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can you join us in the pledge of allegiance of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with [Music] absolutely trust here no here are here person [Music] wounds here shang weisberg here we are five tonight okay oh and here comes some more winners all right [Music] hello just stay here present good do we have any correspondence none that's reasonable no we don't have any questions it doesn't look like there are any visitors tonight so and we know um student reports so we're on to new business all right well thank you um thanks everybody for being here braving the cold and uh at the same time we've tried to keep this meeting um relatively short so there's no uh student activities report tonight nor is there a team presentation we just thought with um the copa numbers the way they are that we would just err on the side of caution so in addition as you know there's a relatively short amount of time between the december meeting and the january meeting so we do not have any items for curriculum instruction and assessment uh the personnel items are included in the human resources report so you can have a look at those there and that'll be part of the consent agenda and we do have a couple uh items in the business section so sean take it away uh the first thing is um steve uh brittany and i uh completed the audit um or the request for services um for auditing services uh the request for proposal i should say we sent out nine packets to uh various certified public accounting firms we received seven back um of the seven we did interview four of them we chose not to interview evoy cam schulte jacobs who is our current auditor because we already kind of know everything about them um the interviews went very well and we were able to narrow down to two firms and at the end uh after some discussion and analysis we are going to be recommending tonight to the board of education toward the contract for audit services to launder bach and almond at a cost not to exceed eighty six thousand seven hundred dollars for the life of the three year contract and just uh you know for comparison um this is more um than what we were paying um currently but is the uh almost the similar price as to what evoy cam schulte and jacobs um quoted us as we change to a modified accrual um basis hey can i please have a motion to so move second okay any questions i got a question sure what didn't you like about our existing guy um the we've been with them for so long we don't have a specific policy on rotation but their firm is really shrunk in size and we were looking for a change in our auditing partners in order to do that they don't have the manpower to change um who is overseeing our audit to get a fresh set of eyes so here's the answer you wanted a fresh set of eyes well the answer is that a good practice is to rotate your auditing team every five years um if you can do that within a firm because of the size of the firm you can rotate your partner but because of the size of evoy we they just we just can't do that okay can i make a couple of i'm sorry is moving to the accrual basis more complicated in terms of the auditing in the accounting is that does that change things a bit correct okay sorry you gotta raise your hands i'm raising my hand but no one's calling up no i just i wanted to make um a couple of quick comments um first of all uh i did sit through the interviews um with truan and brittany and i just want the board to know that sean and brittany really impressed me they put together really good thorough questions and they engaged each of the people that were interviewed um they i thought they asked good questions they really got a good understanding what the different forms were about and what they would offer us and i just want to give them a shout out because i you know if you didn't see the process you don't appreciate what they did for us and i think they went with the firm that they didn't originally think they were going to go with in response to the what they saw and then also they followed up on the references and spoke with people about the different firms and so they put a lot of effort into it i just want to give them a shout out having said that i just want to also point out that there were other differences with the firms that they really uh focus on for example there were more quality control and reviewed by other partners within within the firm the firm that we're picking is focuses on governmental services everyone in their firm does some kind of government work and the they've developed this area of expertise with school districts uh and have really been pleasing a lot of their clients um and impress this in the in the calls i just um i just thought the process went really well and they did a great job and um happy with how they handled it now that he said that you're not asking for our grades no [Laughter] nothing 100.
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uh all right we resume back in open session uh can everyone please stand for the pledge of allegiance nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all right does anybody have anything to add to the agenda can i please have a motion to approve the agenda second vivian and lauren peter yes yes uh next item accomplishment recognition mr gold all right we're gonna start with uh we've got a lot of a lot of accomplishments to honor tonight um so thank you all for making uh making a trip here tonight we appreciate it uh we're gonna start with our december student of the month and can i call it braylon evans please raylen can you come on up we're spreading that there he is [Applause] brethren i'm going to have your teacher mrs going to come up and talk about you for a second here she nominated you so we nominate students each month getting nominated in the staff votes on a student of the month and in the nomination mrs foseka listed a lot of great things about you uh so i'm going to let her talk to you i didn't have enough room to list everything all right so the reason i picked braelyn for student of the month is because he exhibits what it means to be a star student here at big hollow every single day there's not a day that goes by that he does not exhibit these characteristics he is always respectful to his teachers his classmates he's always helpful he always wants to do his very very best i mean he sees one of his classmates not understand what they're supposed to do he quietly walks over and helps him out explains it and he goes right back to his own work he is just an awesome all-around kid and he's just fabulous so that's why i uh that's why i nominated him it doesn't doesn't get any better than that so when i went in bradley's classroom and told him he got through the month this was the expression i got it didn't it didn't change it didn't change let's get a picture with us okay all right thank you braelyn all right we do the same for employees each month and we have people nominate employees and then they vote on who was nominated and this month very very much very well-deserved jackie lasky who is our transportation secretary jackie come on up and mrs arndt is going to share a few words about jackie jackie is amazing i wish i could spend an hour and tell you how wonderful she's been she joined the transportation department in a new role this year organized great to work with great was communicating with parents with students with staff with bus drivers you guys don't know what goes on behind the scenes all you know is we get the buses there and try to get the buses there safely and on time every day this woman and also our transportation director mr swederski are miracle workers they work extremely hard to make sure that we have coverage she's not only answering the phone she's driving the bus almost every day helping us out so jackie you are wonderful i am so lucky that i get to work with you so congratulations of well deserved okay now we are recognizing and this is why most of you are here recognizing those of you who have put so much time and effort into extracurricular activities whether it be sports fine arts and you're also excelling in the classroom and that's that really is uh you're setting a high standard and we really appreciate that you're representing your school very very well so we want to acknowledge that i'm going to start please forgive me for mispronouncing any names here because i might i'm going to start with cross country and we'll just we'll call you all up and then we'll take a quick picture and then we'll let you go so joshua bowker is joshua here okay tyler tyler walls i think tyler's here i saw him tyler and bobby lamatea come on bobby bobby there we go okay awesome okay oh good mom right here all right thank you [Applause] oh okay now we're basketball uh sean ski okay brody lyons [Applause] justin liam morales [Applause] danny patel [Applause] madeleine schneider [Applause] and these students have maintained a 4.0 grade point average catherine danka [Applause] and ryan kedlick [Applause] oh and some of these do have more than one sport so some were involved in multiple sports so we'll take a quick picture here anybody that wants it all right thank you very much [Applause] okay i have one for just soccer andrew wirth it's andrew all right andrew you get a solo picture all right these are just softball emma malik is emma here and caitlin the manson all right okay okay cheerleading and dance cali [Applause] did i say that bad not too bad all right [Applause] okay fine arts uh we got a lot here emma corbett emma corbett okay sophie dollinger i don't think sophie's here uh isabella gorski isabella here all right these are fine arts and maintaining a 4.0 great player evelyn vassey [Music] [Applause] isabella ellington [Applause] thank you so much claire herron [Applause] addison smith and cayden zeller [Applause] all right thank you so much [Applause] all right we are also going to honor the grant junior bulldogs uh both cheerleading and football so grant junior bulldog cheerleading uh kaya helbig helbling nope okay kaden zeller uh sabells um slide him sabella slide him uh brianna miyake addison mrwinsky addison all right and hannah jones i saw hannah here quick picture here thank you very much since mr lyons coaches the junior bulldogs football i'm gonna let mr lyons announce these guys uh these are for all the kids that got over a 3.5 gpa while participating in football a dakota bar henry quigley [Applause] kaden gulliford [Applause] brody lyons [Applause] colton selders logan sledzik [Applause] ethan justin and connor evans all right congrats boys parents you should all be very proud because they're they're model students and athletes and fine arts performers and we just you know you're you should be very proud that they're able to maintain that type of academic performance while staying involved in in their school so you should be very proud and i hope that you all continue that work as you go on through big hollow and to high school so thank you and and feel free to stay around but you're welcome to leave two years not rude don't worry thank you [Applause] thank you correct okay take a picture with them i'm buying pizza for lunch kevin wow all right oh look nobody stayed yeah thank you uh board member code of conduct review mrs plusha i will represent all school district con constituents honestly and equally and refuse to surrender my responsibilities to special interests or partisan political groups thank you anybody have any questions on the consent agenda before kevin i just wanted to mention a couple things on consent before we prove it because i know we talked about uh reviewing the policy or the committee meetings and i want to let you know that we had policy committee met i did not put the press edition on this agenda because there's some follow-up issues i want to have with our attorney so i'll bring it to you in february it would have doubled the size of this uh i think it was 350 pages actually on the policy agenda but so it'll be coming in february but i'm getting some clarification on a few things before we take it and then the building grounds transportation committee um we we uh you'll see some notes in there you might want to take a look at we we've got a lot of stuff we talked about but if you have any questions anything just let me know all right anybody have any questions okay please have a motion to approve the consent agenda motion second lauren and vivian yes did we have any public comments superintendents report mr gold all right it's just two items tonight first one is uh just to have a covid19 discussion um i want to give you just a cover a few bullet points first is just uh the updated guidance i sent out to all of you on friday parents as well that guidance was sent to us by idph by the health local health department um there are some districts that haven't haven't moved there yet because idph did say there's going to be uh they said this is what the guidance is but they're going to like provide school specific detailed tool kit is what they say so we took the guidance and we just we know it's coming we took it made our own and made our own tool kit i guess because i don't know when they're gonna have that out so we thought it would be over the weekend but so we didn't want to be surprised on monday so i know that big hollow i know gavin fox lake i know lake zurich followed suit i know there's some districts uh for sure on the east side of the county that followed suit and went out and sent it out same time i did but there were some districts that did not so just so you know that but um uh we have obviously a current spike going on right now last week we hit highs in the mid 60s for a number of staff and students with that are testing positive it went down a little bit today to 56 but that's you know i'm not going to say we're on a downward trend yet um we have we also went down in the number of people who are ice isolated quarantined to 190 under under 200 which have been over 200 for a few days that also is probably uh that might be impacted more by the shortened quarantine time um i can't compliment jen berg and liz villagomas enough and our building principles because they are all trying to solve a puzzle every day filling holes with staff positions that we don't have filled and moving people around and so it's a challenge every night i know that i know that the night before a school day and one of them was last night on a sunday night i know they were all talking because i was in on some of those conversations trying to figure out what to do for the next day so those those people working really hard and also our nurses are really uh as well at a time where this has been challenging for them uh more so than any time this year i would say the last two weeks has been tough transportation is the one that uh um we're we're making it and we're doing okay but it's it's one that i you can't just find bus drivers so we start losing bus drivers we're down to where we we we were you know a route short or anything like that but we're making it work so um testing supplies is something i want to bring up we uh we have what we need so far but but we are running short so one one building ran out today so they're using some from the middle school the the supplies that we are strong in are the ones that the people that signed up for the weekly tests that one we get we have plenty of those that when they take the tests they take it home with them they take the test that night they bring it back the next day and then we ship it out that the courier comes and picks it up that day and then that night they have results so if you take it one day you get the results the next night so it's a pretty good test we have about a hundred kids that are doing that every week but we also might start using those tests for tests to stay students that are in the test to stay program um as far as mitigation strategies you know we've emphasized the staff in the classrooms to try their best to make sure students are three feet apart minimum and that's the you know that's the one area we have some control we don't have a lot of control in the lunchroom we don't have a lot of control at recess we don't have a lot of control in the hallways unless we really want to lock this place down and it things have functioned really well up until this point not that it's not functioning well but just society in general right now it's just all over the place and you know i was confident before christmas that kids weren't getting coveted from each other i can't say i'm that confident now i have no idea because everybody's getting it before school even started everybody was getting it so this is a different variant so i can't say that what mitigation strategies are working what or not so we we you know are we are we doing everything we could do there not not at this time i mean we we don't know what to do about breakfast we have kids that come in the morning and get breakfast we're putting out like i think it's like 800 breakfasts every day or something like that it's a large large number of breakfasts and so those kids are taking those breakfast to the classroom which means their masks are off and they're eating uh around other kids so there's you know we are doing that we don't have we don't have any other place to take those kids to have breakfast um so that's a but that's something you know if this doesn't get better soon uh in the in the community then you know might have to look at something there but um well if you take breakfast away how would if they're eating breakfast here that means they're not eating at home i know that's why we don't want to take it away right i was thinking that uh we might have to look at like other locations or something how how to spread those kids out i didn't send it home with them the day before you know miss visica had that idea and i haven't checked to make sure that that's doable it might be it might be um the only thing we can't send home with them is the milk yeah uh the uh um the only the one challenge there will be i gotta make we would we could we could overcome it if they say it's okay because the state has some they have some regulations we've got to follow on that to because it's all reimbursable um we can get we if they say it's okay then we can do that um with the exception of milk obviously i just got to figure out a way to make sure those kids don't eat those on the bus because the buses will be met trashed but uh what i'd want them to eat it the next morning for breakfast but um janine actually gave me that idea last week and i haven't followed up yet can you buy a different kind of milk like sometimes when i buy like the single serving like the organic milk cause it has a different encasement yeah i have to look and see but anyway that's uh you know um you know open to your input on athletics i know that that's we're getting ready to start another season uh there's some i was on some email a superintendent emails today they were asking about that and it's just so that our our conference schools are really all over the map on how they're we're dealing with athletics some of them are forcing all wrestlers wrestling is the one that's been a challenge for some schools some of them are forcing all wrestlers to test weekly we've chosen not to do any force testing on anyone so i would say from the comments i got from the schools that that were the superintendents were talking today it's about half and half half were forcing it half or not um so are they still going to participate yeah with well they may that's the thing i think there might be some schools that say since big hollow is not forcing their wrestlers to test they may not wrestle against us that's possible they didn't say it in the email but it's possible so we'll have to see what happens they kind of alluded that's why they're asking so i don't know what your thoughts are it's a board about that but we've we i know we talked this summer about not forcing any family to take the test but making it optional for me it's all about parental permission the parents say yes you can test then you can test i don't think is a yeah school i mean that's just yeah i don't think that that needs to be a school decision it's a parent parent decision parents have to realize if they say no and their kid doesn't the other school doesn't let their kid wrestle against them that could be a consequence but that's out of our control that's my thought and i don't think we should cancel sports fine arts anything these kids need something they cannot do what we did last year that can happen yeah no i'm with him they're playing they're figuring out ways to play band they're figuring out ways to do dance competitions they're figuring out ways to do all of this stuff gymnastics there's no reason at schools we shouldn't be doing it or offering it if parents choose not to because of the risks that's fine but i don't think there's any way we shouldn't be offering it i agree i mean that's where i'm at so i feel like we just need to keep pushing forward and just start figuring out how to live with this and it's going to get it's going to be worse at some times than others and i i don't have a none of us have this but i'm going to tell you my gut is i feel like if we if we can weather the next two or three weeks i think it's going to have to get better but is the test to stay still the same period of time even though the quarantine is not uh no actually we're doing tests to stay on i think uh i'd have to confirm with dr pittman but i think we're doing it twice instead of three times just doing it twice and i think it's days two and four part of that's because of the lower number of tests that we have yeah so we're burning through a lot of tests so that's all i've got we're weathering it right now and i do have i do have some people i will tell you i have some people that are upset that we that we went to the five-day quarantine but i it wasn't a bob gold decision it was it was a uh all levels of government it was the you know cdc idph and we followed the guidance all along and some of the people that are upset are the same people that are happy that we have always tried to follow the guidance just the guidance right now is five days so we we move to it some school districts haven't yet but they will be they're taking a more cautious approach in that they are want to see the official like school toolkit but we we i have official i i linked all the documents in that communication i sent to parents it's official idph documents so here's the guidance five days all schools so uh i think we've followed the guidance whether we all individually agreed with it or not and yeah i think that that is the most important position we can take is follow it people aren't going to like it no matter what you do so right right all right that's all i've got on that and then uh dr king is going to kind of lead this discussion but we put a in exhibit eight you have our an update on some of the diversity equity inclusion work we've been doing and i'm going to let dr king take it away well yeah i'll mostly just answer any questions that you might have we provided that document for you we're collecting our survey for our diversity equity inclusion and belonging right now our results are if they're slowly coming in they're about as slow as our desa results for it coming in it just takes a little bit longer this year than last year since families are all trying to get caught up on life this year compared to last year but we are collecting those results till the end of the year and that's speaking to the fact that all three of our buildings have that same goal to really address this and take this this work seriously in there you'll also see some of the things that the buildings are doing and we didn't highlight input any building in particular because all three of them are doing excellent work um from our building experts we have school psychologists and social workers that are leaving leading groups on with of their teachers on like functions of behavior because sometimes we don't quite understand our children and our students and so understand the function of a behavior why student behaves a certain way there's always a reason behind it so sometimes a student may be acting out and so our goal is to try to figure out the they call it the fancy word is antecedent but what's the underlying uh thing the student is searching for whether it's attention or escape maybe they're afraid of the situation that they're in and so they're going to have a behavior and so we've got experts that are training our staff on that because that's about belonging so when students are acting out sometimes there's something they're looking for and so that's one of the things we want to talk about and discuss because that divergent thinkers some of our more intellectually different students that we want to make sure that we're supporting them and creating spaces where they feel safe we also have some of our experts are talking about gender identity or what it's like to be a non-white educator in a predominantly uh white class with a bunch of white teachers and so we've got a variety of options for our staff to be a part of and these are conversations that our classroom teachers have stepped up or our building leaders have stepped up or our social workers and said i want to be a part of the conversation and leave this conversation and so they may present their presentation to the principal i know you were as principals talking earlier today the principal is reviewing some of the conversations the powerpoint that the staff are going to be going through that is district or excuse me the teacher-led for their teacher group so that's one of the pieces then you'll also see the work that jessica has been doing with diversity to inclusion she has really been involved pretty regularly on this campus quite often for um some of our our students really need to identify a person of color who supports them and rallies behind them and so she's been meeting in groups with our families and our students on site and now more back on zoom a little bit because she lives near cps so it's been more zoom with the kids but on a very regular basis to help them identify some of the ways that they're responding to different search uh situations in ways that will be a catalyst for change and so um they're working very closely with mr shorsh who does our announcements and they've been creating announcements that we see on a regular basis at this you'll start to see teachers and students i'm doing kind of speak outs to a little bit about who i am um to help raise awareness about just the various ways that we're different and the way we want to make sure that we've create spaces of belonging so it's authentic because students are creating it we've got teachers involved in creating trainings and then we also have outside experts that are still a part of this work it's it's very much ongoing very good jessica and i have also met about on the human resource side of things i haven't pulled the whole committee together yet but she and i are just talking about how we can be more attractive to a diverse population of of applicants and not even only that but also making sure the applicants we do interview have the mindset of uh that we're looking for uh coming in so yeah that was i guess i saw the thing about the bias training on here and i didn't know if the people that that hire whether not just the principals if they do teachers the teacher level hires like the third grade team gets together and with those dumb candidates are these individual teachers and teams getting this training the implicit drug buyers training i would say yeah i would say yes yep this is really good work you guys are doing yeah very good all right thank you very much that's it for me kevin all right thank you mr gold um anybody have a question on the annual review of the closed session meeting minutes okay please have a motion to keep all closed meeting minutes in closed status motion second doug and joe uh all in favor aye aye any oppose eyes have it anybody have any questions on the december employment recommendations there's actually no report there is no report so we have no questions first time that's ever happened yeah we accepted a resignation uh from nicholas wells bus driver effective january 3rd no foia requests anybody having a question on the monthly reports and agendas the next regularly scheduled board meeting will take place monday february 14 2022 with closed session beginning at 6 00 p.m can i please have a motion to adjourn motion second joan vivian no delay that time all in favor
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again let's call our workshop meeting to order christopher espinoza uh here cheryl fuller here nancy kupka thank you jenny hagstrom here terry pavich here going to vasquez drexler here mike davenport here sounds good o'hara here and jade teledonal here thank you i think we have a quorum let's stand for the pledge of allegiance pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right and we're going to flip up the uh flip around the student perspectives tonight and start with our student board member questions and comments so scarlett and jade take it take it away you like to go first would you like me to go first okay so hello everybody welcome back to second semester so exciting so all of you um in front of you have a northwind literary calendar it's very exciting we're starting off 2022.
