructive ideas and criticism as we move forward to the evaluation so that's just some highlights um from the discussion uh from some of the evaluations obviously there's much more to be read there much more obviously that the rest of the community digested throughout the process so with that i'll conclude my introductory statements um i ask that when we get into deliberations everybody is it's courteous uh positive and effective right the goal here is not to um not to necessarily i just want to make sure that we our goal here is to put ourselves in a position for everybody to grow from a school community perspective a superintendent perspective because at the end of the day really what what's happening is we as a team we need to grow right so with that being said i'll include my my introduction uh and i'll ask jeff if jeff has any comments or questions i do actually both first i want to thank the community for supporting me it was been a long 18 months and um you know hopefully we can get off to a different start in september i just want to thank you for your support and patience this year it meant a lot to me um [Music] on page six it says in the third section down the star session so the star is at the convention we're using to indicate the [Music] the weekly new newsletter good stuff but oftentimes there's the same static static information weekly can you give me an example of what static information you're referring to yeah uh so i'm gonna enable uh a lot of the not specifically yours but as superintendent of sort of the editor or publisher of the newsletter a lot of things mostly from the business side of it the school launched saturday it was repetitive which i understand being necessary but some other information could have thrown in there especially even around the time when schools were shut down for multiple weeks um our applications so that's what that's the subject yeah the school lunches i meant the business sections they all seem to be pretty sad okay i didn't want to mention that much of that information was put on there and he remains on there at the request of parents who often times don't see the newsletter wondering and maybe on vacation and just visiting they don't see so um that's that's that's the just want to clear that up yeah that's fair i understand yeah i think what i was looking forward here is this is about communication with this year being and what it was it's more important than ever so more information is always better than less i would say um after that jeff speaks about the toxic nature of social media can you tell me when i've done that yeah it was right around the april vacation storm that happened with the facebook page i've said it in public uh i thought i was interested to check all of the minutes about everything i've said in public and i've now said i know you refer to social media as toxic i referred to that graduation as being in your face and i don't remember and i and christian wasn't able to confirm that that expression toxic if the t-o-x-i-c toxic word is an error on my part i'm sorry but i think the overall view of it was negative okay so why didn't you use that one also that's so much those are all all the comments in that box oh okay okay and the second line it says you disagree that four hours a month is too much the committee republic to get a good sense of the direction of our schools ahead what are you disagreeing with are you saying that i said that the four hours is too much during the self-evaluation you were talking about the length of the meetings and how they they've gone on and it was your responsibility to help bring that in to the effect they're not getting off topic or not having likely discussions about things i made a statement meeting in consumer games only for one and a half to two hours i never i never said anything about four hours four hours too much for the community or for any of meetings that was about the average length that's what he was experiencing 6 30 i believe this government is a response to your overall criticism during your self-evaluation of the handling of meetings and the lengthy time allowed for parents to speak and linked among times you directly tied you directly tired i won't put words in anybody's mouth you directly tied the management of meetings to a challenge that you encountered as it relates to meeting one of your goals so you didn't say you're not saying that i said foreign been about four hours and the comment you made i don't have in front of me i'm sure i could find it if you wanted to take the time to increase this meeting but it referred to the the length of the meeting how they were going over and i believe in other conversations we've had i think from the first day of videos told normally they're about two hours these ones have gone about four hours it was a reference to that and your self-evaluation say that you should do a better job of bringing in the time and the reasoning out of control was for public comment uh going a long time the sometimes as a committee no one's particular fault but it gets off topic on some of the discussions you mentioned that i believe and so it was a reference to that i don't think one meeting a month for however many hours it is is too much to ask for the public and parents in the community to get a sense of how school is going through the schools okay [Music] page 11 and the second second section [Music] it's on line 11.
now you all have a link but don also has a short presentation so we're going to prevent screening thank you for this opportunity um what you're going to see is a presentation um that is prepared for parents um in our enrollment meeting that shares a lot of information about the trip so the trip that we're proposing um aaron griffith and i are proposing a trip at the language and cultural culture trip um to puerto rico in april of the april break next year the trip will be seven days um i i've been before the board a number of times to present trips um this is my this will be my eighth uh with ef and on the side i have some pictures of trips that i've taken previously uh i obviously think travel is a really important first-hand experience for our students and um just traveling myself uh my first trick was studying um shakespeare in england and since then i've done a lot of traveling um through other in other countries as well but this will be my eighth trip with students from the high school um one of the things that really drew me to this particular trip is oh aaron and i uh are going to be teaching the black messianic studies course that is being offered um this year we saw this as a direct connection to that trip um we're hoping that this will be an opportunity for students to experience first hand the cultures that we're going to be studying and um what i liked about the design of this trip is that it it includes opportunities for kids to see cultural aspects you know museums and um lake locations and doing walking tours of the city we're going to have a cooking class a dance class um and we also get to see some environmental features of five minutes in bay um and also one thing i really like about ef is very able to cater this forward to our interests and having talked already with our tour coordinator um and expressing the connection to the black latino studies class um we can focus on uh african influence in in puerto rico as well and that's going to be a highlight of the trip so even though it's the language and cultural trip um the language is not required the trip will not be conducted in spanish we will have a bilingual tour guide who's with us at all times who is a local of puerto rico and they will do any translating that we need we do have two different opportunities so to sit down and have conversations with students at a local school and for the family and so i think this will be an opportunity for our kids to have conversations and learn about culture quite firsthand from people who live in puerto rico um one of the things that i'm really happy about with this trip is that i was able to secure locked-in dates typically when you sign up with ef you have a range of dates and so even though i might pick the friday of the start of our vacation or april break um they will give us a window of five days before and after this year sunday of our april break is easter sunday and with all the disruption that we've had over the past few years i thought it was to actually lock in a date that is the monday after easter sunday so our students if they choose and if they celebrate easter they choose to celebrate that with their families and not have any more disruptions to their families this did mean that there was a little bit of a price take pick up take off because um to lock in those days they have to like really secure the flights um ahead of time so our trip will be april 18th to the 24th so it'll be monday to sunday this is also really important because the kids should not be missing any school aaron and i both teach ap classes and this is right before the ee exam so we were really keen also to not be missing any school with our students so um we will we would be flying out of bradley airport which also means that we would be leaving monday morning from the high school to go up to bradley um and returning back on sunday the 24th to bradley and then taking the bus back to the high school which i will coordinate um yeah this was really just a wonderful opportunity like i know it felt really early i'm a very cautious traveler and i wasn't ready to even think about offering a trip or opposing this until i felt that there was some security in travel and that there were the restrictions were being limited in a way that i thought were reasonable and safe for our students i've traveled a lot with ef and i'm really secure that they are very um concerned about our students safety and that they want what's best for them but i just also felt like our kids needed something to look forward to and that we needed something to like just you know be excited about again and i wanted to make sure that what happened in that for them um and created some opportunities for students to have something to look forward to um obviously you've traveled with ef before so i don't need to tell you too much about this but one of the things that i do want to announce them is that ef has a along with the piece of mind policy that comes with their insurance and i do require and it's included in the price that the all of the travelers on my trip buy the insurance um because it just makes life a lot easier should there be any issues um and if like should the board decide for any reason that they don't feel it's safe for us to travel it makes it so much easier when all of our travelers have the same insurance and i also think yeah they've done a really great job of working with us in the past that's part of their peace of mind um response but the coped piece of mind policy also means that if on our trip for any reason if a student contracts coped they will pay for the hospital visit and set them up in a hotel and they will also pay to fly the parents down to be with their kids in the hospital that is part of their policy and that is a new coping policy that they have which i just think speaks to their attention yeah this speaks to their attention um to like the safety and just wanting parents to feel comfortable with where their kids are and that they're in good hands um and having traveled with them uh you know i don't know multiple teachers at the high school travel with yet but they're also really good at working with us um and solving problems should anything come up i think they've done a good job in good faith resolving a lot of issues with us it's a touch screen oh it is okay um included on this tour is a 24 7 24 hour seven days a week our tour director they meet us at the airport they're with us the entire day um they're with us all the days until we leave um they bring us back to the airport we also have 24-hour emergency support provided by ef one thing that's unique um they said as part of the norm the norm for national travel is that there's professional overnight security dedicated to our group so in our hotel there'll be a local security guard who is just working for us just make sure the kids don't get out of their rooms which totally eliminates me having to put blue tape on their doors which i typically do um and there are required background checks for adult travelers but right now that would just be um mrs and i were already approved um and then paying for the tour they offer scholarships i encourage all the students if they decide to go on the trip to apply for a scholarship they can get anywhere from a couple hundred dollars for a couple of thousands a couple thousand dollars and they have over fifty thousand dollars in needs-based scholarships and they really encourage kids to sign up for it and kids can also get a giving page which when they sign up for their trip instead of saying oh buy me a suitcase they can give their family and friends the link and people can it's kind of a gofundme for their trip people can donate directly to the giving page and fund their trip and as i said i offer the travel this travel protection plan which is there it's already included in their price if they wanted the travel protection plus plan which i thought was not necessary it's an extra 180 they're welcome to take that on but this one is already included in our price and these are the things that out first and again included in our trip is the trip prices the round trip transportation the tour director all the transportation that occurs um all of our safety hotel safety sorry all of our hotels um guided tours and activities any entrances to museums breakfast and dinner daily i'm actually really excited about that because i think exploring food in a culture is important so lunches kids can like go and buy what they want to eat for lunch um our overnight security are those the student dishonored ratio is ten to one this is an eight country trip so this is not an international trip uh our personal learning guide and our assistance the accident the illness and accident coverage which is part of the insurance the support team of ef oh the other thing that's really nice about this price is that it includes tips and security tips and gratuities in the past i have um had to collect that separately but for the national trips they include that in the price of the trip and i also question them because i'm a very good tipper and i don't like to undertip people and i also wanted to make sure people were getting their fair price and i said are these people being tipped according to the industry standard and like well and they assured me that they are that there's no expectation to tip beyond that so tip is included um and of course access to the giving page and then i think the next one is probably just this is the the price of the tour paid in full is 3089 and then parents have the option of setting up monthly and five weekly minutes for the trip they can do that all through the year so if they want to collect you know money or put money aside and then do that all at once they can also do it and then this is this was part of the enrollment presentation so it's a qr code if they want to access the website directly i appreciate the link to their site yes i know having the having the agenda for day-to-day um do you have any questions no no none of those okay um just curious are they gonna have a vaccine requirement or no do they i a lot of our students are vaccinated and um i you know i i think we'd have to go with whatever the cdc is recommending and whatever you recommend in terms of travel i mean obviously i need to know from from the school's perspective and from the from the fourth bed perspective like what the requirements are for like our students who travel but hasn't yet doesn't know this in-country trip and so they i mean we'll go with whatever the united states is you know suggesting as travel um you know and movement if the flights obviously planes and airlines require that and we'll meet that standard um if like when we arrive in the country like whatever the suggestion is whenever we arrive in puerto rico like whatever the requirement is there at that time like you would abide by whatever rules exist well it wasn't it was 10 months away too so i mean okay um aaron and i are really really cautious so i think you would err on whatever um is most cautious and prudent in this situation and um you know that is like part of like you know our guiding practice to have the word about approve the trick just means we could come to you if we have any questions about like you know suggestions that you have about how to handle that and obviously because the world may change and that's the point of having the travel insurance as well okay yeah i would definitely follow it up more uh gotta have some deadlines but hopefully it's not issues right um um i think it sounds exciting finally um well i thought it made it easier to pick a destination that was in the united states as well because it meant that we had a little more familiarity with whatever was being suggested as guidelines rather than dealing with another country that might have a completely different situation it's very local yeah i appreciate you bringing up that you're tying the trip in i think all our trips always have to be culture aspect first it's not tied to biology or language so that's nice to see um this is i don't want to discuss a letter but earlier early in the meeting but there's two i think there's two different things there there's a circ guideline training that uh district on diversity equity inclusion and then there is the latino studies which actually is quite passed almost two years ago and set part and parcel suffered from what circus doing that is not a course that's teaching racial biases divisions of all cultural awareness that's when so in this case closer a lot because it's coming more and more and there's nothing else like this yeah it's not excuse me it's nice that you didn't time it but at some point before we actually offered the course there's got to be some front part i'm not just a the skull needs i think i'll be able to share more about that yeah yeah so this is positive it's cultural these kids need to be exposed to as much outside travel as they can possibly get i understand it's very positive yeah thank you so i mean it's open to all students even though it is you know connected to the course like anyone who has an interest in coming with us is welcome and of all ages too right yeah in the high school right okay um all right so thank you so much i know being that there's days left of school you certainly don't have to stick around we're glad that you were able to come and thank you so much for your time i really appreciate it thank you um right so um do i hear a motion that we approve the out as a committee approved the out-of-country field trip to puerto rico from april 18th through the 21st 2022 um to be moved to the full approval you're making a motion thank you any discussion none all in favor great classes easy okay um no all business then we move right into informational items um first on the agenda is um curriculum writing institute all right so we've been sort of talking a little bit about this for a long time now and it's finally coming to fruition we will be holding the curriculum writing institute in june it will be next week thursday and friday and next week by monday tuesday and wednesday maureen and kevin have both been working on this along with some of our coaches we were fortunate enough to work with linda who was actually the plain person to run the niagara evaluation at cheshire high school she is very well respected and knows our district a little bit from that evaluation and our [Music] a lot of construction happening this summer and uh we were able to find space at highland school so we'll be meeting at highlands and we've got some breakout rooms she will be doing some training on creating performance tasks that are authentic and are directly tied to our standards this meshes with our acceleration work and that we're looking at priority standards and how to make rich engaging tasks for students we'll be tying in our vision of the graduate as well and really learning helping with helping teachers and facilitating how to make rubrics work for for teachers and how to have kids really take ownership of this work that it's got to be meaningful to them and so that's that's the guide that we're that's our focus as we go into this um over the course of the next couple of years we our goal is to have a digital curriculum library k through 12.
it just didn't really matter how it was split it just had to equal 100 and that all teachers regardless if they do any of their their group b duties they are all still eligible for the for the group a which is the increase of the base pay because that's what the legislation said and and so greg just as a reminder what was the what was the amount of this 301 money that every teacher received this year i know we split it up and so what was the total amount it's right around six thousand dollars i i i don't have the total off the top of my head and god caught me off guard with that one it was about seven something like that it was like six sixty five something somewhere in that right remember this year's 301 is going to be a little bit higher um the amount of money that the state has to give it's based off of 744 per weighted student count so we're going to have twice the money in 301 available this year than we have you know this previous year some of the money that is within that 744 dollars is just one-time monies so you know we can expect the following airport to come down significantly but this is a huge jump this is the highest amount of 301 money that's been available since the proposition passed so in essence our teachers next year could get somewhere between eleven and thirteen thousand dollars in addition to their base pay is possibly is there any reason that we can't use easy merit in student achievement criteria i understand the timing but we just approved the prop 301 payments a few minutes ago in the consent agenda and we have the azure merit data in front of us now since that's the statewide standard by which and against which we are measured why can't we use azmerit well it doesn't mean that we can't we could come and say this year's azmerit data will be factored into next year's teacher performance it will just be again apples to apples and were you know giving performance based on past this year and next year for their work so it would be it would take us to have a study session with our teachers and our 301 committee to help them understand what we'd like to do or how you know we can rectify this to include both data points i i can foresee a problem using the az merit results because you know when you have special ed students that brings all the averages down no matter what kind of improvement those students made over the years it's still going to bring the average down and so you're penalizing the teachers for having specialized students in their classes but if they're able to take those students and still show an improvement on the math scores then they should be compensated for that so i think definitely student achievement and growth over where they were would be more important than the standardized test i could just see teachers picking their wanting to have the best students in their class for that reason for the discussion okay can i just throw something yeah good i'm sorry i don't know if this is out of my if i have seven special needs students who take a zero on the assessment because they just don't take it at all i don't have the student population to actually compensate for taking that zero because you know five special needs kids with a zero that drops our scores drastically across the board so i mean so are we looking at trying to different or separate out special needs students it's just it seems to me like it's a slippery slope if we start going that route thank you okay [Music] yes motion passes thank you okay are we uh looking for approval to issue a purchase order to robertson recreational services how about some background numbers okay so before you have um two estimates from robertson recreational services what this is going to be for is the playground purposing at the preschool in both of these estimates they are going to cut away the first six to eight inches of the stone playground replace it and then recover the the more expensive of these options is taking that same foam surfacing and covering up the sand area that is currently attached to that plate that's the 21-7 that's the 21-7 yes how big is this sandy area like compared to the rest of the playground it is roughly 250 square feet bigger additional additional space and can you clear it this is the money from the from the federal government oh but that was for cobin correct yes it is but it can be used for any m or capital expenditure so speaking with uh miss lixton dr lixon she has had students who have um that are visually impaired and there's about a six to seven inch drop between where the foam is to where the sand is and those students can't see it so they either end up falling into the sand or falling straight over onto the surfaces either way that is something that needs to be done the the surfacing needs to be it needs to be resurfaced um but i leave it up to you as to which route that we're going to go with that i don't know a single preschool parent that would oppose getting rid of playground stand yeah the kids in their hair fantastic stuff it's nice and cool this time of year okay i mean and and we're also getting rid of a liability too we don't want preschoolers especially if we're aware of the problem and that's um theoretically if this is approved to be done before once it's approved we will add it into the sr3 grant we haven't even submitted it yet and we're waiting on this we'll submit it into the grant as part of the budget items and then we'll report much of that grain is that all of it we haven't we haven't even yes or three we haven't even submitted it yet and what's the total amount just over four hundred thousand dollars i will entertain a motion to approve the purchase order for either so it's a little hard to read 15 six or twenty one thousand seven oh one ninety i'll move that we go for the higher amount twenty one seven oh one for the new service i second [Music] 21 000 701 90.
congratulations to jacob [Applause] okay and the next one is the resolution of commendation would you like to say a lot of things about alicia who will i'll get it started and then you could read the really impressive things okay alicia would you like to stand up uh alicia is the daughter of robert and renata stoppel she will attend purdue university in the fall to major in radiological health sciences with a concentration in pre-medical physics so it is an honor to present alicia to the board for accommodation and just like jacob you will be equally impressed with what an impressive graduate alicia is as mrs woodward reads the connotation that indeed will be true this is a resolution of commendation the avon community school corporation board of school trustees would like to congratulate alicia stoppel with passage of the following resolution whereas alicia estoppel is the valedictorian of the avon high school class of 2021 with a 5.403 gpa whereas alicia stoppel received an academic letter and was recognized as the outstanding student in ap calculus uh bc ace whereas alicia established the co-president of the national computer science honor society co-president of the national spanish honor society co-president of the girl to code club and a member of national honor society whereas alicia suppose an ap scholar with distinction a 2021 national merit finalist an indiana rising star for the class of and the third place finalist in the 2021 iupui high school math contest whereas alicia stop will earn the purdue presidential scholarship the purdue national merit scholarship and the hendricks county purdue alumni club scholarship excuse me whereas alicia supple has demonstrated excellent work ethic determination and commitment whereas the highest level of distinction given by the avon community school corporation is a commendation from the board of school trustees therefore let it be resolved alicia staple is hereby commended for her success and achievements board members i would entertain a motion admitted the board of school trustees approved the commendation as presented to alicia stockholm for being named valedictorian of the avon high school class of 2021.
