Reader
Browse passages, annotate evidence, and export with full provenance for citation.
[Music] drew are you there hey hi anybody else on the call [Music] yes [Music] just here's i just so we'll go ahead and session and get back to our meeting can i get a motion to return to our normal meeting i moved and returned to our regular rescheduled agenda okay that's proof so um we are back we have um earlier scratching item six our special recommendations section so we'll move on to approve the december 14th uh [Music] any discussion um in the call to the public the information from mrs sampson while i think we captured much of the essence of the discussion i think we left some of it out and we may just want to go back and add some more to it and that's recorded so it shouldn't be yeah this is a summary but i can add more on the next one any more discussion [Music] anybody on the phone for call the public i think it's just andrew okay and we'll skip over that and miss superintendent it's your turn our screen's not working [Music] fine well quickly just to report um good evening everyone and we've only had a week in session so i'd like to wish everybody a happy new year 2022 and we know everybody's studying their new year's resolution so don't be the same be better our enrollment update we're still steady as you can see our numbers there we are still just down six students usually we see a lot of enrollment um increase in january students who are either moving into state and we didn't see that this year we had a few students withdraw but not too many students come in but we're steady quarantine and isolation so um we had 116 kids absent this was yesterday today we had 10 more kids out positive student cases we have 22 six were in the same class positive staff went from three to four for today quarantine students we have 32 students on quarantine three students quarantined on staff we had 16 students who were opting for the test to stay and one staff member of detest to stay we did have to close one classroom which is started virtually today the teachers here on campus teaching the students since we had more kids out with with close contact quarantine and isolation in that classroom staff and students hit the ground ready in 2022 we had our chorus center cheerleaders assist with the baja baseball first kitchen from here which was nice so there's our dream team there with mr ferguson and miss valetti and miss potterton who took the kids to this event also our staff kicked off thank you mr osterby and our governing board members and mr williams and crew patriots for their help and encouraging words it's always a great time to encourage and show appreciation to our amazing continental cold staff we had our asiana's winter conference so sunday monday deanna and mrs cuevas and mr maguianes and i presented it was leadership in action fuersa was the theme and mr nain and mr nathan were supposed to go present with us but both of them became ill and weren't able to make the conference so um due to increase of cobit cases we did have a lot of participants and even some superintendents who didn't make the conference because of close context upcoming events we have a long list on our board docs so i didn't really include anything on that slide and that's about it if we're focusing on the big rocks making sure that they're in first so we can eliminate noise to really look at data and um our teachers have a plan for our we teach and enrich this semester these next nine weeks so we really are going to be prepared for our state assessment great thank you so we moved to number 10 the consent agenda there's about three items within that do we have a motion for the consensus i'll move to a proof of concentration second any discussion mrs allen yes mrs yes mr australia yes miss valentine yes and mr mcgivin yes okay mr greg good evening everybody glad that you all had a great holiday season and we're back at it here um the district finance report is attached to decide your agendas but it was also asked me to bring up uh what our budget is versus our actual expenditures and conferences per category so i went ahead and did that for you here this is our ml budget everything in the yellowish column is what is budgeted for that line item everything in the bluish columns is what is expended or encumbered within that column um at the very end of that column that tells you how much we budgeted how much has been spent or encumbered and how much of each column is remaining another thing that was asked for if you can go ahead and move that to the right just a little bit mr thank you is you asked for the budgeted adm versus what ade is calculating our adm admins so our budgeted adm right now is at 583.39 and as of january 5th ade is calculating our adm at 577.85 so with that i will i hope this answers the questions that were put forth as far as what was expected of this report if it isn't please let me know and i can make whatever adjustments it is that you need to get the information that you're actually looking for but other than that i ask that you approve this month's district financial report do we have a motion and i do have some questions i really don't have a question on the district financial report or the budget actual report um but what i what i am wondering is some of the numbers don't match between the two exhibits at least as far as what i can see um i went through the whole m uh in the financial report looked at the the total expenditures including encumbered uh encumbrances and i'm the way i'm looking at this thing is that salaries are 28 000 less on the financial report than what they are on the budget and versus actual report benefits are fifteen thousand dollars less purchases match exactly and supplies are twenty thousand dollars more on the finance report than they are on on the budget versus actual report um i i'm not really asking you to let me show me where i've miscalculated uh or something that i've missed and you can get back to us later if you just want to shoot that to me an email i'd be more than happy to answer that question and that's fine with me fine with me um and and if if i'm wrong just point out again and that i missed an area but that's i mean those are round numbers uh uh but i i didn't think i missed it too much because the purchases matched exactly yeah and it could be a simple thing as i tried both number here there because everything on that the uh the budget versus actually once again keyed in so it could be something that i transposed the number here to there so i'd be more than happy to look at this for you if you can just give me the specifics of which ones you're looking for then i can go ahead and give you that information right since we're halfway through is there anything that keeps you up at night as far as our budget and you know that i'm a little worried about here that we're gonna run out of money or we've gotta so within the budget versus actual report that we said joe if you scroll down to the bottom of this moniker so it's kind of subtle in sections so within regular education we're still sit with 314 000 dollars that have not been spent or in comfort uh within special education we're at 91 thousand dollars that haven't been spent for encumber within transportation we're at eighty two thousand dollars and within our k three reading program for twenty two hundred dollars so that's roughly four hundred and ninety thousand dollars that has not been spent or encountered so with that being said and to answer your question what's keeping me up at night is how much am i going to have to get rid of that because the state doesn't pass the aggregate limit so that's where we're at right now we're keeping really close track on these numbers and we're just needing the legislature to override the aggregate limit so that we don't have to cut budgets because that is what i have available right now and when is that oh do we know the legislature has to act by march 1st you know so if you look within those categories so i've got 314 000 within regular education as long as you know the legislature does pass that budget that could go towards you know equalizing out the raises that we had to give last month or for this month for the for the