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unit school district board of education meeting can i have a roll call please mrs doyle here mr gatewood president mrs johnson president dr marino present mrs simonton president mrs swanson presents please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all the board of education will elect an officer for the position of secretary nominations are now in order for office of secretary are there any nominations for secretary i would like to nominate jennifer johnson second i'd like to nominate ali swanson all okay are there any other nominations for secretary no are there any further nominations for secretary are there any further nominations for secretary okay all right um if there are no further nominations uh the nominations for the office of secretary are closed um okay so we are going to take a vote all those in um favor of jennifer johnson please raise your hands do you want this no kidding okay all those in favor of ellie swanson please raise your hand stop it i'm sorry you've been here longer okay sorry jennifer johnson received the majority of the votes cast and is elected secretary to the board of education congratulations jennifer [Applause] i think it's fantastic jennifer if you would like to move over to the secretary oh my goodness i've got my whole area she needs some help right do you want do you want help got pretty cozy you sure did 5.1 public hearing concerning the intent of the board of education to sell not to exceed 18 million dollars working cash fund bonds for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund of the district tonight's meeting will start with a public hearing concerning the board of education of sd 308 kendall kane and will counties illinois proposal to sell working cash fund bonds in an amount not to exceed 18 million dollars to increase the working cash fund of sd 308 we will therefore have two opportunities for public comment tonight the first opportunity will be during the public hearing on the proposed issuance of working cash fund bonds if you wish to make a comment about this proposed bond issuance please make it during the public comment portion of this hearing if you wish to make a comment about some other matter unrelated to the public hearing on the proposal to sell working cash fund bonds you may do so during the second opportunity for public comment after the public hearing this is the public hearing convened by the board of education of community unit school district 308 to receive public comments on the proposed issuance of working cash fund bonds not to exceed 18 million for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund of sd 308 at this time i would like to ask our administration if they have additional information to share about the proposed issuance of working cash fund bonds being presented tonight no no further information at this time okay we have no comment for this oh no comment no okay um and no written testimony okay thank you so um all persons desiring to be heard have been given an opportunity to present oral and written testimony with respect to the proposed issuance of the bonds the board shall not adopt a resolution to sell the bonds for a period of seven days after the final adjournment of the hearing at this time i asked for a motion and second to adjourn the public hearing followed by a roll call vote i make a motion towards during the public hearing mrs simultan aye dr marino aye mr gatewood aye mrs swanson aye mrs dorial aye mrs johnson aye motion passes six zero now we will have public comment on behalf of the board of education i would like to thank the public for attending tonight's meeting we value the feedback we receive from our residents and encourage everyone to take an active interest in their public school system residents interested in speaking to the board this evening are asked to have completed a comment card and presented it to the secretary to the board when the secretary calls your name i ask that you come to the microphone state your name for the public record and provide your feedback please note that comments are limited to three minutes per person for a total of 30 minutes no discussion of personnel matters or responses to questions are permitted the board does not participate in discussion during public comment if your questions or concerns require follow-up a member of the administration will reach out through the contact information provided on the comment card thank you jennifer stamp my name is prior to now i can't see any scenarios i called my daughter out of school today for mental people care health each other's health where they care about overwhelming hospitals that compromise safety educators is after two years thank you mom the ninja very very quick tonight i uh wanted to start off by thanking the school for getting the children back into school today in person it has done so much good for both my son and my daughter since they've been allowed to come back to this school i just i really appreciate it everything going on yes cases are way up but hospitalizations are way down depths are half of what they were in january but regardless of the point i wanted to say thank you for having kids in and i also wanted to do a special thank you to uh anne marie ryzen who's the special pet coordinator at thompson along with chelsea bailey the social worker over there for the work they've done with my son over the last two months so i really appreciate the work they create two great individuals that work for the school district thank you drew nicholson all right um i just wanted to uh come forward and thank the board for all the work that you're continuing to do um i did want to say that i know that there's been a lot of stuff in the news lately about a lawsuit representing some 800 parents against a number of school districts they claim to be the majority i just wanted to say that in my hand here i have a website petition eye in favor of the mass mandate in favor of vaccinations in 36 hours we have almost a thousand signers so people who say that they're the majority may not actually be the majority but i do want to thank the lord for all the work that you've been doing and i hope that you will continue to take into account these you know very unique times and remember that there is an opportunity to take an adaptive cause or district if it becomes necessary i know that hospitalizations of vaccinated people are down but it is still a problem and just because you might not die getting exception coed can have a massive impact on your life for a very long time for my thank you we'll move on now to board member comments um does anyone on the board like to make a comment tonight i'd like to start last board meeting some of our members who attended the illinois association of school boards reported out on their experience in that in that conference and i too attended the conference and as a part of my responsibilities i am the delegate assembly representative for our board and i my responsibility is to vote on the board's behalf on the resolutions that come before the assembly and i wanted to just kind of briefly share what the experience was um within the assembly and it's um it's an opportunity for our the district members to have voice and to provide direction for the illinois association of school boards and so we do that by debating and drafting resolutions that are important to the education of our students in the state of illinois and so one of the just to give you an example one of the resolutions and before i say that all of the resolutions that we voted on are on the school boards on the district's website and you can see how we voted as a block of in of individuals for for our district and so for instance one of the resolutions that came before the board was regarding pre-service teacher education and licensures in literature and so what that amounts to is the fact that we they wanted to know whether or not teachers needed more support and more skills to deliver the type of of of learning that's needed for our students to excel in reading and is one of the one of the things that's happening with not within our district is that we have a spotlight on reading um for for our students and improving those those test scores in reading and it's one of one of our our priorities and our focus is um as a as a as a framework and so as an example one of what what they do within the assembly is they allow testimony and so that's anyone within the assembly who's interested in getting up and speaking on behalf or on in support or in opposition to the resolution and one of the students got up and she was a a young teacher she was in the top 10 percent of her class in her in her college and she she spoke about an experience where she had to take the the educational exam that all teachers have to take and she came back to her professor because one of the um one of the questions on the exam had to do with um the initials cvc and she said she had never seen those initials she had never in in all of her learning heard or or had been exposed to it and what her professor told her was that it stood for consonant vowel consonant and she was she said to her professor why have i not been exposed to this why do i not know how to teach um and what skills do i need to teach students how to read and so she was obviously in support of that particular resolution as were was the the um the the assembly in its uh totality so it was voted to have a resolution that would then go would be a part of the policies of the illinois association of school boards and then they would then go in support of that with regard to the state of illinois so that's kind of how it works and that was just one of 17 resolutions that we voted on that day oh can i just give a shout out to the human library so i don't know if you're all aware but on martin luther king day the human library which is an international organization and they partner with our school district to bring the human library in a virtual form and what that is is it's where people are books and reading is a conversation so you log on individuals then are placed in rooms where they can ask questions of of these books and these books are people who who have lived experiences in all different areas of life and they're interested in sharing their their their lived experience with with uh with the readers and so i would encourage anyone who's interested in you know just exploring more about different um individuals who they might have questions about how their lifestyles how they live um you know march 17th monday at 12 noon you can log on she stole my thunder oh i'm sorry that's okay um i just i just want to give a little bit of a personal uh note here so every year for myself i always have a personal theme last year was what's the best that can happen versus what's the worst can happen this year is assuming assume positive intent so as we start to um move forward in bringing our students back today we do know that we are going to have a lot of absences teacher absences bus driver absences support staff and student absence i ask that everybody kind of hop on the bandwagon with me and assume positive intent from our principals our teachers our bus drivers our superintendents and assistant superintendents i know that while while most of us were on quote unquote winter break our leadership was working very hard behind the scenes um to make sure that we opened today um although we didn't get the ice rinks all over the entire city of oswego fixed but that's okay um uh but just assume positive intent and and move forward with me if you will about just knowing that everybody is truly doing their best and um i will um share that it really does when you can change your mindset to something it really does make a huge difference so i just wanted to share my little personal testimony there and um you know the opportunity to shut down over break and reflect is is very powerful and we're all everyone's doing their best and very proud of all of our teachers and principals today who got through that first day back so thank you yeah i'll just piggyback on on that that i'm very excited that we were we were back today and i uh texted dr sparlin hey how are we doing for staffing and we did great and i'm just really proud of our district our staff and administrators who um who got our kids into schools today so thank you anyone else from the board that might not be the time but i do have a question um that i assume that someone emailed it not just to me but i know the cdc has new guidelines for isolation and quarantine um and if i'm not mistaken the idph did something with them on friday although like like i don't mean to put you on the spot and it doesn't have to be right now but like at some point when i don't want to talk about so the announcement was made on friday that idph and isbe will are planning to align with the new cdc guidance that was released the week prior we were told by dr ayala the state superintendent that that information is being developed now and will be shared with schools soon at this point we have an outline of what what that will look like in a shortened time period for a select number of people as they come back asymptomatic and there's different categories again it also changes what fully vaccinated looks like in regards to being able to avoid a quarantine or isolation so we are in the process of building that on the back end right now it will have some significant changes especially in settings where students aren't masked like lunchtime some extracurriculars and things so we're working through some of that and planning that right now but we don't have the written state guidance yet we also don't have the new uh state kind of crosswalk that tells us sort of you know who should be excluded and when for all the different scenarios that we go through there's a roughly 80 page set of guidance that was updated last fall and we have not updated that information yet so we are doing as much planning as we can right now but we do have some significant gaps and information from the state on exactly what that will look like before we can roll that out district-wide and and i didn't mean to put you on the spot but thank you you're welcome okay board committee reports can we start with policy and legislative committee well we could here's my question well here's my question do you want to talk about it now or do you want to talk about it when we before the consent agenda on board policies you tell me well can you give a little update um we had a lot of policies to go through and val is amazing and we did not get through did we get through half yeah probably close to half uh we're going to meet again so we had to pick up a meeting to get through them all because they all have to be done by next meeting so we're meeting again on tuesday there was um just some press updates i mean i'll give you the quick one for um we pulled a couple like for instance um we had to update some committee reports seven colon 20 um we talked a little bit about um signage in the buildings by adding some more that one has to do with um harassment of students you know if you see something say something um and then it was i believe it was actually margaret who noticed was it margaret somebody noticed that on our district website we have a button where you can do something i want to say was margaret darnell from here from oe but we needed to actually add a student one because we had ones for parents and teachers and and not so um we have to do that and then we just kind of talked about it going how it was being funneled and it needed to funnel straight to the building level first like if a student put something in the in the button on the website that it should go like right away to the district building so we kind of talked about that um we talked about a lot um five colon let me make sure this one might have got pulled nope that one got pulled hold on um one colon 30.
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all right good evening and i welcome all of you to the regular school board meeting for the bartholomew consolidated school corporation we are here in the administration building we also welcome those of you who might be watching us on our live stream yeah this is a busy evening and i have a whole lot of people wanting me to move this meeting fast but we will be thorough in the work that we have ahead of us we start each of our meetings with reflections from one of our board colleagues and tonight i will turn to dr julie bills thank you dr shed i hope you all had a good holiday new year is always a good time for a fresh start i kind of like to think of the new year's i don't know this is going to age me probably but i used to have this toy called etch-a-sketch and it was red and you drew on it and then you shook it and then it was all clear again um and so the new year makes me think of that you can draw and write on it and shake it and all disappears and then you can start over so some of the words i think if i had to etch a sketch with me for this year i would it'd be very simple i'd write hope and health and happiness and that's what i wish for for 2022 and some people think that hope is kind of a passive word it's really not it's active word it's exercise to become i want to become healthy happy it can be or to travel or go on adventures or to excel at work or it can be a hope to excel at other aspects of our lives and our hopes can turn into goals and the new year is a perfect time for resetting our goals i don't really say resolutions anymore because i don't know i i don't know if i just have too much pressure when i give myself a resolution that i never do it or or what that is but i've kind of changed my language on that um hope is a important word is important to have and to value there's been hope can lead to better health which is one of my other goals and it can lead to happiness i want to share with you a a study there was a study of about 13 000 people researchers found that those with more hope and i don't know how they you know exhibited that hope throughout their lives had better physical health better health behaviors better social support and a longer life hope also led to fewer chronic health problems less depression anxiety and lower risk of cancer so one of my favorite poems i'm going to read to you is emily dickinson i may have done read this before because it is one of my favorites hope is the thing with feathers that perches in the soul and sings the tune without the words and never stops at all and i love this poem because it shows how hope costs nothing at all it's miraculous it's impossible to defeat its things and adversity and gives people a reason to go on our hope perches or resides in our souls and hope can lead to a happy content well-being and give us a glimmer of something better so i want to end with another small poem entitled happiness and this is by a scottish poet named stuart patterson i'm going to read the whole thing because it's several stanzas long so i'm not going to read all of it i've made my own museum of happiness which isn't built of brick or stone or wood its walls the thickness of the day a flapping tongue of canvas held in place by rope and peg to stop it flying off and joyously away up into everywhere in time and space what sites what wonders see those things unseen except in meanwhiles vivid dreams smile laugh and gasp and live a lifetime somewhere in between the daily grind of minutes and two hours be amazed by happiness's alchemy to joyous raucous ends of impossibility happy new year to all of you get out your etch-a-sketches or magic slates and write down your own words for 2022.
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and responsible citizens through inspirational and innovative learning opportunities if you all stand please we'll do the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay our first order of business is the adoption of the agenda do i have a motion mr president i move that we adopt the agenda as presented thank you mr alexander do i have a second thank you mrs counts any discussion all those in favor say aye aye all is opposed motion passes 4-0 thank you and as you can see mr daniels was unable to attend with us tonight as well as not being able to hear virtually our next thing is the reorganization of the board for the 2022 calendar year our first uh business there is the election of a board president do i have a nomination mr russell i nominate mr hubbard to be board president for the 2022 calendar year thank you do i have a second on that second okay and i assume there's no discussion all those in favor say aye aye all those opposed motion passes 4-0 thank you so at this time mr hubbard and i will switch so first order of business for mr hubbard this evening will be to present mr russell with appreciation thank you for your service services all right thank you very much with our first order of business we will look at the reorganization of the board be my first presentation to you guys for approval i'll be asking for your approval on this there's any questions i guess one comment i'll make something uh dr r can often need to address is my commission what the greenwood redevelopment commission is up in june i believe so just fyi and um that's what the does the mayor appoint that position is that correct yes the mayor the mayor typically appoints that position so that'll we couldn't fill that he needs to disconnect i'm sure we might have some input and influence on that that's why i'm putting the bug in here about that now any other questions i need a motion everybody's okay with it uh mr president i move that we accept the reorganization document as presented you have a second a second thanks guys mr bait a second all in favor say hi hi hi and you want to post i do i guess i do assume we got mr daniel's input on this yes did you have any feedback or anything yeah no feedback he was okay with it the next order will be the with the board meeting dates so board meeting dates are up on the screen we reviewed these with the board sorry turn my microphone on here for your approval you'll also see i believe sorry real you'll also see some addition down at the bottom on the right the board's um goal to gain more community input by adding community tour dates that are listed on the right hand side of the screen at the bottom so the regular the executive and regular board meetings plus the work sessions and then those community tour meetings so those are up for the board's approval as well just need a and the community that's correct all five will attend the yeah and they will move around the district um the first one is scheduled to be at the high school any other questions on that are all those community tours scheduled to start like at seven yes i believe that's correct is that correct stacey 7 p.m yes 7 p.m so they're always the same yeah all scheduled 7 p.m and then we'll put out stacey will put out some communication with the particular topic that might be discussed at that time it just depends on the time of year and what's going on i need a motion mr president i move that we accept the board meeting days for 2022 as presented motion's been made and seconded to accept the 2022 board meeting dates all in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed motion passes well before we get started i want to first i want to acknowledge um what an honor is to represent this board as the board president and i appreciate the trust that each one of you guys have put into me and the administration and the community as well um i'd also like to take this opportunity to thank jack russell for the great work he did over the last year as president jack it's a it's a difficult job but as a parent with two little girls um in the school i sort of personally thank you for everything you've done you know i've been on the board for three years and one of the first thing i realized is we make the board the five of us make decisions that uh affect a lot of people we've got about 9 000 students here in the school we've got 1200 faculty and staff members here and we also are the voice of about 5 000 50 000 people in white river township whether it be parents or community members or whatever and that's a lot of a lot of voices and opinions so as president i want to i want to make sure we can hear everyone and hear everyone's voice been in a format that does not disrupt the important work we do up here with the board so uh so i'm glad we're going to do these community tours call them community tours this is a great opportunity for anyone in the community to come and talk with the board the five of us the plan is to me like rich said earlier is to meet in different schools all around the school corporation so it's convenient for parents um and the first one will be a week from tomorrow in the high school cafeteria right that's great um we'll send out a flyer and we'll put on the district website and we'll also kind of share it on social media and stuff but i want our parents i want our parents and the community to have an opportunity to be heard while also allowing us to deal with the important work that we do up here during our board meetings i want to thank all of you and especially my fellow board members for voting that in and allowing the opportunity for the community to to bend our ear a little bit appreciate it anyway public comments we do have one person signed up for public comments paula downey she wants to speak on the agenda item of the ottoman president paula the only thing i ask is the the board we want to hear from you we set aside we set aside a time during each meeting for members of the public to address topics on the agenda we ask that you share your name your address group affiliation if appropriate and the topic you'll be addressing please limit your comments to three minutes and try to stay on topic and just direct your comments to me the board the full board policy and public participation is available on the website if you guys have any questions about it paula downey 1229 woodcreek drive greenwood indiana 46142 um my comments were just remarks for the outgoing president jack um on my behalf on my husband's behalf and school board audit i just want to thank you for your meeting with the parents back at um i think in october at the bay horse and your candor and it was appreciated and i know it's not easy to walk into a room where there's tension and um you know it's there and um you you rose to the occasion you mended bridges and you built bridges that weren't there and just wanted to say thank you it went a long way so just like to see more of that and i think any time that the parents can speak with the board members and and that communication can be there it's a good thing so thank you thank you very much next thing is concentrated concentrating items does anybody have any questions before motion i got one i think we all do all right i guess i guess a couple of comments um mrs pam parker has uh continued her retirement to retirement greg retirement to dr arkanov um i think effective january 20th 21st 21st um i i i will tell everyone this pam has been a great resource for me as i have been on the board i think she she's been on the in rich's right hand uh lady as long as i've been on the board and she's been a great asset to me over the years and i want to thank you your your future replacement whoever that replacement the future person to sit in that seat whoever that might be has some pretty big shoes to fill so but i want to thank you for your years of service at center grove i want to thank you for that and thank you some to me thank you and i would like to add to that as i've been around a little while pam has been very helpful and kept me organized she was the go-to when last minute things were needed and she kept her head about herself when i was falling apart and got things done at the last minute when we needed to she's she's just spot on thanks for all the wonderful meals you ordered for us over the years and so forth and uh to say you'll be sorely missed is a very huge her i was like understatement gosh i don't know what i would have done without him be really hard for me to say anything yeah i'll i'll let you i'll let you off the hook so i'm sorry mr president you probably want someone to make a motion on the consent agenda now that we've derailed you no that's fine i'll make a motion we approve the consent agenda as presented thanks scott motion's been made this segment all in favor to approve the casino items say aye hi anyone opposed i would like to thank the johnson county community foundation um part of that that you guys just approved was they gave us a grant that was in there so i just wanted to personally thank them for that that's right i don't know if they have anybody here but thank you very much yeah that's first staff appreciation and in regards to coven yep okay we have one action item tonight rich thank you mr everett uh bonds appropriations i now open this public hearing i'd like to call dr gabriel to provide information about the additional appropriation this appropriation time for members of the public to comment on additional appropriation of the information presented this evening just right there just stop right there for now yeah okay yeah so thank you so this is the time which i normally would have a brief discussion of the middle school project which is the uh project that we're talking about this evening but this is the third hearing that we've had on this topic and i've presented it two other times and so i think this evening i would just say this involves renovations at both middle schools it involves selling bonds that total thirty million eight hundred thousand dollars and uh we've had two presentation uh two previous times so i'm not going to go into any more detail than that this evening so with that i would i would turn the hearing back over to mr hubbard to complete the process obviously i'll answer any questions if necessary this appropriate time for members of the public to comment on the additional appropriation of the information presented this evening are there any members of the public president who would like to comment uh thirty million eight hundred thousand dollars that's combined for both buildings okay i now close this public hearing are there any board members who have any comments or questions for dr gabriel i guess the only one i have is there a reason we went three or two here or yeah there was some change in the law um that that now requires three hearings so we're just doing the minimum required by the the law that's necessary to to satisfy the potential bondholders i don't know that change happened i think a couple years ago so the first two are preliminary determined this is a consolidated appropriate additional appropriation hearing and um confirmatory on the leaks of the funnel okay any other questions for gabriel okay pointing to motion say aye anyone opposed motion passes for you thank you next is uh announcements yes this um just a couple of announcements to share out immediately following tonight's uh meeting the board tonight's board meeting they'll be the board of finance meeting it's an annual meeting required by law and we'll go right into that then we'll have on january 18th the board community tour at 7 p.m at the high school cafeteria as mr hubbard shared that will be an opportunity for the board to hear public input on various items we will be communicating out what the topics will be for that evening and then on january 20th a special board meeting at 7 00 am for those of you just can't get enough of board meetings really that meeting will be mostly to approve the bid project the bids on one of the building projects coming up and with that back over here do we have any uh any other business from you guys any board member comments the only thing i'd like to say is welcome aboard congratulations thank you very much congratulations well done um and uh here we go off to 2022 so thank you hope that being said uh we'll we're going to join this meeting and then we're going to open another board of finance meetings we haven't signed it yet yeah let's do this real quick yeah okay so we'll call the we'll call the next meeting to order the board of finance yeah they're looking for the buzz all right we'll just go on we'll go ahead pam yeah absolutely um so okay so the first action is we need to drop the adopt the agenda for this evening i mean a motion to adopt the move that we adopt agenda agenda for the board of finance meeting as presented thank you scott second thank you jack motion's been made and seconded all in favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion passes thank you okay the first action item is resolution authorities of the board of finance thank you this evening the first action i'm recommending a motion um to adopt the resolution to establish the board of finance and dr gabriel will provide you with some additional information is this on okay you have a copy of the uh of a memo which describes the five purposes of the board of finance and just briefly i'm going to mention each of these the first one is you have a resolution to establish the board of finance that resolution is attached that's the first responsibility that you have and that basically says that that the the board of school trust fees is the same as the board of finance with the same officers the second responsibility is you have the ability to take action on public public disposal public depositories and briefly what that is is the ability to exclude doing business from certain uh financial institutions based upon some past bad practice or conflict of interest we've never done that i don't believe there's any reason for us to do that now the third function of the board of finance is to receive an investment report because of our very limited opportunities to invest money right now in return get any type of a good return we invest all of our funds with fifth third bank in an investment program that they have specifically designed designed for public entities and at the time this is memo has been written we haven't closed our books for the year so we we have estimates in all these cases they're very close but the final numbers might change a little bit but basically for this year we've as it shows there we've only earned twelve thousand and uh twelve thousand eight hundred sixty nine dollars in interest which is of course very small um we don't have a lot of of choices in what we can invest in and our returns are very small as is the case uh for many other people for many other institutions um the the fourth function of the of the board of finance is to adopt an investment policy and that's being proposed as a separate agenda item this evening and then the fifth responsibility which is new in the last couple of years is to receive a report on the fiscal condition of the school corporation and that is a separate item uh later on the agenda so at this time we're asking the board to approve the resolution that establishes the board of finance thank you dr gabriel any questions there's no questions on the motion mr seconds anyone opposed motion passes thank you 4.2 thank you next item all right so gord has a policy on investments which you see here uh the the important part policy 6144 that's been in place for many many years and that simply establishes the legal options that we have for our investments in addition to that in 2012 the legislature gave us some expanded ability to invest funds in longer term investments that may be from two to five years but that does require a board resolution to do that those investments allow us to increase our interest rates slightly the investment program that we just talked about with fifth third bank is specifically designed to take advantage of these types of investments but it does require a resolution every few years we adopt this resolution every year so we don't forget about it so the resolution that's proposed um simply as it says expands our ability to invest in some longer-term investments we're asking the board of finance to approve this resolution this evening thank you dr gabriel you want the board any questions uh we've we've done that about every four years we haven't done it it's time to do that again we haven't decided exactly when we're going to do it with the changes in the business office that are coming we may wait for those to settle down before we do this again but it's kind of time for us to do that but we've i mean we've done it for example i've been here for 14 years we've done it twice in that period or maybe three times so any other questions with someone on me with a motion please thank you very much amy do you have a second second motion has been made and seconded all in favor say aye aye z one opposed motion passes four zero thank you another business uh this evening we have one report we have a report of the fiscal condition of school corporation yes so so this is a this is a report that was required by a new law and starting in 2019 that the board of finance should receive a report on the fiscal condition of the school district and it must discuss the six fiscal indicators that were developed at that time by the distressed units appeal board and you can see this data if you want to move forward one screen chat thank you you can see the web address where at which you can look up this data on all districts in the state of indiana not just ours the data right 2020 because the state hasn't had time to accumulate the data from 2021 these are done on a calendar year basis and i would say this is not a test with right or wrong answers it's meant to really be a more of a comprehensive look at how are we doing as a district and we've added some information that we believe is appropriate for our district that's that expands on these six indicators a little bit the first one is average daily membership i'm going to go through these quickly obviously as you can see this hasn't changed much we've been on a gradual increase and i like to describe this as a as the sweet spot because we're it we are growing a little bit every year which allows us to do a better job of long-term planning for our facilities gives us a little bit of extra money because we get more money for more students but we're not expanding so fast that we end up with severe building shortages the next slide kind of shows us shows what our current enrollment projections look like we're at that 90 000 or 9071 right there in the middle and you can see what it's been for the past few years and what it's going what we are projecting that it will look like for the coming years the second indicator is fund balances this is a little problematic because the state changed the fund structure in 2019 and 20.