i'm speaking as a father of three children a daughter age four whose birthday is actually today yet my wife and i are here also two boys ages six and nine that attend rock creek elementary and is an uncle of three nephews and four nieces who are also in the bartholomew county school district um a little bit of educational background is i'm a mechanical engineer so the science and statistics of the pandemic are something that interests me and something that i've studied fairly extensively both the lab studies for mask materials for example as well as real world studies on whether masks work for past studies like the flu and that sort of thing in a real world setting where you have lots and lots of noise factors that are not controlled um so i'll just get to the chase and give you my conclusion is that masks do not work as controlling an airborne virus we're not talking it's it's not a bacteria particle that's 10 times larger than a virus we are talking about a virus here and so the filter media does matter and therefore the cloth masks that most of our children are wearing are as effectively equivalent to trying to catch mosquitoes with a fence a chain-link fence the cdc states that viruses such as the flu or they finally came around on covet 19 are primarily transmitted via airborne transmission these are also called aerosol droplets and basically are water particles that are so small that they stay in the air for hours and are inhaled and then infect said person so like i said whether you're a mechanic or a teacher we all know that we have to have the right tool for the job right and cloth masks especially are not the right tool for the job if you want the numbers looking at lab studies of filter efficiencies for various mass materials that don't even consider the leak large leak paths around the top of your mask that you are you can put your finger in probably the mask that you're wearing if not considering that passing all the air through the filter media cloth masks filter less than 10 of particles three times larger than a virus particle a virus particle is roughly 0.1 microns and the smallest that they measure mass materials at from a filter media standpoint are 0.3 microns and a cloth mask will catch less than 10 of those particles so what you might say well what's the downside of wearing a mask it can't hurt right well actually it can prolong mask wearing my biggest concern is bacterial growth inside the mask my youngest son six-year-old kindergarten would come home with a wet mask because he would lick it and stick it in his mouth and chew holes through it literally and so what is that doing that's that is a warm moist environment perfect for bacterial growth what about and how often are these masks being washed my wife does a great job wash them every day right but are all kids subjected to that i would say not um some of the side effects that studies have done on masks are irritability headache difficulty concentrating reluctance to go to school impaired learning drowsiness fatigue that was from a university in germany another one of my bigger concerns that have already been mentioned is verbal and non-verbal communication we're impeding the learning of those skills early in there in a child's development and then now that the indiana mask mandate has been removed for a couple months now you have kids out family get-togethers playing with other children going to church services where masks are no longer mandated going to restaurants maybe shopping so what message are we sending to our children if they're doing all those things outside of school and we send them to school and tell them hey you have to wear a mask are they are they going to think that school is no longer a safe place especially kindergarteners right who are already scared and now you tell them go to school and when you go to school you have to wear a mask even though you don't do it any other time so i guess the other question i tried to answer is who are we trying to protect coven 19 prevent presents a very low risk to our children the survival rate is 99.97 of children that have been infected that live through that infection children 5 to 14 years old per a study from the timeline of march to july of looked at the death rate between covet and the flu and children in this five to 14 year old age group were three and a half times more likely to die from the flu think about that march to july time frame that was a peak time in the pandemic and that's not even a peak time for the flu virus so let's say that we're afraid of kids spreading it to adults at school so maybe there's been some rumors that bc is considering uh mandating mass based on the percent of residents vaccinated which as of june 13th in bartholomew county was 47 so my thought to that is the adults who want to be vaccinated have had ample time or we still have two months until school starts so they have ample time to become vaccinated if that is something that they're worried about we shouldn't be penalizing our students to basically try to meet metrics of percent vaccinated in bartholomew county metrics aren't important what's important is our children let's say we would go down that path though and that you would say well we're going to mandate masks until we get to x percentage vaccinated well what is that percentage and what is the science behind whatever number you would come up with the answer is there would be no science and maybe somebody would say well we're trying to get to a percentage for herd immunity well my question to that would be yes we have 47 percent vaccinated but what percent do we have naturally immune because they have had the virus that would not be included in your metric that you're trying to get to to allow us to remove masks from our children so in conclusion i believe that masks are not an effective control measure against controlling the spread of an airborne virus such as coven 19 or the flu i know that it's my opinion and others may feel differently therefore all i'm requesting is that you allow the parents the freedom to choose whether our true children are required to wear a mask for the upcoming school year or not thank you misty hunter hello my name is misty hunter thank you for hearing us tonight um can i ask you to do do it a little bit closer than that okay can you hear me for me to say but i'm not good at it but yes so we could hear you better okay thank you i will preface this with my family and i just flew in at noon today after an all-night flight so i'm not as prepared as i'd like to with my comments so i'll just take a minute and let other parents that are but i thought my husband and i think it's important to be here because there's nothing more important to us than the well-being of our children we have four three who have been through vcsc and one who currently is still here and i think it's important that you know from her perspective what she experienced with the mass this past year it was a struggle for her she's a straight av student and it got to the point where every day when she came home we had advil and water in the car when we picked her up because she had daily headaches from it some of her grades dropped and i think that is in part because of the mask and the focus and the physical effects that it had on her and i think that's something you should take into consideration if you are thinking about what's best for our children in our educational environment thank you thank you amy menifee hello i'm amy minnifee i'm here today to both thank the board for the thoughtful decisions made during the 2019-2020 school year that prioritize parental choice for their child's education and to ask the board to apply the same consideration of parental choice concerning mask use and vaccination decisions i asked that the board only require optional mask use for all bcsc students for the upcoming school year i felt the need to speak today after seeing the recent isdh recommendations the recommendation to mass based on vaccine status is not only discriminatory but it can also be interpreted as an intimidation tactic to pressure parents to vaccinate their children these recommendations by isdh are highly questionable given that the vaccine has only recently been authorized by the fda for emergency use only in ages over 12.
i don't see enough evidence of including stakeholders and creating a shared educational vision this is specifically related to my goal of superintendent advisory how do you define shia's education's vision does that go correct me if i'm wrong yes i think we have a discussion with the last name of that really you could i don't remember did you yeah someone asked the question of how many parents or fourth town how many parents from each town were involved we had a discussion where a lot of members on that committee were taken from other committees or other working groups and it didn't seem to give a broad enough sort of experience to feed that you know all these different committees other are with the same people you don't get as broad of a feedback so how are you surviving that so can you define that specifically [Music] which is why i never mentioned educational okay so the next question is what about that goal what about the way that goal specifically was i think specifically that goal is written for you to get feedback from the community and the way your self-evaluation was written it sounded like most of the meetings that were done with that group was you reporting to that group on whatever was happening in school whereas from when i read it i understood that you were to listen to the community the way the self-evaluation was written was more like you would report right okay so let's get into [Music] shared vision development needs improvement was engaged some administrators staff students families and community members in developing a shared educational vision focused on some aspects of student preparation student preparation for college and career readiness civic engagement responsible citizenship and community contributions the stakeholder engagement is limited or that was the part they brought me where most of the meetings seem to be huge for them versus those things it was possible yeah i would say that your last line of spirit of the goal is to get perspective from the community it's closer to what i was trying to do rather than to share educational vision and in the box above the wrote that there's a comment that says i would like to see media agendas highlight key questions for the report to respond to rather than a list of information information and topics which feels more like information to being given less than groups of advice being sought that's exactly what i was going after so that piece of presence might i think will help me a lot along with another one that talked about defining roles i think laurie actually addressed that and um page 12.
we have that in pockets right now but we think it's really important to have it digitally so that it's accessible to the teachers who teach that course and we'll keep you posted on it post post to june um when we get back in the fall but we've got um the feeling really um what is it what would the digital curriculum library i mean it would just have resources that um they could print off with the kids or it would be actually this is sort of what our curriculum library will look like and you can go to the elementary middle high school curriculum or ua curriculum and this is not completely populated in full but when you click on it you can get to whether you want whatever subject area you want to so if you are a social studies teacher and you want to see how you might be able to tie something to the english standards for that grade level you have access and you can do so if you we just hire you and you're a brand new teacher yeah um you don't just get my notes you can go right to the library and get what the district has written and created and what's been approved so that when we have turnover no one's lost everyone is up to date because this is where we'll keep our most up-to-date document some of these things include assessment that we wouldn't share because we don't want those assessments being seen by the kids every year prior to but this is you know sort of on that on the um so how long do you think it's going to take you to populate all of those files i'm hoping that i'm i'm optimistic three years okay but knowing the teachers who are involved in it if it's not working for them and it's not paying off for kids then we don't want to replicate it but you know it's it's seeming like that will be the plan and we will offer this three years in a row and that way we'll train more staff and get more people's voices involved so that teachers really have their hand to get creative and of course our curriculum documents are living reading documents they're going to change over time right but we want to make sure that you know nothing gets lost and then that will clear on what those alcohol exactly okay and so we'll hear more about the backside of this likely september okay all right um next is on the item professional development federation coaching and gsm yes so um we were talking we've been talking a lot about acceleration we've heard a lot about bombs forward and how we're using some of that money and i just thought this would be a good opportunity to share with you sort of what that plan is looking like for next year so last summer when we had the pandemic and the power outage and the hurricane we had actually sent about 20 or so teacher leaders to this virtual training to the connecticut center for school change on this topic of acceleration and we sat there in our various places with you know some folks were at mcdonald's because that's where there was wi-fi and it was really a comedy of errors but everyone agreed who was on this call k through 12 that this was good teaching we were talking about remediation if we all went back to try and heard me talk about some of this we went back to try to fill in the gaps those kids would always be behind never catch them up so it was the best way for us to make sure that kids didn't lose any time due to pandemic so we prioritized standards and then we talked about how we would scaffold and pre-teach to get them to learning on a grade level we also have talked extensively about building kids self-efficacy and really believing that they could do this despite the terrible odds that they've been up against and that meant believing in our teachers that they could do it and that believing in our students that they could do this work it also meant making sure that the things we were asking them to do were the important thing right that they were tied to the most important standards so this began to catch on and we were using that collaboration time that the board had given us to have people teaching teachers teaching like subject areas time to collaborate we'll really force that collaboration and that you and i've talked a lot about how do you ensure that across all these buildings that everyone's getting the same thing so it it really helps us to develop that so fast forward to march um i think everyone here is going part of the tuesday afternoon from four to six club and teacher leaders attending virtual workshops on tuesdays from four to six to do another layer of this acceleration work and mary and kevin and myself we all had a small group virtually that we would work work with on these topics because while these topics sound simple they're much more complex when you have a variety of students in front of you somewhere after a little some who aren't and how do you get them all moving so fast forward a little more to this curricular writing institute we'll be using the institute to plan for that type of acceleration in addition at our retreat coming up in week next um and wednesday um we've got two days two mornings set up where we have the instructors from that acceleration workshop providing support to our team to our administrators we want our administrators to really feel comfortable in this and to know how to to even to leave this even further next year and so as part of that we've also got monthly phone calls meetings set up to support our administrators as they go through that process they'll need that so that they're able to talk to folks about some bumps in the road and how we would get past that and we continue to do this work at the same time you heard in the bounce forward conversations that we've had about hiring some additional staff and coaches so we have um we have now two full-time assistant principals to cover up our remaining elementary schools plus we're working on hiring a coach at the middle school i'm sorry a math that person at the high school a math person as a support teacher at outside middle school and we take because of shifting some of the response teaching responsibilities around we're able to pull some of our teachers to further develop their coaching skills and we'll be going through coaching workshops in the fall so we've got a point person in an assistant principal at each level who will help you liaise on to that kevin and i will be creating a community of practice here for those teachers to get support with coaching and we will also be working with the connecticut center for school change to get support outside of the district or to work with other coaches in other districts like ours so we're putting in a lot of levels of support ultimately so that we can be shoulder to shoulder with teachers and helping them through this process because we know we still have kids who are coming to us after being little last year sounds like a lot of work that all good and all for a great cause and to have a very busy day driving the question the team how much time and support could stay no i think we have a really good plan in place i i think we're just you know shifting looking at our calendar reallocating time reallocating finances resource um to make sure that we can be there this is the work this is what we do and we're very excited about it um and it's not not yet complete there are actually other things but um one of them if you were to look at our professional development updates pre-pandemic you would have heard ngss ndss and ntss so we're also very exciting that we're restarting our partnership with the connecticut science center that will look like for our elementary teachers we have most of our elementary teachers who um fall in 2019 participate in a dss workshop about every one of two teachers so we will bring that workshop to our teachers who didn't have it a year almost two years ago now in our in our november pd session also at the elementary level we have moved to the training trainers models so our rams got trained from the connecticut science center and then they took that up to grade levels so we'll continue that work with five train trainer sessions for our brands relative to science at the middle school level um we will have a one-day training to get everybody back invested in and what ngss looks like in the middle school level and then we're excited they will be attending our monthly science division leader meetings um for an hour chunk at a time as consultants to help us do the work throughout the year but that's not additional time that's embedded time in already existing meetings and then at the high school at the high school we've been working with julie barker who's the science department chair and we've met with folks from the family science people believe this was march 10th of last year we're all downstairs in conference room a and we had the science teachers there and we were working on infusing ngss into their lesson plans so we were doing what's called lesson study where collectively you take the topic you write about it and that was on march 10 and they thought oh wouldn't it be interesting to study they said you know they're calling this a pandemic so maybe we can integrate i remember that conversation yeah yeah so we left and then we were number two so um next year beginning very early in the school year we will be pulling the earth science teachers together to do lesson studies so we would all get together and we would plan out what that looks like then we would go together and observe each teacher and say okay so what in this lesson worked what didn't what do we need to change and is this getting to the heart of what we wanted to do and we've been fortunate again with some of the title for grant money that we will be able to run that not just for our science teachers but also for biology teachers so i think people are exhausted as everyone is out there teaching right now i think people are very excited to get back to some sense of normalcy and all those plans that we had made and were not able to accomplish just for a lack of you know being able to be together science extra time does this cost it does this thing for the team to how much do they have to devote um you know you talked about your your workshops and this and that and um and he just asked the question about do they have the time what are we can you quantify each i mean uh participation needs to it's it's across the board right so our brand this is part of their job if i look at um liz human at the high school and in well speak we're looking at their teaching load and we are making sure that they have the ability to do some of this coaching and that in their schedule they are then available to come here for that those progress professional growth opportunities um tom toscano will be doing some of this work for math at the middle school and kristen shanley at the middle school so we're looking very very much at how we are you know how they're scheduled what their time is so that they can be here and be available to do that and we'll also be reinstituting our learning models next year and all of those folks will be instrumental in being a part of those learning laws and then um acceleration was um kind of a response to copic um i mean that's initially what it was intended for but now it seems to have become a regular i mean it's almost it's a new it's kind of like you stumbled onto something that seems to um be almost a better way of instruction so is this a is this going to continue to be temporary for say that three years or this is now i would like to see this okay um what we've seen in in all the trainings and the research that you've been doing is when you look at the number of standards that we have here in the united states and you compare that to other countries our our our bar graph is up here and japan is down here and so we really need to make a joke and some of the training that we've been to and if you've heard of murray condo yes you know but we need to re-condo the curriculum and the standards because you know we're running just i don't mean cheshire but just in general teachers are running around your kids are running ragged there's a stress level there we really need to slow down and we need to focus on what's most important and spend the time on that and i think what what you're going to see is our next item on the agenda is a continuation of we don't typically do a snapshot of this type of data we share those standardized data that's more tied to state um funding and so forth this is a snapshot that shows us that somebody's working here okay so i don't i don't need to move it on if you have other questions i'm happy no no that's all right teachers have stated i've gotten further in my curriculum than i had any other year and it's an amazing feeling so they're really well if you're excited about it we're overall yeah um okay so item c is [Music] so we have that you can probably the second slide we have been as you know in two other um fricking committee meeting updates we've looked at some lens on both our reading and math performance out of k6 or k8 uh over the course of this year so i'm going to give you two end of the year views for reading and for math both are are ultimately strong if we were to consider that at the end of this 14 or 16 months worth of education that did not look normal that we would have strong performance in in poetry and that that would be something that um that i think we should celebrate so in this view you're seeing an agreed level performance over the past four years unlike our fallen winter data we obviously don't have spring of last year but in this view it kind of gives you a relative sense of how our overall performance is the two areas in green and this is reading data on the reading inventory um in each of these grade levels the two areas in green are at or above our all-time highest levels in um in reading data and i would say on the whole um our meeting scores continue to be as they were after the mid-year just below or x previous performance a slightly different view on this that i think shows that students are continuing to make growth is actually on the next line and that's looking at the growth of the group of students over that same time period so that first row is our current sixth graders the percent of students who met with benchmarks as third graders and then there's fourth graders you didn't have fifth grade data and then again sixth graders and it is often the trend in reading and math data that the percent of students needing mastery out of these students does go up over time um so even in the areas where we weren't quite as strong as maybe historically we're still showing growth from our students over multiple years so this is really strong reading data is not without areas of focus and areas of need things that absolutely need to be addressed and i'll get to that a little bit later but this is pretty significant celebration of some of the good work that's happening if we look at math we continue to be static at this performance because where we were near or at great historic levels in reading we were at or above historic trends in math and five out of the six grade levels have an all time kind of highest performance level score within that and that's a combination of factors you talked about acceleration talked about internally this is multiple years utilizing the curriculum so students familiar with the strategies and the approaches and a lot having to do with the collaborative planning teachers so that here's really when it comes down to it the essence of what needs to happen uh for students and so that's again the view the grade level view and if we go to the cohort view the next supply we'll also see those similar trends up over multiple years in almost all the grade levels so that's this data um and our reflections on how we approach this year really are going to help inform us going forward and i think about it we've been talking about it in our reflections and teachers this way if this is what happens when we have some extended getting into the building getting out of the building mass breaks inability or less of an ability not inability less of ability to sit down and confer in the kind of ways that we would typically as part of our best practice if this is the kind of performance that's happening here we actually have a really prime opportunity to leverage this to bounce forward and really see some strong performance at the backstreet english and our students i'm i'm really excited for those opportunities um you know i said giving me every match break was replaced by two green conferences and we did that every day of the week that's a whole lot of learning that can happen for for students so um we're really looking forward to kind of moving this forward a little bit and a few of those reflections show up on the next uh one more slide so we talked about acceleration practices one part of that has been paying attention to our pacing so really hear the standings that you need to address within the school year um let's make sure that hey we're collectively in the same spot and being that we're still continuously exposing students to grade level work so that's a big premise of acceleration the collaborative planning to make that happen has been huge the research note there is one thing that also gives me a lot of hope and promise for the future is watching uh times and places um when education has been erupted in other uh other parts of the country at other times so hurricane katrina and then there absolutely that caused education or a recent study that kind of shared in rural uh west that sometimes your budgetary reasons to go down to 48 week or day construction to save money in all of those kind of research studies around those interruptions when the return to normal happen student performance right back up to merely anticipate if that's the case we really have and we lean on the research and some of the best practices that go with how do you get students back up after after an interruption it really shows a lot of problems for future some of the areas that i know we're going to need to focus on uh i mentioned conferencing before they absolutely are found students but the fine-tunness of that um the frequency of that is a little bit less than it would have been so i think that'll be a an important part of moving our reading work forward we have noticed we're paying very close attention to our youngest grade levels um phonics instruction how we approach teaching that does require us to really get it unless they have students who are reading provide feedback help move them along in that front so we are seeing a few um possible gaps in that and i've already planned for will help in the next video level up how to tend to some of those areas of time so that's a good part of our planning another affirming piece of research is as as we have looked into ways that help support students one of the things that you'll see on research is high dosage tutoring when you look at what happens in high dosage tutoring it is a lot like the structure that we have for our lsts and support for students so we're we probably will have some more students who are going to require that but we have the structure and we have the people who are trained to do that so that is another very affirming as we looked into that research and got received some information on just the effectiveness of that we were pretty excited to say well we that really mirrors what we're doing they have more skills that we have potential on that but we're not being doing a structure we're just including some more students who might be struggling and we continue to uh through this curriculum writing institute uh which one we'll be doing uh one of the lenses of that curriculum writing institute is we're having teachers from our pupil personnel department special education teachers occupational therapists involved in that writing as a way to help all of us understand what are some of the most significant needs of our students and what are some ways that can help address that those needs through our core curriculum so i see all those things as helping us bounce forward and all of the performance but particularly that math performance is something that's just really incredible something to be proud of and i know the teachers have worked hard to make that happen certainly been a combination of these things as well as you know the resource that we're using provided but we must always talk about eureka every year and that's because we're staying the course and making sure that everyone understands they're spending time with our math coach to make sure that they understand how to teach in this way also i just want to reiterate what you said kevin how important it is that we have special education teachers paired with regular education teachers during this institute so that they're working together and one's not in their silo over here and you know regularities in their silo over here we're really actively breaking down those barriers to make sure that people are working side by side not just when there's an issue that a student good question so i noticed on the assessments and you know the grade three recommended fell off of all nine eyes yeah still still very room lost so now they're ending in the fourth grade are gonna be uh some focus in that cohort to yes so one part of that on the reading end that the pundit's instruction piece you really should kind of round out learning how to read that often happens by the end of second grade and if it doesn't quite get there you're really using third grade as the time to share that usher so as we looked into what students are struggling a little bit more and where those struggles are that's kind of an area that popped up so you've heard us talk about pat castle before she is already on providing some tools updates strategies for teachers to really zoom in on some of those needs that's not all of the needs of rick relatives but it is it is a likely um chunk that if we attend to that early and often in the school year when the students are fourth graders and actually the same is true from our second and third grade performance we're saying the same um [Music] um yes same mindset on helping support that cohort i don't know if we refined exactly where some of the needs needs are yet but i know so have you seen that that same trend over a period of history i'm just wondering is that a is that a development issue with a child with the children i mean is there something about that the development that goes on at that age that would somehow explain it or is it the curriculum i mean and or because i mean even second to third grade what i used to teach and i didn't have a couple years of elementary um a second grader was so different from a third layer sure um you know that you just started to see things change in that third grader and that yeah so that's why i'm wondering for that that timeline developmentally that's a lot of abominable milestones start to i'll say you pull out and hand out by the time you get back so if we pair that with some of the eruptions that's happened some of the construction that was really good but maybe not as ideal as we'd want it's not surprising to me but this is where there might be lights and decent needs so it's not surprising to get an front it's a little bit predictable and recoverable i think that's right clearly so much about the research on on when you're able to address it in a more normal way you can get back up so that's i know we'll be doing that for sure right okay and our last item the update on the african-american black britain so i know we've known dr reed and dr gab have shared sort of along the way what has transpired and kept us abreast of this when it was originally just percolating so i would like to be able to share a little of that history or let them share a little about history today and also talk about where we are so the course itself has been um you know obviously was was approved in the legislative legislature um it's public acts 19-12.