minimum wage increase i can look at doing some raises for teachers and administrators off of that and the same thing with the salaries i've got what forty thousand dollars close to forty thousand dollars within special edit teachers and then like 185 thousand dollars within parapros and things like that so it gives us that opportunity to give those raises that we didn't get at the beginning of the year um do those also include any like unused salaries like if we just need to hire so can you scroll up again i'm sorry for so when you're looking so when we're looking at teachers instruction okay so that's going to be that 160 100 lives that's the teacher line so i've got roughly what is that fourteen one four four seven and one four nine two so roughly 48 000 within teacher salary so there is room for another teacher within that category now when you're starting to look at anything anything dealing with salaries is in that 6100 section so it's just a matter of taking the difference in between the two to see how much is left just so like if by some weird occurrence we get a a lot of bus drivers apply and i know we're always looking for bus drivers there's i'm sure stroller miss monica please so under 400 which is pupil transportation it looks to be 19 000 roughly so yeah i can afford bus drivers if needed for the remainder of the school year so we've got to march first there you go well yes that's what's keeping me up at night anybody else this is alan yes mrs yes miss rossville mr yes and mr mcgivin all right that moves on a new business [Music] field trip they want to go to flagstaff and in february we are excited that the field trip is back on in person for the jazz festival in flagstaff and it is during rodeo break so students do not miss school but our staff members are willing to go and take our kids for that weekend and its funding is all paid entirely by tax credit the music funds that they have do we have a motion to approve mode to approve field trip quest to flex second yeah and next year's calendar yes so it is um we have our calendar there proposed it has been shared with teachers as a draft form for feedback it is aligned to sabarita's calendar which we try to align it as close as possible to the same families and kids so we'd like to get it approved so that teachers can start to plan their vacations and their pre-service days and make sure they're back on campus when school starts um christmas break aligns with so anything yes we did make um two changes on this calendar based on christmas break because if you notice that it has christmas eve is well the 23rd is friday that's records day and we know that we do have families that go out of town so we moved wednesday will be a full day and thursday the 22nd will be our half day so we just flopped instead of making it wednesday every release and thursday full day we did that for december and for may as well so that the last day would be a half day instead of the wednesday prior but other than that it's similar to for some reason the way the calendar turned out it's giving us one extra day right albert on the calendar one extra day from this year and more days in fourth quarter but it is a line to someone in the student contact days of 176 does that include the 39 half days yes so we've got whatever that comes out to be about 140 146 actual contact days full days [Music] yes does that what is the state standard the state standard is by hours not necessarily days so um when mr bagnanesque um does our numbers we well exceed the hours of what is state mandated although i don't know if you don't have those numbers i don't have it with me right now they'll be the same very similar to last year's uh rk through fourth grades exceed the number of days almost by 33 days a year based on the number of hours they only have to go 760 hours for the year middle school goes a thousand hours that's seventh and eighth grade and then k5 is uh four or six is 900 900 hours a year so typically um elementary school kids usually go to school an hour less than our middle school kids and high school kids but we have all of our kids on the same schedule that's why we have so many extra hours for our elementary school kids because they don't go out at two o'clock they stay till three like the middle school students do and we've discussed the fact that as we continue to grow and with transportation at some point we may need to have two separate dismissals for elementary and middle schools other schools in tucson that are k-8 have separate dismissals for the elementary kids and the middle school kids but we haven't had to do that so we're just going to keep them here as long as we can for as many hours but our little kinder first figures are exhausted by three o'clock um no they're still um they still go home with a lot of energy even though they're tired and i think because of the energy power it does allow us to continue to provide the music and pe for our students and again our teachers have an hour for technically a 40-minute lunch and then their teacher planning time is built in so teachers at continental have an hour for lunch and in other schools it's usually 35-40 minute lunch break that they have so our kids even have more recess than what is mandated or required can we get a motion on the calendar thank you any discussion seems like we got our discussion sorry um mrs allen yes mrs tykes yes mr australia yes mr hollery thank you mr mcgivern yeah all right looks like our last thing is the washington dc trip end of the year we're thrilled to report that we did find another company after sending out um more bid requests for gerber for the washington dc civics trip and the amount of 89 650 and you do see the other bids that we received um this company did allow for most of the things that we have really deemed that's critical that we want our students to have the must-sees plus some additional excursions that we haven't taken part in the past can we get a motion i move to approve the civic squad washington dc trip second any discussion i hope they get to go yeah do we know if you have a kid in seventh grade if we can go ahead and do a tax credit this year [Music] somebody's on livestream so they're repeating the next day it's just it's remember there's a delay oh and then so it's somebody was on live stream and had the phone that's scary like yeah give a tax credit to the civics club for your kid anticipation of them going in eighth grade so then you would have 800 already head start so i will just put it this way so that i keep myself legal technically tax credits cannot be donated for a particular individual they can only be designated for an event so if somebody wanted to to make a donation for the civic strips the answer is yes now on the other side of it we will keep track of who's making donations for whom so to make sure that that student gets credit for that donation it is a i was supposed to go last two years and still disappointed i didn't get to go okay do we have a motion yes we already have a motion in a second is this the three-day tour and they get um then this group to get passes so they go to the front of the line everywhere so that's really the way to do it once it's approved we'll confirm dates we haven't confirmed dates yet but they usually go the last week of april or the first week of may well it looks pretty awesome we're excited hopefully things will stay open and our kids can't go i want to hear about the ghost and graveyard tour this is ellen yes mrs price yes mr yes mr ellery yes mr mcgibbon all right school board events they're coming up tomorrow is the pre-k trot do you know what time that starts 10 a.m are we allowed to just come on yes yes it'll be out on the track 10 to 10 30 so you're welcome to come watch the preschool students trot for fundraiser around the track and their siblings are going to be out of class walking with them as well and then they'll happen and they'll have lunch outside and that's to raise money for sunshine yes shade structures for preschool and are the girls kindergarten boys basketball girls basketball and voice soccer games 3 45.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