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um oh all right [Music] good evening i'd like to call the january 10th meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order would you please rise for the pledge of and to the allegiance for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all um good evening everyone and welcome to the dartmouth school committee meeting for january 10th um for the record i would like to state that miss kathleen amarill will be participating remotely ms ganther can we have a roll call please shannon jenkins here mary waite here kathleen amaral here john nunes chris oliver here thank you i'd like to remind members of the audience um to please uh signal or turn down your cell phone turn off the sound so that we do not have any disturbances during this meeting um i'm sort of floundering because i know that this is going to be shown on dc tv but i forgot it's not written in my notes anymore and i can't remember but it's going to be shown it's usually it is usually shown mr nunes has it while you look for that i'm going to say you can also access this via live stream youtube dhs tv media the meeting is rebroadcast on dc tv channel 9 on wednesday and thursday at 5 p.m friday at 6 saturday at 8 and sunday at 2 and then on dc tv channel 18 on monday and saturday at 12 noon and thursday at 3 p.m and there are some other times that it pops in there and we thank them for doing that thank you mr newness i appreciate that um so we're going to start the evening we've allotted 10 minutes for public comment if anyone would like to comment on an item that is on our agenda this evening i would ask for you to come up to the microphone here please state your name and share your thoughts with us hello i am lynn turner i am a parent to two kids in the public school system one is in the middle school one in the high school i also have three step children that went through the school system they are young adults um i am this is my first time speaking at school board meeting i am very grateful and thankful to be here i did write a letter of concern um at the beginning of the school year asking for it to be read and it wasn't so i'm just very glad to have a voice and i'm grateful that you guys have opened it up thank you i hope we continue to have a voice i guess i want to i'm very grateful also to the wonderful teachers that touch my kids lives and other kids lives in dartmouth and also to the staff but i do have some concerns regarding one of them is that i want to speak on is discrimination and segregation i feel that the vaccine status push that is you know everybody should be vaccinated and by deci saying that you know when we reach 80 percent status i think it's just around the corner right that maybe we can open it up so that masks cannot have to be worn and maybe that's by the um the vaccinated but i i fear that that will create discrimination and segregation where there's a privilege afforded to one group of students and not to all of the students i think that you know mask choice could be implemented instead at that point if it comes down to that i know that both vaccinated and unvaccinated are carrying covid right now and sharing covid right now so i doubt that's going to happen but i think that it's important not to have one group over another group when you're dealing with kids in the same school and i do have a book that i love and i was an elementary school teacher and it is a dr seuss book called the snitches and i have two pages that i just wanted to share and it reminds me of the times and what's going on these days with the vaccinated and unvaccinated status and it is a a story about assigning more value and privileges to certain sneetches and not other sneeches and they are awarded stars on their bellies to say you are more special and you get better treatment and it says when the star-bellied sneetches had frankfurt or roasts or picnics or parties or marshmallow toasts they never invited the plain belly sneetches they left them out cold in the dark on the beaches they kept them away never let them come near and that's how they treated them year after year and at the end they decide after they've spent lots of money putting stars on and off of their bellies to try to be special at the end of the story but mr mcbean was quite wrong i'm quite happy to say that the snitches got quite uh really got really quite smart on that day that the day they decided that sneetches are sneetches and no kind of sneetch is the best on the beaches that day all the snitches forgot about stars and whether or not um they had one on bars so i just really want to make sure that all kids are treated equally and not discriminated against so that is my i'll yeah that is what i'll speak on today thank you thank you um i'll invite anyone else in the audience who'd like to speak and i will remind that our audience members that public comment is typically restricted to items that are under consider under consideration on the agenda i appreciate your comments we did read the letter that you sent to us all public comment that's been sent to ms ganther has been forwarded to all of us but we generally speaking reserve public comment for items that are on our agenda for the evening if anyone else would like to comment on something about some item on the agenda for the evening i would welcome you up and to share your name and to share your thoughts please come up to the microphone state your name and you may ask a question my name is jeannie tripp and i no longer have any students in any of the dartmouth schools my question is how would we go about getting something added to your agenda so that we could have open discussion about it and go through your process properly so generally speaking the school committee establishes the agenda there is actually under massachusetts law no right to public comment at public meetings it is at the discretion of the school committee about whether to allow public comment we do and we allow public comment on the items that are under consideration right now there is no discussion of the max mass mandate or the vaccine mandate because those are not in our power right the commissioner of education has extended the mass mandate through the end of february if at some point in time there is a discussion to be had about whether to continue or discontinue mass policies that will be on our agenda and that will be the appropriate time to have that conversation but right now that is not under our control therefore it's not on our agenda so in theory it would be something that when the state department of education or so on brings it up then you would take that matter up again in public at a meeting or yes correct and i would you know i don't we don't generally speaking do back and forth during public comment um but because some people have questions about how that worked i'm i'm okay with that generally speaking the way public comment works is that there's an item on the agenda and we hear all of the public comments we take that under consideration and then when we move into the agenda we discuss it then we don't normally have questions or back and forth but i do think it's important to sort of explain how that works to understand the format for those of us like i've just started attending and it's just out of respect for the board and for the system that you have in place that we obviously want to follow proper protocol and approach you professionally okay thank you i appreciate that thank you if there's any other public comment on any of the items on our agenda you're welcome to come to the meeting state your name and share your thoughts all right having no other takers i will entertain a motion for approval of the regular session minutes for december 13 2021.
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so 1 through 12. connect any emotions accept the resolutions of the reorganization of the district resolution 1 10 22 r dash 1 through 1 22 r dash [Music] oh all right so first was mike who's second all right so mr bella yes mr januzzi yes mr at this time we are too open to the public any questions comments concerns seeing none can i get a motion to adjourn motion mr bill [Music] all right anybody opposed okay our reorganization is now complete you're moving on to our regular board meeting so call to order open public meetings statements all right switch gears okay the new jersey public uh dean's law was enacted to ensure the reign of the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which time any business affecting their interest is discussed and acted upon important provisions of this active board of education policy the board of education of the borough of downtown has caused notice of this need to be hosted in the board office at the boundary high school mailed or faxed apparently news boundary clerk southbound board of education any person who's requested individual news once again [Music] six okay roll call mr bale here mr denucci here mr thomas ellen here miss moussan here miss gazino yeah you got it all right mr fazio is uh not present he's homesick is the resignation of this mars can i get any emotion to accept it's removed second all right congratulations yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes mr musa yes mr russell yes and thomas elliott [Music] we're up to president's comments sure um so first to the members who uh uh moves to have me be president this year thank you for your confidence um i hope that it won't be misplaced and then we're gonna have a nice strong year i do think it's a pivotal one for the district as we're looking at things like hiring our new superintendent as well as the negotiations with the teachers union and preparing some of the community relations issues that we've encountered over the last few months so i do think it'll be pivotal for the district i do think it'll be busy and i'm looking forward to tackling those issues with each of you um i'm giving out to you the new guidelines that we've just received this evening from the department of health regarding foreign i have not been able to get through those at this point but i do believe that they're going with the cbc recommendations [Music] so we are up to open to the public for agenda items only do you have anybody from the public say none seen no person online 12 13.
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before we nominate anybody is anybody that just does not want to be president before me i don't like me i don't want to be president so and anyone that gets nominated can decline the nomination as well do i hear any nominations i'd like to nominate mr options and i would like to nominate mr kurdistan [Music] and i'll nominate wendy thank you though so we have two mr hopkins and mr curtis is there any discussion or questions about my nominee my reasons for nominating rodney are he he's second in seniority after marcha so he has the institutional knowledge um more than any of us aside from marcia um he's almost always here at meetings we're the earliest of the meeting and i think he will he's very thoughtful um and really good at um kind of voting in on the the gist of the issue which i think is um valuable for us i played question in this length of being on the board because eric had had four years and four years now i think he is actually one been a board member longer than well current i guess current well people stay current yeah recent but uh i think you have to take into consideration that as well and actually it was prep board president i mean you would have experience in that as well this all comes down to me right so this is all going to come down to me yes of course then he's going to vote for robbie you know and that ronnie's going to vote for himself and you're going to vote for erica there's good vote for himself with my boss over there that could probably be available for more if it's possible i mean operations at work you know gotta take precedence a lot of things but um earlier you had this so much time i'm sure if it's possible i'll be wanting this more than willing to help people make the congregations for things so but if not it's understandable you know operations got to come first you know but i do understand how important this position is so rodney you really want to be president on board you feel like you're going to work with dr daly tell yourselves it's pretty important part of it right oh yeah you need to call the vote because you have to name the people all right we will go um ms duncan uh eric myself miss robertson i vote for mr hopkins uh mr hopkins uh vote for yourself okay and mr guthrie so i think both candidates are very very good my only reason for my vote is i know eric's work schedule and i know that no matter how hard he tries he's not gonna be able to to be here all the time so i'm gonna vote for mr hopkins hey mr officer did you okay then moving right along so a question so oh so you're not sworn in yet we just take over finally when you get elected so if you want to do clear and then we can change things at the same time any other nomination okay you you don't have to call anyone what the i think you still do with both though yeah maybe you just said yes no vote since there's [Music] see how easy that is okay so marsha if you can adjourn the meeting and then uh mr hopkins you can start the new meeting uh the meeting will adjourn about 5 40.58 i can't read them okay [Music] welcome to the cheapsite account 549 start the study session with the screen board and then there is a robot all right mr hopkins yeah mr president is here miss duncan yeah please [Music] stands one nation and god indivisible with liberty and justice for all at this time we're open to visiting comments visitors are welcome to speak on agenda and non-agenda items comments are limited to three minutes please state your name and address prior to making your comments please note that members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda therefore action taking is limited to directing the administration to look into the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for future considerations how can i didn't get any paperwork for anything i didn't get any paperwork for of the personnel [Music] for a teacher's aid position the superintendent recommends that mr has been approved i mean anybody has any questions [Music] item under personnel is vacant classified physician teachers aide mecca the board did you hire megan as a teacher's aide during the december board meeting unfortunately due to family issues mr media was not able to relocate to office he had never reported to work and so their discussion my thought is anytime you folks vote to hire someone you need to vote to vacate the position before we place someone else in so that's the recommendation item three and first of all classified deployment paraprofessional teacher's aide hannah gonzalez anna gonzalez has been interviewed for a teacher's day positions um mr president um there's two items there's an item that's not on the agenda yet tonight that we hope we can put on the agenda tomorrow um jose young's staff he's been two people short for 20 months i believe it's then um we have a candidate tomorrow that wants to come back to work for us for a while beforehand mr yan i have an interview with him tomorrow i think the interview looks good and we can do a couple reference checks because we need to have another maintenance worker right now during the day mr johnson person here so i'd like to build those two people here during the day in case there's an emergency so you'll find i hope uh another candidate for uh first self-esteem by wednesday night you said he's worked here before for about a year we can't discuss it though all right i'm assuming you're hoping to have that before the 24 hour period before wage increase per the arizona voters approved minimum wage increase school district must increase minimum wage to 12 and 80 cents an hour attached to 22 district employees who will have their rates increased by 65 cents because of the voter accrued their salary will be more than 1280 just because it's not related to the minimum wage it's because of experience in the district that they already received that or they already received a increase in salary this year because of retirement agreement i'll recommend obviously approval of that second business item second reading approval of drug policy ded the administration reviewed the board with the board on january 10 2022 recommendation recommended changes to privacy pdba this policy is ready for board approval we submit this for our lawyer take a look at the only change he made does he thought was vague and the fact as to whether uh when an agenda should be available for the public disease we clarified that so we started a new first reading with that change it's wise to consider the first reading for that change because the 91st reading and we can adopt uh on wednesday night and the change is basically um that as you can see on the two pages after that see the existing policy initially in the chain what what the new reading will be second paragraph and four paragraphs in one sentence superintendents four board members may place items on the agenda any board member desiring to place an item on the agenda will notify the superintendent of the particular item at least five working days before the meeting then the second change takes the word upon request copies that's taken out you say copies of the agenda will be placed available to the public interest that's what the lawyer had problems with he didn't let up on request he said those those policies he thought should be those items should be available regardless if there was no question or not and so we agreed and so that those are the two changes that we will propose as a second reading on wednesday night to adopt uh policy [Music] the approval of extended to extend mandatory mass squaring in ah school at the october board meeting the board approved mandatory mask wearing with inside of the school facilities and vehicles the motion was for masking to be approved until january 2022 the board discussed revisiting and potentially extending the district masking mandate in january 2020.
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a larger piece with the clothing one we're actually covering most of those that would be covered really what you're running into is sleeves and other tattoos on the ankle maybe you know a little bit higher on the calf whatever it may be that that all could be but i definitely there there has to be a limit so nothing on the face or call it record to the face do you have anybody in existence now in to play devil's advocate do you have somebody in place in a job right now that has we should come here because of course yeah i'm just trying to you know look out for that one yeah i just looked after that one guy that might get blindsided if we go that way oh yeah yeah as long as like you said all this other stuff as far as sexual words by nature all that stuff is on there for tattoos they can be visible or appropriate as long as they're appropriate yes and nothing above nothing neck or head anything near that and we could do something like that and i and i understand that but i just didn't want to see a skit and this was a real problem that got me in our last meeting was what was i don't remember the exact comment well we could just police ourselves but we can't if we police ourselves we wouldn't need a policy you have a policy because there will always be the one that says well [Music] because there are people that won't right there are people that won't and then we'll get well it's not in your policy or your policy says that i can't have tattoos your policy says it doesn't say anything about i think though that teachers having tattoos and opening that conversation up to stu with students says over the past you know however long i've worked here i've had half a dozen eighth graders that have real tattoos permanent tattoos yeah some in places that will you know cause them a problem later in life and it's a conversation like well i didn't get this tattoo when i was 13.