thank you okay reliant wheel drilling background please so we have a well that has all of our non-potable water that does it for landscaping that pump is now out it is no longer working we went out we received three bids um the lowest qualified bidder came in at 11 179 42 and that was with reliant well drilling and pump corporation so this is the pump that's supplying all the water to our grass and everything else discussion have a question how are they going to stand behind that is that is there any sort of they guarantee it it's it's got a um i mean i know pumps they have their own guarantees yeah it's got like a five-year warranty on the phone so is that something you can get from that state maintenance meeting no no it is not classroom okay or any occupied spaces for students recycles won't bring all right further discussion okay mrs allen yes mrs price yes mr awesome yes mr yes motion passes we're live well drilling eleven thousand one seventy nine forty two thank you approval to create a feel to jim click dodge for two 20 20 dodge caravan vans the amount of 62 000 so both of our bands recently on trips to tucson have spent quite a bit of time on the side of the road as they weren't they were overheating and not running correctly i believe the one the door almost fell off is that correct i haven't heard that story but i i can't say that in one of them that you see doesn't work or we have to repair them they're the old astro hands from do you have a year on those greg i think they're about when i was born um did you go here mr mcgivern you know i wasn't going to bring that up but so yes i'm no spring chicken and i was in one of those fans many many moons ago they're just they're they're really really lots of mechanical problems for constantly having to to replace the belts and all sorts of things they're just to the point now where we can't even keep one running at a time so they're both out right now both down and out and those are used for several different applications one is going to conferences and things of that nature but then also we have to go staff members go up to tucson every week to the county which is where we get all of our checks are for payment for our staff and all of that stuff so we have to have a reliable vehicle to be able to do that and right now we do not just to i have a real quick question um well i'm not putting them up into the auction until you say the prices of scrap steel is like sneezing yeah i was going to ask um how long the old ones were depreciated for on our books but now i guess yeah they're honestly in my life basically they're on a standard 10-year depreciation schedule well it sounds like they need and i want to say that those are both late 80s early 90s i was staying correct when i was six just tell jim click that you expect these celestia's long if i could also we're looking at in the near future getting new buses and we've talked about that and we have looked at trading value with the bus to trade them into the to do that as well as long as they don't charge you to trade them in is that bad the the only caveat on trading them is they have to be able to make it to phoenix without being towed discussion mrs allen yes mrs yes mr ostrows mr hillary yes and mr mcgivern yes enjoy the new vans we certainly need them let's go here 22 proposed budget so every year in june the district finance department proposes a budget for the upcoming school year this budget is based on what we have as a best guest as far as our adm on the 100th day which will take place somewhere in january i haven't looked at the calendar to see exactly what it is usually that second or third week in january um the budget that we're proposing we have based off of an adm of 685 which is 120 adm apparently higher than what we have now we base that on students coming back from those outside digital forces as well as the new development coming in now as of a few hours ago the state still had not passed a budget so the sheets that you have before you are come from the um come from ade with some of what they are proposing to put into the budget so there are some small changes in it there are some of the category b weights are changed um the um there's just there's just a few small tweaks of what we think the state is going to be putting in so this is by no means a budget form for the upcoming year but because the state hasn't passed the budget does not mean that we are still due to upload this by the 15th um here is the budget okay so as you can see we have just over 4.2 million dollars of our budget that is strictly into going towards teachers and so that's going to be salaries benefits professional services part of that purchase services is the money that goes to the school district for high school tuition so that's why that's a 2.2 million dollar number this page here this is showing you what how we have our money allocated for our special ed programs now they are talking about having money for gifted and funding that but currently we don't have anybody identified as gifted and we don't know what that funding is going to look like so when ad put to help them put together these budget forms they didn't even add anything in there you can see the cost of our federal of our non-federal audit over there on the right is thirty thousand four hundred dollars within our mno budget there's 3 245 assigned to performance pay our food service budget what we're going to supplement our food service department they're sixteen thousand six hundred ninety five dollars right next page this is classroom site fund as you can see everything is put into teacher salaries and benefits i had a total of seven hundred and sixty six thousand seven hundred and twelve great can i stop you for a minute go ahead this didn't come across the way it was this doesn't look anywhere near what i looked at today i mean prior yeah this isn't coming across like it like i mean prior year was there yeah everything was in there it just with the tech i don't know what if we're having some technical difficulties or not but this isn't what was uploaded originally because all the prior year was there to show you the increases and it decreases and i've got some questions with regard to that okay because we want taxes paid for that has it what were your questions sir there's a 27 projected increase in general administrative fees and support services it seems like an awfully high increase for administration and the support services that's going to be the addition of a special advert but no because a special ed director is down in a separate budget excuse me could you please it would be easier it's not even her email see this is this is my drive yeah come here once again technical difficulties um did you have questions um specifically you can look up in our comments uh i had about three questions uh number one was the administrative general administrative uh increase in in support services i am floored with the classroom site fund projected increase in the classroom site fund yes money i mean that's based on sales tax is that what the state is telling us yes they're coming across with a weighted student account of 744 weighted student accounts and also on page six and other funds there's significant reductions in community school the tax credit the gifts of donations auxiliary operations and debt service significant reductions right because to be honest we hadn't been using those so why inflate what it is when it's not remotely accurate so on page six that is budgeting based off of prior year expenditures you sit there yeah that's it right there okay we now have it you have to get a telescope to read it so greg is that carry over money from from like in tax credit which goes primarily to extracurricular activities correct so so any tax credit money that's in there which would be the fund 526 okay the budget that's in there right now is based off of what we had actually spent the previous year so if if i'm going to throw and i'm just going to throw out numbers why would i put 200 000 in there as a budget when we're only going to spend 110.
second that motion was my aunt and it was seconded by anita is there any further discussion all those in favor that motion passes 4-0 congratulations um congratulations on that congratulations [Applause] okay uh board members before we go on to consent agenda any comments about our celebrating orioles congratulations to um just outstanding individuals you have made us so proud all of you have and we're just um i just sit in all at your accomplishments i i truly hope we can be updated on your future accomplishments because i know they will be incredible and the world does not know what's coming you guys are going to take the world by tale and you're going to make it a better place so congratulations it's been an honor to have you a part of our school preparation i would like to congratulate jacob niels and alicia on their honors and wish them well in the future i hope i pronounced this name right surya that i said yay okay well i too would like to congratulate you on being named a national champion pretty good i think i met you when i was invited to come to a speech practice and i spoke with you and you were explaining this and that and you did a practice speech you were very good and i thought that girl's going to go somewhere so good luck being a champion now and in the future you've done great also congratulations to alicia and jacob achieving the titles valedictorian and salutatorian it's quite an honor when we were there when you were there at graduation that night you had words of wisdom and you shared those with me it was meaningful meaningful for your classmates and the audience you both have already have already shared some of your dreams and you are going to begin a brand new future congratulations both of you and i'll just add my congratulations to all of you for such academic pride pride in yourself pride in your school corporation pride in your future i really feel that it is these types of students that we like mrs engelhardt said we turn out into the world and they turn the world into a much better place so thank you for being part of our avon community and i would sincerely wish you all the best of luck thank you for being here tonight okay uh we are going to move on to the consent agenda um which includes approval of minutes for regular meetings working sessions special meetings the approval of claims payrolls ece registers the april transfer memo approval of the personnel report an independent contractor employment agreement job descriptions disposal of equipment obsolete textbooks and library materials overnight field trip requests eca funds and the donation report board members who are all provided exhaustive information on all these topics to review um and so i will entertain a motion on the consent agenda well i'll go ahead and make a move for the border school trustees though there is a um a resignation letter in there that i'm kind of sad about but super excited about as well so dr king is super excited um i mean that the border school trustees approve the minutes of the regular meeting on may 10 2021 working session on may 17 2021 special meeting on may 28 2021 claims 30026 one 40018 nine one zero zero zero eight six nine eight through nine one zero zero eight nine four five two one zero zero zero zero zero one five three two one zero zero zero zero one three nine two zero two one zero zero three seven three eight two four six two five three three three two zero two one zero zero six seven four a mini board nine one zero zero eight six nine four three nine one zero zero zero eight six nine seven pay rows for may 14 and 28 2021 minifigure on may 14 2021 pandemic stipend for june 4th 2021 eca check registers for all schools from september 1 2021 through march 31st through 2021 april transfer memo memo personnel report independent contractor employment agreement with amber woodson revised job description for assistant superintendent and new job description for chief financial officer disposal of equipment overnight field trip requests for avon high school boys golf eci pca funds deposit and a donation report as presented second motion by anne seconded by anita is there any other discussion always in favor motion passes for zero uh the next time on the agenda is comments from the board president i would just like to thank everyone for being with us today for those students that were honored for academic achievement you can certainly stay we would love to have you say or we understand if you would like to leave as well so i'll leave just a couple of minutes for you to do that if you would like and then we will move on to the next part of our agenda thank you thank you thank you everyone appreciate it [Music] congratulations okay yes okay i think everybody's moved in thank you the next item on the agenda is public comments to the board this is the part of our regular meeting where we allow the public to give us comments that they would like us to consider please remember that comments are limited to three minutes per person and that we try for privacy's sake to not uh mention in public names of students or administrators or teachers staff so with that i will open for public comment yes sir could you stand and give us your name and um address my name is gregory mess it's m-o-e-b-s and my address is one zero eight blender thank you i wasn't aware of some of the restrictions so pardon me while i edit as i speak sure of course and i will do my best to fit within three minutes but there's a number of items from this past semester to work through good evening i'm a parent of two students within the avon school district even though the focus of this evening's discussion is looking forward to what plans should be in place for the upcoming school year it is still important to review the prior year and learn and understand what went well and what did not i would like to share with the board some information specific to our experiences and the impact to my family as background for the issues i'm about to present we do have a family member who was at high risk relative to severe coveted illness as such my wife and i remained cautious relative to risk exposure and also conducted as much research as possible to maximize my family safety one of the decisions we made in 2020 was to keep our two children at home for the fall semester for e-learning my daughter was a sophomore at avon high school this past year and have been accepted to the wynn symphony which could be clear as the highest level concert band at the high school with avon offering no hybrid options allowing her the opportunity to play with the wind symphony was one of the factors that informed our decision to allow her to to attend in-person learning for this past spring semester for the most part we were satisfied with how the school operated coded protocols with the notable exception of the high school band department our first observation in regards to issues was with a concert hill in january this event coincided with being in the middle of the surge in code cases in indiana it was reassuring that there was going to be limited audience attendance and that the event was going to be streamed via facebook live however as soon as the concert began we were shocked to note that the students were seated in a normal art orchestral arrangement spaced immediately side by side with rows faced immediately behind each other obviously students could not be wearing masks while playing woodwinds or brass instruments and the shooting arrangement would dramatically increase risk of exposure our concern was heightened even further when my daughter reported in the following days that several members of the woodland section were missing from band class the second issue occurred throughout the spring semester when the state health department announced in february that schools were going to be permitted to follow a three-foot rule for facing in the classrooms the band directors decided incorrectly that they could take advantage of the three-foot rule my wife and i exchanged several emails with one of the directors who is part of the wind symphony in an attempt to have the in-classroom seating arrangements during band change when we stated that they were in violation of the coded spacing protocols we were ignored when we emailed that director and copied the principle the direct quotation from the state directors is explicitly stating the band programs were not permitted to follow the three foot wool and was still maintained six foot spacing the only concession given to us was that our daughter would be singled out and allowed to sit six feet from the other students in the band room the rest of the band would maintain a three foot spacing the third and most egregious issue stems from the planning and execution of the end of year concert in may when our daughter reported that the directors were again planning to use standard orchestral seating arrangement we reached out to the principal who had the final say relative to the school code of protocols to have him intervene following several discussions by phone we believed he had secured an agreement between the principal and the band director that the students would be spaced as far as possible given the auditorium space constraints this should have meant approximately five foot spacing in all directions given the limitations of the auditorium space instead the director completely disregarded the agreement just four days before the event on the monday before the concert we learned that the shooting arrangement would be unnecessarily constrained by the addition of risers with minimal space into either side within the rows and less than four foot space in between rows mr monis your time is up unfortunately is there a way that you could summarize for us um and then if you would like to turn that over to us we'll be happy to put that fully in the minutes i can do that yes um basically in summary what we are concerned about is the in particular band directors not following the we are one engagement respect and accountability throughout all those issues and you'll see in the minutes the additional details that i outlined where the director failed to meet those in particular and we just wanted to make you aware and ask that perhaps something could be done in this regard appreciate that thank you so much and if you wouldn't mind giving those to stephanie and or dr windham um all of that information will be put into the minutes thank you very much other comments yes sir basketball did you say nick nick basketball okay thank you my attention here is for the following upcoming school session my intention is to bring awareness to the unethical and dehumanizing potential of segregating students that have not participated in an intervention involving an experimental drug that is not approved by the fda also to uphold my duty as an american citizen stand up against policy to challenge our freedom of choice medical freedom and the ability to make private family decisions without having to explain oneself to state or government organizations as a public school this is not your right to police medical freedoms according to the vaccine adverse reporting system as of june 7 there has been five thousand children eight deaths reported potentially from the copenhagen vaccine one might say this is far less deaths than hospitalizations that has been contributed by the wild virus but keep this in mind this is supposed to be the medicine not the problem i will refer to 17 year old utah native and school basketball player everest romney and his family that was impacted by the copa 19 vaccine and shortly after getting the vaccine he experienced experience swelling in his neck and experienced headaches which was dismissed by the pediatrician that was diagnosed with pulled muscle but shortly thereafter ended up in the icu with blood clots the whole point of this record is in someone's authentic choice to get vaccinated um if they're good with that then that will be good cosmos if you're being forced or threatened to be inoculated and you become verbally damaged by this unimproved drug this is this is immoral many levels so segregating the definition of segregating the action or state of setting someone or something apart from others this was pertaining to the indiana board of health recommending segregating unvaccinated kids with additional policies such as mass wearing excessive social distancing and mandatory quarantine in 1954 the landmark supreme court ruling groundwork board of education was an initial win in order to begin to put into racial segregation in public schools this was a huge move towards ending graceful segregation public schools although this was just the beginning and after this decision it took two to three more decades and several other portlands to really solidify the actual integration of all races into the same public schools the reason i bring awareness to this president in this present moment is if you decide to set these policies and take away the freedom of our amount families and ultimately the children in our schools where does it stop it took 30 years or more after groundwork board of education in the racial segregation if you begin this ideology where will our freedom be in 30 years from the next step for the next generation i'm asking that you take a leadership role and say no not on my watch i will not perform the political propaganda that can shift the psychology of our children and will protect the freedom of choice for our avon families and i pray for you and i hope you make an ethical decision [Music] other comments if not oh i'm sorry yeah right oh i'm sorry i will let you go first pardon me i was not planning on saying anything today so i jumbled it all over the place i apologize uh i know everybody here is under immense pressure hi kim this is greg i can't hear the speaker can you move her forward oh sure yes [Music] okay um i have two sons in avon schools thank you um and both are under age 12.
