I am, um, board members have asked all the questions that I would have thought of, um, and I am so glad that we are moving forward and that this will be in place for next school year. Um, my only question is when we call a discipline incident for an elementary school, is that very clearly defined so that it is understood at every elementary school that that's a definition of it? Because I know there's sometimes what we might think is a discipline incident, maybe someone else doesn't. So, I just want to make sure that are those clearly defined? Because even on this data that we had from uh, the data slide where it said students of had seven or more discipline incidents, what what was what qualified it as a discipline incident? That That's a great question. Um, our code of conduct is very specific in the student handbook.
Um you know, Jim is can probably speak to it a little bit as well, but I give you that's sort of an overarching you know, view of what what it has. >> So so part of the switch Mark is and has been um the the reasoning behind it is one is not supported at the state level, right? So iPass is not a state certified program. We're we're one of two districts in the entire Commonwealth that still used iPass. And the the move to PowerSchool allows us to to really modernize where our student management system is and to ensure all the data we've struggled for 15 16 years uh making sure data is accurate and whatever we're publishing to the state that really has an impact on chapter 70 funding, has an impact on um you know, if you're classified students as as English learning students or students with special education plans, um that data is getting cleaned up now as well.
>> Right. Those two that those two last years, I don't know. We have five long-term subs right now. >> There's your savings and your personnel lines. >> You're playing you're you're paying those people a bachelor's one level. >> Are they mostly specialists like at the high school? >> No, they're all over. So the these would be the reason they are considered right in long-term sub is because they do not hold certification. five. >> So, um had some ELLL questions. The Moroan remaining tutor being cut confirmation child children they work with no longer need them. >> And one of the things we're clarifying, Mr. Messing, links crossed, >> it is still there. He's doing it via contracted services that month. So, >> okay. shift contracting services and then I thought that when I spoke to someone they said that the ELLL person at four corners also does that.
But I do think thinking about what is our role here. If our role is to take whatever is handed to us, then I guess I would have stayed home. Do you know what I mean? I I don't mean that fresh. I I mean that sincerely. If our goal is to take a school budget that is handed to me or any budget that anybody hands me and say, "I don't do anything more about that. I'm just going to put that forward. It's perfect." I think that we're very intelligent people and if we could offer a few suggestions kindly, which which is what I thought that's all. >> Right. We got member Childs and member Goodwin. Oh, >> probably go to good one first just for ease of turning the laptop. >> All right, member Goodman then member Charles. >> I feel like we're lost in the weeds.
But I really urge the library to come in with a plan that may be sustainable and that we're targeting those areas like we are right now with Molokai and some of these other areas because we have to start to be mindful of >> [clears throat] >> you know, what we can afford and what we can do and how we're going to the future on this. I I believe firmly on literacy and helping our students. But again, just because you have a library at home and we have a library at home and tell you, after my son reaches a certain age, they don't look at those books at all. They're on their devices. So, maybe we have to send them audiobooks or something. But we really have to keep up with the times and I think that we need to look into the future and how we do this.
They're on Medicaid, we know this. They're They are demanding they perform full-time labor without pay and that leaves only two realistic options. Either you keep paying your bills and you watch your loved one enter costly nursing home care. Or you attempt to provide that unpaid care yourself and you eventually experience homelessness. That's That is the trap. This bill here disarms that trap. It forces the state to actually think, Okay, Ian "Can this person really really take care of that person?" Yes, thank you very much. Okay, anybody else wishing to testify in HB 2009.
I think it's about 17 pages long. Um, and in addition to having those matrices in writing, I also work with the TOSAs and the deans to do training so that we do some calibration. Uh, aggression, for example, is one that can sometimes be, um, somewhat subjective what is a disruptive incident versus, um, a minor aggressive act. So, we talk through those sorts of things and we'll continue to refine and make sure that we all have, um, shared understanding of of what is a major incident. In addition to the number of major incidents, you also look at the types of disruption in order to define a tier three student. A tier three student is not someone who has seven incidents of an attendance violation. This is someone who has some aggressive acts, might have some elopement. Um, we sadly have some students that have, um, led to crisis calls or might have some self-harm conversation.
I I I can't you know, shout out Gretchen uh King's um you know, work behind the scenes and Chris as well attending these meetings. Seems like every single day. Uh I don't know if it is or not, but uh I know Gretchen was on for 3 hours yesterday um ensuring the data gets moved forward. So, even having conversations Kelly was on yesterday. What does it look like at the high school? What do what do the ranks look like? What's what's the rank book? Uh how do you how do you calculate GPA? How do you uh have forward-facing information that's distributed to families? Uh we are now moving away from those if you if you're at the high school, it's probably the blue form uh that came home with with all of the the data that you had to cross out and send it back in and administrative assistants were sitting there looking through 800 of these to check and verify that all the data was correct.