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but um i'm not quite using the whole entire 500. i'm just 400. it was close to 500 but i was granted 500. well thank you again and congratulations thank you thank you so much for this opportunity it's been been a great experience next we have julian rita for the yeah the yavapai county education foundation award also good evening my name is julie bias and i teach biology and anatomy and physiology at the high school and this is rita johnson she teaches chemistry as well as earth science at the high school and we are actually right next door to each other so we team um as far as the grant we'd like to formally thank the yavapai county education foundation they provided both of us a 500 grant and then maria i'll let her do some explaining of how we're looking at spending that so julie is going to be able to purchase an entire set of classroom aprons that are that chemical variety which these this is an example of some that we have um they're well worn through you can actually see through them so they don't really protect the kids clothes like they should um so we're going to be able to replace these and we've also got um this vinyl ones currently what i have in my yeah which tear so then they're constantly being mended or taped or something like that so that so that's what julie's gonna purchase and then for my classroom i'm gonna replace some of the aprons that i've got and then i'm gonna be able to get an entire set of classroom goggles safety goggles which these are some that um like if you hold them up to you they're everything is foggy they're so scratched and damaged or they're kind of bent so they don't fit right a lot of the elastic has been broken and then re-tied so it's going to be really nice to have a whole nice set of aprons and goggles that the kids can use and know that they're they're being as protective as they can for their eyes and their and their body so so thank you very much thank you that it almost looks like you have just a nice little trash peg those were the only two forms i had for calling the public anyone else people called it the public all right in seeing them we will move on to item six which is our information and discussion items first up is a high school student council update maybe well that we can come back to it yeah i haven't shown up yet um so okay not a problem then we'll go to the superintendent's report please please good evening members of the board i'm filling in for mr scholl who is away this week at a family event saying goodbye to a family member who passed away so he asked me to give you a report on a covet update report and you'll find that in your packet he also had the latest benchmarks from the county in there there were these are from just prior to christmas time so we believe that the statistics that will be coming in from after christmas probably will have spiked a little bit due to family gatherings and things like that one of the things that i wanted to note on the page that looks like this one is if you'll look on the very first line where it says 1-4 yavapai county i just wanted to point out for 1-3 and 1-4 the number of cases in the county for children school-age children compared to adults is very very low and that's consistently what we're seeing here as well that this continues to be something that adults seem to be more susceptible to than school-aged children so um and while we've had um miss verner busy doing tests for people who suspect that they may be um have contracted cobit 19 we're finding that the overwhelming majority do not have it they're testing negative so we have a very low positivity rate among staff who are being tested here so that continues i think to be encouraging also we wanted to point out something else to you which is about the quarantine period we follow the cdc guidelines through the yavapai county health department as our lead and just a reminder that the quarantine time has been decreased to as little as five days and we also want to draw your attention to the fact that fully vaccinated has a new definition it includes the booster if it's been longer than six months for the pfizer madura vaccine or longer than two months from the j j initial one if someone is fully vaccinated then they are exempted from having a quarantine in the case of exposure so we wanted to let you know that and so short and quarantine certainly helps our building principles who you know work because we're continually struggling with not enough substitute teachers so and primarily the absences are due to quarantine issues not illness issues so this will be very helpful also something else that we want to talk to you about was enrollment you might remember when we were working on setting the budget that we were agonizing over what would it look like and so one thing that we wanted to share with you was that we are on track for a 100 an increase of 160 adm and the principals will not affirmatively they enrolled students last week a lot and this week already and so that look that 160 is probably still a tad low it's that average of that first hundred day and so we're and we're only at day 75 so we are definitely expecting even to see maybe a little bump up there so that will equal increase revenue for us which will be very very helpful does that bring us back to pretty pandemic levels you know what we are creeping that direction um yes the pre-pandemic but no to pre-2009 yeah yeah in fact we are higher at the high school and higher at territorial than we have been in 10 years easily easily so we are even edging out that era of the economic recession era so in those two buildings so it's just it's spotty because we have some small co very small cohorts and then we have some over 200 so that's huge for us so you probably remember you've never handed out 200 diplomas at graduation before so today was the opening day of the arizona state legislature and as you'll remember a big priority on the agenda for our legislature is addressing the constitutional expenditure limit and we have no updates about that so we think in the next week or two that's going to be a political hot potato of epic proportions but in the past and mike's been around about as long as i have doing this job john and i were talking today he can recall two i could recall two or three times when this has been an issue before and it was easily handled and expeditiously handled in the past so we're confident that they'll do the right thing and step up especially because it's an election here and that is it for the superintendent's report unless we have any other questions about what was in the packet just one quick observation for some reason we tracked the covert cases around the state and in the nation our infection rate in yemen by county is one half of maricopa right now i mean i don't know what we're doing right in this county but we are handling his current surge far far better than all sad to say maricopa county is we have a natural propensity to avoiding each other in this county i didn't want to go there sydney or the oregon individualism that we all have or you can live in poland and not see anybody for three or four days exactly stay healthy thank you all right agenda item 60 is the chino valley education foundation update this is a pass around this is a pass around tell all the august members of the board thank you for letting me come and be here tonight i'm wayne ballard i'm the current president of the chino valley education foundation and i just want to give you some information tonight i wanted to send that around some bullet points for you so you're uh have them at your uh disposal as well uh our annual income for this last year was uh over 500 000 and that uh please don't spend that money yet because i'll explain in a moment a lot of that had to do with the denise pearson uh scholarship that we received and and now we are the caretakers for but with the various programs and things that we're doing it we are seeing a lot of growth in this last year we are a 501 c 3 organization and we are also a qualifying charitable organization for the state of arizona meaning if you would like to give money for the tax write out for this arizona state taxes you can double what you give to the education foundation because we service a large group of under-served people and so instead i think with 400 a month or a year it's 800 uh for a married couple and so uh that is a significant uh uh thing that we're trying to get more and more out in the community a few things that we've been doing this year and you've got the list in front of you you can see some of the major projects we were one of the major sponsors for the chinomali high school graduation night we provided raffle items gift items throughout the night gift baskets gift cards and uh we were also uh the ones on the hook for the insurance and some of the other items that were provided for that we sponsor teacher gifts each month and uh also last year in april we did the wool staff lunch including transportation every custodial staff everyone who is part of the chino valley unified school district was included in that luncheon of the staff gifts back at back to school event hungry kids project weekend meal bags chino valley food neighbors which was started by several members of our board and the homeless student support including the monthly sponsor student christmas gift 100 bags of hope and much much more lori marley is absolutely astonishing don't lose a sight of what she brings to our district so those are some of the major projects some of the other things that we do for example with academics uh we have a scholarship application assistance program sometimes uh students need help filling out these things and assistance in that process as well as when you apply for colleges they're always a 75 fee uh which some of our students especially the homeless ones uh and and those who qualify that's a insurmountable task and so we do some of those things for academics we are also very involved with the athletics knowing that athletics has a huge part of your academic success as well there's something about knowing you have to pass to play that motivates students but we we help with the pay-to-play uh process uh we provide meal vouchers for the coaching staff because as they're traveling sometimes uh they stop at subway and the students don't have any uh way to get a meal we provide the coaches with some opportunities for that we also provide some of the sports equipment uniforms cleats flats for track and the various needs that are there this last year we've had some new projects including the back to school fair backpack giveaway clothing school supply giveaway there was a financial sponsorship of a vaccination clinic which for all of the standard that you need your mmr and your eieio and all of the various vaccinations to come to school we wanted to help with that process as well this year we've added scholarships we have the uh we are now the executors at if you will of the denise pearson scholarship we are in the midst of getting all of that set up and established and all of the uh steps required for that also the mike fogle and wendy watson are working on providing scholarships for our students here in the community as well as the education foundation it's one of those things that we have dreamed for years about being able to provide scholarships and now all of a sudden the floodgates have opened and we're just delighting in that in fact we're looking at a scholarship specifically for students within uh lori marley's purview with the homeless projects that we have there are very specific things that we're working on and getting these funded and our goal is that someday they will be an endowed like the denise pearson uh is for us at this time so we're hoping this will be a something that continues to grow we we are committed to supporting students teachers and their families and we want to uh be an active part of what's going on in the unified school district thank you for your time i've talked far too long do you have any questions [Music] we've already distributed all the applications for scholarships oh excellent applications have gone out and uh my wife was even asking me about some of those things she is now working in the counseling department this year and uh she was asking me about that just the other day and i know all of that process has been gone through committees and worked out how it's going to be funded and worked through invested and all of those steps we're working hard to take care of all of that with the various scholarships so you're saying some will be awarded this this school year yes sir yes sir there will be denise pearson scholarships this year uh i think the number we were talking was around the twenty thousand fifteen to twenty thousand depending on need depending on applications and and depending on all the other factors that were working with this because it was handed off to us mid-year from wells fargo bank part of it is we are trying to get all of the structures in place for the financing and investing and all of those other steps that are required well thank you thank you for all the hard work hey we love we love china unified school district we're cheering for you all and we appreciate all the hard work that you put in and thank you for your time all right item 61 is our financial reports [Music] the year-end you could say december 31st 2021 expense report is in front of you i've just got a couple comments on that it's in your packet there i like to look in a year-end like that if you want to look at it that way and then say 50 of the operating days and that's a bit of an estimate or gone what percent of the operating budget is gone and if it's 60 the operating budget is gone and the 50 of the days are gone you've got a little problem the calculation with us 7.3 million spent on a budget of 16.3 million comes out to about 44.7 percent of the operating budgets spent as a halfway point in the year which is a good a good sign and that is 44 based on that increase we approved you're approved at the december meeting so based on the growth of enrollment that daniels was talking about our budget last year 14.4 million this year we started at 15.5 but hoped for more enrollment got that extra enrollment jumped to 16.3 so that's a quick look at our operating fund capital fund 1.1 million budget spent 31.9 of that year-to-date and we do have again thanks to ms daniel's inner grants and back writing and the whole bit we have a vehicle that we just moved into a new grant that we have for homeless students and that will again free up a little more of this capital funds that's 75 000 as long as it's called number it's a really nice number but with all these grants that we're able to bring in it relieves some of these traditional sources of funding so we can use them because we do have about six other capital projects that you'll probably be hearing about at some point and then with our adjacent ways the adjacent waste blend is is uh at this point not scheduled to be used we were thinking of using that for 2 000 feet down the farm area for an access there and that's off the table temporarily so we'll get back to you if you have any projects there the budget's 424 000 in that fund cash is about 230 and we have a levy to bring in another 100 000 this year so we'll be able to carry that forward with no strength any other questions about the basic financial report peter says he does not have any questions okay thank you thank you john's already answered my question for this okay could you give us a quick update it's not in this party but just on the hvac project expect where we're where where we kind of are at i've had three phone calls in the last couple days and two more today with our emc that's our design architecture and design they're kind of architect engineers at the same time they can consult with structural engineers mechanical engineers they've got architects they work with and their projects together for the hvac on all four buildings has averaged about 145 000 per building so almost 600 000 budget we spent here to date we're a little behind on expenditures we've only spent about 52 000 here today on those but i've got about 14 invoices that i'm waiting for the school facilities board to approve they tell me they're about 60 to 65 percent done with all this design material and organizing it and putting these together once that's done and they're fully paid then they'll get back to us on their plan and then we'll write more applications to sfp for construction it will involve a company to help us with putting those bids together and evaluating things and there's some that are on state contract so that shouldn't be too difficult it's just a matter can we get them here once we want them here these these companies on state contracts so i think it's going well we haven't heard from from emc ii that they run into any unsolvable problems so just being kind of quiet on the direction that the design will take thank you thank you i appreciate that update um we'll just keep moving along with you and talk about student attending firms very good a quick summary of that if you look at the bottom there's some encumbrances that have already been spent one was for two thousand dollars for wrestling for the year and then there was this tournament that they held my high tournament and they that 4500 has been spent in the teams that were i've got a brief report on that it seems the first schedule to come did come but it wasn't quite as energetic i think it was new year's day right around there that the tournament any more information on that karen or no it wasn't cancelled there wasn't many didn't kill us there were i think three or four teams that weren't unable to come because of quarantine issues but they still did well sure that's our cost to do to the hosts yeah another than that a pretty pretty quiet one for activity funds thank you very much um our consent agenda tonight item seven eight through g well let's just have some clarification it says g but then down in the information and supporting data it's a through f okay a through f yes all right all in favor item eight a stipend for cvhs unified sports head coach um i'll go ahead and present for mr campatelli i know he's had a busy day with sports alrighty so we are as you know unified sports is a division of special olympics arizona and our head coach miss jenna ballard has been the coach for nine years she's been the aia coach of the year our we've had student partners who are general and students be partner of the year and we've had our special education athletes be athletes of the year for aia and truthfully we've been remiss and haven't been paying her as a coach even though it's an aia sport and so mr campatelli is bringing to us a recommendation that we approve this pay for the which is the annual stipend of five percent of the teacher's salary base for the unified sports head coach and he asks for the approval well i just want to personally say that i apologize for overlooking this i guess i just presumed it was an automatic coaching stipend so um i'm all for this so with that uh approval second all in favor all right there you go so and as you know we have um athletes and partners competing in the world games this year and i know they are fundraising for them so and where will they be well that was a really good question like amanda do you think that is disney world in two of our city disney world i got it yes all of our students were chosen for the state of arizona to represent the state of arizona in the world oh my goodness that's amazing it's really cool we get some good videos okay let's go on to our personnel report um so you have in your packet not only the personnel report that's in your packet but you also have the supplemental that you should have received at your table this evening that includes the other personnel issues so um karen made me a handy-dandy cheat sheet we have one new classified one new classified sub we have two retirements eight resignations a classified change a certified change we have four extra duty we have eight coaches on here and we have 72 timesheets the reason we have so many timesheets is because friday school tutoring those kinds of things are that's primarily where the overwhelming majority of timesheets are coming from and they're grant funded um and then i wanted to just point out to you that we had in case you're wondering there were two certified resignations that were mid-year one we applied the liquidated damages to one we did not one was health related one was just a life change decision so that would account for the difference there in case anybody was wondering um what that might be and we are as much as we hate to see people retire we're excited that they're being super duper courteous and giving us this much notice that is very helpful the two mid-year resignations are we able to fill this position so one of the positions we have a teacher that was a fifth grade resignation we have a fourth grade teacher who has requested to go to the fifth grade was kind of eyeing and hoping that an opening might occur miss reader made that recommendation and then so that teacher will move into that position and then the four remaining fourth grade teachers asked to split the students up um like they did in the past and we had a teacher who was out for the year you know albums at fmla and in your packet you'll see there on the list the sort of the pro rated pay for that so they'll each get a bump for one semester for taking all those extra students and the board has approved that type of situation in the past and we are still in each one of those classes below our staffing model just so in case we wonder are we good will that put us over our staffing model no we're still under that so that's okay it happens to be one of our smaller cohorts of students at the fourth grade and then our position at cdhs has been posted since just prior to the christmas break and i checked with miss wolfe this afternoon and we currently do not have any applicants but she discussed a plan with me today for filling at least 50 of it in-house so we're working on some other options she had an applicant had an interview set up and never heard from the album again so i've just been unable to track her down so to that end one yes two okay i have a question about a bus driver uh how how how is that limping along how we're still short of the bus drivers it's kind of like having a soft tire on the big yellow limo it's kind of fun every time it rotates but we're getting by so as you see we had one move into a spot and fill a job and we're able to hire another sub which is basically our training ground so limping along would be where we are and we have several classified positions that are vacant right now in the district um and we would encourage everyone who is within earshot to go to www.channelvalleyschools.com and click on employment to see all of those days again this is an action item and we need a motion to approve please please i so move to approve that i will second the motion and all three of us are in favor hi thank you all right item nine a mid-year academic updates miss daniels okey dokey so um what we asked the building principles to do was to provide us answer basically four basic questions any way they wanted to provide information to us any way they wanted to about how their middle of the year we called moi benchmarks came out and what they learned from it not the numbers you know that kind of stuff because as students come and go it's not necessarily the same students we're testing in the middle of the year that we test in the beginning of the year so when they're examining the data they get to look at are these students who've been with us the whole semester are these students who are new to us which is what do the data sets tell us and so um they have each submitted a written report for you in your packet and i have pulled out some things from each of those reports to share with you that are the probably what i would say are the most germane to what's going on in that building and then if you have any questions after we kind of look at all four they're here so you can you know fire away and there they'll be ready to answer them but one thing that we wanted to point out regarding china valley high school is that they tried something new this year that was a suggestion of a long time staff member that we actually were really super excited about which was instead of trying to be in the past you know they've done the galileo testing galileo was sold a few years ago the new platform is not very smooth and it hasn't worked very well so they banned it a couple years ago and then cove it and blah blah blah you know so it was too hard to even get anything off the ground when the kids were in school not in school so what they have done instead is we are using act benchmarking because as you know we've did the alternate assessment for the high school the last three years and selected act um with the idea that the state might select that as the test so we have um we have act aspire pre-act and act given we also have some arizona merit that we have signed arizona science-based tests given as well so when we look at that what they decided was they have been making an effort in english classes and math classes science classes to do work throughout the course of the school year whether it's spell work whether it's homework and things that mimic and use the verbiage from act practice materials so students become accustomed to even how the questions are worded the suggestion of the staff member was why don't we do an assembly schedule like basically they've started doing it once a month rotate each subject that we do and in that 40 minutes when the kids would normally be in assembly school school-wide we're all doing a ct practice test and so it's crazy efficient because we're not trying to run kids through computer labs and killing lots of class time we have a shortened schedule everybody's doing it at the same time so it changes the school-wide emphasis on this academic component but i thought it was like the most amazing idea so on 10-7 they did the first english and grammar assessments they're doing so that was on what i'll call mechanics so in the mechanics part of the english language the next act test regarding english will be the reading test in january near the end of january and they're going to do another english grammar in february to see if some of the adjustments they're making are working math the first math benchmark we have um schedule we have a scheduled benchmark for february and so i wanted you to know that they took a very unique approach to it but it sends a kind of this ripple effect message across the school about the importance of doing well and everybody being on the same page so that's been pretty cool at heritage they have really worked with their reteach and enrich periods and individual student goals and essential standards and the teachers have done a significant amount of work identifying both standards that they believe are the most pivotal and crucial to a student's success over time in different subject areas and so they're continuously giving what i'll call short small benchmark tests to evaluate how is the kid doing on that standard and so rather than giving a large test that encompasses several standards all at once and creates some assessment fatigue they're doing things to help the students they're taking it in little bite size chunks when the students are struggling in a particular concept they can be routed to a different reteach section where they get sort of that shot in the arm for um that particular thing with the eye on getting that skill up to par yeah yeah one thing i was a little curious are they doing that teacher's class by teachers class or grade by grade um the skills tests are grade by grades so like your students they collectively design the assessment so it's not necessarily random they're working together um julie and laura have set up a team a coalition that guides what they're doing and so they're doing that one of the things that they have noticed and you'll see this across the board is that overwhelmingly our students are not as far along at this midpoint as people hoped um and or as they try to prepare the students for to get to these further points and we have and you'll see especially at territorial we feel that kind of that long-term lagging effect of the kids fell behind a year and a half ago almost two years ago now when they missed all of fourth quarter um you know to add home instruction versus in-person instruction and then last year with our in school out of school some kids stayed at home all year those kinds of things it wasn't as strong a robust a learning environment as it is as you know when you're have a teacher in front of students and um one of the things that they have also found is that we've seen it across the board we've seen a staff attendance we've seen it with student attendance even though people are back kids got in the habit of not always coming to school and that not coming to school thing is we're still fighting that no you really got to be here thing you know and so whether they're quarantined whether they're choosing not to come whether they're someone sick in their household or whatever it may be you know we're still fighting some of those effects of school school isn't where you go every single day kind of a concept and then the other thing was that they found at heritage is that there was a bit of um attitude like uh in a middle school attitude hard to imagine right but that there was um that concept that if a student went to re-teach that it was punitive so they weren't getting to do the fun things that you get to do and enrich you know whatever the perception may be but that re-teach was computative and so the teachers are working hard to overcome that stigma and to help students understand by setting their own goals and evaluating their own progress helping students really take that ownership of their learning and trying to catch some of that enthusiasm for no it's really i'm not and i'll use mr parnell's example mr brian carnell um example the students it's not that they're they're trying to get rid of all that that stigma i'm bad at math and say no i just don't understand this concept and so they're trying they're working hard to try to overcome some of those things with kids and that will be a an ongoing ongoing battle and mindset and that's a huge paradigm shift um for students and for teachers so that's where heritage is at del rio you can see all the different types of assessments that they're giving and the teachers use a pacing guide for their essential standards in reading writing and math and students are assessed every few weeks to see how they're doing and then they're adjusted in their walk to read and walk to math groups and those groups are similar to heritage's groups where students are grouped and regrouped according to the skills that they need to work on so it's not the bluebirds redbirds and blackbirds from you know first grade reading that we might have had and they're not ability groups they're really what skills have you achieved and what skills do you need to work on and so that frequent little bite size assessment helps kids keep moving through those skills and you know it was interesting because also and i very carefully reviewed the third grade reading progress for mid-year and we have seen some really really good gains but i want you to think about this year's third graders think about what second grade looked like for them think about what fourth quarter or first grade look like for them when reading really takes hold is that fourth quarter of their first grade year when all of a sudden all those little pieces they've been learning really start to show and so we would expect that our third grade students still are behind the curve with reading because because what happened when they were in fourth quarter of their very first grade year and then um something else i want to see is besides the core instruction the grouping and regrouping at the bottom of that page we have after school tutoring heritage also is running for high schools del rio's running for high school territorial's running friday school the high school has friday school going as well for students especially who are credit recovery based and then i wanted to talk about territorial miss brandy bless her heart she's so good she didn't name grade levels but we can all figure it out um in her been her thing here i'll i will tell you this when i looked at her middle of the year kindergarten reading scores they were amazing those kids have been in school in school every day [Music] no interrupted learning no at-home learning no alternative delivery models of instruction and it shows the the power it's the biggest kindergarten class we've ever had in the district and they blew it out of the water and we're still enrolling kids and so it was very very impressive to see and i think nothing speaks louder than that about the value of a good teacher in front of kids every single day in a classroom where you're making those connections with kids and sparking their interest in learning in our first and second grade we are second grade as you would expect is struggling the most because what happened in kindergarten they didn't have fourth quarter when a lot of those reading things like all the letters the letter naming fluency all the sounds the words all those things start to come together they miss that direct instruction and then some students may have attended online during first grade or things like that and while we had great teachers doing that there's no substitute for being in classroom with your peers where you hear the questions they ask and answer so first grade is doing not quite as well as they've done in the past second grade is also not doing quite as well as we've seen in the past so that's where we are in terms of the middle of the year and what we've learned from things and i would say if you have specific questions um i know we're adding staff to friday school i've had email from principals this week about some staff in the fall people are like i don't know if i can do one more thing it's just too much but we actually have had staff this week who said yeah i think i'd like to do that so and we run buses for friday school teams so any questions for the principals the questions very good they're doing a great job well and cindy i love the insights that the principals are are giving not only on how we're making up for the loss that the kids had over the last eighteen two years but even the change in attitude toward towards that now that to me is outstanding that you've changed it from a negative to or that we are changing it from a negative to a positive because you know to me that's that's the secret of success is if the kids say this is helping me instead of i've got to go that's it i i'd love to hear that that's tremendous that's great so this is a thank you and thank you to the principals for the time and effort they've put in with their staff this is a discussion and information item only so no actually needed agenda item 10a is revision policy gcbb administrative staff contact contracts and compensation salary schedules this is the second reading so this is an action guide so you have in front of you in your packet the changes are underlined in red that are being recommended to you by superintendent scholl and the administrative staff and you see the strikethroughs that are removing the old rather obtuse salary schedule for administrators and trying to make it a little bit more transparent and understandable than all the formulary assignments we had in the past so we would ask for your approval of this policy change fantastic and we had a good discussion last month about this we did very much so all right listen i'm very happy to make a motion to approve agenda item 10a revision to policy gcpp the administrative staff contracts and compensation signs schedules and it looks like you were just waiting to make assignments all in favor aye thank you item 11 a schedule study session for board development by me um it's been a while since we have done any sort of board training for all of us to get together so i talked to mr scholl about it and i'm proposing that we get together an hour before our february meeting and nikki wally is it wally or okay she's our the board support training specialist with the aspa and she would be able to come and help us start developing some strategic planning opportunities if that works for everyone else is that the date of our february meeting i had actually put the 14th in my phone after our last board meeting so the eighth would be the week prior i mean the date doesn't matter if it's good for everybody the eighth february 8th is actually a tuesday as well not monday 14th if it works with everyone can we just say an hour before our next meeting and then make sure the fourteen years the second monday and this is the eighth so that would be wonderful i'll check on that too and then i'll let you follow them how's that so now i'm wondering if she was only available yeah it's not an action item but if yeah you may want to check and see if she's available yeah let me check this i will check in the morning to see if she's available and if for some reason february doesn't work out we'll talk about march and we'll talk about absolutely um and just for both of you to know on the back it kind of talks about what some of the things that they can talk about also if the strategic beginning does not interest you this is point of order is that an actual asset it is [Music] we are adjourned good night everyone see you next month and nothing to sign also gosh look at that i know
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okay so can you please pull any other questions can you please follow the board sure no i i are well i'll get back to her carson hi moon's eyes shane hi where's cross hi here now i think she mentioned my name you got a good seat actually i know she just struck me well forward how many i got a six to no vote it's all right just on amazon for right now okay okay but it carried okay um thank you uh at the novomer board meeting um if you recall the board approved the intent to sell 17 million dollars in limited tax bonds to fund the remainder of the east building edition phase 2 project the board then held a public hearing on december 13th to receive input from our community um tonight we are taking the next step which is to adopt a resolution authorizing the actual issuance of the sale so following any discussion it is recommended that the board of education approve the resolution providing for the issue of not to exceed 17 million dollars in general obligation limited tax school bonds series 2022 b for the purpose of increasing the working cash fund providing for the levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest in on said bonds and authorizing the proposed sale of said bonds to the purchaser thereof are you gonna so please have a motion second thank you any questions for sean okay can we uh please pull the board artwell i'm gorson hi moons i shane hi oysberg hi frost right thanks no i'm emotionally curious and i should point out if i should have said this before but um standard and poor's with our ratings call was very uh pleased with the answers that we gave to the call and did in fact assign us a triple a bond rating for that issuance very good um the next agenda item i have is uh part of the process of issuing is new new bonds is we need to restructure the existing 34 million dollars of outstanding debt because of the current interest rate environment we are able to save um 417 dollars in interest as a result of this restructuring i'm so following any discussion it is recommended that the board of education approve the resolution providing for the issue of not to exceed 34 million dollars in taxable general obligation limited tax refunding school bonds series 2022 a for the purpose of refunding outstanding bonds providing for a levy of a direct annual tax to pay the principal and interest onset bonds and authorizing the investment inside bonds by the education fund of the district please have a motion second thank you all right questions foreign you're all done and it's fine but are you floating a geo non-refund a non-uh i know a g.o uh non-refundable can you fund something yeah we have to refund we have to refund ours before we can issue okay that's correct all right so what is the expected uh the expected coupon rate um was going to be like one percent ish one one an angle uh one to one point two five percent on the refund we have our ratings call on wednesday or our sales call i should say on wednesday um that's going to be a little higher obviously because it's being issued sure it's a new issuance still a good deal still very good okay would you please call the board certainly gerson hi moons [Music] thank you no i i will i carry seven to nothing and then of course you can see our freedom of information request um it was a rather lengthy one but very just won this particular match was that difficult to do no not difficult just a little time consuming you know who is this guy who wanted it and why do we know no idea he's actually uh um he's the sort of 211 teachers union at 211.