we also have the knowledge now that the risk of having serious illness are complications from covid and all school-aged children is extremely low what we do not have any knowledge of or data collected about is the long-term or even short-term risk of the cova 19 vaccine in children as parents we should not be forced coerced or pressured to give our children an untested or briefly tested experimental vaccine mask requirements based on vaccination status will create a bullying environment for the children in our schools having an optional face mask policy will allow for all to do what they feel most comfortable doing for their child our society is opening back up and mass are being born less and less and all other areas of our children's lives to enforce stricter mass policies in their schools than any other public place is not only unreasonable it is also unscientific it is time to acknowledge the facts and to change course from all the fear we had over the last year before we had the knowledge of how dangerous this disease could be for our children i ask you when you consider the plans for the next year that you make parent choice for their child the guideline to follow thank you thank you devon hunter i'll just be real quick first of all i want to thank the board for all the work that you guys do but uh every comment that i was going to make has been made tonight with the exception of thanking all the people for being here tonight your comments were you know extraordinary so thank you very much thank you william reed so yeah my name is william reed elizabethtown indiana i'd actually planned on two topics this evening but i don't think i need to on the first one so largely agree with everything that i've heard i'm over the fear fear is not not one of my values it's not american value we don't need that um so we'll get into subject too which hopefully won't take too long here raising kids well and educating them is a responsibility that comes with the job of parenthood to facilitate that education parents and parent communities work together to provide education options locally we have very successful home schools private schools and public schools personally my kids attend rock creek ian go bulldogs and i've been very happy with the collaboration that we have with the teachers in the administration there in my family we teach our children that they're accountable for their actions and their outcomes to be respectful of others especially their teachers and we expect them to create more in life than they consume late in the school year my kids came home with a sheet about social and emotional learning it contained a very general overview and asked them to wear green on a particular day in support of sel i had not heard of sel and was put back that my kids would be asked to support something that i wasn't aware of or knew if my wife and i would support as we educated ourselves it didn't take long to realize that sel delves into areas that are the sole property of families to decide morals and beliefs are not things to be impressed on youngsters by a government agency or non-government organization sel organizations clearly state their goals in rewriting norms right and wrong so-called equity and revising our moral beliefs further reading on scl led me to its tie into critical race theory crt is a politically motivated idea and one of the ugliest and most divisive concepts i've learned of it serves to propagate racism classism and division america is not a place for any of that and it should have no place in our public schools in conclusion my wife and i are opposed to sel and crt i'm very interested to hear from the board on how you plan to keep our taxpayer-funded classrooms clear of this political re-education thank you for your time thank you mr hunter or mr reed sorry sorry sorry um christian schofner good evening i'm kirsten schaffner that was a nice breath of fresh air not talking about masks pun intended but um sorry good to go back to that um one year ago my heart sank along with many others as we got the news that our children would have to be masked for the 2021 school year i was forced to make an uncomfortable decision just like everybody else i either can keep my kids home mask free or i send them in a mask hoping it won't last a full school year well it did i was often confused and frustrated when my kids would tell me that they were to keep masks on the entire day besides at recess this confused me since recess is where more classrooms are all together in one area breathing heavily on each other while playing games don't get me wrong i was happy that they were unmasked outside but didn't it just undo everything they just did inside while being masked at their seats i was also very upset as i saw my two kids get off the bus with sweat spots on their clothes bright red cheeks and were both fatigued from the heat and lack of oxygen being on a bus with no air conditioning for an hour is bad enough but then with a mask on it is unacceptable there have been private schools across the country who did not mandate masks and gave the option to the parents these schools have similar statistics as the schools who mandated masks this is great news in my opinion as of now people have had the chance to get the vaccine if they choose to therefore teachers and staff members are not being forced in a dangerous situation by working at a bcsc facility this means we should be able to feel comfortable about leaving the masks as a choice for parents if parents are not comfortable sending their kids to school with children not masked then they also have the choice to online school please allow the parents who love their children more than anyone else to choose what's best for them thank you thank you sharon brubaker do you mind sharing your address you did not put it on here thank you 12 30 south 850 west thank you okay hello my name is sharon brubaker and um i'm actually here on behalf of my daughter she wanted to be here tonight to make a speech but couldn't make it she and her husband both would have liked to have been here um i also though i have five grandchildren that attend bcsc school so i'm kind of speaking on their behalf as well um she sent me a message that she had a little speech prepared so i'm just gonna simply read what she had to say she said hello i have two children who attend schools in bcsc and i'm also an employee of bcsc based on what i have seen and heard from my fellow employees and parents i am fairly certain that the majority of bcsc students will spend their summers unmask playing playing with friends participating in sports going to family gatherings the majority of bcsc students will not get sick this summer but if they do their parents will make a decision on how to handle the sickness parents don't turn to the school board when deciding if they need to take their children to the doctor parents don't turn to the school board when deciding if a trip to the er is necessary and parents don't turn to the school board to make any medical decisions for their children this is no different the school board should not be dictating our children's health needs if you have provided accommodate accommodations and options for those students and families who are not comfortable sending their children back to an in-person learning a decision that these individuals made or will be making because they feel that is what is right for them it is time you provide the rest of us with options as well the options to unmask our children and allow us as parents to decide what is in the best interest and health of our children thanks thank you eric streetville hello thank you for allowing me to speak um all the comments and everything that i had prepared myself to speak about tonight i found about out about this meeting a short notice so i thought i had been well prepared but it has been far better articulated by these ladies and gentlemen as i'm one of the last speakers i'm i'm fortunate and able to benefit from that one thing i guess i would like to comment on is uh what i noticed in the opening remarks i believe it was dr shedd that made them as we've gone through all this with covet in the masks one thing we do tend to forget is your remarks were based upon collectivism the group how we've all come together i feel like the individual liberties and rights of the parents and or the children that we're speaking of have been lost in that i i'm not a scientist my degree is in history and i've as you go through history you see the very same tactics of separating people okay we're gonna we're gonna as one person put shame one group into doing what we want by marking them making them wear a mask or a star of david or a yellow armband whatever it takes i think what i'm trying to say here is that chairman mao would be very proud of how things are being done oh and also with the curriculum that this gentleman was speaking of i've had my head in the sand like a lot of parents have for a long time our eyes are starting to open on this stuff this is my first school board meeting i've got four kids in the system two of them are through it i've got two left but it will not be my last thank you amy streeville yes we're married and we didn't we didn't talk a lot beforehand so we have different remarks um i'm very much in support of dropping a mask mandate these are now for show they've been for show for the last two years they don't a car a year and a half they don't accomplish anything and we those who have looked at the cdc and dr fauci and those remarks realize that their stance on mask has flip-flopped thousands a hundred times and there has been no consistency and in the end they're not effective i we have four children we have one that's still at south side we love south side the teachers are fabulous and we're so excited to have andrew return for another year this past year andrew lost 20 in-person school days 20 to close contact reporting okay the second time he was quarantined he had apparently been in contact with a student on or a teacher one or the other on tuesday he attended school the remainder of the week he went to piano lessons he went to a class party at urban air in franklin on saturday with all those same people he went back to school on monday we got him all up and ready and then on monday morning he was sent home does anybody follow that logic now i understand that there's testing and testing takes time but we need to rethink this process we really need to rethink this process these kids are in contact with one another first of all they're not as somebody said what are we protecting them from if he was exposed to someone with kovid i i'd be more concerned if he was exposed to someone with the flu because kofit presents very little risk to him at all for all i know because his symptoms could have been very mild he may have already had it so we don't really know i just that is one of my concerns going forward is that we revisit this quarantine process um i am just going to quickly review um make sure that there's nothing that i wanted to say that hasn't already i did want to point out as well the other thing that um when we talk about the vaccine versus not vaccinated if we were to separate people on that basis we do know that vaccinated people are still getting coveted right do we every time you look at the news you open it up and says five people that were vaccinated are now positive the um the vaccine wasn't intended to eliminate people from being able to get infected it was to reduce the severity of symptoms so breaking people up according to this criteria really makes no sense at all so um just if you would keep those things in mind and the very last comment i want to make i already touched on once is the school board in general using the cdc and the indiana department of health i know we've turned to these organizations as the knowledge base for how we make decisions but i think a lot of americans and a lot of people in this community realize that they have they've been a disappointment to many throughout this pandemic have not provided clear guidance and it seems that at times they've had ulterior motives [Laughter] and eric and i are the same address did we give that to you no you didn't 39 39.97 jonathan ridge okay thank you very much columbus 47201 thank you school board and dr robertson thank you i appreciate it that does end the list of individuals who've signed up for comments i can i think i'll speak for my colleagues i appreciate the time that you took to be here the time and research that you did and the comments that you've shared as we have alluded to already we've got a lot of thinking to do from now until july and all of your input has been very very important and helpful to us so thank you very much for taking the time we will move on to the rest of our agenda thank you the next item is board commendations i think yes it is so i know mr grimes has some so we'll let him start all right okay so i have a uh i have a handful of accommodations here and i'll try to go uh fairly quickly but uh first off uh congratulations to columbus north uh student hannah franklin for earning a scholarship from the indiana commission of higher education seventy five hundred dollars a year up to a total benefit of thirty thousand she is part of the fifth class of next generation hoosier educators uh secondly um c4 continues to do just seems like all kinds of great things and was just recently presented award by the indiana governor's workforce cabinet for their excellence in business community partnerships and about 900 bcsc students um each year have a chance to tour local businesses to learn more about various careers in conjunction with a course that they take called preparing for college and careers next one has to do with students um just kind of out of my own curiosity on may 19th i had the opportunity to go to columbus east and witness some senior project presentations and i'll i'll just mention real quickly the three students from east whose presentations that i that i saw that were um very impressive and um i i think it's probably safe to say my kind of preconceived notions of senior projects and what all they entailed changed significantly as a result of my visit but the first one i heard tj barkheimer who is working on his private pilot's license i think tj took his first lessons in greenwood at the 1st of october and made his first solo flight from greenwood to terre haute by the middle of february and tj plans to go to indiana state and wants to be a cargo pilot at some point another one i heard ethan glade ethan who plans to go to the iu kelly school of business and study accounting was the online editor of east's student newspaper the oracle and came up with all kinds of creative ways during this last year to help continue raising funds to to support that publication and then lastly um shaylee derringer who plans to go to school to become a psychologist and she organized a cleaning fundraising for for the crump which yeah all very all very impressive and enlightening the last two i want to share have to do with teachers um csa lincoln teacher uh mrs brittany mahoney who well it's not brand new anymore but through the heritage fund was a 2021 recipient of the bill and sally henley excellence in teaching award mrs mahoney only a fourth year teacher i mean she i get the impression she does anything and everything under the sun to peak kids interests in education from you know setting up a jurassic park type atmosphere to coming dressed as a storm trooper to teach new oh math concepts all kinds of things and mrs mahoney commented that going above and beyond is simply the csa lincoln way yeah and then lastly um mrs peggy myers a special ed teacher at columbus east who just received the 2021 edna folger outstanding teacher award that goes to any bartholomew county teacher k through 12 elementary secondary public private parochial and mrs meyers not only teaches her students run the coffee card at columbus east she founded the best buddies program at east as a unified track coach at east and then she was actually nominated by a former east student who was inspired by seeing her in action who is currently at ball state and plans to major in special ed as as you know what she witnessed um from her days at ease seeing mrs meyers in action that concludes mine awesome awesome thank you very much are there other commendations to be shared i have one thank you dr bills so congratulations to columbus north high school band it's a recipient of the indiana state school music association all music award for the 2021 school year the indiana state school music association may have already presented the band with a special banner to display in recognition of these outstanding achievements so congratulations to the band the musicians the music staff and everyone who is part of this great award thank you dr bill so there are others all right i'll move on to school board member reports yeah i've got two quick ones all right um on may 25th um i met with the high ability broad-based planning committee focused on a few things one the blinded identification of students for the program that began in school year 1920 um is alive and well and is is a process that the committee continues or plans to continue they talked about updating their website to include testimonials about about the program looking you know continuing to look for ways to create more uniform information going out to schools to create more consistency in an effort to be as transparent as possible and then lastly there was continued discussion on how to best meet the needs of high ability learners that remain in general education classrooms and then lastly on june 1st the school foundation had a strategic planning session where we looked at tonight or at the 2021 budget proposal and first quarter financial activity and started discussion um in terms of setting some strategic objectives to focus on over the next few years with a particular emphasis on ways to increase community awareness of the school foundation in an attempt to broaden and grow its revenue base for continued sustainability awesome thank you am i reading my reading eyes well enough nikki did you have a comment i'll just say from the redevelopment commission um you know there's so much work looking at revitalizing downtown which is really exciting i will say the garage has reopened under new leadership so you know at times like this we are dependent on each other and those businesses need your your patronage so so try to try to support them also say some may have read sarah cannon has passed away she led the redevelopment commission a great loss for our community she served in in many many ways i think there's a celebration of life this week to recognize her so please keep keep everyone in thoughts and prayers that's it thank you for that are there others we did have a diversity council meeting in may and it was also strategic planning meeting much like here's mr grimes and um trying to determine really kind of go back and determine the purpose the vision of the diversity council do we want to be an advisory board do we want to be an action board what do we want to do and of course we did go over the groups that are part of the diversity council such as the underrepresented teacher and family academic achievement and the different groups so our um we're going to continue to look at that look at our plan and hopefully figure out a direction that we want the diversity council to go into whether that's advisory whether that's action or something else or a little of both but um the diversity council has been around for a really long time which i wasn't really aware of around like 20 years or something so but we you know it's always good to re-look at purpose and mission and values and those kind of things every once in a while to figure out are we still on the right path do we need to switch do we take a different path what do we need to do so that was what our diversity council consisted of in may dr shed all right thank you so much i will just share with you um my colleagues i participated in the exit report meeting that we had this afternoon from our the audit of our state board of accounts the meeting went well you as board members will get a little more information and then that final report will be public at the end of july on the board of accounts website so we can share more information as it becomes more public all right cabinet reports and mr phillips you're first on the list thank you dr shedd good evening this is the semi-annual extracurricular account report this is just a school by school accounting of the beginning balance for this last semester the receipts expenditures and ending balance big picture as you would expect we continue to both receipt and spend less money in this last semester due to covid restrictions um about 50 reduction over the prior year of 50 less receipts and 50 percent less expenditures but basically the same balance then since both expenditures and receipts were offset by about 50 happy to answer any questions you might have all right do individuals have questions okay you're good to go there's a proposal or comment report on support staff pay good evening this um mr phillips and i will be presenting a plan for some addressing the support pay adjustments because that will go into effect july 1st and when we're looking at the support staff we're looking at any support staff members that fall on our matrix system of the different grades of employees and who will this impact it'll impact over 900 support staff employees and i do want to be clear that this does not include administrators teachers or special contract employees we will begin our formal contract uh collective bargaining with our teachers in september they'll conclude by november and at that time we'll see that outcome and then come back to you with decisions made for administrators and special contract employees following those decisions so at this time we'll turn it over and tell you why we want to address the support staff matrix thank you so the last time you you may remember is 2016.
the first line down it says ask for self-evaluation i do not agree that allowing the public public to speak facilitating landed discussions that's okay though did i say it was the tone of your self-evaluation [Music] i'd be happy to replace the word negative that to me they're all negative and further down you say do not believe your reports are invaded at a meeting simply to discuss the major points whatever additional details needed so i get the point it's good advice except for the final school community meeting why i clearly did that too so i didn't miss anything what else have i done you didn't watch the school community you the final statement whenever do i do you think or have you seen me just leave my entirety for those times most times yes never okay now i read two final statements i've made two final statements and i read my evaluations that's the only time i've read things so the goal is another committee number one tell me when i read there in my experience i've noticed in the five entire meetings that i've been part of there has been a lot of just reading of report i think i also put in here that you know one of the issues was the length of meeting of course and that's because of the verbatim reading and then discussion after that we don't get the reports until friday or sometimes even later for a two-day meeting and if there were more time for the committee to read full fully through the report fully digested they would know what it says were made of by the time the meeting comes and then a discussion could be had so this goal is about improving presentation skills our presentation skills is not simply reading the screen or reading what's been presented in a report or a paper or newsletter is to make sure that everybody in the audience has that information before the meeting and then it can be discussed questions can be asked maybe highlight's going to be noted to start with so that was the nature of this note here i understand it but it's not accurate i understand i thought that i don't agree it's just what you're saying is [Music] no less than a count three i read two final statements and then i read that other than that three out of five this is 60 yeah well okay i don't actually see that he says you uh you read your reports verbatim all the time [Music] foreign it doesn't have to be a common practice to give suggestions for presentation right so it's okay it's okay so let's let's take a pause for a minute because what i will also say is i would like to ask them to respect everybody's opinions and professionalism here let's as professional as we possibly can it's i one thing i like about this process jeff is that it is public he does a lot of choice i'm making a statement i'm not i'm not criticizing anything i'm saying uh what i'm all i'm asking for is to let's just make sure we keep it as professional as we possibly can the committee's job is to as a team decide and talk about some of these things when we get to deliberation so susan helping and responding is just part of her role as a community member so let's just make sure that the committee to direct the question for the hands of referencing that's what he said and that's what he did he did not make any comments i don't know okay jeff he also did not ask susan okay so you are now putting words in his mouth because he's i'm not saying he did that what i'm asking oh listen you're allowed to defend yourself and ask your questions that's what makes this process possible so it makes it the way it is i'm just asking to make sure we keep this as professional possible that's all he's answering he doesn't need help okay it's not it's not whether i don't disagree with that you would like to i'm just i'm asking for the professionals to just maintain [Music] foreign i respect your opinion i just don't agree with it it says do not read your reports verbatim at the meeting it does not say you read every single report verbatim without change every time i've ever been here for the five times i haven't been here ever don't say that it says as a suggestion for this goal of improving presentation skills it says don't read verbatim from the slides from the report have a report there for the information and just speak to that it was based on your self-evaluation that meetings do go too long in part because of lengthy reading of reports and discussions my question is why if something's done once why is it relative to relevant enough to put a suffering about english that's my question for something if there's a part of a goal and it's done all the time or most of the time or a great majority of the time then it has enough relevance to be put into some evaluation if it's done once or twice why is it relevant why would it be relevant to be put in a summary we just had a discussion that maybe you've done it five times ever i've been here my evaluation is based on five meetings you just discussed uh maybe three times out of those five okay three times out of that probably the majority of communities i've been present for that i've had to base my evaluation on i'm not basing my evaluation on last year or from september to december it's based on what i experienced from january through may okay mike are you saying that no no i'm sorry if you want to respond to something jeff said or ask questions any other final comments or questions the jeff christie can you just confirm um when we move into liberation or discussion if a committee member has a question for jeff are we allowed to ask jeff questions at that time yes um okay so uh with that um what we'll do now is um as soon as you've documented uh some of the couple wording changes do we [Music] correct the vote yes so uh but we will we're going to vote correct with the motion to vote as presented right now then we'll get into our deliberations and then the final vote will make amendments for the changes has been part of that vote and then the final will be vote will be to vote to approve um once the amendments are made the i's names will be based on the amendments that made inside the vote thank you so could i please have a motion uh don't you accept the final report um as is that thank you for a second jeff made a couple of um conference questions that he has those changes we will uh i will ask um for emotion at some point um we'll need to make a motion at some point but you know the way it stands safe so i'll just sort of get the ball rolling uh the way it stands right now we will make a motion to approve jeff as a proficient right so okay so we can um that so any other all right so any other um amendments updates to the report that anybody would like to make alongside jeff's jeff's changes okay here we go so could i please have a motion uh uh for amendment to accept um request changes yeah i'd just like to hear them okay person would you be it's impossible for you to give those back to us do you have those are they in a form did you write i didn't have the page number but it was the injection yeah parent advisory was changing negative i think that's a legitimate inefficient and ineffective but uh [Music] 12.