Yes, a lot of that was for train some some was for translation purposes. They do that and >> we have personnel doing that now and we also have programs >> phoning in programs or even an iPad that if somebody was to walk up to a desk in each school that they can do and have a you truly have a conversation right there. >> Yes, they charge per minute. >> Yes, they do. Then another ELLL question is are we having five or four? Um because presentation slide 42 we list five but then the total number is four and on on the little box to the side and on the budget draft lines 135 to 40. >> So yeah there's the there >> what budget lines did you say? plan is the plan was the new ask was so we currently have four there's five that's in the FY27 so that on the the the line item thing should be five there are four sitting here today um one new shares between Fedville and Newton what four corners one Greenfield middle one Greenfield high currently >> they have to move around only one does one does it So another question I was asked was asked every single year why four corners has the higher budget of the three elementary schools by a noticeable amount.
Once again, the process is the issue. The process keeps changing in Greenfield for like the conversation. I've been doing this a long time. The process from Mayor Martin to Roxan Weeden Gardner. A phone call between a superintendent and a mayor. Mayor gives the superintendent a number. The superintendent says, "Oh, that can't work." And then the mayor says, "Well, I could find this." I've stood in a room when those conversations were happening on a phone. Then the superintendent makes a budget within the mayor's number. That's somehow in the last five six years it has become the school committee makes a budget puts it in front of the mayor and says you have to produce this amount of money and then I've watched city council I've watched the mayor everybody be blamed people cry little children in green suits brought forward to public comment. Really not a good process.
So, but having said that, recommendation is to amend. Any discussion, members? Hearing none, chair votes I. Members, HB 1934 chairs, we're going to issue a pass for the amendment. Chair votes I. Noting excused of Senator Kidani and Fukunaga. Any members voting with reservations or no? With all those voting I, recommendations adopted. Okay, and with that, we have adjourned. >> have one more, right? Oh, one more. I thought I just did that one. Okay. Okay, sorry about that. House Bill 2567 House Draft 1. This is establishes the early childhood education investment special fund. There was nobody here to testify on this measure. So, I am going to recommend we defer. Okay. Unless anybody has any opposition. Okay, with that, we are adjourned and we will that our chair only now arrived. I've been here all the time. >> [laughter] >> Thank you very much for your patience.
Members, any questions? Okay, seeing none, moving on. HB 2007 relating to household independent care services tax credit. First up, Hawaii Department of Taxation providing comments. Thank you very much. OHA, Office of Hawaiian Affairs in support. Hawaii Public Health Institute, Chris Colfield in support. And you can slow down because of the testimony. Okay, very good. Um >> Aloha. Chris Colfield from the Hawaii Public Health Institute. We're in strong support of this bill. As you know, child care has become exorbitantly expensive in the state of Hawaii. There have been studies that show that more than 20 Child care can cost more than $24,000 per year on infant care and in many cases over $2,700 per month. It's so that means that Hawaii families are spending 13 and 1/2% of their income on child care, which is the highest share in the country. This measure would be a tremendous boost for that.
So, those are the students that there are very few of across our district, but they do, um, require quite a bit of our time and our support. And those are the students we want to be more clearly defining who is tier three. Okay. Thank you so very much. All right. Uh, next would be called to the public. We don't have any cards, so we'll skip over that and go to the consent agenda. Do I have any motions? Motion to approve as written. Second. Lisa, I have a motion and a second. Ben Owens. Aye. Lisa Garcia. Aye. Carolyn Lopez. Aye. Patty Cuchran. Aye. All right. First action item is discussion and possible approval of the personnel schedule. So, Mr. Beckett's not here, so Dr. Lotman.
This is now going to be on families to do electronically. Uh yeah, yeah, exactly. Um I've been promising Linda Cheney for 16 years and finally we're going to get it done. Um but it's really all of the data that Mike collects through Open Architects is really still going to be the data for uh analyzing uh test scores, um progress of say I-Ready or whatever it is. It's that's not really the tool uh for for PowerSchool, uh although it will have some capacity to do those things. Um Special education for instance, we are not transitioning into PowerSchool this year. It's a that's a full year process too because we have to actually input all of the IEPs by hand to ensure they're accurate. So, I I said to Brett, "We'll push that back a year." And instead of moving away from They're forms, yeah. Yeah, so it's it's really time and labor intensive, right?