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um with this i was created by northwind which is our magazine at north which is very exciting i know the kids put in a lot of effort for it i have mine at home and i think it came out very nice it includes art and literary pieces from our students student submissions which is very exciting so beautiful that's right as we start off second semester we do have course selection coming up a lot of students got the recommendations back in december so now in the next couple weeks they'll start choosing their classes for the upcoming school year which is very exciting although scarlet and i won't go through that process this year many will so that's very exciting with that our winter sports are continuing they are doing great i'm very proud of everybody and along with that we do have senior nights going on which is very exciting and going along with that we do have our orchesis dance company having their showcase later this week on friday and saturday i will be attending because i'm very proud of all their effort that they put in it's very exciting and their theme is unity which i think is a great theme for this school year everything going on in general i think it's very fitting last week we had our jazz cafe and it was in the commons which was very exciting uh using the new spaces to host that uh the sound impeccable the lighting how it worked it looked so cool i know they put in a lot of effort for that so it's very exciting we also had the allstate musical which is the most competitive musical in the state a lot of north high students participated in that in this by audition and it's very selective and they did amazing and i'm very proud of them and then north is hosting the 99th annual scholastic art show later this month which is the most prestigious art show competition that we have for student artists which is very exciting i'm so excited for artists to be able to showcase their art see other people's arts get critique and be able to grow because that i think is the point of anything be able to learn and grow from any experience we also have ilmua allstate coming up in the next few weeks for our student musicians which is very exciting they will be getting work class uh work work classes master classes i forgot the word which is very exciting for them to be able to showcase their abilities grow perform together with different people in the area which i'm very excited for them they'll have a great time done in peoria in the next few weeks we have the coral festival also happening next week which is our north high choirs with middle school choirs from the area which is very exciting because they'll be able to practice with them they're going to perform that same night which is very exciting because i think it really creates this sense of community that district 99 has been able to offer in its culture to be able to be inclusive and make sure everybody including the incoming classes feel welcome feel accepted feel like they have a place in our schools which is always the best case and going off of that with the sense of community uh north high will be offering a student organized blood drive at the end of this month which is very exciting because i think it's so important for us to be able to give back to our community because we are so thankful for them and i think it really is more than just a blood drive it's realizing that you're impacting not just people's lives that you're saving but everyone that they have in their lives is impacting beyond just that and finally at the end of the month we will be having our class of 2026 open house so we may be leaving soon but we have an incoming class my younger sister will be in that class so it's very exciting i'm very excited for her so yeah 2022 is going to be a great year i'm very excited yes yes and to scarlet yeah thank you jade okay so i don't mind won't be as long as jade's very detail-oriented but um there is there's a couple things i like to highlight so our second semester is off to a great start you know we're excited to see what the new semester holds brand new start teachers students we're all back happy to be back in the building our first week back was forum world language week so we celebrated by having bingo we learned some new words in german french and spanish and then there were prizes for people who won unfortunately i did not i don't have that luck but you know winter sports are back in full swing we can't wait to see how all the teams finish girls basketball will be hosting a fundraiser this saturday for savers so we'll be collecting clothes from 9 to 11 at the west events entrance and then those will be then donated to people in need and i also want to highlight wednesday will be our special olympics pack the place begins at 5 45 it's blackout theme so if you like to come you know the kids and the teams and the coaches they would all very much appreciate it girls basketball will all be there so i will be there with them and then our as jade said course selection is now going on so juniors sophomores and then our incoming freshman class 2026 will be having it on the 24th and the 29th so they'll have like orientation for a couple hours 6 to 9 on the 24th and then they will select their courses on the 29th so we're excited to see the impact that the class of 2026 has on the community in south i also want to give a shout out to our nine all-state musicians and singers for all their accomplishments i could never do that so it's amazing to see them perform and they're all they're all wonderful artists thank you all right thank you very good so i think we're going to hear from our north high students now correct all right i'll bring courtney forward thank you good evening everyone i am really really excited to introduce our student perspectives tonight from north high school we have with us uh this evening mr andrew heims one of our cte teachers and our students from our incubator class our very first incubator class and we have i think about eight students here i'm going to let them introduce themselves because they're going to present a little bit today but i will tell you i was really really lucky at the end of first semester back in december which feels like a million years ago already that i got to go in to see their final pitches for the semester and what i saw was absolutely incredible and it was really fun i mean not only are these kids talking to business leaders in our community but they're talking to lawyers they're talking to people with patents and learning about all of these really unique features of building their own product and building their business and so i thought it would be perfect for you guys to hear that tonight so i'm going to invite them to come forward so we have again drew heims here tonight and i'll let the students introduce themselves okay hi everybody um yeah a little bit you heard a little bit about the class um and i did bring some uh a couple of groups here with us uh they'll introduce themselves here in uh just a second but the the class itself again is just this authentic entrepreneurship opportunity that these kids get um it's real learning it's not role playing it's not out of a textbook um it's not quizzes and tests it's real applicable learning in which these kids are figuring out answers uh they're figuring out what works what doesn't work they're figuring out how to fail and how to pivot and continue moving forward so so far this year we're halfway through and the kids just got done before holiday break doing their mvp pitches in front of some of our volunteers from the 99 foundation board so we do appreciate their help with this but they're there to help act as the bank to help us if we need finances to make better prototypes marketing efforts moving forward whatever it is to try to get these businesses developed so we have two groups here for you i'm gonna let them introduce themselves tell you a little bit about their businesses so far what they've what they're working on um yeah all right my first group um yeah we got to be official so the people at home can hear us uh my name is hamza ahmed i'm kyle peters uh my name is me here shot uh i'm josh david okay so we're not just uh presenting our idea we kind of made this little pitch for you guys so yeah you want the clicker no no we don't um it's 2022 we're already here in the second week time really does fly sometimes you wish you could just go back almost teleport back to those fun and happy moments the good old days unfortunately that's not possible so how can we take those fast memories the ones no one prepares for the ones that no one poses for how can we take those and give them the same nostalgic feel we get when we look at a photo album yeah we can pull out our phones look at the photos and videos but it just isn't the same because the people in those memories aren't there with you and it's not organized that's where look back comes in look back is a way to look over memories and videos and photos with family and friends josh you're so unoriginal social me is already a thing i wasn't done me here um we're trying to create an app where how our generation thinks dude photo albums are so cool well only because they have the nostalgic feel to them when was the last time you guys seen a teenager print a photo and put in an album book you know what he might be right there oh sorry let me explain this idea to you so pretty much what our plan is is to create an app called look back and look back we'll pretty much have group chat so i'm gonna give an example just to explain how this app works so let's say you and your friends at the beginning of the summer create this look back which is essentially a group chat without the chatting okay and you'll send these photos and videos to that look back but the catch is that you won't be able to open it you'll set a date for it to open so let's say the end of the summer so at the end of the summer you and your friends will get together and look over those memories that you put into that look back over the summer and uh that look-back concept doesn't just apply to groups it also has a personal aspect to it so let's say for me example for example i'm on my weight loss journey so what i would do is on january 1st i'd create my look back okay and every day i'd put a video in i put a photo in or a video and i'd be able to add a little text to that too and the next year i'll set it to open on january 1st the next year and what i'd be able to do is look over the progress i've made in an organized manner which doesn't which really isn't there with the normal photo albums that they use um a lot of people are probably thinking this is just a photo album right the catch is once you put your photos and videos into we kind of think of it as a virtual time capsule you cannot look at them until the opening date to build the nostalgic feeling thank you all so much for your time that is our idea [Applause] we're also willing to take any questions does anyone has about that maybe someone have any questions no questions i i i love it yeah i really love what you guys are doing so where's it going next what's you know so then the plan is to uh pretty much uh get free downloads we're gonna we're gonna make a video we've already made a video but it's like a prototype we're gonna make another video which will be on a website which will and also that website will have something where you can pre-download this app and we're gonna get a bunch of free downloads see how many people would actually like you know like this idea and then hopefully we'll get into the process of developing it we're already talking to people who can develop apps and stuff we're currently talking with several different app developers trying to figure out an exact price point for how much it's going to cost to develop and a time frame for how long but right now like you said we're working on interviewing people in person asking what type of things they'd like to see if they would use our app and then we're creating a website right now where you can pre-download our app so when it launches you will automatically have it on your phone thank you for your time thank you great job great job that's impressive yeah very cool now the girls he's so smart of course [Music] so this is our company the pet so i'm jana rattery and so taking a look at these avocados you probably wouldn't want to eat the one that is brown and over ripened and since you don't want to eat this one you'd tend to throw it away thus wasting the money you spent on it so since it's unfortunate that we have to plan our schedules around these types of fruits and especially when they're expensive and you can't put a price on the health benefits they have so it's really just a waste of time and money and the problem that we face is that they're wasting their money and the food that um and their food due to the natural over ripening of these fruits so we found that the biggest complaint for consumers when it comes to buying fruit is either it's ripening too fast or not fast enough you never can find that sweet spot it seems so how did we fix this well let me tell you we came up with the idea of having a kitchen appliance that would ripen and preserve fruits and we learned from research that it's the same process for all fruits such as what's on the board and at first it seemed really unrealistic but then we dived into the natural process that occurs and whereas in fact it's very possible to mimic through science we went on a trip to mission produce which is a fruit distribution company which is doing a similar process to us but on a much larger scale ripening premature fruits and distributing them on a level two of a ripening scale of five which would be ready to consume and eat our goal is basically to bring that ripening process to people's homes speeding up the natural process of fruits so consumers can eat them when they're ready not when the fruit is alrighty hello my name is jocelyn and then on the screen if you go ahead and take a look you're actually able to see our first prototype that we began began to work on and it's a very similar concept to a air fryer where you put the food in the drawer and then you close it and then with our product since we're trying to preserve or speed up the ripening crosses of the fruit we actually um have the compartment in the back if you can see on the on the picture on the lower left it has a little opening and that's actually where the catalyst will be which will then be exposed to the fruit allowing it to be ripened or preserved with the change of cartridges for our next steps we're going to be continue working working with our intellectual property lawyer and also working on attaining patents and also since we learned that the process is available to all fruits we want to change our name from the pit to the ripe life which is more inclusive to all fruits we are also going to continue working with univar which is a global food ripening company with chemicals and we will better understand the ripening process by working with the chemists they have at that company it has been an honor to work with the various departments at school and it made this class cross-curricular for us i like to thank mr himes mrs dameswood mr dillard mr hines our mentor and all the teachers who have given an interest in our idea thank you i'll blew my socks off so i [Music] yeah so you guys can see from in one class we have somebody who's talking to uh programmers and developers and then we also have a group that's working with chemists taking field trips on their own meeting with different types of people you heard ip lawyers right we have lawyers coming into the classroom there's stuff that they can't disclose to me about their ripening process that i'm not allowed to understand how it works so that i can't take it very common question as the teacher like are you able to take their ideas and run with it when they graduate well the answer is no because i don't know how to do everything but it also makes my life as a teacher a lot easier because one i would tell you that the kids from top to bottom every single group of these kids have invested in this and every single one of them has grown throughout this process every group has hit a wall has hit you know some type of failure and they're learning how to pivot they're learning how to figure out things on their own myself as a teacher i i don't have to do a whole lot especially with the groups that you saw here today because they're doing it um you know so it's a it's been a wonderful experience i i can't tell you how proud i am of every single group of kids uh that we have i can't wait until may uh if you guys are interested may is gonna be the big pitch night um yeah where these kids are gonna go out and actually present these ideas for investment competition style shark tank style um you know and and we we couldn't be more excited so if you are interested investing i welcome you to come out and mate okay so thank you very much for listening to us tonight thank you to dr dement and the administration for all your guys support and uh you guys have a good night [Applause] i like those ideas it's not going to get any better than that so this is our entrepreneurship class we put into place what was it it could be an incubator yeah yeah yeah it was pretty recent so and then this last board meeting you approved the next level of that course so yeah these ones that are going to advance to a year two of this are the programs that could continue to advance so just a quick question i guess i could have asked when we talk about the ip um attorneys and different things how are we managing that or do we have people that because this is the type of thing that people that's where like drew undersold himself because that's what our teacher like he's saying he's not doing the work yeah i mean the kids are doing the work but he is helping them blaze their trail through and bring in the resources and make the connections that they need to make so that they figure out how to lead it from an idea to an actual you know product that people want to invest in right so his job of helping them guide go the right path to get them past those spots where they stop to be their cheerleader like those are all connect them with the right types of in you know professionals that's his job right and uh that's not an easy job i know he makes it he undersells himself yeah this is where um people would it would volunteer you know that are ip um and that's what they are that's what they're yeah my daughter's in it and so that's what's happening yeah so that he facilitates and kind of helps them with some connections and if they you know seem to be heading in the right direction or if so that's cool yeah he's kind of a guy who shepherded them down their path right so and there are a lot of people that volunteer or you know have offered to volunteer that they've asked to volunteer too so it's good yeah it's quite a it's a pretty cool like community outreach type thing too so very nice you can definitely see how it would take the entire student experience and bundle it up into one package right impressive and and and the community experience you're talking about i mean i can remember when i first came on the board just one of the things i was thinking about 10 years ago was all of the intellectual capital we have in our community you know and we got argon just down the street and i mean so the more we can engage all those resources with our students i mean the whole community benefits people if you take a look at the courses that the board has approved over the last couple of years like this course our internship course all of those are leveraging yep you know those community resources and building connections between our students and hopefully a future career yeah i think companies really like like to see it too yeah i think the students seem like they're having fun with it too right and i'm so excited we're taking full advantage of bringing the community in and all the resources because that's important yeah absolutely good stuff all right so we're going to move on to our first reception of visitors there are no forms no forms okay so sure we can move past the future i don't have to read this whole oh wonderful so let's go right into the board workshop and return to in-person learning right all right i still got to keep moving here all right return to in-person learning this is me all right uh good evening everybody uh as you can see from our this is up on our website our dashboard uh just as the rest of society saw spikes in coveted numbers we did as well i think we might have had more positive tests uh this last week then maybe all of the weeks combined uh we're pretty close to it coming back from break i'd like to take a moment to thank everybody on our staff that has been working hard to process all of these and support families and explain everything i know with all of the changing guidelines it's very frustrating for everybody to get one of those calls or to have to be working through it and to process what am i supposed to do how's it supposed to work how is my my kid going to get help all of those things were working through and trying to support everybody as as much as we can it's a large amount of work for the school staff the district staff has been pitching in as well to to try to lighten the load in the buildings but it is a heavy lift this week although we believe strongly believe as the board has heard from me for the last two years that having kids at school in person is the best thing that we can be doing hey can i just say to over break we had staff members having to to do a lot of work yeah yeah this the numbers that came in over break yeah the you know they're not reported here because we just report the weeks when we're in session but we had if i'm correct i had more cases that first week of break than we had all of november right last week before the break started and the first week of break we had nearly double what we had in our revenue yeah and same thing in north high right when i know that our staff had to do uh a lot of work yeah we had and we and we worked really hard and we had we we did what we could to keep things going with uh extracurriculars and that sort of thing so make some changes thank you too ed and courtney put in a lot of hours over break to make sure that things could keep running at school so and their teams did as well coaches were very flexible in changing practice plans and how things worked so we could try to keep things safe and keep things moving the the numbers are reflected in our staff cases as well you can see we had more cases in the last week than we had in the first four months of the school year amongst our staff this has also taken a lot of of lifting by our entire school community our teachers have been working almost non-stop they're either teaching their classes or covering for somebody else or helping another staff member out the the group that pieces together subs and coverage and and finding everything from that has been working you know non-stop hr department you know this has been uh a large amount of work to try to keep everybody in there has been several points the board knows where we were on a tipping point between would we be able to staff classrooms or not the administration including our principals have been subbing in classrooms this week district administrators have been in buildings so we're doing everything we can to try to piece this together and keep it moving forward but i need the board and for the public to understand that this is on a razor's edge as to how this goes hopefully we've seen the peak of this and it starts dipping back down but it's taken a lot of teamwork and effort and then finally i want to just point out that our students have been incredibly helpful and patient throughout this last week as well you know they've seen a lot of different teachers come through a lot of different adults come through and we've had no student issues that i've heard of students have stepped up they've been respectful they've worked with the subs that have been in there they're they're working just like all of our adults are to kind of make it through this crazy time and then hopefully we see it kind of go back the numbers go back down to what we were seeing before this this piece so a huge thanks to everybody involved our students our parents that are dealing with sick kids at home you know our staff our administration everybody that's working to make school continue in person as best as we possibly can right now so um some good confusing updates as usual from the health officials um i have said many times to the board how incredibly frustrated i am with our state and our state leadership and the fact that we cannot get timely clear decisive information from the state level i'm going to say it here again publicly the cdc came out with guidance i think two weeks ago on changing quarantine practices it took a little time for the cdc to clarify that yes that they intended schools to be included in that i don't know why that was a question because i would think if schools were excluded they would have clearly said schools were excluded from it but it took us a while for the agencies to say yes schools are covered by this then once they did we've been in a holding pattern at the state level for the five-day quarantine change within schools on friday we received an email in the morning saying it's coming soon we're sitting here monday night and we're still waiting for clarification so i hope you can sense the frustration that i'm experiencing once again that having to lead a district with all kinds of different changing and conflicting information from multiple levels of government ultimately the governor's executive order and idph have not provided updates for schools on five-day quarantine this is the cdc guidance that we expect to be coming there's a couple of key changes in here students that have received two doses are considered to be fully vaccinated under the new guidance they do not receive need to receive the booster but it's recommended that they do after five months staff it changes that fully vaccinated means both doses and a booster or the single dose of j and j and a booster or as it has been anybody who has tested positive using a viral test is in the clear for 90 days right so the first bullet it's really what it has been the second bullet is a key change for us because up to this point any staff that had received their two doses of the equivalent were not eligible for contact tracing couldn't be a close contact well they were eligible they would be contact traced but couldn't be identified as a close contact under this a staff member that hasn't yet received their booster could end up as a close contact so in a time where we're seeing spiking numbers we could run into more staffing issues if staff don't get get the booster we've encouraged i sent out a message to all staff last friday letting them know we think this this isn't in place yet but we anticipate that some version of it will be soon from idph that's what they tell us and then once that's in place then we will move to that next one so it'll be essential that our staff that have chosen to get vaccinated also choose to receive the booster to know to be out of that close contact range all right so we're holding on communicating this out to you know this is out there this is what the cdc guidance is but we haven't sent anything out to families yet because we're waiting with idph to see if they make any tweaks or changes in this guidance so that's close contacts questions on any of that then the change i'm sure you've seen this out there as well is the change between if you're a close contact or your confirmed case and you need to isolate or exclude um it's been changed to five days after the onset of symptoms or from the test date and then if five days have gone by and you have no symptoms you can return and then it gets into the details of how we count up those days underneath there's a you know there's just so much out there that sort of you know we have to call every family talk to every staff member to kind of work through and there's a lot of questions that come with everyone like everybody's obviously concerned and trying to understand the rules and it's just it causes a lot of time and frustration amongst everybody that you know the rules keep changing and it's hard to keep track of everything the fact that it's different in school versus everybody else i understand you know how how difficult that is we're doing our best to support everybody as we move through it the last final change is if they if somebody's out for those five days when they come back they need to wear masks as we always do through day 10 but the challenge will be when a student or staff member returns for days six through ten if they can't maintain maintain six feet of distancing they can't remove their mask right so we end up in spots like primarily lunch band and some high risk extracurricular activities like swimming well you can't wear it in the pool um gymnastics wrestling where uh they are they're supposed to take off their mask for safety reasons but they can't and maintain the six feet of distance so we're gonna have to maneuver through this for that kind of four day window right so uh we're working through this in the buildings as to where we already have some locations where students are uncomfortable removing their masks and eating in close proximity to one another that they can spread out we might need to come up with a couple of other spaces depending on how many students yeah are able to take advantage of this so we'll we'll work through that in the buildings to identify some some additional physically distanced eating areas so uh still waiting we have an email ready to go out to everybody assuming uh that this as we've told soon and imminent is in place plus whatever things illinois adds to it so that's kind of where we're at right now so do you have a ballpark of how many like just a percentage of how many teachers or students are vaccinated i don't have for students because there's there's a lot of things in collecting it we have some that we've collected so we've been using the county wide number which is about 70 percent across the county is just we're going to be somewhere around that right staff we're at 96 fully vaccinated under the old definition i don't know under the new definition with the booster where we're at are we seeing do you know if we're seeing a lot of breakthrough cases or are we really seeing a lot of the unvaccinated terms of the staff getting getting covered just like we see in society there is a larger percentage of unvaccinated individuals that end up with cova than those that are vaccinated yeah we're you know what you see in we're just a cross-section of society right so what you see out in the public is what we see here at school except it does seem to be that cases at school are not spreading at the same rate as in public right because we're all massed we have good ventilation we have you know but we were probably more mindful of the mitigation strategies in a school setting than just the general public sure yeah does it in parents best interest to update the schools with their kids vaccinations it helps us with the rate at which contact tracing happens because then it's right there and you know we don't have to look at it the parents can always email the nurses that information but if we don't have it we still follow up with every family to be sure all right any other questions on those the drama of covid continues and yeah ever changing moving forward just keep moving forward right so we're all here we're all learning that's what's important all right hybrid block schedule right all right i'll bring gina forward good evening i'm going to give a real quick update on where we're at in terms of our solve force as you may recall we have adopted the hybrid block schedule i just put this in as a reminder where monday tuesday and friday or eight period days and then the black days are wednesday and thursday we have several committees and those are those salvors that we've talked about before three of the committees met in december the part-time and traveling