it's a one-party course and it's an elective this is not a mandatory course for any of our students but what an elective this year we have this is the first time we have offered it and we had 84 students request to take the class for some of those it was the main collection and for others it was an alternate selection but they did not need to choose something in social studies or for this course this was definitely an elective option for them um i think this also helps to sort of shape some of the conversations when we think about the makeup of the cheshire public schools so i thought i would just share with you some of our recent sort of involvement so we have currently 11 students in worlds who are american indians 409 who identify as asians 100 141 black students 3 286 white 214 hispanic and one hawaiian pacific islander so when i think about this course and and where it came from the policy and i don't want to i don't want to bore you with too much about like you know the background but but sort of for anybody who might be watching about how this didn't certainly didn't originate with with this this group in front of you the policy originated from the connecticut legislative black and puerto rican caucus it started as a k-12 initiative and was passed as an elective for students in grades 9-12 circ was written into the law alongside the canadian state department of ed to collaborate to develop the curriculum the spirit of the law was to provide an integrated course that provided instruction on both african-american black and puerto rican latino studies so the idea is that it covers content knowledge and identity development so it was interesting to me to learn that there are over 150 members of this advisory group that helped to create this um and i'll give you just an example of some of the representation where they came from yukon central southern west conde con the connecticut community colleges the coast guard rural suburban and urban school districts and then the rest like crack and learn and ces they had nine different committees that were formed but i think the one that was most relevant to us is the focus groups and those were held from march 1st to may 8th and i know faith that you were able to attend probably the last in-person one that they had before everything came crashing down i think if i read this correctly the sort of the theory of action behind this is that if districts teach this african-american puerto rican latino studies as part of their social studies curriculum then all students will have the opportunity to learn about the history and impact of african american black and puerto rican latino contributions to our country to our state and students of color will learn about the history of their ancestors and more fully develop their identity if i think about it a little more i can say that if districts teach this course then all students will have the opportunity to learn about history from a perspective other than a euro-centric view and students will receive the message so if we think about again our some of our demographics they they will be seen and heard and recognized in what they're learning about in school so we've always thought that this course comes under the umbrella of our social emotional learning umbrella right comes into the umbrella of our district initiative and that's when i had shared that presentation with you about how this really ties under cultural awareness and responsible decision making and all of those areas of the castle standards so the um the course was a new course and that's something to turn over to dr reed and dr gad just to share how a new course goes goes through how it's communicated how particularly um this course was communicated to to students and and how it did they deviated all from the regular process that kind of thing no i didn't need you from the regular process you want to go ahead and talk through it we brought it here and share the puzzle and then yes we did share it with um we knew the instructors that we would like to teach it one is miss banaya who's really an expert on latino really what i'm trying to say and then aaron really is an expert in the multiplex so obviously they have growth to make with learning than enforcement but we spoke to them about teaching it because we knew that that passion helped them they were excited to team teach it also so um you know i think word really went out through our instructional leadership team and you know reaching out to kids when it was course request time we're offering this course we're excited about it the history teachers the english teachers were all on board with continued to advertise it to the kids through the student request process of scheduling so that was a big part of the public science because it was also put in a program of studies say this is going to be in addition to the program studies that was developed in let's say december i think that's right and so we utilized pretty much verbatim the course description was part of the state materials that they sent to us so that's the course description that goes out to everyone in our school community and it's published online as well and then that's that's the guidebook that our students use to determine what they want to sign up for the followings so i can certainly share with you the course description the course is an opportunity for students to explore accomplishments struggles intersections perspectives and collaborations of african american black and puerto rican latino people in the united states students will examine how historical movement legislation and wars affected the citizenship rights of these groups and how they both separately and together worked to build us cultural and economic wealth and create and create more just society and local national and international contexts horse wolf will provide students with tools to identify historic and contemporary tensions around race and difference map map economic and racial disparities over time strengthen their own identity development and address bias in their communities learning objectives and essential questions that will guide instruction and student inquiry include and then we have again something that i had shared in in the in the link so there's this was provided as the draft from the state department of education and the state education resource center the implementation sort of hurdles that i see with this is professional learning right because this is a new course and we're not something that necessarily any um social studies teacher or english teacher is going to be familiar with i have learned much this year on about history that i never learned growing up as a as an adolescent so there's a need for the teacher of this course to engage in professional learning to support successful implementation i think we were glad that we had that relationship with cerf because they were putting together that professional learning plan the other piece was to continue this conversation to make sure that the board knows and is aware of the steps going through we need to make sure that um that families were aware of the course when course selection came out when they you know helped their students select this course we need resources to teach this course and we needed to make sure we had budgeted for that because we didn't really know what the budgetary constraints were to be we also needed to give consideration um to what would we do if we had depending on how many students enrolled in the course what did we do if we had six students enroll the course would we still run it we don't typically run courses with less than um you know 12-15 students so we did not have to address that because of the number of students that we did have um we needed to look at how we ran the course you know staffing etc and we needed to give consideration to making sure that um that our teachers were prepared so what we have recently received cut off the presses is the launch of this training with the community so there will be a leadership launch on july 14th where all of us at this table will be attending a session in the morning there is a summer institute of which john and aaron griffiths and our history department chair will be a part of so we are going to be sending them to that in august then there will be training and this is um partially why we have offered this course this year is because we were promised that as the pilot your teachers would receive this training so we thought it would behoove us to make sure that we did this in this year so that our teachers were a part of that and would receive that specialized support so in quarter one they will receive training in october again in december again in february again in march so we feel that they have a good support network in place they'll be working with other teachers in other districts as well as with circle facilitators i believe that central connecticut state university is also offering a one-week training in july and there's a professor from yale who is also offering some supplemental support so i feel that i feel that our teachers are in good shape to be able to to handle this and was very happy to see that dawn was thinking about the cultural implications and how she could support that we sort of are looking at the positive outcomes on this for our kids as the fact that the rigorous content included in this course will support our district's strategic initiatives to you know lead them to be complex thinkers we think it provides students an opportunity to learn about different racial and cultural backgrounds and provide the opportunity to for our students to learn the history of people of color that they might not otherwise have gotten in our regular courses so i would say i'm happy to answer any questions that i might be able to to the gentleman who wrote in earlier today i'm happy to send some of the contact at circ i really don't know some of the answers to the questions he was asking about them as an really pointing organization the direction to some of these other things to help answer some of his questions i'll wear this going back to i think it was 2017-18 that the caucus the state are discussing 2019 i think it was asked then to be elected and ultimately be mandatory after a couple of years right so there's no mandatory department down below there's [Music] the challenge we all have and our scholarship has is the amount of you might have mentioned the other day is everyone this is mainstream media and all of the opinions and uh all over the place and critical race theory diversity inclusion everybody's racist everything's racist it's not a razor as a parent you have to wonder what's going on right but we look at what's going on in cheshire and look at the means of our our students our culture our diversity um i don't get the sense that this is a curriculum that's going to divide and separate our kids it is about cultural awareness now when you sprinkle to serve mission i understand if you need those words right it has the kind of connotation i guess the point is you and the rest can have been very proven to not just jump on any game language without sort of thinking through a sign i know that was implemented being implemented for what works for cheshire and so but for parents that are not close to this they're not watching this meeting tonight they've been watching any discussions over the last few years um i the place that i had last week was an artillery herald and one of the educators uh the son of peace of course was quoted saying uh it was going to create an empire racist classroom so i already had people say so what does that mean our classrooms are racist and so you know it's that's the mindset out there because you hear all this noise um so i i would very much like to see whether it's uh some recorded sessions or other things going into the fall uh some kind of education right here for parents to tap into you so they want to catch up on what this is and how cheshire is actually remembering it it's there for their purview i can't help but wonder and use the s word summit then when that was rolled out a few years ago we underestimated that she came to appearance on this right shiny new thing or really where it was going on a whole facebook thing once we had some sessions with them it got a little clearer but it was too late the reception was done there was noise out there i don't think there's going to be the case here but i'd rather remind ourselves it's not just our kids that we're trying to um make them aware of all the cultures and their influences it's also parents because you know they need education too listen directly so i was just uh i hope that we find a way to include that uh i know you can't teach him on this other day but he's got to be a little bit questioned but that's a there's a new perception of what actually happens and you know all the how you play sensitive topics out there the skills is going to get the wrong attention for all reasons until folks actually see in action and to that end um we do i i i am concerned that this is going to um get larger than life um you know and i understand uh mr shane's concerns i really do you know he's got a small child and he's wondering when you hear that it was originally supposed to be a k-12 um and when i went to the focus group it is not off the table they are still going to push the k-12 um curriculum and they do want to make it mandatory at least from the sort of perspective so those are not linked to rest yet and i i think you know this is you know sixth point b of the of the standards and someone a friend of mine found it buried in the department of education before it i find it i don't understand why this wasn't the concerns of parents are that was this done in secret wasn't i don't know i mean it is a public document but it was a very well very public document why you know this should have been out there this is not like talking a new math curriculum this is not like talking a new history curriculum this does go to the character of people what have we been doing all of these years um you know and and you go through these it is the other thing that um the law requires is that it the standards can cert's gonna dictate what this course is they've said that as well so there is no we have to follow this and some of the questions it raises are concerning as i read through it what are some of it okay there you go what is it i guess the question is what are the concerns nothing at all i absolutely think we should be doing um well first of all it just presupposes that we've never taught slavery or we've never it is very much a slave based curriculum now i haven't seen dawns but these standards are very much focused on slavery and the black community is so much more than slavery um there is like also um you know there are there there are folks out there and there is a conservative black movement that says we are beyond we are not just the product of this horrible scourge that is on this country we have done so much more um and as i read through this i don't see that celebration um and where were some of these other groups consultant and i can you know i've got if anyone wants them i can get literature that that would present this um but what are some of the concerns when you talk about um a uwem the course is an opportunity for students to explore accomplishment struggles intersections perspectives and collaborations of lack we'll examine how historical movements legislation wars affected citizens rights of these groups and how they vote separately together work to build u.s culture on the commonwealth for more just societies um you know we are an imperfect union always working for justice but i just don't quite understand you go through and it's more just society more just society more just and the kids are going to um as far as i can tell the you know agency engagement in what ways of african black latinos in puerto rico people demonstrated agency in developing organizations how can young people take informed action to address pressing issues on their own communities what is that going to look like you know is it going to be you know um for example why not just i can give you a number of organizations that simply need tutors to work with inner city kids um or is it going to be marching in cheshire i i guess both are equally valid but i think for the kids in developing and raising up the educational inequality that is taking place we all know in the cities get our kids in there helping these kids um you know i just i see a mindset that sir took to this curriculum that presupposes we're all in unconsciously biased um if we're white and so therefore we're going to have to somehow eradicate that whereas human history is is right with tragedy but glory and i just would love to see someone who develops a complete and round examination of humanity i'm sorry i guess i'm one of those who says that um i hope for the day or we don't see color where we truly do i mean they say that you know it's racist construct it is not scientific fact in this case i believe the science you know we are all people and i just don't know how focusing and it's i been not in any way trying to demean slavery or anything else but to focus solely on that is to in some ways almost deny the humanity of the black community because they are so much more and they have accomplished so much more um well i actually had a concern i more than i think we said written or let's talk about contributions society economics so forth so how well-rounded it is um i just don't have the same reaction however i uh i don't believe in order should get worse that's kind of the right people based on and we're not a scholarship does that so i know i'm not signed up for that i agree with your faith i look for today when we look beyond our appearances i think the more we focus on college and more advice we get but i'm also trying to understand what the actual issues are of the course for cheshire what are the issues in the course how's it not going to affect us but but going back a little bit certainly we must identify some areas that this course can help with so if this course is implemented and you're out measuring how do we measure success with tonight's tonight's point what problems or issues opportunities our school is i would love to answer that question okay so there's plenty out there because we'll be asked by the parents i think we'll see at the end of this and i think the state will be looking at it as well i don't think we'll be helping people with that but for our purposes i would like to hear from our students at the end of this to see what their takeaways were i think it's great so you know who cares what their what their expectations this will certainly be continued as we you know press forward without the training that students are saying at the end i think we're all interested to hear what the next well probably around this time next year well i mean i think i i would at some point perhaps like to have a broader either board meeting or curriculum meeting where we are able to have dawn get up and present more particulars about the cheshire course you know what is the what does it look like what um you know what what does she want to accomplish with this and how is she getting there um and have the parents have an opportunity to ask the questions right or wrong you know are they is it being fed by the media or is are they feeling this viscerally that they are somehow under attack you know let's but i don't want this to blow up in any way i want a community discussion of this because it does go to the heart of one's character you know yeah am i a racist inside you know that's what a lot of people are asking and whether this is that course or not you know whether it has anything to do with this course that's still out there and i think you need to head on and talk with the community and not just say well you know we'll find out after the fact i think at some point early in the year we should have that dialogue and at least open the forum up for anyone we may only get two parents so what action you're asking for you ask in the start of the school year once the course even before it was of course outlining content or no is do a somewhat uh don't say a deep dive but enough of a guy to understand the content and see just some of the concerns you have of the students who have selected the course you know if that is the audience to have a conversation with it's you know these these kids who have said that this is interesting to them as we would do with any course we would share that information that might be a good place to start to make sure that the parents of the students who are taking the course are educated on what that content will be and then as as that progresses that can be shared out for any other parents who are interested or or wanting to know about other course offerings that nice way to of course see election night and parents can talk directly to department leaders about typically what freshmen are going to take so they learn what the whole whole progression is but we also do requirements for each grade level in the beginning of the year we don't always talk about electives and this is an elective so i think i i might my thoughts as i was listening to all speak was you know i think i i think speaking with the students and the students who looks like the coursework to explain what's going to be taught and what the kids are going to be learning because they're going to be part of a pilot program and so that's the important thing for the parents to be aware of a new course that was developing that as we do with pretty much every course which is part of our philosophy yes we're teaching you certain content but also what students learned in class is also important so what is it that you're interested in reviewing what are the ways in which you're imagining the material all of that is important so students will be influencing this pile of course as much as of course is sharing a set of standards which needs to be the point thing is about the course it's going to evolve within applied courses would there be an opportunity for students even parents or students that we're on course and get feedback sure okay so um there's an event at the end of the course where there's um showcase of what each district's experience and teachers experiences work with of course and that's going to be referred back to statements another thing i'm thinking too not necessarily moving into this course but what we received today is from our students feedback from our students on not this course but in general that that will be something that we need to share with the board as we look at policy and really have a more conversation about what the kids are saying i think that the high school does a really good job and they talk about creating the conditions for students to be you know in a safe space and i think there are always as always i think they're going to be pockets of kids that don't feel that way and i think they were very forthcoming in sharing with um the counselor and the team that was dispatched to get student voice so that may be something else that we should really listen to as we move forward and we need to continue to get student voice as as we even look at them absolutely and you know ask about who or what you know what what are the items you know i know the school itself classrooms or other that uh are the students that i view an unsafe space now you know what is that you know the world has no insight what that means we got the components i do not want to um you've mentioned the parents and they're the back to school nights but i want to keep our ears open to what's going on because it's a very broad time right now and the best thing we can do is is communicate um and if they feel even if they're not in the high school level yet if they feel they're somehow being cut out um i think we're gonna have a bit of a from conversations and from just knowing um you know again what is what's going to go on with this with this program and let's at least um get something more than a herald article on the topic so are you referring to the program that's in the state documents vision that cert mentioned are you talking about and you're going to talk with the parents but at the same time that big you know that big balloon is out there with cert saying we want a k-12 curriculum um i maybe they dropped it but i have certainly seen that they say obviously a lot of things but it's got to work for the legislature so you know i don't know how much we can i don't know how much legislature but it's hard for us to educate parents on what the lecturer is going to do when they but we can't over communicate the course as of life it's not the fault of people in this room or our school system per se it's just the noise around us uh especially we have so much staters that you know miles away that are not tuned in to cheshire so parents eventually have their radar um so i have been forced to commit to helping them here locally but you know what we believe what we are working on for our students with our students i think we have to focus our microcosm here yeah there's a great opportunity done right and you know again there's there probably will be other stuff coming out of the fight on these topics but you know parents uh feel this is not the appropriate force or it needs to change you know all the power is going because those are the voices sorry i had asked kevin earlier [Music] and they were the group who was looking for the k-12 experience at least that's not for my research that's what i recall but i asked kevin this if you just quickly look and find out how did it pass in the legislature and i i can't read all his notes legislature passed to 122-24 in the senate so it had i would qualify that fairly broad support from by the time you got finalized so i think we have a couple of things that we're looking at um working with dawn and erin on communicating out early and often about that of course to that group we want to make sure that we continue to provide updates here as we go through and we want to make sure that we're hearing the student voice certainly by june but you know along the way have some updates and be really thoughtful in how we communicate out this elective just as every other course it also it's been possible making resources available to it yeah we could probably do something on the website that lists knowing no longer they have been excited about all of the ways in which this can be which an experience is possible and i would imagine there's going to be on their classroom a rather extensive offering of resources and they'll should have other students like a national web page well and it's a great opportunity too for community education and um you know there um it certainly has um expanded my reading list you know um but you know it's um for both sides of the political aisle it's it's picking up books that initially might make you uncomfortable um you know i mean to um you you gotta you gotta dive in you've gotta see what this debate is about but um you know that's perhaps as you say a web page where or at the library page or something but again a broad spectrum of ideas i mean there are some interesting things being quoted and that they the perspective is very rich okay so um our next meeting is wow september 13th so i guess that concludes once after september we're second minute
so the budget itself is based it's not based on how much money we have in the account it's based on what we're going to be spending so we are going to use carryover money that we did not spend thank you okay how's this there's this page which one which what are you looking at sir on on page one i i see uh uh on line 2300 247 000 prior year 315 000 this year 28 increase that's the only item in support services that shows anywhere close to that kind of an increase yes that's that is where we have our news fed director coded to well but the sped director's down in no she isn't she isn't because she doesn't get coded she doesn't get coded to 200 special education she gets coded to the 100 under general education well it looks to me like in column f 69604 is exactly the salary that we're paying for the special ed director okay i do have an explanation for you sir and i apologize for arguing with you okay we're not arguing i'm just trying to get an answer as to why why we have that kind of an increase in general uh because i budgeted her twice so i'm sorry i budgeted her twice oh okay so that is why that's why i was so adamant about her being voted to 100 okay so that so that general administration uh in uh support services is going to go down significantly yes thank you i apologize for arguing with you sir for the question and i'll be more than happy to go through any other pages that anybody has any questions on again this is just proposed budget we'll deal with this again next month is that right yes and hopefully the state will have a budget passed by that it's my understanding that the governor has sent them into a special session have to deal with budgets to go concurrently with the regular sessions and ms kaiser might correct on that yes they have to pass the budget by june 30th okay with that in mind i'll entertain a motion to approve the fiscal year proposed but 20 particularly 22's there well i thought this was just like a first round no no budgets are up for it so i have to submit this with your signatures to ade as a proposal as proposed by when june 15.
i i realize that there are a lot of people who are hesitant about mass wearing and also about the vaccine i am not one of those people so you know but my current concerns are my children i think hovered i don't want that to happen i've done everything in my power for the past 15 months to keep that from happening and i i know that it's coming up of optional masks i know that that's a thing that that could happen uh i also know that in order for masking to work it has to be done by everybody who is unvaccinated that said those 12 and over they have had the chance to get a vaccine and they're they can rest easy my children can't so what i ask is a compromise that until the children within avon school systems can receive the vaccine and those who are under 12 that the intermediate and elementary schools do enforce a mass mandate now it's looking like it's going to be in september or october that that is happening give us till november i don't i i don't feel safe sending my children to school with that not in place this past year we had we had an online e-learning action and it was very limited but i certainly appreciated it and we took advantage of that um but we're not going to have that this next year so in order for my children to be in public schools you're taking away the only option that i know that would make them safe i don't like masks i hate them i think we all do but i'd rather have something that is an annoyance for for a few more months than something that is potentially giving my children problems with their lungs with their hearts something for the rest of their lives [Applause] do i come forward or if if you can because we have a board member that is uh dialed in remotely so he can hear from that microphone okay my name is stephanie bates and my family represents 20 years in avon schools i've compiled a list of actual problems and symptoms of students in our very schools these are real testimonials from the parents of students right here in our hometown and the symptoms are a direct result of mask wearing nose bleeds having to stop your emotions chronic rash under bottom lip mask filling up with sweat over the course of the day the parent discovered the mask skunk after just one day of wearing though it was a fresh mask child came home crying over mask wearing and mask enforcement sore ears teachers constantly babbling with kids mask wearing headaches nausea feeling faint this is called hypoxia and it's caused by oxygen deprivation constant nosebleeds irritation under mask six-year-olds with daily headaches nausea abdominal pain exhaustion long naps immediately after school and this is a 17 11 and 9 year old set of siblings uncharacteristic malaise irritability and education masked acne tired irritable and hot breathing difficulties chest pains heart palpitations serious and debilitating panic attacks never had them before personality changes one high schooler witnessed two separate friends having very serious panic attacks which rendered them incapable of going in the school building these are top notch highly motivated top of the class students and i'm positive the school never knew these students um even had this problem and they just did their school online and um so they were invisible to notice ten and eight-year-olds with headaches fatigue sadness blues lack of connection an eighth grader with severe panic attack after repeated prompts to put masks over her nose expressed she was panicked and asked to go to the um to the hallway to breathe and she was told no panic attack high achieving kid but hadn't even had a panic attack prior fifth grade with anxiety headaches very irritable tiredness not to mention all of the other psychological issues these are causing more angry now and irritable a fourth grader with headaches every day anxiety tiredness loss of focus a great um a fifth grader with headaches anxiety fatigue depression apathy not wanting to go to school fourth grader with migraine level intensity headaches regularly depression loss of focus confusion a seventh grader with increased acne in um in their mass covered area apathy depression inability to see value and peer friendships somebody says my children were tired and they were sick and tired of being yelled at in the hallway about the mask they cried in the morning having to go their main symptom was tiredness they would sleep a lot after school a 9th grader with acne headaches i think you get the impression i have more there are my list goes on i'm scrolling down i want to read them all to you the unfortunately i understand and so um this is just a small sampling in our community our very community and this is absent of long-term effects it's not even going to indicate the brain development the respiration the mental and sociological health outcomes so i say avon school board you you have the power to make the decisions for our community children these are our actual children your children you have the responsibility in the state to make these changes if you're going to be the power over our children then be the ones who make the responsible caring choice for your charges don't pass the buck don't wash your hands of this and say those over you will tell you what to do i am asking you to allow the children of the avon school system to breathe unmasked avon schools good evening my name is john pedro and i have a under 12 year old daughter in avon schools i came here tonight uh first of all to hear a compelling argument of why we should press forward from what has been a successful plan and to go against not only the cdc but the department of defense uh in an approach and a plan just to appease uh some people that you could probably see in this room very evidently let me tell you appeasement does not work going with a plan that's proven until the cdc will come out with new guidance i don't really know who here thinks that they know more than the cdc okay as as almost 20 years of defending this country for the department of defense i can tell you that we took this seriously from the very beginning secretary esper on federal installations kept us when we put in social distance indoors and maps i thank you for the school board for the wonderful plan that you accomplished last year and kept us in person this would be a decision point for my wife and i uh this this fall if it were not to be put in place uh a plan that was safe thank you [Applause] yes that's really unfair because you know i want to comment on another topic this has been a long-standing rule for our school board so well i know would you like to speak now would you like to speak somebody else talk twice so no i guess they won't okay any other comments yes hold on just a moment she's first oh i'm sorry no go ahead she'll be next my name is angel thank you and i'm a wife a mom a small business owner and a taxpayer um i have lived in ammon community for nearly 20 years and i love this community um i want to start off just by saying a big thank you to all of you for um what you have done you've done an amazing job in the face of incredibly difficult circumstances um and i applaud your determination to move forward with in-person learning this year you know many other school districts chose to about to the pressure to keep their kids at home and i really think it will prove to be to their detriment that they did not do in personal learning you showed much courage and boldness in the face of a lot of fear and fear-mongering in my opinion in the same spirit of courage and boldness i am asking you to decide to give parents the right to determine whether they want their children to continue to wear masks or not you teach our children to be critical thinkers and i'm asking that we do the same the data shows that children are not carriers of this disease they do not and will not contribute to widespread outbreaks of cobalt among teachers and staff the stats from the cdc which are continually being revised by the way now show that the survival rate in the 0 to 19 age category is 99.997 in the 20 to 49 age range which i'm sure covers probably the largest majority of school staff is 99.98 um you have more of a chance of being struck by lightning or getting in a car accident than you do of dynamic um yet people do not let this detour them from living you know they get in their cars every day they go places the fact is that the side effects from masquerading are i think more detrimental to our children than kobe the countless instances of psychological physical and emotional side effects that mask wearing um have are much more difficult to ascertain and may sorry let me start that the countless instances of psychological physical and emotional side effects of mask wearing are much more difficult to ascertain and may have much longer lasting side effects than culvert itself will these side effects should not be underestimated and i'm asking again that you allow us to be parents and to be the decision makers for our families please choose the wise decision to make masks optional for all april schools thank you [Music] hello um everybody my name is i'm sorry my name is corey girvis 1392 run i have two daughters one is just finished third grade the other one finished kindergarten i was very glad that yvonne decided to go ahead with in-person learning my husband and i were very happy about that we moved here from northwest indiana a couple years ago and the school district we came from was doing like a hybrid cycle thing so we were comparing those with friends and they were all jealous i don't wish my kids could go back in person so i do appreciate that that was implemented and i think considering all the contentious arguments from both sides i think you know overall it was a positive thing but i can tell you as a mother my two girls every morning they were scared to put their mask on because by lunchtime they were both like out of breath my younger daughter complained of headaches all the time my same younger daughter was being bullied by a kid in her class they did nothing about it didn't take the kids to the principal didn't have that conversation another kid in her class put