put a filter on it yeah okay we're good to go we're starting whenever ready okay [Music] it's 4 30. let me know when you guys are ready we're in everyone's present okay uh thanks for coming to order at 4 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
okay call this meeting to order roll call please brown is here mrs galbraith dr hall here mr sawalis here mrs walters vice president rupert here president albrecht here please rise for the pledge 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 and ms roop would you please read the mission statement sure it's to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future great uh terry any public comment okay so we'll move on to administrative updates and turn it over to dr cara great thank you board members i just have two updates i think today um the first update is really to talk about uh remote days student attendance staff attendance and then the other one was to provide you an update on where we're at with the dome and some of the construction projects that we've started so i will give you just a brief update on attendance as you know when we came back from winter break there was just a lot of conversations about what's going on with the omicron surge and so forth and there was just a lot of you know concern about that as you know the illinois governor along with cdc idph and the illinois school board have made in-person learning a priority they have stated that numerous newsletters as well as publicly and again the idea is you know we need to get our students back to school in person whenever possible because of some of the damage that happened you know with many of the students with remote the last year in doing so the state has really provided very limited options to close for remote now this is different than last year last year we were given the autonomy to close if we saw fit based on the positivity rates in the community that is no longer the case is a different game this year so we are told that we need to be in person regardless of the positivity rates out there in a community but really need to offer instruction in-person instruction as much as possible districts are given five e-learning days those e-learning days can be done for district-wide emergencies or for inclement weather those are basically what we have to use from now there are other days that we can take such as an adaptive pause and some districts are taking that adaptive pause now in order to do an adaptive pause district-wide it must be pre-approved by the regional office of education and in consultation with the idph so there's a little bit higher bar in order to get those district-wide times and again those are primarily used if there's not enough staff to support a district you can't have classrooms with no no staff so that's predominantly why many of the districts had moved to that criteria once five e-learning days are exhausted then a district may consider using non-attendance days so you can do a remote day but then you're gonna have to add on to the end of the year the school calendar and many families and many staff members are not particularly interested in going that option so usually we want to make sure that we're using that sparingly and again it's to cover shortages of staff currently the district does monitor staffing every single day at five o'clock we are beginning to look at our attendance for the next day each building principal contacts our um meal to run numbers to see if they can open and then those in buildings can make an individual call if they can run their building or not we can close a one building for an adaptive pause as long as it's not the whole district for district wide and that's what we've done you've seen that we've done that with the middle school last week and we did with elc for two days and that's what we did now having said that you know we are really stretched on these days and we are just in some cases just keeping classrooms open for our regular instruction which includes interventions and sometimes we are not running them at our full capacity staff is extremely stretched they are covering for one another they are covering for classes and recesses and lunches and many of the staff members are going without breaks sometimes so it has been difficult to say the least and we want to certainly acknowledge that our staff's been working very very hard and they've continued to work very hard and they are definitely being pulled but we have been able to manage keeping our buildings open for the most part and we have been able to cover last week we were able to cover most of our buildings as i indicated overall as for the district we had 81 percent of our staff members total that were able to come to work and that you know was a pretty decent statistic considering what's going on 83 percent of those were teachers so for the most part in many of the schools they were able to keep things up and running so much of it depends on individual buildings example who's out when they're out and so it's not necessarily a number district-wide it's every building has to make that decision for themselves now out of this number we have about four percent four percent of our staff that had the confirmed case of coped and one percent of that was due to just exposure so they were excluded while they were getting tested this data is based on staff self-reporting of copin because we do have to have them report to nurse kate who does keep the data for this and there's also this conversation with the idph now other absences of staff is undetermined why they're out based on a variety of other reasons and sometimes it could be taking care of their students it could be we've told staff if you're not feeling good don't come to work you know if you've got a sore throat or cough people are very sensitive about this so you know staff is you know taking taking that seriously students last week we had 73 percent of our students were here last week that was that first week this week it tends to be trending a little bit higher we're averaging about 79 percent of our students are back this week out of this number we have an average of two percent of our students have confirmed uh reported cases of covid and 10 are out due to just exposure this is the amount of students who are able to receive live streaming so according to the state they can have remote live streaming if they're out on confirmed remote because of covid so we have those students if somebody is just out for other reasons then they just have to make up their work being absent out of the 21 percent of our students that are absent 12 percent were confirmed or exposed receiving live streaming the other is about 9 percent so 9 of our students had undocumented reasons and so they're just receiving generally homework afterwards and so forth um you know we are monitoring our community exposure rates right now and it varies certainly communities are up we have some communities as low as 11 percent and then one of our communities is up to 25 and that was as of today and those are seven day roles so you know we definitely are seeing that um and as we're looking at our district uh statistics you know our district level statistics seem to be lower than the community and so this kind of reconfirms you know idph as well as others saying you know try to keep your schools open because they are a better place for our students testing for staff and students we're looking into right now agencies that can help support our staff either vaccinated or unvaccinated staff that would like access to testing as you know test kits are very hard to come by now there was a big run on those for a variety of reasons and it was difficult for many staff members whether they've been vaccinated or not to get access to testing so we are looking at some agencies around to help support us um and we are we are having some luck with that can i see a question yes so back in september i thought we talked about shield coming here yes did they can they not come here well we were supposed to be put on a list and we were on that list um and they originally told us that they would provide all the staffing we have a very limited staff when we talked to them a little bit later in the fall they no longer could provide their staff they said you had to staff it