teacher schedule committee met in december i'm met with them and we looked at potential schedules there were several teachers there who are part-time teachers and so we worked to kind of map out what some of those schedules might look like and we gathered feedback from them concerns ideas it was really a great opportunity to see what is a priority for them we have a professional development committee that also met in december they created a draft schedule to determine what the priorities are and how different professional development activities will look in terms of the calendar of the year because as you may recall we will be doing professional development inside of the school day during what would be the teacher's lunch period just like students teachers have a lunch period either period four five or six and so a little bit different schedule for it but certainly mapping out what that could look like the department course team time i'm also leading that committee with one of our department chairs we met in december we looked at potential solutions we mapped out what the priorities are and tried to pair those solutions with the priorities and our group will come back together our small planning group will come back together and look at those options we have two other committees that will meet soon they have not started meeting yet we were very deliberate in which committees would meet first based on the volume of work the committee needs to do the fact that as you heard from our students our student board members we have students going down for registration appointments very soon and so scheduling is a big issue and that's why we kind of mapped out the part-time traveling teachers some of the department course team time and then the largest committee which i'm leading with a teacher is our act source and resource period committee and the access is built into those two days and that committee is about 50 people so it's a large committee we've met twice we met on december 1st we met on the 14th and i'll be sending out an email to the group either later tonight or tomorrow for our third meeting at our first meeting dr silly joined us and really set the vision what is the goal of the access and the resource periods and we started talking about programming what it could look like our second meeting we certainly addressed questions revisiting what we had discussed the previous meeting we looked at some possible structures for access period we actually looked at two options that we brought to the team and then we asked the team if they had ideas and two other ideas came forward we put out a google form to ask for individuals to be on like a subcommittee to work just on access and then we looked at a calendar for potential resource resource being those lunch periods periods four five and six different large group activities for students that it could occur on their lunch period because remember their lunch is built in in all students and all teachers into periods seven and eight so they'll have that additional time this committee as i said i'll be sending out an email very soon um at that meeting we're going to map out the access calendar work on our subgroup and you know who's going to be on what planning phases of it we are still brainstorming activities for resource and then we're also looking at our policies practices terms of attendance expectations for students and i anticipate this committee continuing to meet some of the other committees may meet once or twice like our part time and traveling teacher committee that's not going to be an ongoing all semester committee but this committee i do anticipate will be and then just a reminder of our task force timeline this is just one of the updates on the sal force and what we've done since we presented last time any questions just a general question what's your sense for your confidence level and that we we're actually going i mean these softwares are going to be solved after this work yeah i definitely feel like we have the right people on the committees and they are committed to the work so i feel confident that we will be able to solve some of the questions and concerns um and and just issues that will arise with a new schedule certainly there's a lot of work to be done but i do believe we have the right people especially on the access resource committee because that's one of our ongoing committees unlike some of the others might meet you know a couple of times this is going to be ongoing and i anticipate the work related to access and resource will continue into the summer and next year okay right it's new there's a lot of programming of course that we need to plan for um but i'm very pleased and and when you think about we have 50 people who have volunteered or have been asked and agreed to be part of this committee and i think that speaks to our teachers and administrators and their professionalism and commitment you mentioned some ideas are already being generated and and so coming up when's the next meeting we are hoping to schedule the next meeting for january 20th but i haven't sent that email out yet so some people might be listening and they're going to have a trailer on that yeah right you've made emphasis that uh you know progress is going to be reported back to the board right for the reign of the year so we'll be this will be an ongoing regularly scheduled event hearing from gina so all right so we are still looking to implement this in the fall yes absolutely in august we're fine tuning right yep we're fine-tuning all the concerns nancy do you have something oh yeah i know this is the direction we're heading but it's not we said we would know by i want to say with your eyebrows you would know for sure if we were going forward with this for the next semester based on the file force so i'm curious as to how we're going to approach scheduling different models yeah it's the schedule itself is either way is built around the same eighth period day so scheduling outside of part-time teachers and traveling teachers which we think we've resolved in our last couple of meetings are really the only key impactful pieces that we needed to make sure that we could work through before scheduling started otherwise we're fine to schedule with this model moving forward and get ready for next year in the new model and then if we run into a solve for which i would expect that by now if there was something that gina or i were strongly believing that we couldn't solve for over the next couple of months we'd be coming to you at this point to say oh we need some more time i think we're well on our pathway to having this all of our solved floors resolved and be ready for uh our next school year but you know we still have work to do so you know i still want to reserve the right where if something comes up or you know something develops along the way here and also we're living in very uncertain times right now that if something should change that i would come back to the board and say hold on we need to put a pause on it but i would i am in the very high percentage i don't want to give you a number but because i can't give you a real one but i feel very strongly that this will be the schedule that we'll be moving to next year but we should assume that this is where we're going unless i pull the emergency brake for some reason in terms of what they need and what they want what they desire so okay thank you yes we'll go go about course scheduling as we always have which is the first priority is making sure that as many students as possible get the courses that they want to get any other questions next thank you thank you gina i have uh rob coming forward for summer school nice to think about summer 10 degree day yeah let's think about 85 yeah all right good evening everybody i can't hear myself yeah this is on uh so i'm here to talk about summer school i actually have christy toth here with me she's going to talk about this past summer school but before christy takes the microphone i'd like to spend a little time bragging about her because she deserves to be bragged about the 2020-21 school year was an incredibly stressful school year especially for our teachers at the same time we had a vacancy for our summer school director because our previous director now has summer commitments so he can't be around during the summer so in a time when teachers were ready to just take a break during the summer we had a whole court whole cohort of teachers who signed up to be teachers in summer school and we also had christy who raised her hand and said i'd like to continue working and then work during summer and it also happened to be the largest summer school that we have ever had so christy joined us christy found many ways of doing things better for our students during summer school and led the largest summer school that we've ever had so she's going to come up and talk through this past summer's summer school and then i'll talk through some plans that we have going forward for this upcoming summer all right so since we've been talking about cobin things i have to share that we had the largest summer school by almost double serving over 500 and we had zero covered cases in summer school so we did something right over that period of time um because that was the first time that we were actually fully in person before that we had done remote for a period of time we had done hybrid but we hadn't actually been fully in person and so we had to do a lot of brainstorming and this took so many staff members to make it work we were actually even more restricted than we are in schools now as far as having dots the kids had to sit on at lunch we had to move kids classrooms three different times throughout summer school and our cmg team just absolutely rocked they worked the entire summer for our kids our secretaries and support staff our nursing staff to do any contact tracing or checking in on what was going on in our admin at both campuses and at the asc to really make this happen so as we mentioned it was the largest summer school by over double the amount of kids that we typically have and one of the reasons that was able to happen is because gina zaccardi worked her magic to be able to find ways to use those sr funds to be able to offer summer school for free for all of our students so no student in district paid for summer school this past year and additionally they had free breakfasts and lunches provided every day and so not only did they do that they got hot hot lunches or cold lunches i mean the everything was just coming together by the people that wanted to do work to get kids in the building because it was so energizing at that time um so really cool things that kind of happened i did mention i wanted to mention that 99 of our students that enrolled were in-district students and that was free for all of them and then only one percent of those students were out of district and they were charged at that time um but overall we have four main programs we have our academic programs we have enrichment programs driver's ed and then online credit recovery i'll touch on each of those really briefly and then we can take time later for some questions so in our academic programs which is probably what you consider typical summer school we had 518 students that were able to earn credits at the end so that's just not kids that enrolled it's the kids that actually earned credits in the end and stuck all the way through summer school we had all of our typical core classes running and then we also were able to offer global connections for the first time in years years years and a full section of consumer education which typically is on and off as to whether or not we could run based on how many kids need that so that was one of those courses that a lot of kids were able to take to make their schedule the next year a little bit prettier we were able to get paraprofessionals which are like teacher aides that really support student learning to lower our teacher to student ratio in every math class and that was a lot of math classes in semester two alone we had seven math classes running typically we would have three to four in a school year we ran a section of foundations of math one which is not always occurring either based on the number of kids that need to be there and we also ran biology and two sections of ap chemistry prep ap chemistry prep is more of an enrichment course but it's preparing the kids that are going to be an ap chem the next year and both of those were able to run in a really unique format of like a hybrid blended type class but those teachers have been doing that before hybrid and blended got cool before covet hit that was like a thing that we were practicing that was going to be a good practice one day and i still think will be a good practice and so they very effectively ran that program for enrichment we have freshman bridge so we check out the students who may be targeted to struggle a little bit more if we just look at the data because they struggle in reading or in math and we're able to support them to bridge them better into high school we offered like i said the two ap chemistry preps and typically we only have one of those and it's not completely full keys to academic success which is all of the executive functioning skills so like how do i note take how do i ask questions of teachers how do i text mark and i got multiple emails i just got another one last week from a parent that said i just can't get over this i need to tell you how awesome that class was for my student and that class is open to any student no matter what your ability you can be an ap student you could be an incoming freshman and so that was a course that was really successful this year as well and then we have el enrichment so for english language learners it's giving them another chance to bridge their language and practice it over the summer driver's ed initially was not going to run so i actually just started for this next year driver's ed stuff like right now like it usually starts pretty early to get things running initially we did not think it could run and the reason was because we were so far behind on catching up on hours from when kovit was going on we couldn't drive with kids but gina zaccardi and adam peterson are two people that made it work and came together and we were able to get it to get 50 kids their licenses over the summer i lied it's 49 i'm sorry um but we got 49 kids their licenses over the summer which was super successful in a really unique crazy schedule and those teachers worked hard to make it work so that was exciting credit recovery that's an online model and typically we wouldn't offer that unless a kid was already in a summer school program so this year we did that same thing let's say that they failed a few classes or they wanted to catch up on a few classes in greater place if they were already in the in-person model because we needed all students to be in person at this point there wasn't really the option then they could add on another class online also for some of our seniors who had really gotten behind and wanted to graduate we gave them multiple classes as options and for people in very unique life circumstances we were able to get them those classes and we had 130 students like i said complete 100 classes and six students graduate high school that wouldn't have otherwise um there was i will be completely honest when you guys look at the report there's a part that says the reason for attending summer school we usually ask that on like the bubbled form that the parents used to fill out when they were enrolling for summer school we went digital this year and that question was not something that i wrote out so next year you'll have that data back again to see did they want to be enriched what wanted to happen i could make up that data right now assuming based on looking at kids grades but i feel like it's one we could skip a year and we'll come right back to on that um and last i just wanted to share i feel like these numbers can be a little bit boring but this district really prides itself on its stories that's something that we consistently hear as staff members is to share the stories so by being able to run this summer school little stories about kids i know i had one student who earned two a's two full semesters in summer school after two full semesters of f's so they were remote f in every class effort in every class without exception went into summer school two a's and the student came back and said i cannot wait to come back to school next year i still see that student in the halls and he's still beaming ear to ear and still a really big success story we had a student that built such a strong relationship with a teacher that they went from last year working with selective mutism and really not speaking at all in class wouldn't talk to any teacher any peer anyone and they actively engage when i was watching that class in really deep and meaningful discussion they were talking about things that i couldn't even believe i could hear that voice coming out so that was an example of someone going above and beyond building that connection we had a teacher that was home for a period of time um due to fmla leaves and other things going on and they couldn't wait to be back in the building and on the first day back when they were teaching they came into my office and they had tears in their eyes and they just thank you for hiring me i like i love working with kids this is filling my heart so i wanted to share that story too as a little narrative and then finally we had multiple students who had anxiety about coming back to school this was the first time they were going to be forced back in yeah one girl in specific our policy is really tight i believe you guys know in summer school it's after two absences you can't come back because we only have 11 days total in the semester and it makes up a large percent so this girl had missed day one and then we go into day two she wasn't there and so we called and said hey hon like what's going on and found out she was really anxious and so we said can you just come to school we don't want you to walk to the class we're just going to see do you want to come up to north high doors and we're going to say hello to you we did we said hello and eventually she's like yeah this isn't so bad i said do you want to walk up to the class but we're not going to go into the class we're just going to go look at the class we're going to see what goes on eventually we got to do you want to meet your teacher but we're not going to ask about the subject we're not going to talk about like the stuff you have to do or what you've missed yes and then eventually the student said can i come back tomorrow and do the work like can i ask the teacher what missing work i have to do that student ended with an a in both semesters of summer school and is still beaming in the halls when i see her now so i think that i wanted to share those stories because it's bigger than just the numbers thank you guys for supporting summer school because it was a really successful summer [Applause] wow christy is amazing you'll notice when you exit you'll see her photo on the wall over there is one of our national board certified teachers she's awesome in her job as a teacher and she did a really great job last summer as our summer school director so going forward to next summer i was reviewing i know this sounds pretty lame but i was reviewing our old board uh meetings the youtube videos to figure out how long ago it was that we committed that we were going to expand summer school it was december of 2019 and at that point we said after construction we'll have a plan ready and then covet hit a few months later right so it's obviously slowed us down a little bit but we do have ambitions of making summer school more than just the credit recovery model that we have right now one thing that we've learned as we've processed this is that we need an administrator whose focus on expanding summer school is there year round so our current model has hiring an individual to be the person who runs summer school but we really need somebody who has that focus year round in our administrative meetings to talk about how to expand summer learning opportunities so as you know we are in the process of selecting a new administrator a director of student experiences that person will have a primarily responsibility of uh helping us to envision how to expand summer school now the challenge is that person starts july 1 of this year we want to try to make some steps towards that this upcoming summer so gina and i have meetings with our department chairs and our apis to talk about how can we start to offer some some options during the summer for students to accelerate through their core sequences and then we're also reaching out to our peers in other districts to see how they're doing it one thing you'll notice in the request that i have for you is i'd like to do something unique with that director stipend because just like our previous summer school director christy now has commitments that prevent her from being on-site during the month of june for summer school but she does an amazing job as the director so um what i'd like to do is split that stipend in half and then christy is our priest summer school director and then depending on how we hire for that director position it could be that that person comes in early and is our on-site summer school director or we have to troubleshoot it and figure out how to have an on-site director for this upcoming summer but that's still a solve for and tbd once we get through the hiring process so you'll see in the the report the recommendations that i have typically we do this every year we increase the teacher stipend with cpi cpi was 1.4 percent increased the director stipend by the 1.4 percent also we'd like to hold the tuition cost at the 210 dollars per semester for in district and 420 for out of district it was a few years ago that we did a five percent increase we don't feel that there's an increase that's needed right now one thing that christy did mention is last summer through a combination of us feeling that it was really important to remove as many barriers as possible for students because of last school year in addition to the asser funds that we had we were able to find ways to make summer school no cost to all of our students except for the driver's ed students we feel that this year is a much more normal academic year and we don't have as much of a need to offer that we also have the assert funds allocated other areas but keep in mind that our fee waiver students always for you know always get it no fee associated with them so we'd like to get back to a normal model where our students are paying their tuition for their summer school because we feel like the need that we have last year is not there this summer to subsidize it through the user funds uh and then we have the calendar uh that we'd like to recommend for summer school for this year starting on june 7th going through june 23rd having the fridays off uh and then july 4th falls on a monday so we would have that monday off in second semester but second semester would run from the 27th of june to the 14th of july i have a question yeah oh i'm sorry go ahead i think that's it okay do we generally subsidize the the summer school for students that may not i know we offered it for free last year but for students who aren't able to pay for it yes yeah yeah i was thinking we did but i wanted to be sure yeah and then their whatever form it kind of somewhere on there tells them if you can't afford to pay for it you could yeah there's a way for them to indicate it and they're also a way for us to check our records from the previous school year to confirm all right would the fee include food again well i believe because we moved out of that program we don't have that available any longer right no that's not an available option any longer i mean students that aren't on free lunch yes we would still provide but all other students would we'd have lunch options available for them to purchase you said because we don't have that program anymore how do we i i don't recall last year was a long time ago i don't recall how we um how we were able to get that program yeah that was all federal money that came in and even throughout the school year we were providing meals yeah i remember that yeah and then we just continued that throughout the summertime yeah we don't have that flowing anymore part of the federal national food lunch program which this year we chose to leave uh to provide students a better meal experience quality of this school year yeah okay so that all went together yep yep okay yeah no i'm only asking because it sounds like um it was successful summer school it also was so much going on um you know more kids could be interested in it another thing i i took away from it probably the intimacy of summer school meaning it's not as many students where some of the kids opened up and with so much going on were able to to enjoy it so this was thinking there's also a different structure of the day right because you're with the same teacher for almost a whole day for the equivalent of a semester right it's a as a high intensive it's like a j term in a college experience right yeah so it gives teachers and students this different opportunity to build relationships and get to know each other different and you know and for some students it's maybe their second time through the content so you know it's just different it's a very different i used to love to teach summer school just because of that you know just a different way of running school for a period of time um so it's just hard to compare one to the other but they both have their place and no certain and that's certainly on the things you mentioned that's kind of what i meant about the intimacy of it because you are with the the teacher piece and the subject matter being where you don't have ten of your classes or how many other students may have at one time so lots of things going to it so i just was asking about it because it could be positive again as far as a bunch of students but i mean we opted out of the grant so we just wouldn't have the free component of it well and part of the funding this year this past year was those additional federal coveted funds though i wonder yeah it's just unless they give us another round of funding which is which is possible uh you know those funds have been allocated in different places right yeah any comments questions sorry kind of a parallel um to what cheryl was talking about we saw we had more than twice the number of students participate this last summer so it begs the question right is it was was that a a factor uh is it the fact that it didn't cost anything was that a factor was was it a fact you know covet going on and the need to kind of the desire to get back or the need to you know catch up so to speak with was that a factor i think the answer to both those questions probably yes so um uh it'll be interesting to see what happens this coming summer um and getting back to the the point why why are you taking you know the the summer class um uh will be good information that we gather then this summer to to analyze that i do i do get concerned about the funds right i mean i i can picture students um in a family where technically you know they're able to afford summer school but mom and dad say no or mom says no our dad says no or they're even afraid to ask or what you know and um removing that barrier um is something maybe we can talk even more about as we go along or at least to minimize that and we work with any family that needs us to work with them right we can work out payment options and everything else for anybody that needs them they just need to let us know when do you start to get a sense of how many you're going to have for summer school yeah yeah so um yeah exactly pretty much we kind of have an idea based off of grades from first semester but really even though second semester grades it's a fast turnaround from when the grades are issued to when the student signs up ready set go but leading into it you know our counselors have a have a good idea of we're not so sure if this student's going to pass this class so let's get everything prepped for them to take it but ultimately it's up to the student to sign up for it okay are the are the teachers encouraging students to to look at that as an option is that something actively that's going on yep teachers and colleges and counselors yeah very good anything else i guess we're moving so proposed summer school that was in the report okay left an extra slide there got it um so recommendation for action right so uh we have a personnel report today that is our one action item uh i am excited within that action item is the appointment of our next principal at south high who has joined us today uh miss arwin pokorny lip who is a very experienced educator who i think you will come to find over the next few years pending board approval this evening that she is a very student-centered experienced principal that nobody can fill ed shoes except maybe ed um but you know you always get concerned especially in these times that you're going to bring in a leader of a building and go backwards and i'm very confident that uh with arwen's leadership there that south high will continue to excel and continue to move the district forward irwin's very familiar with our school district she has served as courtney's mentor this year so you can imagine she would know if this wasn't a place that she wanted to be and obviously is excited to be a partner with courtney here working together moving forward but also she is a resident of the community and we have two future mustangs here in the room with us as well [Music] so i am very confident and the hiring team is very confident in selecting irwin as the next principal of south high and we hope that the board approves this here with our next action item afterwards assuming that the board approves we'll bring arwen up and introduce her super so how about we get through the business right and then we get the phone stuff so i need a motion for the board of education to approve the personnel report leave of absence classified and appointment administration so moved second all right so we've been moved and seconded there we go joanna thank you so much terry pavicich aye joanna vazquez drexler aye nancy kupko hi christopher espinoza hi cherelle fuller aye jenny heggstrom aye mike davenport hi sounds like we've approved all right so i will bring irwin forward to introduce herself congratulations little fun bit of trivia as well arwen is the seventh principal of south high so only the seven and the first female principal of south thank you so much i just um i wanted to say first my thank you to each and every one of you and to dr thiele i could not be more honored and more humbled to assume this position so just my sincerest thanks for this opportunity i know that south high and district 99 have such a long tradition of rich stories and fun traditions and i'm excited to be a part of that as well as working with our students to create new ones one thing i wanted to share that came up often throughout the interview process was my desire to work with students to create systems that amplify and empower their voices to continue the work that ed is leading to make sure that south high is the most inclusive place it can be so that every student can show up every day at school as their authentic self so that's the goal and at the same time i'll be building collaborative positive relationships with staff and fostering those individual connections with families so i could not be so more excited to get started and just thank you again all right all right thank you yeah so i have um on the phone um my tommy lip who is currently a seventh grader at jefferson junior high in woodridge and he was at a ba individualized baseball practice tonight then i have aj lip he's a fifth grader at sipley school in woodridge aj actually swims here um twice a week alternating between here and donners north with hornet swim club then brody is a third grader at sipley and brody um assuming i'll go as planned brodie will graduate from south high in 2031.