his hand down her pants forgive me i'm sorry if there's children here they did nothing about it it took my husband threatening to call the police before the principal got involved what happened earlier in the same school year the principal was involved because a kid in her class didn't have his mask on properly now i i understand everybody has a view on all this okay but as a mother of two impressionable children it infuriates me that that's where the priority lies i perceive that the priority was oh let's make an example of this kid for not wearing his mask properly oh but this little kid could touch this little girl under her pants and be you know perfectly fine so as a parent of a couple kids i just had to share that i had to speak out for my girls and for all the other kids that you know come home and they're upset or they're distraught or my my older daughter's on the autism spectrum she has sensory issues doesn't like things too close to her skin or too close to her face i had to fight tooth and nail with her teacher in order to give her just an opportunity to breathe during the day and it i felt bad because it occurred to me there are other children in her class who probably looked at her and thought well what makes her so special why can't i get a chance to take a mass break and so you know just just you know take it for what's worth it from one human being to you to all of you i just ask you to please consider all of this the best interest of our children i agree with many of the comments i heard regarding cbc stats it's out there on the website and mainstream media is not necessarily putting in your face and single by the way revise the number but it's a simple click and search away i promise you so that's all i have to say and thank you guys very much for your time [Music] um mrs grina sweet we're going to need contact information from you before you leave if you wouldn't mind maybe dr sullivan could you um handle that for us please thank you other comments yes not about the same issue i wish i could comment on the mask issue but unfortunately i feel like there's a bigger issue of play here your name my name is brianna george give me my address please governor south carolina 625 east um i've been dealing with you guys for a while been a few school board meetings for them this is half of my academic time every month just half a day because i couldn't carry the rest i've been here a long time i've let my kids go to these districts i've asked you guys i've come into these movies and i've fed you guys you guys not you do you or you you guys you are our elected officials i thank you to do your job i've fed you i've asked you i'm not the only person in this community okay we cannot have a person at the high school in charge of sports who gets a demotion that makes the same amount of money for your contract we cannot have have a principal at the high school who is not doing his job and did not do his job for four years on top of the athletic director you guys cannot look at this and do nothing and what i see right now is you were doing nothing and there are comments that have been made since last week that i don't have a child in the districts okay fine i'm taxpayer i paid my tax dollars go with this district i'm 100 percent positive that i'm sure the four of you and mr dana you guys didn't bring my hands on capacity okay my daughter doesn't go to this district because there is no way that i could let her go to school in these districts i wouldn't i didn't she's a banana she's in the online program at big davis because this school this high school has become so toxic that i can't let her go here and and she comes from a school district in texas that's much larger than any of you guys can probably envision she she's got four of this high school in her building that's where she came from so my issue with with you guys is this i need you to do your jobs and if you don't want to do your job then there's no there i'd like for you to use it you can step down you can resign or i will make it my life's goal at this point to figure out how to move forward i will petition senators and congressmen and our state legislature to instill a referendum because we don't have one in this state i knew that when i made that comment that everybody got an email but i will make it my life's goal at this point to make sure the people on this school board do not get reelected as for the paid officials in this room you know do your job and do it the way community wants you to do it because you're here by our leave not yours we take your salaries all of you guys in this room it is that's where you that's where our tax dollars go that's where tax dollars go that's where our referendum goes and mr dana that goes for you too sir i know you're there i'm not going to play around anymore but i'll tell you what i would be here for every single board meeting until you guys do what you should do thank you um are you coming forward okay you and then you um i'm kaden stobbs i am currently a student at high school um sorry i have severe asthma and we're in math i'm going to get overwhelmed i'm sorry hold on no you're fine you just take your time you're a student but um i am constantly up and down stairs you know and i can't breathe i really cannot breathe and by the time i get to my costume i'm sitting now i'm sweating and i'm pain panting because i cannot breathe and getting a drink of water is not going to do anything for me it's just going to make me feel even worse um and somebody in here i don't remember her name but she said about her some little boy putting her his hands on her pants and nothing's being said about it i myself had been sexually assaulted school did nothing i go to school and i get yelled after not having my mouth i have it like this trying to be able to breathe at least with some fresh oxygen and i get yelled at that i'm gonna get a detention that i'm going to be in some severe trouble because i cannot breathe and the fact that i have a mask on and i'm breathing out and i'm breathing back in the air that i just breathed out i get lightheaded i feel dizzy i just i can't process and i this year i probably got better grades but i know for sure the information that i got i could not really focus on i could not take in because i was too worried about not passing out in the middle of class to not fall asleep because i can't breathe and i just feel drained of energy i can't go to school and enjoy school i feel attacked every time i want to sit and actually take moments myself take a breather and not feel like my world is being shrunk i i would just like to go to school and go there have my schooling and my learning and remember it and like just how do i actually want to do good in school and not want to feel claustrophobic and just drain all the name time i i would love to go to school and enjoy it not feel like i'm pressured to do something else not be told every little thing to do i don't want to be controlled by everybody i am 18 and i would like to have my freedom especially about a mask a little piece of plastic that's just going over my face and honestly it's not doing anything i hate wearing it and i don't wear it as much as i like if i don't have to wear it i don't wear it and over this year i have been quarantined so many times and i have not once got copic over actually more than a year me and my family none of us have gotten covered and it's been a year and a half of wearing our mask when we don't like not wearing our mask when we don't need to and wearing it when we absolutely have to going to school is the only time i wear it and i've been quarantined five six times and nothing like it's it makes no sense to me yes okay hi my name is michelle i live in abel and i have four kids who attend avon school i didn't plan on speaking so bear with me as i fumble through this my heart goes out to that girl because i suffer from those same things i pulled my four kids out of school last year not because i feared coveted i don't but because i didn't want my kids to suffer with the dumbass stuff it's ridiculous there are options out there for families who want to not or who want to not be around other people i sent my kids to indiana online connections academy it's a free public school i was home we didn't have our mass on my kids did better learning actually their grades all went up we had a great year unfortunately all their all the activities we were supposed to do were cancelled because of colvids so they've just been stuck in my living room and while i love my children they do need to interact with other people i don't want my children feeling like that little girl over there but they have a hand over their mouth so they're trying to learn they're here to be educated their body their choice leave their faces alone they're allowed to breathe while they're at school again there are options for you that are free public school offers you everything that avon offers in the the same tv of your living room i know my children have been in it because i was fearful so you have options and i would like for you to know that leave everyone else's mouths alone let my kids breathe please thank you yes my name is danielle larimer i have sent many requests for copies or links to educational materials provided to my child in regards to sel or case i have been told that the materials may only be viewed in person in the school which violates the no visitors rule i was falsely told that to provide me with additional viewing would violate alleged copyrights and or vendor agreements i say closely because even my request to review those alleged restrictive contracts was denied please provide me with copies or links to these educational materials to allow me to review thank you thank you [Applause] other comments yes sir [Applause] like to uh first uh what is your name oh my name's aaron browder okay with the 1066 spanish lake drive okay um like many of us i'm here in regards to match for the upcoming school year but i would like to say a thank you to all of you for the courage to go in person and keep the kids in person last year they took a lot of courage i hope you'll have the same courage and go mask optional for 2021 mass were intended to be a mitigation to risk before we can discuss them i think it's vitally important to discuss the risk after 16 months we've learned a lot the science is clear on a few things namely the kids by far the least affected by covid i recently read in the scientific publication that an unvaccinated child has roughly the same risk as a vaccinated 30 year old for severe disease put it simply kids who literally have no risk for perspective and to those who argue that kids have died from cobalt there are 80 million kids in the united states under 18.
i'm in charge of this there we go in was the last time we addressed other than just basically small 2 percent cost of living increases for the support staff pay that was the last time we looked at the entire schedule and said looked at compared ourselves to other districts each position compared to other districts across the state this last spring we got invited to participate in a study across the entire state we submitted data as long as you submitted data you got access to the metadata from all the districts in the state that participated and there were about uh 240 or so of the 290 districts that participated so good feedback good information the information gleaned from that generally said we lag behind both our local districts around us and peer districts in our support staff pay hourly pay that in addition to the current labor market that we're experiencing that that you're probably read about if you're not experiencing in your own professional life um and that classified staff survey is what i just referenced uh the the that we participated in this last spring and then our opportunity the reason why the other reason we're able to do this now is thanks to the increase in per pupil support from the state during this last budgetary session that increase in state per-pupil state support hits starting july 15th so the reason why now is because we can starting july 1 because that's when our increase starts customarily we we increase support staff pay after we finish with the collective bargaining process with teachers association but because of the information we had in front of us the labor market and the fact that we're staffing up for this fall we decided it was prudent to do this as soon as possible get in place to start hiring folks for this this falls school session so the what what we're proposing is to change adjust the entire scale in 2016 we went after specific positions in in certain positions we're behind compared to our peers and across the state generally looking at our entire scale every position has lagged behind just a little bit and then as years go by you know that that tends to grow if you don't keep up with increases so our proposal is to increase the entire scale nine percent so every hourly support staff person um would see an increase of nine percent plus on july one is when they move up on experience so there's a if you're familiar with our support staff grid there are there are positions that are the rows and columns that are your years of experience so if you if you're a support staff employee who is above the scale meaning they have more than ten years of experience with us they would see just the nine percent increase not a uh an increase for experience plus nine percent um so if we implement this on july 1 future increases will be guided by the increase from collective bargaining this fall that just wouldn't happen until next july one and so we wouldn't we would do two increases within a few months of one another we would kind of jump start our support staff by implementing an increase here on july 1 and then using the collective bargaining average increase that would guide our decisions around the support staff increases for july 1 of 2022 and this has no impact on referendum increases remember all support staff permanent support staff have a dollar increase per hour from the referendum and bus drivers two dollars per hour increase from the referendum this is what that scale looks like that i just described before this is the current scale right now we the the lowest paid employees are on grade three and i think there's only it might be food service substitutes are the only ones that are even on that row everyone else starting below that so this is the current state um starting at basically 980 at the lowest end and then 24.87 at the highest end and again reminding you that there are a lot of support staff members some of our most loyal and and long-lasting employees with us are above that ten and so they would have received you know two three two and a half percent increases over the years that are beyond this scale this is the proposed new scale again it's just every line item um times 1.09 for the nine percent but it moves that uh line four to 1068 from the bottom from 980 and then the the top end goes from 2487 to 27 11.
[Music] so we're changing uh in page 12 um start comment we are changing the word negative to inefficient inefficient inefficient and ineffective so now read as for self-evaluation and i do not agree that allowing the public to speak for facilitating lengthy discussion journal school community is in ineffectiveness is it efficient or ineffective that's the only one i heard was an official replacement um i think there was one more of that and jeff talked about not using the word toxic but that was just it wasn't that revision suggested there um and four hours a month is too much that was he's really responding to mike's comments without any vision sort of being proposing and then his last point about if something is done one or two times why is it substantive enough to be in a summative report but again it wasn't that was more of a challenge so theoretically the ass will begin to provoke that but i think that is feels confident in this statement based on what his defendant saying just would you agree that you felt confident um was there a request and i remember jeff was there a request to change the world toxic i don't believe [Music] i've heard jeff speak about the toxic nature of social media from 2021 this is how our community engages and communicates and done well to help eliminate or at least tremendous amount of toxicity that may exist that um to accept the report with the one rewarding change on page 12 changing the word negative to an addition i guess all other aspects are important okay all those in favor um okay so now what i will do is [Music] i should call for vote now right on [Music] do we need to amend that motion or is it just automatically [Music] yes we made a motion to open and accept the final report we then made the changes we can close that and close the amendment so we'll say can i please have a motion to vote to accept the final report uh including a foreign [Music] okay now can i please have a vote involved emotion uh do i want to state the rating on this or we're just going to yeah i'll make the motion [Music] to for the school committee to approve the summative performance rating of proficient the superintendent's performance thank you okay uh questions concerns deliberations [Music] four hours long when in fact we opened it up for comments where and uh you know it was also said that you wanted more information jeff was providing so um you know i've actually you know i've heard of other school community meetings for six seven so i guess my comment or question would um it's that was taking comments from parents and they had a lot of questions jeff was answering and that's why it was four hours long in a normal year not cold me was not four hours long you know there was questions that needed answers i felt jeff did an unbelievable job of providing the information that he was able to do and so i just gotta say i wouldn't disagree to blame jeff for the four-hour meeting i mean i understand the reports but i mean i was at those meetings not [Music] he's in response to jeff's self-evaluation which jeff talked about specifically the management of the meetings and the lengthy time allowed for power communication that stuff that they're making questions during it he was referring to like some of the communication that happened during some of his presentations which got his stuff off track which made it more difficult for him to manage so it was more of a jeff caused long meetings and that was a bad thing it was the self-evaluation said the meetings have gone long and i think jeff says in some way not these particular terms but something to the effect of it's my responsibility to do something to bring that in get more focused with agendas et cetera reading that and hearing him speak the last meeting made it seem as if the fact that meetings were going longer was a bad thing as it pertains to this goal and i disagree i if it happens if a meeting was six or eight hours during an unprecedented year where none of this stuff has ever happened in the history of anything we've ever been through before ever the fact that it was only four hours like jim said that's a blessing if it ain't going to work yeah i think thank you so much okay the um i think um first of all i think it's awesome that everybody read the report reading closely i think it's good and i think on a personal basis personal interpretation of quite a load of data over a quite a period of time during an extremely challenging year where some of us haven't even met anybody in person yet right we're pointing over things so yeah it's interpretation and this process is awesome for the purpose of that right so so in tandem with that i think the the process is also to build understanding across the community about the different perspectives that are sitting at the table so each one of us is going to see and respond to different things from the others depending on which shoes we're joking and so part of the process is to ask questions and to try to understand how did that person arrive at that what did they see what are they understanding there that may be different from what i was seeing but ultimately at this point in the process our goal is to arrive at a consensus on the overall rating which is is rolling up all these individual differences of perspective to try to find the cross-cutting agreement right cross-cutting common ground that's a good word and so we we want to pay attention to the specifics because they're informative but that no single person determines the rate it's the cross-cutting ground that we recognize that determines the rating so i just want to remind people of that that we're seeking like for instance jeff is going to learn a great deal from reading at the individual comment level and he's he's going to have reactions to that information he's going to disagree with some of it and he won't pay any attention to some of it which is his variety and other comments he is going to pay attention to he's going to agree with that as he looks at it or he's going to hear it multiple times across several members of the committee and that will resonate enough for him to elevate that feedback and think about it more as he sets goals for next year but our goal is not to remember tonight is not to get involved in the specifics which are really the feedback that you have to consider but to be thinking about where do we concur okay just to bring us up up some levels into that overall rating space okay just remember it's fine i'm not trying to squash seeking understanding of the individual comments i just don't want to get lost we're allowed to ask questions yeah yeah please do when you ask me about if you can speak up a little bit just so that's why um about social media were you referring to people talking badly about yourself talking about sorry where were the comments that mike suggested about the toxic about social media was that specifically i know i'll ask mike first was that about the negativity towards the teachers i think it was more general idea that because social media can lead to so much negative opinions and out of control you know just trolls out there saying things that aren't based in fact as fact just things of that nature i think i might be wrong but it's my interpretation of what i understand that there isn't more social media done either from jeff or from the committee because of that nature uh the way things can kind of get out of here so i think it seems in my experience anyway the preference is to just make communications either through the newsletter or through another email versus an interaction from social media so that's what i think at all [Music] you know social media is a broad term in addition to having a newsletter which we put in place just a couple years ago you know we're trying to teleport means we answered 140 questions in two hours we don't shy away from engaging in public i don't look at facial comments about me that kind of stuff and and i and i encourage them not to hear but to say that we don't engage the community we've had three top qualities we're looking at a way to to revamp our uh old website so we have a mobile application you wouldn't know this because you weren't here before so we don't shy away from that stuff but we have another job which is to run the school so we communicate to the extent we think people want communication i've had just as many parents saying i had a parent a couple of them say you know there's too much toughness it's just gobbling that's the word you know people burying what they want so we try to temper that to give them what we believe they need and people aren't shy about saying you know can you disclose for example the reasons um athletics closer in the newsletter in the high school level is because parents said we wanted to disclose that we want to see the schedules we don't know what the scores are what people are interested in so that so we're open to that stuff the the problem i have like with the stuff you said about communication implies that we we don't communicate or that we shy away from it that's just the opposite even at the school levels they do it on a regular basis and anybody who has a child in school especially at the elementary level you know you really need to be on top of that i don't think parents complain about that stuff and parents have a have a big hand in what gets communicated there's parabolicism of schools all the time my issue with you isn't the necessary you know more communication better we don't disagree with that we're just saying that we have a school system to run too and so we communicate messages out but you know you made a comment about communication being of the highest priority well we have we know the highest you know what curriculum to to adopt and things like that there is a line and we involve parents as much as we can in schools so we don't shy away from that stuff that's [Music] get sidetracked when you said that um you don't feel as an elementary school parent that you get any of the high school stuff in fact i don't think that high school news for everybody so i can see just in that comment how someone in the elementary school might not feel like they're connected to the high school until middle school until they well i appreciate your you know telling me that but let's remember to focus on these comments were made in the context of a very specific community engagement and communication goal they weren't made just in general about the way you found history also i was only here since january so all my comments are the stars in there because i was only here from january and then it seemed like it was silence and then there were some closures or certain weeks around vacations there was uh the april vacation situation i think uh probably the freshest in my mind when i wrote this um you sent out a communication that was fairly general i know you have to do that because of the health reasons privacy reasons but when i talk to you about specific reasons why you did that then it made sense but that wasn't what the community got the community didn't get that information i got that information the community did it not until i think you eventually said that probably one school came back but those are the things that i was that was in my mind when i was writing this well there's something i think the social immediate comments are i mean i i think they're i stand by the social media conferences there's another thing is we can't tell parents i mean if something straddles the line of privacy i'm not going to share it i always hear on that side you mentioned this share it and i don't think it was a privacy concern when you shared it but it was just delayed by two weeks only because it was only because it was such an unusual day for just a couple of students to cause not to cause like they did not i appreciate that was a unique situation that's kind of the point of my comment was because it was so unique and never experienced before additional detail or communication or something a little bit beneficial to prevent all that online i don't disagree with a lot of that stuff but you know i said it at the beginning of this it's like we're building the plan over transplants sometimes stuff would happen and i don't know if any superintendent did i think i said you know not your fault uh local government just do a compliment to get it right to begin with so how can you get it right i think i might send something to that effect in there but i think i i agree i understand what you're saying i agree with i think this applies to all of us is useful and constructive for you to apply as possible so it's not just criticism but it offers a suggestion or something else to think about and it doesn't just attribute sort of negative things to you that's kind of dead-end feedback so we should always be thinking about how to make out the about all of us um useful to you um the second thing is i just want to for context i'll put out because when this evaluation process was designed it was too prompt one was the superintendent's evaluation and one was the school committee's self-assessment of their own work and in the design when we designed this they were to go hand in hand so that the school committee would first reflect on their own functioning and uh get clear on their own performance before they evaluated the superintendent's performance so that you don't conflate an issue that they addressed in the school committee with what this superintendent's performance is doing so this year last year we had the self-esteem self-assessment results we digested that before we digested the superintendent's performance this year we weren't able to do that because we hadn't changed the schedule around because of this election stuff gloria and i have looked at this school committee self-assessment results and we can just give you a foreshadow and you'll get to look at those in the fall but there was one clear area of weak school committee performance identified in that self-assessment and that had to do with community engagement and outreach and so by the reason i bring that up is to help us not entangle things that we may also believe in with what jeff may be beginning right so we don't want to get those inflated we don't want all that to be targeted and jeff when our own performance in that area is something that we still need to discuss [Music] i'd like to make a comment speaking on this topic in this particular value right because no majority of us did fall in the challenges of social media because of that is why i'm ready to be an exemplar because we the hardest thing to do in the world of social media is not responsible it is by far the hardest thing to do in the face of criticism particularly on social media is to not respond and that takes a cool calm and collected approach to understanding and evaluating you know what people don't know is that we'll use the example that you use in that multiplication of all the stuff right a lot of people didn't didn't know was just all of the continued research and understanding and tracing and tracking that had to take place during that time right so the ability to deliver effective communication right out of the gate was going to be a challenge so he had to manage that in a way that wouldn't create panic but at the same time provide enough information so that individuals could make informed decisions for their own students which at the end of the day is the most important part being given the information that allows you as a parent to make an informed decision for your student right hence all is that all of the continued uh social media to mention the emails and everything that he gets and all that good stuff all which leads to most of the time inaccurate information which then comes up right it's a challenge to parents want that stuff back so i looked at it in a different way like i looked at it in a way as actually i don't know that there was a right way to respond to it so he had an educated response to it which allowed more people to make more informed decisions and make them students so when i looked at that i said holy crap pardon the use of word crap like that's a really tough position to be in like think about that we saw some of the emails we probably didn't see some of this we read the facebook back to school blah blah blah up until that point i hadn't even joined that group and then that stuff came up and i said oh boy i gotta get into this i have kept myself honored for so long and so in my opinion i felt like that was a really really challenging position to be in along with the rest of the pandemic and that type of stuff so when i see but i completely agree and that's the top part about these things why it's an opinion based informative just in value right based on what you're saying you see it differently right so i just felt like when we look at the two aspects of that like i just want i want to share how i would look at that stuff right during some of the challenging times so um it's just interesting i think that's the important thing that we take from these evaluations is pull them out of what jeff can uh use to inform his goals and how he grows um you know moving forward right but we can't forget that we are evaluating and it is tied to pieces of jeff's you know personal um you know stuff so okay that's all i wanted that was just i just went i just wanted to share right cause i thought it was good context okay well we focused on you a lot for you and i felt like that wasn't fair i should share why i went the other way right there's a couple of things that you said versus proficient versus other radiation before this process we started susan and maury both men with meaning and they sort of uh discussed the different ratings and you know what sort of qualifies for each rating right yeah uh and for the example of the way she kind of correlated with exemplary proficience was you know that's what you should do that's what's expected that's what you should strive to exemplary was something that is a completely new way of thinking of things it's something you would want to model take around to the different conferences and speak to it and try to train other districts online so when i was coming up with my ratings that's what i had in my mind exemplary is something that oh my god this is groundbreaking stuff we've got to share this with the world proficient is yeah you know uh that was really good he strove to get there it was a really hard thing to do so on that part so that's what was in my mind when i was on the great just that one um the other part of uh i forget what you said that made me trigger this in my mind and think about it but you know back to communication and some things can't communicate because privacy with kids health issues and i called jeff about this back when it happened but it was around the same time vacation i don't remember exactly i asked them why more information didn't come up about the coping situation cases in the school why it led to the actions that it did lead to and it was you know we can't we can't tell everybody when that's the case because that's privacy and then shortly after that like within a day or two of hearing that from jeff i got a letter as an elementary parent from the elementary school saying that it was a strep case in so my question was then why can we announce the community that this is the case of scrap throat which is a health issue but we can't do it when there is just a health issue as well not to downplay the society of coping but there are two health issues to privacy issues so there was a little bit of sort of uh inconsistency there and i i don't i'll respond to your first feedback first and i'll just say personally from my own perspective and i'm just speaking with myself in terms of fun that's exactly how i would look at it i took the approach this year putting it down to the concepts seeing watching the news and watching the way other districts were handling things some better some good but won't say we were best but some a lot worse as well too right so i when i looked at it this year i put it in different products that's just from my own person so that's kind of why that's kind of how i didn't the second piece i remember that i remember i remember you saying i don't i don't overlook there's an answer to that yeah i don't want to probably get into that thing but i know what you're saying um and again those are things i think for jeff's feedback it's important like that's a great example but just feedback let's just make sure we remain consistent in communication right so that everybody understands um we can be consistent with different things and not one time they're [Music] i just think the report has a lot of very positive feedback unfortunately we spent a lot of time discussing um some specific critical feedback but there is a lot of very positive feedback in this report about jeff's his calmness and his very steady leadership during a very unsteady year and i don't i think that's cannot be and that he also worked respectfully with a wide range of stakeholders who all were have deep investments and a lot of emotions running a lot of change in context all around throughout the year and i just feel like this is the leadership that we needed this year i think he was a really good fit for our district this year and that he was very successful in uh guiding us through a very difficult time and i personally am appreciative of that and again i think i've already been moving the question which is considered by the state to be a rigorous high achieving rating okay all right um jeff i apologize but now you have to go back to their hd schedule program and um i must ask you to move forward with your traditional all right if anybody else feels like they're struggling talking during something i think it's okay meetings we didn't always agree but we always found the middle ground every time we spoke anytime we didn't disagree it wasn't often but i think you've been a great school committee member and a great chairperson and i think the leadership team's been a mission thank you covered testing um so we this year has been a lot about the colbert testing testing about 25 to 30 percent of the districts did and we knew that at some point it would go away [Music] but one of the things we always thought if it would happen would be a sort of diagnostic test like take home testosterone to get the students to take home and um and there was a couple things we thought about one if we could have an at-home test that could reduce the amount of time a student was quarantined had to be home and we don't know what that's going to be it's ten days now it could be nothing next year and then the other thing is as cobra starts to diminish the testing sites will start to go away will not be as easy to get a cover test so that's something we always thought we would look for and the state just last month announced that they would have at home testing did you begin to follow that free of charge so we did we started getting these at-home tests and so what we will do is if a student is quarantined not if they are not if they're positive but if you get sent to them because you've been exposed to someone who is positive you get this test you can take home you can administer it on the morning day seven and if it's negative you come back now originally what they said was you take it once when you get home you give them two tests once when you get home there's variations of that so we'll see what that looks like in the fall but certainly after [Music] they take this test um get positive i mean the negative they come back back to school so it saves so two things saves them three days from from having to be home and it also saves the parent uh the trouble and time of trying to find the testing site to get any of that done so we're gonna try it they didn't send us we ordered we said 250 thousand i think they just laughed when christie said that um so we did get us to send they we have 36 right now and um they it's a pretty quick turnaround so you order them we have within a day or so but uh we're also looking into the company we've contacted the company washing bases we're gonna see if we can purchase enough so that we can have um them on hand at school i'm still a little shell-shocked about this 60 kids that had to leave at one time this is mike was talking about um which we would have never had any money but typically that's not what happens it's five kids six kids we should have enough tests to give them and then we'd call the state um get more they originally only sent us 12 numbers how did you get 12.