yourself and those test results needed to be run driven daily you know or driven into um you know the facility to be tested so it was going to be very burdensome and at that time and i think it was even in september we were not able to get their services so we started our staff just finding their test results outside and that seemed to work and people were able to get their testing and so it really wasn't an issue i think until probably after january when test kits became unavailable that's when the staff were having a difficult time getting their appointments and so forth so then we went to see what else we could do to try to support the staff so we are looking at that um we do have our and we are looking at it as whereas we do have outbreak testing available if we need it in the district we have not had any outbreaks statistically relevant for us to do outbreak testing but we do have it available if that was needed we do keep our co covid dashboard on our website it is accurate take a look i know people want to see how things are running it is accurate we update that daily um so that is available for others so that's kind of the high level view of where we're at and kind of maintaining and moving forward you know we look at this every single day and we make decisions based on the data that we received and priorities can we run classrooms enhancement coverage so now we we have five days right how many of those do we use in august for the ac we didn't we used we did not we used um emergency days um for closures and we only had two of those so we used those so we have three left of those well so let me back up a little bit trust me it's it's very confusing to figure out how you can use various days and that's the reason why i'm bringing it up so that anybody's watching understands that how do we close because of ac and then again the com you know the concern is why are other districts and again there's not as many as we think going remote but there are a few but again for how long and how does that how does that happen because that's the question is you know and then you said we have one we can close one building but that doesn't does that depend on how many buildings we have see um so going back to beginning of the year we were closing just a building or two at a time for the heat as you recall again it's not district wide and we were able to close and we use those as two uh heat heat days we still have our five left untouched five e-learning days yeah okay and that's supposed to cover if we have inclement weather if i have a snowstorm coming in i gotta use one of those if i can't staff district-wide i'm gonna take one of those by doing an individual um school closure as long as the whole district's not closed that doesn't count against us um so that kind of um maybe separates some of this a little bit okay to use an adaptive pause for a single building do you have to go to the idph or to the we do consult with them yes okay in the regional uh school board um we do have are always well we do both yeah okay and like i said individual is a lot easier to do than a whole district yeah okay and so that's that's the criteria we've used is looking at individually as we go through so in theory if things get a little worse and we decided hey that's what we're going to do we did remote it wouldn't be for the rest of the year it would be for a limited time if it was just safe for two weeks five of them would be covered underneath that the other five would probably have to be made up at the end of the year it could be there's a possibility there is a possibility yes just so like i said there's just a lot of information out there that people don't know what what the reality is what is our reality our reality is can how many days can we use what availability do we have if we close the school does that you know how does that hurt the parents and the staff and the students so yeah and like i said every individual district has different things that they're going through a majority of it has been staffing from the conversation they've had with many other superintendents it's about staffing they don't have enough to support their classrooms so they've had to take you know go that route we have been able to um to maintain as best as possible okay yes busting fits into this and this probably is your little ariel over there mr sermon i have had people contact me not angry i mean we expect the buses to be late now we know that they're going what what we're going through but some districts with their bus company i'm not quite sure who's making the call but if they have a bus that's running 40 minutes late and it's a 10 degree day they're calling the people on the route they're sending out a robocop your bus route 362 is running 40 minutes late if it was due at 8 10 you won't see it before 850 or whatever so that the little ones aren't standing out on the corners i'm just wondering if there's any way we i mean when do we talk about buses again is that something that we i mean i think that the parents right now they they understand that we have no control and and then they're not screaming and yelling they're just telling me what other districts have come up with or what the bus companies have come up with so i'm just wondering if somewhere in a conversation that could take place that you know if you have a 45 minute delay and it's 10 degrees outside i think it would be very nice if we could call that bus route and say your bus is going to be 40 minutes late or whatever sure one of the things that um so i'll tell you what we have to do in order to do that we would have to set up every single route in school messenger in order to do that the bus company itself does not have the the school messenger like we do that that will throw out the robocalls and then so again what you have to do is go into school message or set up every single route in there there's a lot of them you know and that and then push the button at the same time you know you have to make sure you keep that up and keep those routes you know uh current because those change all the time too is it possible yes it's possible and then so it can be done uh i think it's something that you know i don't know if we can get that done now but it's something we can look at for the future though too yep do we have any data on what our experience with our buses are are we consistently running late how somebody hasn't looked at that right now i can i can easily ask and get that get that data to find out they're right or are they doubling up routes or how their drivers are i haven't i know you know i'll tell you this i know we're covered you know and that but i know and in fact i just talked to the first student uh the other day you know they're they're struggling too with drivers as we all know you know and all that stuff so i can get that data just to kind of see where we're at with everything yes and i did make one other suggestion to a couple people you know there are parents who drive their kids to the corner i mean even like i only live a half a block off but when it's cold and you've got a six year old that's a long way out there so they're starting to make like little carpools with their neighbors so that maybe this week the smiths drive the six kids and sit at the corner because some of those people have to go on to work and now they're late for their job sure so um i've just been kind of watching what people are saying on social media and trying to pass some of those little tidbits on sure and i just thought there's some way that maybe on some of these days when when they're really running late and nobody's complaining about 10 minutes or 15 minutes they're complaining when they're 40 45 minutes and i guess that's happened a couple of times in some of the routes and the bus driver will say i'm sorry you know i had to pick up a different route first and i don't know that when i come to work yeah you know um from what i understand we haven't been horrible horrible but our times yeah i don't think we have a thought that people are growing out there for the future sure there are also things quite honestly this is something i can't do that now but i'll do that for next year where parents can have access to where