>> It's pairs. >> Yep. The the I the answer I've always uh heard and given is that it's the sped paras specifically for the ASUS program where a lot of kids need one-on- ones. So, um, a question that came up from telling that to someone was, "How many of our ACES one-on-one pairs are assigned to kids who are not full day students? And would it be possible for pairs of halftime or part-time kids to shift to one of the other elementary schools when their charge isn't at the school in order to relieve the other school's parent crunch?" >> So, I talked to Mr. messing and he mentioned that there might be one who had just gone into might consider a part-time mode while some they were being they were working with this young student over there on the other side like if somebody's student is out can we just take them and move them to another building currently no due to some contractual things we'd have to and we're looking at this for next year we've ran into this problem this fall we discovered it so when somebody is hired they're potential they're hired and they say um dear blank Sally you are assigned to this school and what we're looking at next year in some positions is to say dear Sally you are a district-wide pair professional and now working here right now in each day you wouldn't want to do it because it creates a lot of movement and when somebody's student is out I can assure you truly they are not sitting around twiddling their thumbs there are many vacancies We don't get substitute teachers every day, right?
We have to be in this together. So I think we need to we have the mayor here. We have the superintendent here. Define the process because the process keeps changing and evolving based on who's sitting at this table. It was always clear. I've been an administrator since 1996. Doesn't matter where I worked. South Hadley, North Adams, Greenfield. The mayor has a city to run. The school committee has schools to oversee with a superintendent who's hired to manage all that lovely money that we give him or her. The mayor has a bigger picture than we do. They need to provide us with a number that we have to live within. If we get in trouble, say a roof blows off of one of our schools, we go to the mayor and say, "Hey, we're in trouble." She did that for a fire panel. She did that for an elevator.
[clears throat] We're convening the committees on education and Water Land Culture and the Arts. Appreciate everyone's um uh consideration while we had multiple other agendas in the other room. I apologize. Up first on this measure is HB 2592 relating to the Mauna Kea Stewardship Oversight Authority. I'll note we have everyone's written testimony, so to the extent that we can be very concise, it would be appreciated. Um we'll be limiting folks to 1 minute to make sure we can get through all the testifiers. But up first is the Department of Land and Natural Resources. Good afternoon, chairs and members. Um we sent over our written testimony. However, I did want to clarify one point. So, after we submitted our testimony, um I did find out that there are certain conditions within the CDUP that may not necessarily be applicable to only the observatories. I think there are some things that are UH specific.
The skyrocketing cost of child care is an is a not just an economic issue, but a public health concern. As many of the issues that come before you are when taxpayers have to pay more for child care, then they cut back on a lot of other essential services. We would know that this is essentially a fix to Act 163 from 2023, which increased the amount that taxpayers could claim under the household independent care credit, but failed to increase the percentage of expenses that they could claim and didn't adjust the thresholds accordingly. So, it severely restricted its impact, but we're in strong support of this bill. We'd love to see you move it forward. Thank you so much. Thank you very much. Next, we have Nicole Woo, Hawaii Children's Action Network Speaks. Nicole, oh, you're present in person. Yes, every now and then I show up in person, Chair.
What can I answer if you have any questions that I can answer? It's so much different not having Mr. Beckett there. Not as much fun. No, not as much fun for me. Uh, do you So, contracts went out over spring break. Mhm. Uh, I'm assuming that we've started to receive some of those back. Can you speak to that? I wish I could. I cannot. What I can can do is I can we can check into the system and see how many, um, have been returned. They went out on the 16th. Okay. Do you do recall when they're due cuz I don't right offhand. I want to say it was like 2 weeks. April 2nd. April 2nd. >> They They got a little bit longer because they came out at spring break. >> Yep. Okay. Uh, that was just certified classified. They already got theirs and administered it.
But to ensure it's accurate. So, but as we begin next year, new IEPs, those can be you know, um input as we're going through the process, but it's really exciting. It's just a lot of work. It if rolling over one system to another, there's going to be some redundancy first for a little while, but this is going to be rolled out July 1st. So, staff can start using it for scheduling and and you know, classroom. It's really great. Thank you. All set? Yeah. Okay, next up Chris, student activities bank reconciliations. Good evening. Within your packets, you'll there are the FY25 and the first half of FY26 student activity reconciliations. I've reviewed and reconciled the accounts and I'm requesting your approval to to accept the reconciliations.