wow well i mean i i can't sign it when we've got errors in it it's a proposed budget sir it's not you have to submit it yeah and so if i sign and i'm saying i'm okay with this proposed budget yes okay i can't change the date that has to be submitted by it button administration portion of 68 69 600 604. yes and i'll just take the money and move it into supply the 69 000 yes because supply money is where i can take money moving out in and out all year long then put it to some place that comes up later in the year where where it may be needed what's the advantage of putting it there rather than the unencumbered funds so the budget before you reflects exactly how much money the state gives us so i have to have a budget that reflects that amount so it doesn't matter where i put it if i leave it there and then move it later on that's also fine as well what's the repercussions if you turn it in lee i get nasty grime from add and it could be an audit finding for not having it submitted on time but the time it will take to get this this error corrected would be how long does it take to do that i could do it in within 10 minutes okay so that's an option to correct the air and to approve the proposed budget with that air that particular error correct correct any other errors that we saw that need to be corrected budget finally started looking at this this morning so that's all i saw initially okay i'll entertain a motion to approve the fy 22 proposed budget uh corrected the remind me 69 604 yes error but let the minutes of the meeting reflect this is not an error no it's not it's an allocation of funds that he put and he double entered for a director and so now the question is where do we move that money right and your suggestion is is i can move it to supply or i can at least leave it right where it's at it's just an allocation of funds and you can be moved on the next adopted budget it is which will be after the state passes the budget because right now this budget is all a bunch of guesswork based off of what asp or what asbo is saying what um what the ade is telling us so it's just so the reality is the numbers are going to change the numbers are going to change all over the place on the next budget anyway because they may change our base support level they could change how much we're going to get for transportation based on our move that we approve assuming that the double entry is noted in the minutes any further discussion so the motion on the floor is to approve the proposed fy 22 post budget uh noted in the minutes of the double the double entry double entry dispatch director okay further discussion that will be i would like to see it corrected on this budget because we're the way that the data is shown it's indicating that there's another fte which uh it comes up later yes okay well your motion was to prove it was to show in a minute so we need to vote on the original motion and have an amendment to yours or your motion okay so we'll vote on the existing motion yes mrs price yes mr osterling yes mr ellery no and mr mckinnon no it passes so that that pass is based in minutes then as you uh oh okay okay motion passes it will be noted in the minutes of the double entry thank you uh h race day resolution miss guys well i submitted to the board a resolution a proposed resolution on critical race theory and uh shall i read it please whereas educating students in continental elementary school district number 39 on history civil rights racism and the negative impacts racism has had throughout history is a necessary and should be done in a thoughtful historically accurate and appropriate manner whereas some concepts contained in critical race theory degrade important societal values and if introduced in classrooms would harm students learning in the public education system whereas the governing board of the continental elementary school district number 39 has the statutory responsibility to establish rules and minimum standards for the district including curriculum and instruction requirements now therefore be it resolved that the governing board of continental elementary school district number 39 strongly recommends that the administration and faculty review standards for curriculum and ensure that the following concepts are not included in the curriculum standards that one race is inherently superior or inferior to another race that an individual should be discriminated against or receive adverse treatment because of the individual's race or that an individual's moral character is determined by the individual's race via further resolve that the governing board of continental elementary school district number 39 strongly recommends that no training or training material that the local education agency provides to the faculty staff or students include the concepts described in the preceding paragraph be it further resolved that the administration of the continental elementary school district number 39 report back to the governing board of continental elementary school district number 39 regarding the administration's progress relating to this resolution prior to the start of the 21 22 school year thank you i'll entertain a motion to approve this resolution i shall move motion one second second oh wait a second discussion i i have a quick comment um i just want to make sure that there could not be some time in the future um i'm thinking like this holocaust denial thing has really held on for a lot longer than i expected it to could could it could this resolution ever be used to say well we can't teach the holocaust because it's teaching that they they thought that one race was superior to another i mean we still need to teach these in their historical context i just i don't want this to be abused so does it need any clarifying language or the first paragraph i think should cover that it is the clarifying language thoughtful historically accurate and appropriate manner further discussion um yes i really like paragraph four now therefore be resolved but the paragraph above it uh actually i'm sorry number two i would suggest that that be taken out i don't know if we need to because you can interpret this critical race theory a bunch of different ways depending on what you read which website you take um i think that the now therefore it be resolved summarizes everything that needs to be done um without i don't think we really need to call out like it or not i don't think that it's significant to give it a name i i agree that the paragraph two doesn't really add anything except the language of the critical race theory which is so controversial right now um but i think it's also abstract enough that you know we're not calling out anything specific that would harm the students learning i think i have a question about just some clarification on the last paragraph what's what would be um requested of the administration what's the idea behind that what specifically what are you looking for just uh they would certify certified they would certify that all the curriculum has been reviewed and you know in particular this is your civics curriculum and your social studies curriculum and that we are not using some of the youtube videos that we see youtube's not an acceptable source also i would just like to add that we teach the arizona college and career ready standards and there is not a standard on critical race theory to be taught to our students at any time and through any content so teachers are not expected to teach critical race theory we are following the arizona college and career ready standards that do not address critical race theory whatsoever you know i i that doesn't surprise me because from what i understand about critical race theory is it really shouldn't even apply to a k-8 school it's it only has a place in very higher level education critical race theory is being introduced in school districts across the country right now and it's not just in high school and in secondary education i'm thinking like law school the ball school district in phoenix has incorporated the 16-19 project into their curriculum that is a k-8 or k-8 school and and so i think that what this resolution is intended to accomplish is to make it very clear that from a board standpoint we don't want critical race theory introduced into the curriculum of the continental elementary school district i no i i support that that agenda for sure um because i i don't think it has a place here um i guess my concern is that this resolution can only be used as it's intended to right now i think that that is our job yeah but like i said before if we call out critical race theory it's actually limiting the resolution um where someone could type back to that so if we just say that in paragraph four that you know we're not going to talk about when race being inherently superior or inferior to another that cover that's what we're trying to say do we really need to call that out because then if when the next critical xyz theory comes out do we need to have another resolution but if this says well then we're already covered because we don't have a theory specifically oh like like i get what you're saying like this can um apply to more theories like that like you know come up with anything next year so anything that has to do with race by using those three bullet points that one race is inherent inherently superior that an individual should be discriminated against or received adverse treatment or that an individual's moral character but the bottom line this is critical race theory it's what they're calling it it's what it's been called for 20 years it's not new they have been teaching it in law schools they've been teaching it in business schools this is getting ahead of something we're not going to be the school district that has people lined up outside the door because we haven't had the foresight to identify issues that are affecting our school our children our administration and their ability to manage i agree yes mrs keith yes mr australia yes mr hollery yes and mr mcgivern absolutely thank you and this one this is a resolution so each member of the board will sign it if you voted yes thank you much motion passes we have uh item i voucher 8039 can you please enlighten us on that question yeah just just a a question on this there's a twenty thousand dollar payment uh for a total liability i thought this had been made last fall but but can you can you advise uh where we stand on this greg as far as a credit from the trust uh we paid twenty thousand dollars the the governor signed an executive order absolving schools from liability all the way back to the inception of the school year or back to july first of last year where is the trust in refunding this money or giving us a credit they have not the last information that i gave you on that is the most current information that i have they are still waiting for the end of the year with all their premiums and everything else before they can issue a credit they currently do not know how much that credit is um in our renewal i did have them pull out the cobia the copping coverage for lack of a better term so that would reduce our insurance by 20 000 in the upcoming year well it blows me away that the trust cannot provide us specific details on claim payments or reserves that have been established for any claim payments for covet related claims i don't understand it and i think we are due a major credit uh for this twenty thousand dollar payment that we made when essentially there's not any liability right are um other schools pushing back as well yes yes yes they are getting a lot of information about they're getting pounded that's how she heard it about where's their credit when can we see something so i think it's appropriate we're not the only one but this payment was definitely for the yes fiscal year yes okay they had never invoiced us for it so we never sent them any money for it okay good entertainment please to approve uh voucher 8039 second question in a second any further discussion group this is alan yes mrs price yeah mr allison yes mr ellery yes yes thank you motion passes uh some important school events what's going on here okay so summer school is going on like i mentioned before on the 30th will be the last day of summer school student showcase from 10 to 10 45 so if anybody wants to come look at the student projects it'd be nice to have some guests we will have eg's for the students it's a little final celebration also our next governing board meeting july 12th and we have our governing board sponsored staff breakfast hopefully we will be ready to go in person since we couldn't do it last year on july 27th so please mark your calendars board members okay governing board information miss guys you're up well i'm quite excited that once again continental elementary school district is going to be leading the way in pima county and hopefully we will set the way for other schools to recognize the importance of setting policy getting our kids in school getting back to school and getting some real academic education taking place and i wish everybody who gets to take some time off a great summer i attended the summer leadership conference on friday i missed some of it because i had to pick my daughter up from summer school but um i i think it was very very appropriate um especially considering the year we have considering so many previously unpoliticized issues have become politicized that was their their main focus on how to be productive how to have productive conversations and not just you know drill your own line of thinking and i think arizona schools are going to be better for it like i said my daughter is taking summer school classes and she absolutely loves it she got into school today she said her day was just amazing it's so easy for summer school to become an afterthought and just kind of a habit i guess but our teachers didn't take it that way they put a lot of effort and work into being creative and engaging the kids in a different way than they're used to and um i it's definitely not a punishment like i always thought summer school was growing up and these kids are just absolutely loving it thank you so much i'm looking forward to a regular school year and i pray that we can put covert behind us i had a grand time at the kindergarten and the eighth grade promotion ceremonies it's wonderful to see our young people and especially the awards that our wonderfully performing students are are receiving and for the eighth graders god bless you i wish you a wonderful high school career and uh it was fun being there thank you thank you thank you for being here with us just thank you and the staff for all that you guys do thank you i'd like to thank you folks for being here it means a lot to me personally i'm glad you're here we value your input um please come again we appreciate your heart i've been um on this board for almost what nine years now and unfortunately for seven or eight of those years there were vast majority of the board meetings there wasn't a soul in the room and as you heard probably an hour ago 17 participation um we really need to improve that all of us the parents community everybody so thank you for being here and please come back and
the last 15 months for cbc david we have 47 000 kids that have died from all causes of the 47 300 under 18 have died with covet and with is a key word as all hospitalized patients were tested there was not a single not one death without a comorbidity and most had multiple so these were sick kids of these 300 roughly 40 percent this is from the cdc didn't even have a symptom of coping so over the course of the 16 months total of cova cases were less than a half percent of all adolescent deaths 99.5 percent of desperate from other things the science is clear the kids aren't at risk so if we go back to mitigation since kids are not at risk they argue we need to do we do not need to do any mitigation strategies for children including mass however to the question of mass effectiveness a recent study from brown university for massachusetts new york and florida schools that is currently being peer reviewed stated there was no correlation of spread in schools with mass versus schools without them put simply massive kids made no difference and even when avons and even avon's own data there was no increased spread from kids in person versus kids not a person schools were as safe as they were in their homes in regards to adolescent spread to adults vaccination rates have went up among adults kids rates of infection have dropped even faster thus kids are not the vectors of this disease they were not and are not spreaders through other kids or adults every adult working in avon schools has them continue to have the opportunity to be vaccinated to reduce their own risk i ask that we follow what we've learned the kids are not risk they're not spreaders and masks are not effective and avon should make mass optional as the seven one let our kids get back to normal school let them live and let them learn like kids again thank you [Applause] other comments go ahead uh my name is jennifer smith i live at 8 27 foreign [Music] i can't tell you how these masks affect these kids lives they can't see each other they can't see emotions my kids hate where i can't tell you how much money we spent out my ass that were lost i had to wash them every night even if they washed it still didn't do the best i actually have been researching this a while um the ex vice president profiler has actually come out and said the vaccine is not safe it causes blood clots he has also said that children do not do not transmit coded i really and i work in healthcare i wear these things all day i actually last year had a major surgery in both my eyes because i bent over and this mask put me right in my eyeball they're not safe these are they don't protect from anything and i think as parents we know what's best for their kids and i think we should have the option to say whether or not they should have their mask or their parents we know what's right for them and i know you guys you guys work for us we pay you and if there's another referendum i can tell you if you do not go with mass optional everything about 18 years gonna pass that referendum again so please please do the best for our kids [Applause] someone in the back here of a child who had a severe vaccine reaction it is not fair to think that everyone here just needs to get vaccinated all the kids need to get vaccinated because the reactions are real my son had to have brain surgery and um so we no longer ask me because of that reason and i would not be okay with him going to school with people knowing our medical information because he has a higher mass because he's not vaccinated he's going to be eight years old he's actually in special needs classes he doesn't like to wear a mask he can't see he he stopped wearing his glasses all last year his vision is really bad um but he can't see because he can't wear the glasses with the mask they fogged up so he gets really angry he's broken them several times um so now he's gone all last year with having no glasses we're trying to get him back on wearing glasses because you can't see the board and it's just been you know the masks have just created more problems i get people are worried they're scared you have every right to be but it needs to be optional it needs to be a parent choice as to whether or not your child wears a mask in the same with the vaccine you cannot push somebody to do something where there is risk there has to be choice 100 and it is it's not safe i believe vaccines are not safe to each their own i don't care if you do but if you're getting the vaccine then you shouldn't be worried about those who do not get it uh are there any other comments i'd like to say something sure i wasn't even gonna say anything before what is your name sir my name is tony tony and i prefer enough to give my address that's fine my son's coming here he has a csl he's moving here to avon school from atlanta and if anything i should be more worried about you know him contracting coded because he's high risk but i'm not worried about coping because i call code and i took black seed oil and vitamin c and it was gone first of all you know you have to look at some of the stats right and then you have to ask yourself how many of you guys have kids how many of you guys have kids in a-box schools then how many of you guys wear these masks for eight hours a day or even longer you know that that piece that goes behind your ear hurts after a while and you guys are subject to kids to walk around and wear that all day long now at the gyms like the ymca i'm a member of that gym they they have rules where they ask you you know we have a mask but when you're working out you take them off right because if you put on a mask after you've worked out for anyone who works out you're probably gonna pass out kids are high energy they run around all day so they're out of breath but they're wearing a mask on their face and you guys are asking them to do that all day for eight hours just you know just think about that dr fauci and bill gates or whoever you know i'm not even going to poke stats those guys are making a fool out of everybody okay now he's on the fire because of his email dr falchi right and this is the guy that everybody is choosing to follow the girl that was uh that was here the avon student i feel bad for her look at what she's going through and you guys are making the decisions you have to make the decisions to whether whether you know allow the kids to either unmask or mask and if you're all parents and you know what the kids are going through i'm sure that you guys will make the right decision you know i'm a little nervous for standing up here and talking to you guys because i'm not the kind of guy that you know like to stand and talk to people i'm not a public speaker kind of guy but i feel like you know if you guys are all parents and you know what kids are going through that you will make the right decision because it's a little crazy to have people walking around with masks all day you know it doesn't make any sense i mean covet look at the stats no i mean how many people how many of you guys really know anyone who will die from coding maybe just a short you know percentage of people i don't even know if this thing is really what it is you guys remember the video with wuhan china where everyone was passing out in the streets that wasn't happening here so what was that this scared the hell out of everybody with that video so i mean i i i don't know you know if this kobe thing is really as serious as they say it is but cdc is changing stats all day long you know and now they're talking about zombies on cdc's workshop these are people these are people that we have to follow someone is making a lot of money to make a fool out of all of us thank you your time is up [Music] okay hi there sabrina halter um i do have four children two of which who are currently enrolled in avon schools and i do want to thank you guys for allowing us to come in and talk i've spoken with a few of you via email and i appreciate your candidness with us and i just want to quickly bring attention to a statement that was made by westwood washington's superintendent um thank you he said on his release that masks would be optional for their school district i don't think it's the school's role to encourage or discourage coveted vaccinations that's a parent's choice and it should remain to be a parent's choice and if we are looking at guidelines and facing whether our children will be forced to wear masks based on their vaccination status i just i can't say enough how that continues to remain a parent's choice many of us have talked this evening about how our medical information should not be made to isolate our children any further also i do want to bring attention to local schools that have already released statements for the upcoming school year unofficially brownsburg superintendent has recommended making masks optional again that is unofficially state malachi optional center grove optional westfield washington optional jay county optional south mo optional in tippecanoe county optional and those are just the ones that i've heard of and the ones that have made decisions thus far thank you thank you uh any other comments uh okay and we're going to move on with the rest of our meeting but i do want to thank everyone for being here um and for providing such um really food for thought for our administration and our board to consider um you know we've done our work a lot of times with no audience and while um a topic like or topics like the ones that are discussed are sometimes difficult for us to hear the fact of the matter is that we do our job better than we hear from our parents in our community um on what your sentiments are so our emails are all available i know that i've heard from many of you i try to answer each and every email as they come although with a busy schedule sometimes it takes me several at least a couple of weeks sometimes to get back with you but i do appreciate you being here this evening and for expressing your comments and your concerns thank you so much we're going to move on to the next agenda item which is uh unfinished business dr terhune our enrollment report please sure just really quickly just to point out we are in summer so we've taken out our graduating class and started replacing it with our incoming kindergarten so you'll notice a little drop kind of typical in the summer as we continue to enroll more and more kindergartners i think i'm looking for carry all day i think we're at 5 43 the last i saw is that about right close not sure okay so i think what i saw friday was 543 kindergartners so we've got a little ways to go that will pick up at the end of june beginning of july as we get closer to the school year which is typical and that's our enrollment report for now thank you board members any questions or comments about the enrollment report any predictions on other grade levels of the moment um the other look i mean look relatively normal uh right now we had a five grade level report that came out this morning um i will say first grade's a little smaller than what we would normally say it's like 645 644 and then kindergarten is in the 540 by 443 range and we have suspicions that both of those will jump up as we get closer if you think about this year's first grade or next year's first grade class were kindergartners last year with covid and things we wonder if people didn't keep kids home uh because of the situation so we'll just see how that goes as the summer continues on and you might have stated this dr true and i noticed that the enrollment decreased yeah and i think that's part of that that that large we had a large you know we have a kid that graduated that's what i figured out in that smaller kindergarten class so it'll be a little mid-year kind of mid-summer drop and then it'll pick back up okay and again i think we even said something here was moving into avon