the bus is also on an app on your phone so versatran interest is a system we have has that capability it's got like a locator or gps locator on there so it could tell you where the where the bus is and when it's coming and all that so that may even help i like that actually a lot better than trying to put the rosters into school messenger because they change constantly i think that's a good idea i don't know that was available it is it is that's something that we can look at turning it around guys for the future right right yeah so that's something we can look at for sure thank you i don't know if that's my advice for that but nope it's in here so last question i have on the remote thing if we did if we had to go to that that i seen your fyi or i think it was lyle's fyi um of the two uh unions the question i have is do we have a plan or a procedure that if we do call it who who comes in who doesn't come in like what what happened so if the students are coming in the remote are the teachers coming in here and teaching or are they teaching from home my thing is if something happens so we can communicate that out so that everybody is aware and prepared for that and then the second thing is then how many layers of that is affected meaning if there's nobody in the buildings is you know our is is i know you're in charge of his maintenance coming in and still maintenancing and his cassois still cleaning because we want to keep it clean like just so that the employees understand they know before it happens i think maybe something should be at least talked about so that if we if that comes up then everybody kind of knows what's going on because i think part of the other issue everybody has is there's just everybody's kind of unsure of what what to do you know but if we do have to go down that road at least we're prepared yes we do have a plan and jontel i don't know if you want to maybe address that we have a plan that's been outlined already [Music] thanks don so um as we prepare to close each building receives instructions and it really depends on what type of closure we're going to have again if it's not safe for staff to travel we're not going to have staff on site if it's safe to have staff in and kids out it really just depends on what type of closure we have to have and as soon as doctor cara meets with her team and we decide that notice goes out right away of who's on site and who's off site and then a lot of times um depending on the employee group we will say check with your supervisor so all the directors know where their teams are supposed to be okay so different levels whatever it is whether it's weather or remote because of covert or whatever it is yeah just as long as everybody knows yeah and on the operational side then whenever you know dr kara and the team make that decision then once i know about it or if i'm involved in that decision then again like chantal says i will call my directors you know whether it's pam or gloria or keith and all that stuff to let them know and say okay you know let's just say let's just say maintenance a custodian you guys are still coming in you know and but we're not going to be in school at that building maybe so it's it's a constant flow of communication that goes on and like you know as gentile said i mean every every situation is going to be different because sometimes we may close this building but we make those inactive holes that one so it's kind of all over the place so that but we do have a plan we know uh it's just we continue that communication all right good that made me think of one question when i was watching cps this week that's a drama into itself um they kept all their schools open with somebody in them because they had to provide breakfast and lunch how do we do that so um all all building administrators have part of their team show up so that could be principal assistant principal other administrators usually someone from uh pam's team is there um depending on that building pam decides where we're going to distribute food from from for the district so again it it really just depends but we always have a building administrator there in case someone pulls up with the child we would not have that child left out on school property without an adult being there so last week i'll give an example so last week we were having discussions about whether we should close down the district for a couple days and then as part of that preliminary discussion i met with our directors to say okay if we shut down what are you going to do and one of the discussions was with pam on where are you going to distribute food because we're going to continue to do that do you have the capabilities bringing people in so we we put the plan all together already now we decided not to shut down any of the district but again the plan's in place so we know so if that's gonna if that's gonna happen we will publicize during this that you can pick up meals here all of that okay my only concern there is what if they can't get to that location like cps kept all their schools open because so many kids walk to school so many i mean chicago yeah what would we do out here i mean like we had a lot of people when we were closed before that pam's people were driving around then we got the buses i mean if we're going to close for a couple of days this is very important to many families that we have that food to us sure it just depends on the length that we're closed i mean for clothes for a day i don't have the resources nor do we have the logistics plan and start getting buses going out to distribute food and all that but for close for a few days we will we will of course look at that and see if there is a possibility of doing that because again we can do that with our transportation squad too yeah okay thank you i just had one question i believe i asked it before regarding clarity on remote learning versus e-learning are we using those two terms synonymously or are they so these you know distinctive from one another they they are different so e-learning you have five e-learning days and those are to be used in case of an emergency or however we need to that's it we get five that's all remote learning is where we are able to still give students learning from home so virtual learning whatever that looks like and for us right now that is students working on their computers at home if they're quarantined or excluded from school and they are streaming into the classroom and working with the teacher and she's working with students who are on site okay so that can that remote learning could consist of some work packages or things of that nature paper paper some type of paper trail or is there interaction with the teacher themselves with the students that's on the other side no right now we're providing streaming so what our students get to like our families at home that are watching and staff that are watching us now that's streaming so there's not that same interaction in cases where a classroom has had to close then those teachers who have been feeling well and we've had to close a classroom down then they then it looks like it did last year where that teacher may be on a google meet and meeting and interacting with students because that entire classroom is closed down versus five kids at home and 20 kids in the classroom okay so is it fair to say over this past last week we did close emmy uh the middle school right the middle school closed for one day last monday for an adaptive pause so those students received um they would have received google classroom assignments from their teachers they would have had google meets because the entire school was closed so they kept their same schedule and met with their teachers and now e-learning only comes in play when the entire district is closed down we can use an e-learning day when the entire district closes down not for a specific school it's different because an e-learning plan is just it it depends on how we have to code it in our school calendar so that is a student attendance day and it's just the way that kids receive their instruction but if we do the entire district we're likely to use an e-learning day but we could still use an adaptive pause day okay so of the is it five e-learning