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so we updated our our school district mission um and we changed it over to match our strategic plan and i will tell you that there was a pretty big split in the room and while i realized that we all voted on our equity statements i also thought it was worthwhile to take some time and and let the members of the committee have the discussion um and the discussion really kind of centered around they were okay with the equity statements with the exception of the word racism right and we kind of had a you know maybe a little bit too long of a conversation about it in regards to you know we we kind of didn't get finished what we needed to finish but i think it was a good discussion i think it was well worth having and i think it reflects our community so you know there are still some members of our community and our board who you know still have a problem with some of the wording but beyond that on 130 um that was it i guess oh we wanted to add science where it says student learning improved literacy math but that's for another day um i think that one needs to go to the teaching and learning committee so as we talk about which number is that that was that was all one colon 30.
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thank you all right thank you very much if you can if you're able if you'll stand and join us for the pledge of allegiance all right doctor i think i'll grab it from here for a few moments we do have a quorum here for tonight's board meeting and so we'll call it to order this is our reorganization meeting for the 2022 calendar year um listed on our agenda and here as we always have is our mission and vision for our school corporation also on the cars behind us as well as our objectives that we try to follow as a school district the first thing that we have in terms of business for a reorganization meeting is to establish the officers for the board so for this first meeting through december of 2022 and we'll then go through this again i guess a year from now so we'll start that our the officers for our school board include a president a vice president and a secretary and so i would ask the board at this time do we have any motions for a slate of officers for this 2022 calendar year dr roberts i'd like to make a motion thank you dr biltz to a point dr jill shedd is president mr cole wheeldon as vice president and mr rich stenner as secretary can i get that right yes it is so we've had the nomination that i've heard as president um dr vice president nicole wilden and uh secretary rich dinner okay is there a second to that slate of officers i second okay second from this is the opt wire any discussion on the slate of officers okay hearing none we'll call for a vote all those in favor say signify by saying aye those opposed same side okay that is the case you will have um we'll change those rules and doctor i'm going to pass the here we'll make sure and get your name tags updated in regards to the title that you will change too we will not change seats at this point in time this evening but we will also in further meetings reorganize your seats all right thank you very much sure thank you thank you very much for your confidence in me and i'm looking forward to working with both mr stenner and miss wheeldon as part of our leadership team so as we continue just because we love doing this so much it is time for our covid update so i will turn to you dr robin all right thank you so much so this is a topic that has been on our agenda now for quite some time so i'll just run through what i have been sharing in the past just updating you with information so the cdc map is i don't think it's changed this entire school year but the department of health one does and again those are just different ways of measuring and the state of indiana has the four colors with orange and red being the most cases red being the very most cases in our county is currently in the red locally if we get to the specific information that is kept track of by our local covid19 task force 117 new positive cases this is middle of last week again these are updated this data is updated every monday and thursday based upon the previous day's information so these are a few days old code hospitalizations at that time were 51.
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and so the the numbers before 2019 are a little bit different than the numbers after 2019 this shows the absolute amount based on the way the state does this computation and slide number three is is this same information presented as a percentage of expenditures the work that we have always done with the board and we have a board policy on this next slide looks similar to that but a little bit different uh and the the reason that these numbers are different is because of what funds we're looking at and because as a percentage we take this as a percent of revenue we look at cash balance as primarily a reserve fund for changes in revenue and states using percentage of expenditures and we also subtract any outstanding purchase orders at the end of the year and count that money as committed as not available as part of the operating balance so that makes these numbers slightly different than what the state looks the number the state provides but still very similar and you know we're quite pleased with the cash balances that we've received we've had in the past few years and again that change in 2019 is because the funding structure changed that's not because we all of a sudden started accumulating more cash but it's so the fourth indicator is somewhat similar this shows you the the uh annual expenditure compared to the annual revenue so the revenue is the green bar and the expenditures are the uh the blue bars and as you can see in almost every year uh our expenditures are slightly below what our revenues are which is what we'd really like to see each year so we look at that as a good position to be in uh and we just want to mention in terms of additional information that the business office prepares a report to the board monthly that shows how we compare expenditures and revenue to the budget that we've established for those indicators the fifth indicator is not particularly valuable for center grove schools this shows that our total revenue that we've received by the type of revenue the big blue bar or section of the graph is what we talk about is the funding formula i think this might be more appropriate for a district that perhaps had a great deal of federal funds based upon their poverty rates for example and the the local tax revenue as you can see is that uh kind of brownish bar at the bottom of this i'm not sure that that really tells us anything particular about where we are except that we haven't gone through very many changes the the sixth revenue is operating uh referendum revenue we have not passed an operating referendum so this shows a constant zero and i'm reporting this because the state said you have to report on six indicators and this is one of them but obviously this does not apply to us some other things that [Music] we'd just like to talk a little bit about in terms of the financial condition of center grove if you've seen some of my budget presentations you've seen a chart like this uh for many years that shows our tax rate um and we just within the last few days got our tax rate for 2022 and it will once again be a dollar too so we're quite pleased with our ability to have kept this tax rate left relatively level and less than it was in 2009 comparing that to other districts um this is the the best data that we had at the time this report was presented and we're right in the middle of the pack we've seen some of the data for 2022 and again we're right in the middle of the pack with our interest rate compared to the rest of the interest rates in the county for our planning purposes we use a slide like this that look set what's our interest rate going to be in the future and this shows um in the bottom the light gray is our operations fund tax rate the that dark red is our current debt uh tax rate and that um yellow slice is for the future projects that we have approved so far or are planning for in 2022 and that green line is the dollar for which we're we're saying we're going to continue to maintain this relatively indefinitely below that that rate another item that reflects on the condition of our district is our assessed value and as you can see for the past two years we've had excellent increases in assessed value you know for us that means that it allows us to spread the tax load over slightly larger dollar base and is as part of what allows us to continue to operate the school district without increasing the tax rate uh that is firm because the 2022 assessed value is based on um the work that the county did in 2021 to establish rates for 2022 so um yeah that's that's firm for 2022.
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so move second so i have a motion by mr nunes a second by mr oliver is there any discussion on the motion hearing nominate we have a roll call please miss gunther shannon jenkins aye mary waite i have steve kathleen amaral john nunes yes chris oliver yes thank you everyone all right next on our agenda is our student representative report uh evan garcia is here with us he's gonna share with us the uh coming to what's going on at dartmouth high yeah thank you dr jenkins i hope that everyone had a wonderful winter break this is our first school committee meeting of the year and i am proud to report that dartmouth high school is working hard to make 2022 a success since our last meeting many things have happened here at dhs in december our band strings and chorus held the annual pops holiday concert as with everything put on by the music department it was a great event additionally nine students competed in the english department's poetry out loud event congratulations to lauren lima who won this competition and to everyone else who participated this event can be streamed on dhs tv media's youtube page our clubs here at the high school have hosted many events these include unified bowling which is now returned to wonderbol the esports club which recently created an esports room here at the high school the debate club which will be competing in its first competition this saturday indoor percussion which is preparing for competition set to occur later this month best buddies which held two karaoke events during pace in december providing students with and without disabilities the opportunity to hang out and sing together during the school day the dhs theatre company which is hosting auditions for the spring show shrek this week and of course dhs tv media which is broadcasting this meeting and has aired events ranging from poetry out loud to our school singing competition on the athletics front winter sports have been temporarily paused over the last week but they will resume in games and practices later this week um our hockey team actually has a really big game this friday at 3 45 facing aura at the dunkin donuts center in providence so you know good luck to them i really hope they win that will be fun to watch um and finally many of our fall athletes have also been highlighted on the standard times super team and all-stars list so uh thank you and that kind of concludes my update for this meeting thank you does anybody have any questions for evan just thank you evan you you articulate things extremely well you're very well spoken and i appreciate the uh the high level overview that you give what's happening at the high school so i told evan that i'm gonna have a question for him because the next item on our agenda is about student representation to the school committee and we've been having a discussion and i thought it might be good to hear evan's opinion on this issue so under mass general law the high school is supposed to elect a five-member student committee and then that committee is supposed to send one their chairperson as a student representative to the school committee and that person would sort of sit at the table for our entire meetings as opposed to just doing a report which would allow them to give some input on items our agenda so for instance later this evening we are talking about the school calendar for next year right and so if we had a representative serving in that capacity they'd be able to provide us our input on what they think about the school calendar and any sort of thing that we discussed so i just wanted to hear your thoughts on that it is going to be i think a big time commitment we meet every third monday about for an hour hour and a half two hours do you think that's a good idea would you do you think students would be interested in participating just any sort of thoughts you might have on that would be appreciated yeah so i think that's a really interesting opportunity i mean i'm graduating this year so it doesn't really apply to me as much but i know if i was younger i definitely want to do that i think that's such a cool opportunity for you know there's so many students interested in government and in education and it gives them a voice that you know they otherwise wouldn't have had it's very similar i think to to use the student advisory committee to the current process of electing the student representative because i was elected by um by the student council so i think you could also kind of factor in like you could probably say that the student advisory committee is made up of the top five you know like uh student council candidates with the highest votes okay does anybody have any other questions they might want to ask evan about that issue before we get into it i guess you know i will follow up evan you know do you feel that there's i want to think of a way to articulate this because like i think part of what we're hoping to get from our student representative is a voice that we may not be hearing and information that we might not be hearing and something coming to us as a board and maybe even the administrators aren't hearing do you feel that conversations happen within the student body that aren't being and that aren't being conveyed properly to an event i mean let me i'm trying to think about how to say this i guess do you feel like there's adequate communication between students and the the faculty and administration as to how the school is running and are we aware of student emotions and feelings i think so yes i know personally when i give my my little spiel before each meeting i always try to think not just of you know what's submitted to me based on you know what's in the calendar but also the events that i've done personally and what i know is going on around the school i think our administration does a great job of always trying to listen to students we have a student a council that's always listened to we have a couple of other outlets i know mr tebow and i have a question he's always there to help and don't respond to my emails or anything i might have i think um in this time especially with social media and with all of these different things happening in our society students are more involved than ever so i think it would be really great to have this more formalized student representative position thank you other questions so that having been said you're welcome to stay you're welcome to go whatever um meets your needs best evan but we definitely appreciate your report and hearing your thoughts yeah i do have quite a bit of homework maybe one time i'll take all right that would be great thanks evans to talk to your teachers and say listen i've got a commitment you know two weeks from tonight tonight i've got a school committee school committee meeting you know so no homework that is my homework thank you everyone thank you thanks evan have a good night you too all right so that gets us to our uh our one item under old business which is the student representation to the school committee um and i know that we had um put that off because i know miss waite had some ideas and wanted to be part of that conversation um but now that we're all here you know i'd like to hear your thoughts about sort of moving forward this and rolling this out in the spring and ultimately i think what we we could do is to just follow the timeline in that's established in law that they will be elected in the spring and then by june they elect the chairperson who would then start attending meetings that would seem to work best to me right or but we could move that forward earlier i'd be interested in hearing what you all think about this dr jenkins you know when they mentioned um when evan would just mention the student advisory council i'm wondering what their role is and would this you know replicate is that just you know focus solely on the high school and high school issues like it so to that point with that same group i mean it does seem that those would be i'll ask you know dr gifford what do those students discuss within their within that council well i also want to be clear though that the law states that there's only five members right so i don't think that would work because i think the student advisory council is larger than no i'm not saying like bring them over as a whole i'm just kind of curious about what issues they speak to and would they be replicated here would they be you know represented as well conveying it as well like so what is the student advisory council well i think you know they they speak with the principal they speak with the admin etc about could be like you said the parking fees for example things that affect them um personally or as a group but also i think if you were going to do this it might be nice to have folks not just elected from that group but from all of the classes because as we know the classes also have a body that meets together to discuss things about their class so right yeah mr oliver did you want to share your thoughts sure i you know personally i think we should be moving forward with this i think one way or the other it needs to happen i think you know i think it would be an asset to have a student body member on sitting with us at these meetings just um just to give us their the students perspective and their feedback you know looking i i have the lauren for the the section up in front of me right now and no i think you know let's my opinion is let's move forward with this is my looking at this um it sounds like one of the things that they bring up is um the consideration that the school committee may designate a student outreach coordinator um so that you know that that's something that i think we should consider just to make sure that they're that student is aware of what's going on but i'm okay with that time that time frame that was actually going to be my first question is what were we looking at for a time frame um but i think that's i think that's reasonable the only we got to at least try it and then you know let's see what happens as far as commitments from students and understanding what the time commitment is so that's all i have thanks you know and i was thinking along that lines of if we do do that that timeline where they would elect and it would be prior to the first day of june and that school year that we could name a student outreach coordinator now i'm going to look out of the corner of my mary miss wait um perhaps maybe um because i think one of the things we talked about was sort of setting up some expectations and so that might give us this time in the spring um to sort of maybe set something up like that right so that students then know what they're getting into what they're supposed to do yeah and then we can present that to them you know you know in may or whatever so that gives us some time to develop that and maybe we could work with the high school administration to to sort of set that up miss amarill did you have any thoughts and then i'll go to mr nunes thank you um can you hear me yeah no i i similar to what chris just mentioned i i think it's something that we definitely um i'm in support to move forward with i think that in less formal ways over the years we had some some changes made based on that student voice and uh positive changes and i think it's important that we engage them in this way um and i'm okay with the timeline i'm not invested in any of those sorts of details but i i do look forward to us moving forward this hopefully sooner than lately thank you mr nunes your thoughts yeah uh got a few i just want to make sure that this doesn't be this isn't uh a popularity contest okay that uh as as evan said yeah there are a lot of i would assume there are as he said a lot of students that are you know interested in you know government and how government works and and that type of deal so which is which is fine but i you know this is not going to be a job to take lightly okay i mean if you're going to make this commitment then you're going to have to be here you know you're almost going to have to have a chairman and a vice chair for discussion purposes that if one of the you know the chairman can't be here that type of deal then you know one of the other for one of the other four members you know has got to step up and and is going to have to be here type of deal uh you know are these one-year terms the law doesn't say that as i read this it doesn't say how long the terms are i did see that hold on first day of june in each year who shall serve for a term of one one year so that's what that's the champion the chair for us yes and again we can set that up but i think we would do elections every year okay that that type of deal okay are we going to have at least one we've got four classes are we going to have one from each class which means you end up with three or four in june and then you've got to get the freshman class and in september and get a member from that for that class to be on that board so that you have a well-rounded representation you're saying every year mr nunes you're saying throughout the course of one year what do you help me understand in other words if we have these elections the way we're talking right now we're going to have these elections in or the students are going to have some type of a discussion come march or april okay so they're going to pick five members okay yeah what happens if two of them are seniors then they're you know come june 6th you know 10th whenever graduation is they're no longer here so that means come september we've got to find two other represent at least then now we'll have the freshman class in and we could possibly get someone from the freshman class i think it would make sense though that we could it might make sense to not have representation from the freshman class because they're just starting out it's not they don't know the ropes but you could do one want somebody coming back and saying that we're not we're not we're excluding a class we could do you could do one from the in at the end of the year when we're having elections one from the freshman class two from the sophomore class two from the junior class you know um but i think those are parameters that we can establish and i think it might make sense for us to do that working with the school administration on some of that mr oliver you're going to share your thoughts yeah i just wanted to just um kind of just respond to mr nunes i think you know this is supposed to be happening across the 300 something school districts across the state so i don't think we're i don't think we need to reinvent the wheel there's got to be through m-a-s-s i'm sure some of dr gifford's colleagues have have this i know in the school district i'm currently in i had the opportunity to speak at a school committee meeting last week and they have a student rep um they did a very very well job of presenting to the school committee and and sharing their feedback to the committee um so i i think i think it's good and i i don't think we need to really go i can i understand what you're saying and i hear you know we don't want to be what about this how come the committee didn't do this but i think there's whether it's through masc or whether it's through just speaking um to other school committees that you know i don't think we need to reinvent the wheel on this no no and i'm not i'm not trying to reinvent the wheel i'm just you know again there's a number of years that i've been here we've had student representatives that have at the time would spend the whole meeting here okay and they would literally no disrespect would be bumps on a log you ask them a question and you get a deer and a headlight look so somebody to you know this is a this is a serious job absolutely to do it you you know you they got to jump in with both feet he or she is going to have to jump in with both feet right so that's that's what i'm saying no it's certainly a good point so i can follow up i know that um tracy novik from masc is who i found out about this from i can follow up with her to see um i think they're doing this in worcester and if you want to ask mess but i can do that follow-up to see if there's any sort of procedures or guidelines that we could copy because i had spoken about this wait i i spoke with glenn you know via masc too and i didn't there at that point it was a very loose framework when i was speaking with him i didn't have a lot of you know feedback there there are some parameters online within the mass handbook again but they're pretty broad and pretty in line with what we're doing so i don't think it's actually i don't see the documents and the guidance that's matching this kind of um heightened um council that we're thinking of so i'm hoping yeah i know i think it seems to be new and still forming so tracy's on the worcester school committee now i know and they they actually have a student representative who's a participant so i can ask that would be great for her for what their procedures are in in worcester for how that would be a helpful policy or um yep practice yeah so i'll look into that i think it seems to be i don't think we need to make a motion right now but it seems to me to be the sense of the committee that we want to move forward to this we're going to bring forward maybe a sort of policy guidance to figure out how to do this and and then we'll we'll do that the one question i have is it does give us the ability to name a student outreach coordinator do we want to do that would anybody be willing to do that miss wait would you be willing to do that can you define though what will because the school committee may designate a student outreach coordinator for the purpose of ensuring the establishment of a student advisory committee and regularly informing the advisory committee's school committee's agenda so i think to the first part you know we can get some of those sample policies and then you can maybe work with the with ross ross that would be great some of the administration um do we want to do a motion to appoint designate mary as a student outreach coordinator are we okay with her volunteering for that i'm fine all right so thank you miss wait i appreciate that and so we can talk but let's i'll do some outreach to masc and then we'll keep moving that and we'll bring it back to the committee once we have a more fully formed thank you policy all right excellent so moving on to the next item on our agenda is new business we have our dartmouth representatives to the greater new bedford regional vocational technical high school school committee um dr cindy marlin dr shea i'd like to invite you to come on up and sit up here and we can have a conversation and some questions thank you very much for inviting us thank you for coming you know i think one of the things we really just want to do is to ensure that the lines of communication are kept open so that we have you you know come in a couple times a year maybe just for us to just talk and stay up sort of on issues questions but just to have a conversation i think that's an excellent idea yeah so i think um i'm going to open it up i think some of our committees maybe you know just do a little bit of a question and answer have some conversation i know some of the committee members had some questions for for you all so does anybody want to start mr nunes can i start with you no problem okay thank you for being here mr watson nice to see you as always sir thank you for being here mr shay dr marlon uh a couple of a couple of things that i hadn't i had the good fortune of running into uh mr shea just before the holidays so he's a little familiar with what i'm about to about to talk about but one of the one of the things uh you know my wife hates it because i just channel surf type of deal and i'll pop across the uh bedford volk school committee meeting so i'll kind of listen in sometimes depending what's going on inside but in all seriousness the audio i can't hear there's there's a very it's very weak you know you almost you know i've got to put the volume up very loud on my television and then every once in a while it kicks in and you know i get my ears drums blasted so if you could you know kind of check on that only because you know it is in my at least on my tvs i don't know if anybody else has said anything to that to you and uh one of the other questions i had and you know you were kind enough to uh to get is the minutes and i just you know with all due respect found them to be a little thin type of deal and and by that i mean there were some things there you know it would say um you're going to approve policies well yeah we all have policies and everything else but it's like and i'm going to make an assumption that they probably all kind of run in the same format you know with masc and and such but it'll say you're going to approve policies or first readings or whatever of you know a a a b b a b c that that type of but no notation as to what they're for type of type of deal so now i've either got to just say okay the heck with it or go trying to find my policy book and say okay so what's aab that type of deal so i know that that you're approving can i i want to amplify mr nunes comments i think if you look at ms guenther's minutes mr shea you're probably familiar with them you can tell exactly who said what and when and what the context of the debate was um i think to sort of amplify both of mr nunes's comments it's difficult if you want to stay informed about what's going on on the school committee the new bedford school committee right yeah you can't hear and the minutes don't explain what you didn't hear and so i think it would be helpful to us particularly but also to the general public if there was more details in the minutes so that people could see like again like i know here that like i don't know mr oliver asked about i think playground no mr oliver asked about the cost of repairs to the high school roof right we're going over the budget kate has listed every single thing that we asked about and so you can see that that's very transparent and i think it's helpful just for the public to know what's going on and so i think we would appreciate that i don't sorry to interrupt you i really want to reinforce what you're saying there yeah no it's just you know sometimes you know sometimes less is not for no disrespect no no i i if i speak too softly let me know