thank you for that but we have a lot of that too we have a lot of ins and outs during the summer too people a few moving out many more i think we're going to see movies as housing developments for those in our audience just because i know you can't see this number there are ten thousand one hundred students planned to be in avon schools in this upcoming year um that's our enrollment answer now as of today this morning yeah and that number will go up uh i would say go up quite a bit uh before we actually enter august in september so yeah in preschools part of that number yeah and they're pretty full uh they are i think they are maxed out at this point i think [Music] thank um next item on the agenda also under unfinished business is cost savings and efficiencies dr sullivan working with dianna kitchener brown and brown were able to procure a 100 345 pharmacy rebate this rebate comes as our pharmacy plan are down 8 and it will be credited to avon schools and the savings passed on to all avon employees who use the pharmacy benefit very good thank you we'll move on to new business and i would like to start with item a which is the school safety update i will turn i think i'm turning the meeting over to deb swain bayless as well as chief lighting all right so i'm deb slain bayless and i'm the school safety coordinator and i was just going to give an update on some of the things that we've done safety initiatives since july of 2018 up until today so as of july 2018 we had a cube a community meeting and there were 17 groups that included parents community members and the format of this was questions concerns and ideas so the common concerns from the groups were procedures building design school resource officers seemed to be a common theme throughout for all 17 of these groups the comments from the community where procedures need to be consistent throughout the corporation they want to know more about building access how we managed it how we can improve it safety training for staff and students securing fund entrances and increasing the number of sros to reduce the student tester ratio so the safety initiatives that have been put in place we've had a lot of things that we've put in place i'm going to highlight kind of the big stuff right now so we standardized our emergency procedures with a common verbiage so we now have flip charts for all of our teachers and all of our staff and we train on it and so the verbiage that we use is called the standard response protocol so it doesn't matter what building you're in we call it all the same thing so it's locked down secure the building shelter evacuate and hold and contour so those five things get applied to most emergencies that we have in our buildings so again it doesn't matter what building you're in the verbiage is the same and the flip charts are the same um and i've been in front of you before advocating not only for increasing the number of sros but that we needed our own police department because i wanted officers who were passionate about kids who knew they were going to be working with kids and that was hugely important we have 26 staff members who have completed basic training in the indiana school safety specialist academy so that academy is run through department of education and you do basic training and then you're certified and then you have to take 10 hours or two and a half days worth of training to maintain your certification so that's a legal mandate and that academy is nationally known and they they set the standard there are other states now looking at how that training is done they train about 2500 people i believe a year in the state of indiana with just fabulous national speakers um could i interject something there i believe from indiana school board association that avon was actually recognized as a leader in attendees at that particular conference i believe that our attendance vested all other school corporations in the state of indiana as of last year so it's a high level of achievement on our part and certainly training like that is is very important in our state in our safety efforts yeah absolutely we had five that completed basic training this year in the year of covid where everything was virtual so again i think that's fantastic um and then this summer we're going to secure our front entrances so we're going to lock our doors we're going to install buzzers and cameras we're also installing window foam on all of our exterior doors that have glass it is not bulletproof but it's bullet resistant and there's just a lot of benefits to fortifying the outside of those entrances so the safety initiatives we have in place for 21 22 supporting consistent safety practices in all of our schools so district-wide implementation of response protocols for threat of violence and suicide ideation we had a soft roll out of that this year and we tested it in various schools that had a need for it and it's worked pretty well so we will do some training in all of our buildings and we will do a full roll out of this program starting beginning this school year the goal is also to have safety committees in every building that meet twice a semester i should be able to get those scheduled and should be able to attend about 70 to 75 of them but between me and our sros assigned to the buildings we will have unified agendas and we'll have topics that we're discussing on a regular basis in all of the buildings written reunification procedures and staff training so we have pieces and parts of reunification not a solid written plan with people assigned so it's going to be a goal this year that we do that we have off-site locations um but it's all written people are assigned and we start training baby stepping into what that looks like and having parents help us out as we train through this and then upgrading our door access this summer actually it'll be early next fall so all of our employee badges are going to be switched over to smart badges so it's the same chip that's in your credit card that you put into machines so it's really advanced um and we're super excited about that the other thing we're going to be moving to is the digital platform for our for their chart right so crisis go is going to allow us to put all of our safety plans in one place we'll be able to have building maps and the big thing is we'll be able to do communication within the building and outside of the building so we'll have mass notifications and various levels of who's receiving what within the building and we know exactly what the notification is and this will help us again communicate with our sros on what's going on and teachers will get better communication within the building if radios aren't working or telephones aren't working in safety the one thing you have to do is redundancy so this is going to be another level of redundancy that allows us to alert people and to ensure that we're consistent in all of our buildings and then the certified indiana school safety specialist so with all of the redistricting we're gonna have three schools that doesn't have somebody in them that's certified so they'll be a focus on those three buildings to ensure that they figure out who they're going to send in the academy so that we have one person in every building as we build those safety teams up so that's my part of it i'm going to hand it over to chase you have any questions for me you want to wait till the end thank you thank you thank you all right well i'm going to say i remember my son being five years old and i was walking his chubby little hand into kindergarten for the first time and i let go of his little chubby hand and saw him walk into kindergarten for the first time and i realized that for the first time in his life there's somebody else in charge of my son's safety other than someone in his immediate family and so our officers who are here in this district take that charge very very seriously and so to the school boards of dr windham it's dr sullivan who oversees us on a daily basis i want to say thank you for your support because i know in some places that's not the popular thing to do but here in avon we have a team of highly trained uh very decorated officers who are here by choice now who are not here because they didn't have somewhere else to go something else to do they were here by choice and so tremendously excited for the work they did this year thank you very much for that i appreciate it very quickly officer terrence smith is our lead officer officer smith this year led implicit bias training uh for our district and always in an effort to be culturally competent and to work with all students of all kinds and colors he also completed a very prestigious leadership academy this year with a lot of other law enforcement leaders in the business did an incredible job and by the way he was voted esro of the year for five states by the national association of school resource officers so we're tremendously proud of him officer sharon is at the middle school uh south and west officer charon built and managed our fleet of police cars if you've ever seen a police car you know it's not just when you pick up off the lot it's one that has a lot of tools and technology in and he's responsible for that and does an incredible job with that he's he was certified this year with the highest level of certification possible in the state he was also certified with the highest level certification possible in the nation uh so officer shron is highly trained and and very very proficient in what he does officer craig is assigned to middle school north uh he completed indiana law enforcement academy this year which he has already been a police officer for a long time due to a loophole in state law he had to go back and do it again out of a class of 135 he was elected class president so he led all of those young men doing and young ladies doing that work so he was also certified as an advanced school resource officer this year tyler jean is in the hospital right now she just had a little baby jean this weekend so i tell you this is one young lady that i could not get to stop working we tried to put her on light duty a long time ago she refused uh she wanted to be a part of what we were doing here in the district so she worked well past her uh necessary requirements to be here by the way she earned a couple master's degrees this year got her license in social work in addition to being a police officer she wrote public safety curriculum for our students we will implement next year and she saved two lives by the way with a big old belly uh saved two lives of narcan who happened to be overdosing she just got the call and went there again with her uh big pregnant self and did an incredible job did did an incredible job off campus yeah off campus sorry thank you for saying that was off campus it was not our kids and not affiliated with our school district thank you very much for that clarification thank you uh oh my goodness we got another problem [Music] officer rooks joined us this this year from the avon police department he and tyler both assigned to the high school he directed our field training program with all of our new sros took over project lifesaver which is a project that helps us keep track of kids who um need some keeping track of and so he does a great job with that and he was voted the 2020 esro of the year for the state of indiana here are some of our major wins uh this year we set up the infrastructure of a police department we're not just a unit of the avon police department we are our own entity the school board or our bosses dr sullivan doctor windham oversee us directly so we set up the infrastructure of a police department which is a much bigger job than you can imagine all of our sro has completed over 160 hours of training that i'll share with you briefly later all certified staff this year and the entire district was trained on alice and what our sro is doing i'd like to take this time to recognize again dempswan bayless who is the school safety coordinator we would not be here if it wasn't for her she has been an incredible partner in safety and incredible asset to our school police department team and just does awesome work and is a part of everything we do and so she certainly was a part of this training as well we have a consistent sro in each of your child's buildings so if your kid is here on a daily basis they would know the same officer who's in the same school every day our model is a school resource officer program not a regular police department so we base everything we do off of this axis of relationships we want to build relationships with students with staff with you so that you know the same officer every day in the building so that you can have that relationship with them and understand that when we do law enforcement we do law enforcement in context we have very special very carefully selected sros who have been very specifically trained to work with students and properly equipped with people who like kids and so that's a a huge plus for us and then we have significant reduced juvenile delinquency uh in the district because of some programmings we have dr sullivan encouraged me in october this year to take care of some data or to to pay attention to some data for things we do maybe that has never been aggregated before and so we were able to quantify some of the work that we did this year even though our officers get tired of keeping track of their data all the time i think they will see why it's beneficial now here's our cumulative data since october we had over a thousand calls for service saying we need uh some help or support from our school resource officer we have 616 classroom contacts which means the teacher invited us in most of the time we have some that pop in every once in a while most of the time we were invited in to either read present some curriculum do a presentation talk to the class about police 616 classroom contacts this next data point is one that i'm um most proud of uh probably we have 14 criminal court diversions which means one of these officers had the opportunity to refer a kid to criminal court because of a criminal law violation that occurred but instead of referring them to criminal court we found a another alternative for them to deal with the same issue to provide a consequence to handle the issue with discipline or some support of some kind but we did not refer that to criminal court uh bogging down the court making the kid check a box the rest of his or her life that they had been arrested that was a significant reduction maybe from years past because of a new model that we have implemented community resource referrals at 23 so we come across a kid we say hey this kid may need some extra services counseling or may need some support at home or dcs or someone in the life of this child to support them that's what that is and then we dealt with 154 dcs reports uh this year that's not always because of something that occurs here on campus in our district but because of what goes on that we hear out in the community that gets reported to us we deal with 154.
we have employees on every single cell that you see here so plus those off of it so it's a wide range of how it might affect each individual employee and dr palik will go over some examples here in just a moment here is the estimated cost annual cost of implementing this from a fiscal year perspective from july through june of next year the total cost about 1.8 million but um you know you're you're used to because i present and emphasize so much about the education fund and that's where the majority of our expenditures do come from but when it comes to support staff they're really funded from lots of different sources so the impact on the education fund is about 650 000 per year but the operations from the education fund again we do those transfers now it's about 360. so the total impact on the education fund is about 1 million dollars per year operations fund 340 and then food service is a big portion of that um at about 150 000 but she nancy milspall is one of the folks in our our administrative group who's most adamant that we need to address this to address her staffing for this fall and then other funds that includes all those grant funds and and all kinds of uh from special ed to title one to title four to um you know all the other funds that support our support staff so there's the the total cost we are able to uh accomplish this without affecting the money that's on the table for collective bargaining or sacrificing any other initiatives that we plan as a district as a matter of fact as we enter the strategic planning you know that we participating up to this point and through this summer doing this now basically says we value this as much so much that we're taking this and allocating it before we finish the collector or the uh the strategic planning process so we know we take care of this this issue that we know is is important for us and as always we know you're always very interested in the impact it has on individual groups and individuals chad showed you the overall support staff matrix all the line items and plus we have people beyond the matrix and with that we just want to show you the examples the stories of the impact of a few employee groups so this is an example for of three positions special education ta administrative assistant and bus driver and the impact it would be and as you'll see below the little disclaimer there and the examples based on zero years of experience for the 2020 21 school year and then with one year of experience going into this school year so if they came with us last year they're returning for this year what the increase will be within nine percent so um you notice special education ta 11.77 cents that is counting a one dollar referendum increase to this year with the nine percent increase 12.96 cents an hour and that still includes the one dollar referendum administrative assistant 15 and 20 cents which includes one dollar referendum pay and then it will go up to 16.79 again one dollar referendum that referendum dollar matters and then the bus driver go from 1967 they do have two dollars on the hour based on referendum pay and that'll move them up to 21.62 with a nine percent increase in the two dollars referendum pay so overall the impact there for special education ta for a year is over thirteen hundred dollars of income that will be coming home to them and their families administrative assistant a little over twenty seven hundred dollars and a bus driver a little over fourteen hundred dollars a year and that's all based on their days hours worked and things like that there could be some exclusions if their days and hours may be slightly different than other groups but that is a base generality of the experience so we did want to give you a brief overview of the why why we seek this is going to be important for us to be competitive in our market give our students the best people to be able to recruit and retain the best employees we're excited for this opportunity we're excited we have the funding to be able to support this and we believe our employees deserve it and i thank you for your time thank you are there questions that colleagues might have while we have mr phillips and dr please i do i do have a question can you go back to the matrix please and this is just me learning the classifications rules can you can you sort of give me on a population basis how many people are at the top versus middle low is it pretty even or is there some you know concentricity in one part of that matrix um there is certainly some concentricity the the um basically five to seven range is going to be the largest group and that's on teaching assistance across we have a wide variety of types of teaching assistants but generally they're going to be in that that five to seven range then there are probably the i said largest group and it could still be but very close to that throughout the middle is going to be administrative assistants custodians um teresa you can yell one out if i'm if i'm missing uh building technology specialists at the at the the beginning level what'd you say uh miss heine [Music] yeah so school nurses that are non-rnc lpns so they're going to be in the middle section and then they're the fewest people in the upper section and those are going to be skilled trades rns building technology folks that are in more specialized positions than the general tech hr supports right the the um the 260-day support payroll folks in this building that work 260 days doing financial and hr work are going to be in that bus drivers are that 16b line so that's a pretty good uh group of people as well 100 or so folks good that help yep it does it does one one more question do you guys feel like you understand how we got you know so far behind maybe what what some other districts were were at was it something in our processes or it seemed like in the original statement that maybe we fell a little bit behind in in some of our pay i couldn't tell you exactly why other than the fact that some districts around us are faster growing and so faster growing districts are going to you know basically the amount of money we we receive from the state is the number of kids times the formula amount and so a district that that increases in enrollment by six percent in a year is going to experience a lot of increase in revenue and be able to allocate that of course there's increased demand on staff but usually if you're big enough there's economies of scale with that that adding a few in a place doesn't necessarily add a position and so you're allowed to increase we're thankful that we are a very stable enrollment school and have been for gosh over over a decade that our growth is is slow but steady and we very rarely experience any declines or or rapid increases that we have to react to probably the reason we don't build schools often here like other districts have to westfield washington has mentioned often here that's a district that would be exploding with growth building schools hiring staff and competing in the indianapolis market not necessarily things that we've had to do and so a combination of those things very low growth in revenues very low growth in the number of students yeah that's that's a summary where i would say we are just kind of follow up on miss wieldon's questions um can you looking back can you identify a point in time when we started to realize i mean what initiated the study were we already having hiring issues when we started the study in 2016 it was really one of dr quick's outgoing you know he wanted to as he left he wanted to take care of as many things as he could and it was one of the things he said let's address any issues we have support with support staff and let me take care of that before i leave and and that was great and it reset and got us to at least where we were very competitive in most of our positions in between that time basically if you if you think about 2016 today and how the the soon after 2016 is when you started seeing some of the uh you know 350 signing bonus at taco bell and sixty thousand dollar pay here those things just started to grow in the market we didn't initiate participation in this study the the group that organized it recognized the issue for all districts in the state and said we will put this together and as long as you participate and send us your data on each position and what you pay them we will give you all the data back so that you can use it to evaluate where you are so it was it was not until receiving that we realized how uh we knew we had some difficulty hiring in specific positions but didn't really have the realization that we were um we were lagging in you know broadly across all position types from a support staff perspective and do you have any reason to believe we won't with these changes we won't be in good shape come to fall certainly can't guarantee anything but i did ask dr bozeman to check with his folks and and um and ms heine to say if we were to do nine percent do your hiring managers feel like it's significant enough to make a difference in hiring folks because if it's not let's look at it and make some changes and uh their response was we think it's it's adequate enough that it makes a significant enough difference not only to hire but to retain our folks that are saying you know what i i think one of the quotes i got is we have people leaving for a nickel i will leave this position go somewhere else for a for a nickel on the on the hour and this helps us you know compete with in the market today but you know depending on what happens with the market we could be in a better position a month from now that we are now and we could be in a worse position thank you are there other comments questions thank you all very much okay dr roberts we got four a through l yeah we have quite the list of uh requests for approval for you so i'll run through those you can choose how to approach them so we start with just the regular school board meeting the minutes of from may 10th so that was the one prior to this one a list of supplemental contracts provided to you as well as field trips and professional leaves school fundraisers a part of your packet just a couple of those i believe from claims and payroll standpoint we do have two sets of claims one dated today and then a pre-run docket from the month of may so june 14th a little over 1.6 million dollars the month of may about 7.8 million dollars in claims for your approval additionally we have a few payrolls there from march 29th change that date at the top to let's see through the june 4th pay actually so it says eight for eleventh i need to change that to june 4th that total is about 10 million dollars you look at may 7th covers work days 4 12 to 4 23 normal payroll may 21st 426 to 57 normal payroll may 27th summer payoff option for 50 individuals we do have individuals who choose to take the summer pay in one chunk versus having it spread out over the course of the summer it's 44 teachers and six retirees um then we have june 4th covers work days may 10th may 21st it does include some covert stipends that you approved as well as a half day pay for teachers when they work that extra time to end and finish the school year when we had moved their final day to the beginning of the school year to start on august the 10th instead of august 6th i believe and then we also have our stipends from the spring that are appendices in our collective bargaining agreement from coaching and other other responsibilities and duties so a lot of different things covered in those payrolls so the claims of payroll is a part of the request additionally we have a dual language grant application it's an annual application that we complete through the indiana department of education it helps us with our legato spanish immersion academy at clifty creek elementary school sr3 has been referenced already tonight so the sr3 grant application is up for your approval we have a resolution for additional administrator days due to covet 19.