days how many do we have left now we have five we've not used them and we have not okay it is complicated so so just just to kind of clarify summarize don't confuse e-learning days with the method of instruction e-learning days is really kind of the equivalence of what we used to call snow days you know that's kind of the best way that's what the intent was whatever days was snow days right so but if an entire class or entire school building is is closed down for a reason they're going to be interactive on their screen with the teacher just as we did last year but if you have a class that's still in session but a student has to stay home because he's quarantined they're just going to it's just going to be streamed to them it's not going to be and that's correct and that's defined as remote or is it that's defined as streaming so we will give you we will put out all the definitions we will put out all the definitions all right okay thank you all right any other questions for all right mr cerma would you uh provide the board an update please on the dome and any construction projects that you're working on please sure i i sure could do that good evening dr cara and the public um let me first start with the dome the first thing i do want to say about that project is i i do have to give a big shout out to carl engl i don't know if you know that name um but carl is a gentleman that i met i think about two or three years ago when we were having discussions about where the oil tank was at the sixth grade center and carl and his family delivered the oil to that building along to other buildings in the district and when keith and i met him in front of the sixth grade center he just pointed to the ground and said it's right there and um i will tell you without that we would not have found this because we even had during the project when they were trying to locate this uh right before break the ball think sonar couldn't even find the tank down in the ground uh but carl said it was there in fact i got him back on the phone while they were there uh i called me for his number and got him on the phone and i you know i said carl i said do you think they ever took it out and he's like nope it's there you know that so we did find it it has been removed um we are waiting for some soil samples to come back because we're epa wants us to do that to see if we need to do any other excavation so they all take us out but again i do want to pass on my thanks and the district thanks to carl uh for his work and helping us find the tank because quite honestly it saved us a lot of money so i told carl i uh i owe him a few things uh i won't go into that but uh so uh i will i will make sure that uh the district's thanks just passed along to him though yeah so please do that i think dr cara is got something up her sleeve maybe too i kind of talked to dr cara so sure because we can't all partake in here i understand i understand um so anyway as everybody can see the uh the structure of the dome is bound right now they are working their way into the sixth grade center uh they have started working on the maintenance building i believe that is almost all down also uh at the dome itself the structure is down uh they are working on the lower level and digging all of that out getting all that concrete out and everything like that so once that is done they have already taken i i saw this taking a lot of the rubbish out already in that so they're separating that out and that's that's moving forward in that it's probably going to take them um probably two or three months to get the sixth grade center down just because of weather and all kinds of things and the size of that facility and everything so but that project is is moving forward in that um the other oh uh i will touch on because i know some things came up about this and i want to address this uh you know straightforward and that is something about people being allowed access into that property and i want to assure the board and everyone else that in no way shape or form have we given access to anyone to get into that property nor has the contractor when i heard about it i contacted the contractor right away sorted keith and they said the same thing their policy forbids that so somehow uh people got in there during operation and there's ways of doing that i'm not going to go into that but there's easy ways of doing that with all the fencing that we have around but as of now uh they are under strict orders to keep everything closed down if there's a problem to call one of us or call the police right away so i just i'll just let the board know that and let the public know that also okay um the other thing another project that we're working on again is the air conditioning here at elc in talala i will tell you that today was the bid opening for that um and the bids were very favorable so that's good news i won't tell you how much yet because we're still going through our due diligence but what i will say is that on the agenda for the meeting on tuesday next tuesday will be an action item to award the contract so we can start moving forward on that and the contractors can start ordering supplies and all that as quickly as possible especially with shortages going out and want to make sure that that is moving forward on the other three buildings which is uh crete balmoral and csk we're in the final stages of getting the bid documents done so that is moving forward also uh we just met today on that with technology to talk about some tech things and everything so uh that is moving forward also hoping to have those bid docs on the street probably by the end of the month the cooling rooms uh are moving forward also most electrical work has been done and completed in the buildings that we're putting the cooling rooms in they will come in over break and put the air conditioners in then and then that project will be done and operational by the end of spring break they already have the air conditioners they're being held with talisman builder who's a contractor they have them uh but we thought it was just best to do that over break instead of interrupting any instructional time or doing that at night so so that's what they're doing and then i think lastly overall from a financial standpoint i was on a ratings call the other day and today and good news for the district is our rate our rate uh or our rating actually has stayed the same but our outlook has improved to stable from negative which is a positive for us and that which means in the long run that you get a little bit better rate when you go out and sell bonds and so that is because of a lot of the work that all of us have done in the financials area along with reports and fund balances and all of that stuff a lot of those things so i just got about an hour ago the new ratings report uh i was on the call with that today when they told me about it so i just wanted to announce that to the board and let them know that's some good news for the district also okay is that something you share with the board yes i will i'll probably put this in the fyi as a doc okay uh that you'll have access to the same thing mr albrecht i've done uh i just put in the latest observation report from the dome and sixth grade center i just put that in the fyi so i'll attach that into the fyi so you have that you guys can review it then too okay so that is good i don't know if anyone had any questions or anything about any of those projects no well just one question when you put the request for bids or however you put it out in the newspapers and things like that seeking contractors yes it's part of the bid specs does it come with seeking minority contractors as part of the prime being a subcontractor or the prime contractor we we do have language in there that we are want to encourage the use of minority contractors by either the main contractor or subcontractors we also want to see from them as part of the process what process they're kind of using to try and recruit minority uh contractors uh for the project too so that's all in the bid documents yes okay i just would like to know and it's up to the board is the board prerogative if they any other member would like to know i would like to know any progress