you say i don't have that problem the audio i will look into we've been working on that for the last few few uh months i guess um trying to get the right setting it's a big room but we thought we had it fixed but this is the first time i've hearing that's not so i i'll get this back and mr uh superintendent watson is here but i will make my notes on that and make sure that we try to adjust that audio now i don't let me just stop you there for a second sir is the fact that you know i if you met in december i haven't seen your december meeting so i haven't but i'm going back through at least through your november meeting yeah was the last time i saw a meeting yeah december we have a meeting tomorrow night so our december ones will be voted on tomorrow night yeah so but but but i'm talking about the audio right now that's what i'm talking about too is the audio okay meeting the you know i have if you had a meeting in december i haven't seen that one on tv yet okay so you know the november meetings the last one i caught when it was very weak okay but we'll definitely look into it i think the uh the minutes itself and i can explain to what our direction was and i remember a few years ago and it might have been even when i was a superintendent because it was been a number of years ago where i met with the masc and we met with the chair and i can't remember where the chair was at the time to talk about minutes and basically we were told that again the minutes are there for a record for a vote taken now you mentioned we have letters but we didn't have anything and i just checked that december one it is listed but i have not gone back but if we're not listing the name or what we're talking about that is absolutely wrong and i will just i'll address that but usually it's xyz talks about you know admissions and then so tell you what it is and the vote was told to me was that sometimes less is better because sometimes if you're talking about it will it may it should whatever what was the vote now the vote we have eight members on our school committee yeah you have to have five so it would be a was it four to six or four to five right four to four or five to three so we do have that recorded as a record so without minutes he was expressed to us that maybe go that route now this is probably the first time that it has been brought to me as a school community member or uh superintendent maybe we were thinking about considering more and i'll bring this back to the full board we have a meeting tomorrow night yeah and uh i'll mention that to them but it was kind of an intentional way of keeping a minute shot so people could see okay there was a vote last night on transfer students and they got defeated okay so that was the call and and sometimes we've had a few people call up to they couldn't attend a meeting they wanted more information we would talk to them about it but nobody's ever came in after minutes before and nobody's ever said you're not enough so i'm listening i will bring that back and let us know talk about it as ourselves but that's why it was done that way it was done because masc at that time said just make sure you go back four five years from now and what was the vote on this issue it has to be there with the name and the number and as you said now which i forgot because when i was on board it wasn't that way the everybody had different numbers and now so the state is narrowing down which is fantastic yeah but we still should clarify everything we're talking about on the vote that was taken and i'll make sure that happens thank you sir can i just i want to follow up on that real quick mr news if you want to follow up on that go but i want to stay on the minutes for a minute yeah do you have anything else on the minutes okay i i know i'm not i think maybe this is pre both of your appointment i know we've had this conversation before and we've asked for the minutes and we've asked for more detail on the minutes i think that was before either of you were appointed and so i'm not saying this i don't want to criticize either of you but i do think it's a recurring we have had a recurring preference for more detail in the minutes and we're hopeful that as your as our representatives dartmouth representatives to the school committee that you will convey that that is our preference um because we this is not the first time in my recollection that we have asked for this um and over the years we have not regularly if it weren't for mr nunes reminding me on this um i don't think we would have gotten the minutes um thank you for that mr nunes and we also don't get a lot of detail on that and so i think as part of our relationship it has to we have to be able to see what's going on in the meetings um and we can't right now unless we watch which you know people have family they have kids they have jobs that can be hard to do so the meeting minutes can be a way to figure out what's going on and so i hope i know again this is not you but i think i would hope that this time that maybe there'd be some taking that into consideration because it is something that has been stated previously sorry i just wanted to stay on the minutes now you had a well i think just to answer your question no statement if after we talk about this tomorrow night i'm not saying the next day but shortly i'll be getting back to you as chair of it to to say what we discussed last night we have a meeting which i set now with the time administrator because that's who all the our information of our attendance goes to and all that at the end of the year and you know if we try at least find out what he or she wants so that is something that we'll talk about too but i will get back to you and not just say it's gone into a cyberspace so yes we decide to lengthen it no we're not here's a reason but i'll get back to you on it thank you i appreciate that uh mr oliver before mr nunes picks up a different okay a different topic i was just something i'm thinking about with you know with uh mr shea and dr marlin uh dr marlon being fairly new and then having a new superintendent at vogue maybe it would be helpful since according to the cha right i believe is the town this is all through the town charter um that the school committee the select board and the town moderator appoints or is it just the school committee and the the school committee the moderator i was right and i was right committee the town moderator and chairman of the board of soldiers thank you mr nunes um and since i've been on it's typically the full committee that that takes it to a vote and then the the chairperson um votes on behalf of the of the dartmouth school committee but maybe it would be helpful if there was more just email correspondence between our our dartmouth reps and maybe just the chair and you know or the chair in the vice chair or just just more correspondence from committee to committee um i you know i i'm looking forward to um you know having a new administration on board you know i think we you know i think at the end of the day i i just think communication has been an ongoing and it goes right back to the note to the minutes it's communication just an ongoing concern amongst at least some of the this school committee as well as you know just hearing it out and about on social media and whatnot so just maybe increasing that dialogue between our reps and us and whether that's through better email communications or um you know just coming here quarterly or biannual or something annually i think that would just be a huge help because you know at the end of the day these are all our students um you know that we're all looking out for all right mr news we keep interrupting you fine but i think we have a lot of the same converse same questions so rather than do the same question four times we can stay on a subject no that's fine you have another question no the only other the only we would i was just going to ask for a for uh you know mr mr shea or dr marlin to uh and we can get to that after all the other members have court about the new uh vote admission policy that's all that's right so that's and i am absolutely fine with that manager thank you okay so we're going to wait to come around to the admissions policy mr oliver you have questions comments i really don't have any specific uh questions or or you know or comments um like i said i actually had the opportunity when uh mr watson sent out the invite over the i believe it was last spring or over the summer i i didn't have a sit down in person with mr watson we had a we had a very good conversation um you know i'm looking forward to some of the uh some of the initiatives that he's looking into um you know i have two daughters i've said this before one graduated from new mexico the other one is a sophomore at dartmouth high school right now and at the end of the day we're all you know i there's a path for every single student and i just think that focus and a very it's an exceptional school um it's known in the state um but certainly there's always room for improvement and from from my point of view i would really just love to see you know whether it's more invitations to to the committee to the dartmouth school committee to to stop by vote and tour it um hear about new initiatives um and then just sharing just the the quote whether it's quarterly or semi-annually um some high-level report from our from our appointees um i think that would go a long way um towards um my my you know my concern around communication so if i had to just sum it up just be better communications so one of the one of the things that mr shea and i and superintendent watson have spoken about is to have some kind of a dartmouth day we had that pre-covered and that got kind of sabotaged and um but mr shea and i have spoken about that again and we think that that would be a great time for the school committee select board members possibly some other you know the uh greg barnes people like that so that they really understand more about the school i think until you actually go into that environment which i know you have quite a bit chris um it's hard to believe what actually goes on there and the service that they give back to the community which i can talk about a little later but um yeah sort of a dartmouth day and we are going to revisit that that'd be wonderful i appreciate that i would just ask that perhaps you consider a dartmouth evening for those of us who work and may not be able to make it i know it's great to go in when the kids are there and whatnot but i know i like you all but i'm not going to take a vacation day to go do that so perhaps considering some options for those of us that are working that would allow us to go in an early evening or some sort of format like that would be great if i may chair that that's exactly what we did number of years ago we had a night event and we also had a saturday morning perfect so it would definitely be part of the package to get everybody in and the shops won't be open but at least you know we had some honest society students that would come in on that saturday morning to talk about their shops so so yes we will consider that very much so that'd be great all right miss wait no i was just gonna say i know we're gonna you know probably lead right into this but a lot of what we were talking about in the transparency and bringing folks into the school seems to be embedded in your admissions policy that you've updated you know and it seems to be you know as i go through there's a lot of that discussion about having you know certain nights going into different schools going to meetings and really you know emphasizing that outreach and again and i had that same kind of buzz that chris of what i saw and you know there were some folks saying you know how do i where's my representation with with the vocational school awares that they felt that gap so i think all those efforts increase communication for us to increase your representation or your voices coming into our committee but also engaging in the public i think are going to be uh you know really there's a desire for that need to be met within the community and i think it's going to be well received so you know again i'm as i read through this i know you're going to talk about this more um it looks like that's already you know a clear part of your agenda so um and plan moving forward so thank you miss amaral do you have any comments or questions uh just not just thank you for being there while i'm here and warranting and uh no i do have when we get into the admissions policy uh i i do have some questions but just to thank you for being here too all right so how do how do we want to handle the admissions policy do you have questions about it mr nunes or would you like to hear what our reps have to say i just would like to hear a little bit about what changed why the changes that type of deal so i was on the admissions committee with the other representatives from the other towns and cities and um i just want to ensure this committee that this was well researched there were over 53 meetings that either the administration attended a lot of those were through zoom um and then meetings that we were face to face for a good three four hours going through all this information we also worked with a former deci associate commissioner who was very very good and really kind of shined the light on what some of the highlights should be of this and what maybe some of the changes would be um we one of the things that we looked at was where possibly would there be some gaps and as miss waite was saying more outreach is definitely something that we've upped our game on not that we hadn't done it before but even more so outreach to the community and also the dartmouth middle school who has they've been cooperative they attended a breakfast over at our school and it was very well accepted the other thing is the gap with families that might not speak english as their first language that was definitely a priority making information more accessible on the website so events on the website the admissions policies on the website that kind of thing um so i know that you all have a packet that talks about this a bit and [Music] i know mr shea will help me with any kind of history questions because i don't have the prior history that he does at the school but um basically there's five we can accept because of space 565 students in the in the future we have adapted the admissions policy a bit and the point system so to let um young people in that maybe you know should just be given a chance so the scholarship scholastic achievement 24 points and basically this would be in the eighth grade and between a 7 a grade of 75 and 100 they could get a potential of 24 points 65 to potential of 15.
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can i get emotion motionless second discussion [Music] yes [Music] motion [Music] superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions is outlined in personnel resolutions under district and high school 6.2 through [Applause] 6.6 and i get in motion awesome mr bell second second let's dress i had one question on 6.4 6.4 is there any restriction of probation applied to people who may be employed by the district for part of the year no okay so this would have been effective for any nurses who were either on roll or it takes effect as of the date of signature it's going to take effect okay so then my only concern would be people who are employed only for a partial year and potentially receiving the full stipend well right now all of our nurses are employed no i i i understand that part i think my question has to do more with people who decide to leave the district before the conclusion of the school year thank you [Music] yes and mr thompson upstairs moving on personal resolution middle and elementary school resolved superintendent recommends for approval the resolution this is outlined in the personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools we have 7.2 through 7.8 can i get a motion motion motion bail second how many nurses do we have i know that we have some faith coming on we have you could be nurses age or nurses okay we have four nurses okay and we're gonna have four nerves [Music] i mean obviously lafayette's probably gonna have a nurse's name right now [Music] i'm saying moving on to education resolutions district and high school resolve the development board of institutional approved resolutions as outlined in educational resolutions under district and hold 8.2 grew 8.5 can i get a motion function second person discussion uh should 8.2 be withdrawn or revised yeah i'm just actually first that was from oh yes we're going to withdraw 8.2 it got rescheduled my mistake on that any other comments since we went to the red it was just very uncomfortable having people outside [Music] educational resolutions middle and elementary resolve the boundary board of education approves resolutions has outlined the educational resolutions under the middle and elementary school that is just 9.2 can i get a motion motion focus mr bail second second uh we'll give it to mrs alex questions concerns bail yes this casino yes oh there you go that's an easy one yes this thomas out is saying okay we are up to policies residing federal court of education approach resolutions as outlined in the house of resolutions under district high school that is 10.2 can i get emotion focus in this first amount of second second second just discussion yes up to special education resolutions resolve the boundary board of education approved resolutions outlined in special ed resolutions 11.2 and 11.3 and i get a motion motion mr bail second second yes [Music] approval of financial resolutions resolved the boundary board of education approves resolution is outlined in financial resolutions 12.2 through 12.9 can i get for 12.6 is that actually running fiber between the buildings i'm assuming it's for our local network yeah this is this is uh probably our monthly um cost for um our e-rate internet services for the buyers between the buildings okay i guess my question is it's not hardware right we're not actually delaying it no no no no no we don't we don't we try not to lay our own game we're all possible i have a question yes it says on here that um two of the vendors did not meet the requirements what just do we have details on that what would we come up with again when it comes to e-rate we have an e-rate consultant who does that because the regulations are pretty thick so i know verizon and um dataworks solutions they pretty much don't delve into the educational realm because of the compliances and everything else that comes through okay for 12.9 would it be possible for us to have an operational update at some point in the future maybe the quarter or a half year mark or for the feedback from the audit so there were some uh comments comments observation suggestions just to get something a little bit more periodic you okay any other questions all right mr bailey yes mrs i'm staying mr yes business and see as we have none here let me just read this real quick we're gonna go into executive session under items four seven and eight can i get a motion motion will all in favor all right we're going into executive sessions [Music] so we are back in session we are up to number 17 approval from hiv middle and elementary school resolved boundary approves the resolutions has outlined the approval of hiv resolution uh cases under middle and elementary school that is seven point two seven point three can i get a motion motion motion mr bail second [Laughter] yes motion to adjourn can i get a motion motion motion bail second second all in favor [Music]
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
attached to this album is an article from kg1 tucson announcing pima county space national requirement and an article from the arizona department of health services showing covered cases throughout the state this is i think it's important to all of us the first page after the gen item shows a radical spike in a number of cases um on honor about january 1st 22 22 a week and a half ago weekend a couple days ago um one reason this is not i don't believe in this article one of the articles i read on the website said that we have 2 000 more cases a day in piano county than we did a year ago so we obviously have a challenge um our low was last summer which is probably about a third of what the spike is right now uh so that's just information to help we're making the city and then the second is the article about pardoning the cape fema county board of supervisors mandated mastering requirement which i have to agree with that's not important but [Music] county has not adopted any type of fine program or anything like that we couldn't do that here first of all they can right no the government the governor is trying to put pressure on them to rescind that i don't see it happening but so they're going to hold fast with that expectation so i think that that helps support us i support you to extend lasting and i think but then but i'm on my recommendations i said through july summer school i think for the new superintendent they're going to have a lot of things they're catching up with uh and you're live one and they may not be ready but i'd like to keep kids safe at summer school so i need to continue that and there's there are people that ignore it on this campus and um dr jim boltz has talked with staff and trying to get them encouraged and encouraged the use of masks i think we're doing pretty well because not 100 percent so i don't have a guess 80 85 yourself yeah it kind of depends what people are doing when they're playing soccer out here they're probably not wearing a mask but what is that english is our environment one of the things that changed today i'll put this in word whatever the country is we had been saying five days if someone a quarantine if someone was exposed um we received a letter today from dr cullen of uh pima county health department that five days still applies but not the early childhood programs there's ten days so we had early childhood kids coming back tomorrow because it was a quarantine now they can't come back for another five days so um it's gonna if you hear anything in the community we're following the directive uh pima county health department can you put that on facebook yes so i i personally have observed um stop not wearing masks and then often and also my daughters one of my daughters said that in at least one of the classes that she's in she says about 80 of the students in that class do not wear masks that's unfortunate so what what i would like to hear not necessarily tonight because i'm screaming on you but for wednesday how are you going to get there how are you going to ensure that there's better mass compliance among staff and students i hope i'd like to tell you about great answers i'll talk tomorrow i object commanded i think the parents should make that decision rather than a government an entity well the one thing i can add to this an area can kind of back me up or whatever there's not a mask in this room that would prevent me from getting cold right and have on an n95 to not get colder so this mass just prevents you from getting covered for me so if you have a kid whose parents say i don't want my kid to wear a mask yet send their kid to school with colbit all the other kids in that classroom are exposed to it because this mask won't prevent me from getting colder from that kid the only way that that you can keep everybody in that class safe i'm not a big master you can ask anybody but the only way you can keep those kids safe in that classroom is everybody has to everybody has to wear a mask so they can't spread it throughout the whole classroom a lot of districts are not a lot of issues but some districts are going um what do you call it promoting it they're going remote chicago's having a big huge battle i don't know they've been keeping up with that or not teachers don't even want to come back to school and so i don't think the mass mandate is unreasonable during this economy okay if it's if it's important okay that's not our job no all we all we can do is make the the policy and then it's up to the administration to enforce that right just like it worked i can make policies but the enforcement's the hard part right have you there is a vaccine for the young children now there is a vaccine we don't know the county has not brought the vaccine to us like they did for staff or to my knowledge but i think the the vaccine is more more effective than that without a doubt but again we had a child a few weeks ago that [Music] came down with coke um and had one shot because they hadn't had the time lapsed in first and second heart the booster officer the case was talking on my expertise it appeared that the case this child had was it was huge the child was sick but less severe than it would have been had they not had increased serious stuff i don't ever want to mandate my own pain in the district requiring kids to get vaccinated i think that's called a little bit too far you might disagree your idea i don't know but but i do think mask is not is not asking too much what do you think martian i'm against mandates period of all kinds not it doesn't have to do with copenhagen but i don't think the government should be involved with it i think you would be part of the school encouraged it not mandated yeah that's my opinion yeah i can encourage it but i don't think they should land it difficult where the resistance to the mandates come in because speed limits are mandatory but you're going to protest against them to get a vaccine like that you will get yourself a vaccine absolutely but on the other hand you know if a business says you require you come in to be a patient of our business and we're not that's why i don't want to go in all the way i want to go into that business i'll abide by that businesses asking me to wear a mask that's fine you know but i don't think you need to be in the position to be mandating this stuff just highly encourage it mandates all the time we do mandates all time to school you may need that you're at school on time you mandate that you come to school we mandate that that if you want to play sports you're going to have a certain grade we we mandate all the time to the kids right we mean that you can't smoke in the bathrooms we can be mandated all the time and this is what i just disagree with that's funny i'm not saying bro i just well i don't mind i don't mind using them wrong at all and i struggle with all this every day right i struggle with all this i'm i'm a very skeptical person i don't think any of it is going to prevent anybody from getting colder i think we're all going to get cold back standing down that's great mass not mask some variant is going to come down the road and it's going to get us all right cool with service state it's not going to go anywhere people didn't accept enough and so but i do think that i personally believe that we need to mandate as a school board like kids just to protect us legally that kids wear masks and we haven't had a huge crowd outside screaming at us for our mass mandate right no not that i know anything right i heard some people up at old when it first went out the very first time and they said have you heard they landed and then other women said yes will you send your kids to school you know they've got to go to school being important more than being at home so i guess i have to go along with it i don't like it and that's all you know i'm sure a lot of them do that yeah i agree yeah to take up lonnie's point um i think if masks only protected the person that was wearing them and those families wanted to make that decision not to that would be different to me than what it is where wearing a mask in a classroom protects the people around you who really have no choice about being around you teachers kids so by requiring all the kids to wear masks they're all getting a certain amount of protection that they wouldn't be if a handful of them were permitted to not permit how few substitutes we have what happens when the teacher goes out i know dr travoltz has been filling in substituting the times because we haven't had the total substitute feature so it is also by requiring masks it's protecting the student's ability to come to school in person yeah at the same time they don't have we're going to have the option of having them come in we'd have to shut down those same with outbreaks if there's significant enough outbreaks within the school that could shut the whole school down so thank you um it's not an action i um i actually have a pretty light load on wednesday and i have three agenda requests that i hope can be added to wednesday and they should be really brief discussions one is the addition of exactly this for for months now this has not been added to our um study session but that's an item for adding future agenda items during the study sessions it's on this month on responses under item business one i'm sorry you're right i'm looking at the movement yeah so i'd like to have a hopefully brief discussion about adding this request for future agenda items to your study sessions number two i'd like to request a discussion on the agenda item spreadsheet that's that's new to all of us um about about the spreadsheet and the workflow around it because each of these three things i think if we get them nailed down it will be helpful for next month's meeting um like i said small discussions and then the third is um something we haven't been doing is having a uh a motion to adjourn meetings i i don't know i feel like we used to do it i don't know but lately we've just been adjourning meetings so i'd like to have a discussion that we add that in the 15 years i've been here there's never been a motion to return okay i would like to have a discussion about adding a motion to adjourn at the end of meetings so those three small hopefully small discussions i would like to hear a report on how the review of the student handbook are you requesting that for wednesday yes [Music] uh call this meeting oh
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i waited i thought about it i made sure it was something i really liked um and i made sure that it was where my shirt covers it for my professional job you know that that is a conversation that's not such a bad thing to have for some of these kids because they don't have parents that are going to tell them those things i get parents conferences that are tattooed with awful obscenities all across their neck and i'm thinking really that flower on someone else's ankle is nothing and then mom and dad would be like yeah come on i'll take you to take one but maybe i'm gonna say like look i thought about this i you know made sure no i don't have one on my ankle um i i i totally get what you're saying and i've had those conversations with my students right because we talk about high school they all want to have fun you shouldn't say too many of them want tattoos right now like oh i'm going to get a tattoo on this they are the people generation and now i i always tell them guys wait because what matters to you when you're 16 is not going to matter to you when you're 30.
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