on that sure you know say yes you know we got females we got minority contractors uh subcontractors like these primes and i'd like to get a running tab on that or something sure that's not a problem at all i can take care of that all right thank you you said that it's i'm just trying to get understanding you said that it's put in the language it's put in the language of the bid documents so within the bid documents there is a clause and i can get that clause actually what it is that we put in there uh encouraging the use of minority and female businesses we don't have like an act of like push for it no we don't have like so much of a percentage has to be for minority or female owned businesses we don't have that okay we have a language in there that and i can get you the language dr hall i don't know exactly but it's something like that but but yes we don't have actual percentages in there got it yes no but there's probably something on there that says that are you a wbe or mbe is what they're you know a lot of the government jobs of this nature that's what they're gonna they're gonna fill it out if they are right yes and then we do ask that uh you know whoever wins the contract when they when they go out and get sub-contractors they try and look at either local uh minority or women-owned uh firms in order to do some of the work so i can find out what the progress is on that and even even veterans too okay sure okay i can do that yep okay uh any other questions on any of those projects okay let me go right into business sure okay so i i have given everybody uh and i'll let the public know this so on the agenda there are two resolutions that are out there that uh we were going to discuss i put a placeholder on there because bond council was still developing those resolutions so for the public you'll see documents new board reports out there that give the actual new resolutions and i've given the board a hard copy of that this evening so you have in front of you two documents one is and i'll go to the first one the first one says resolution providing issue not to exceed 45.5 million so that one is for the 45 and a half plus the seven and a half the 45 and a half um fund refund funding bonds i could get my terms right funding bonds to pay off the debt of the debt certificates and then the seven and a half of working cash bonds and that so that's the one resolution so that's one resolution that you have now the question is and mr brown asked me this question i thought we did this already and then well what you actually did was you did your attempt to do this and that intent was done back if you remember that intent was done back in november and then you had a petition period and this now is what's called the parameters resolution so this is what is we're going out for because the parameters of the bonds could have changed based on the petition period if there was a successful petition it could have changed the amount of bonds that were going to be sold so that's why this is important this is the parameters resolution so the parent this first one is for 45.5 million of general obligation school bonds which are uh funding bonds that will pay off the claims against the district so it's paying off the debt that's certificates and it's for the seven and a half million in working cash bonds all right the other thing i'm going to point out is you'll see there that it's authorizing sales of the bonds to huntington's securities and blaylock and van and blaylock and van is a minority partner so it's something that i asked our financial advisor pma to to work with to get a minority firm involved in this transaction and so they are okay the second one that you have then is a resolution for 35 million dollars in general obligation refunding bonds and what that is is basically we're refinancing our current debt in order to keep the annual debt payment at 12 million dollars and then decrease it down to 10 million so in essence we're refunding it or refinancing our current debt and just pushing those bonds out a little bit farther so that we can have a decrease in the debt payment so it's not taking on any new debt or anything like that it's just refinancing the current debt so those are the two resolutions that you will have that come next week to vote on and ken these are all the end result of all the paperwork that we were given and that were shown on the screens yes i'm not sure if it was last month the month before i'm sorry i can't remember exactly when but this was when i believe bob was here and and things like that so that these are really just the culmination of that now yes they are yes okay thank you okay that's it did um we you submitted the um that application for property tax relief yes that has already been submitted to the state you know when we were here we should here by the end of this month okay and that so as soon as i know you said we're right on the cusp of yeah we're right we're number 40 and i and i think uh if i total up ahead of me uh uh probably about 37 will probably get it above us you know if everybody applies for it so that's what i just have to wait and see okay you know we'll see but uh should be by the end of this month you should know okay okay any other questions for ken okay any old business i have one item okay um and this is board related as we all know we got tons of emails lately addressed to the board and if i recall correctly we had a discussion maybe five or six months ago about handling emails sent to the entire board because everyone or multiple people were answering them and they were giving different answers or versions of answers so i thought that we had come to a conclusion that we we as board members were oh it was okay for us to just acknowledge the receive and let them know that someone would get back to him but i'm not sure if i'm unclear on that or we didn't come to that decision but through all this all these emails we were getting i was told by people that they were getting multitudes of answers and many of them didn't match up so i wanted to address the fact again that when people send an email to the entire school board are we all supposed to be out there giving our answer are we supposed to thank them and you are going to answer them or i think we need a system because it seems to be confusing to the person getting the answers and then it's confusing to me because i'm trying to figure out exactly what's taking place so i understand why people are answering you don't want to leave it hanging out there um but i just want to bring that up and see if we can if i misunderstood or if we need to come to conclusion or no one really cares because i care well i'm happy to respond and then um i think i've been doing that and you know i'll either answer directly most of the time i'm you know giving them you know thank you for your your email you know the board values your input and then i'm handing it off to dr cara for an answer um and i mean my only i think that's probably the best way to do it but um i think what i've said in the past if you have a personal relationship with the person emailing or they're in your community in your sub district i don't have a problem with you saying you know you know responding to that individual so okay what i i would like to see though because people are confused and some lady said to me well sometimes i get four answers sometimes i get one i think that if you're going to answer and i have no issue with that at all but i think that maybe somehow you state in that email um on behalf of the board of responding as the president or something to let them know that you're responding on behalf of them okay i can do that um some people take it that nobody cares you know i got one one answer and then others say well i got four answers but they were variations they didn't all say the same so i guess what i'm just trying to look for is that we're all doing the same thing and i just said thank you for reaching out to the board you know and i haven't really done that lately because you are doing it um but that's what i used to do is say thank you for taking the time to reach out to the board you'll be hearing from someone you know regarding the matter and just leave it at that but i'm not really sure how we want to address this because i know there have been some volatile times and i think we're all work no one is not giving the right answer but mr brown may give this path that he thinks they want and mrs root may give this path and so they're not understanding why they get different answers from different board members i guess is what it comes down to so i i don't know if we want to address it if we just want to leave it be and i'll open up to the board i mean i don't like the idea that you answer them and just say on behalf of the board whatever or something to let them know that it's really response yeah the difficult thing is you know um kind of doing that in context of the open meetings act not cop you know kind of starting a what i what i did on a couple of them was i sent a response and then i sent took that response and sent it back to all of you right so that you know i've responded so you could be cc couldn't you that's what the village does i was told that the mayor answers and he bcc's his trustees so they know it's been answered and what he's told them could we check with bill i think bc is the same thing what do you mean it's the same thing it's cece there's no difference they don't know that you've sent it out that's not the point but that's that still doesn't address open meetings according okay is it different because that's what i was told the village does is that the mayor answers any general email and they he bcc's the trustee so they know it's been answered and what do you say i don't i don't see there'd be a problem with the cc as long as you're not replying at all i think you're ready for this because we said we do that all the time we send you information right right and you all see it but you don't respond the responding is the breaking of the online right right okay i'll try that i mean just i don't know how everybody feels about it but and i know no one is doing anything intentionally i just think that you know when i read email i may take it one way and i give an answer and that's someone else is taking it another way so and and it probably won't come up again because hopefully we not have issues like we have had in the last few months but just trying to nip it in the bud yep i don't know how anybody else feels i mean china i do what nelson said i i answer if i do have a relationship or i know there was one time somebody mentioned something a board member said didn't say the name but i knew it was me and i took that opportunity to answer since it was me and i knew what my intent was but if it's a general thing that i know that nelson or actually cara is going to take care of then i usually i usually don't yeah i believe that we we don't need a constituent out there hanging dry we need to we need to respond if that constituents send an email to an entire board including the superintendent you know i'll look and see way to wait a little while day or whatever see if that person has been responding to the superintendent usually pretty good and i'm seeing nelson chiming a couple of times so i don't respond with non-factual stuff if i respond i better know that i have some facts okay and and no i'm just saying that's that's for me yeah right but i tried i try not to you know delve in until disseminating information like that on on a big mac the two to constituents out there or group so i leave that to our email is tough because you right i leave that to our superintendent i think you can think you're very clear and the resp the recipient is going to read it a totally totally different way absolutely so but yeah one thing is again i i i you know i so i put myself in their shoes if i'm asking for information i'm trying to get something and nobody's getting back to me in three four five days you know i see that have been a problem so i would hope in some fashion that the leadership get back to the constituents and you know we was we was getting fired from all angles last week a lot of emails was going on and the superintendent was was responding i don't want to put everything on nelson to have to respond to the board he is our spokesperson for various things and certain things but i don't think he needs to respond on our behalf every time issue come up you know if it was pr related yeah but i i don't know but i i'm definitely the superintendent should chime in okay so when i sent an email to the school board do you think if it's a school board the school board slash superintendent okay but if you look at them most of them are coming to us because i forward them to cara i've done that since day one and that's many times she doesn't get them they're literally just addressed to the school board yeah you know if it's just so that she knows that there's an issue they're claiming in a school or whatever it is i think nelson and the superintendent should have some dialogue on that and how to respond either one of them should respond but it shouldn't be just a blanket statement for nelson to respond if if someone send usually i could abort i'm carol why don't you deal with this and then occasionally she'll push back i really think this should come be better but i'll tell you i'll keep our eyes if a couple days uh no respond and they keep chiming in you know i might send something to you guys or whatever and just say please respond or oh i'm sorry you haven't got to respond and i'll get it to the right person nelson i'll say did you respond to this because sometimes we don't know i'll try using the i'll try using the bcc so at least you know so just don't reply all can we get clarity on the bcc please i just would rather be safe than not if we can somehow get clarity on that attorney clarity yes yeah the use of that i'll throw that in for this week then okay it only cost us about what a thousand dollars for them to answer that question that's that's not the phone for every 15 minute email i see on my bill yeah we didn't have them here tonight so we've we've already racked up some savings this year okay um any other old business or i'm sorry or okay is it possible to call um illinois association of school boards a nice thing they're cheaper yeah see yeah do they get legal advice they usually can give standard kinds of things like this these are standard questions for oman things like that okay any other old business going once going twice new business mr robert can i just mention one thing i just have to ask you a question please um and i forgot this on the 25th of january we are going to be pricing the bonds and so i need to see if you're going to be available that evening to sign a document if uh everything goes well we can do it docusign what day of the week i mean it is a tuesday yeah okay all right i just want to make sure and then you know i'll i can i can communicate with you okay so thank you uh we have no need for a closed session tonight uh can i get a motion to adjourn
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
good morning i'm bryson and i'm carmen with your morning announcements for wednesday january 12th are you a senior that has not ordered your cap and gown yet see bad to get information on how to order yours so you can be in the ceremony now to kylie with the weather hi i'm kylie with the weather today we have a high of 44 a low of 30. tomorrow we have a high of 37 with a low of 30 and friday we have a high of 35 with a low of 24. now back to your announcements there will be an ffa meeting in mrs fry's room on wednesday january 12th at 11 a.m art club and open art studio will be cancelled today now to kylie with your lunch hi i'm kylie with your lunch today's lunch will be crispy chicken bites carrots and a cheese filled bread stick now back to your announcements start the year out stepping out of your comfort zone with a challenge that could earn you up to two hundred dollars the greensburg optimist club is hosting their annual speech contest february 22nd give a four to five minute speech on the topic of staying optimistic and challenging times application forms are in the office and all information can be found on the flyers hung up around the school for more information see mrs kulkmeyer now to kylie with your sports hi i'm kylie with the sports there are no sports today now back to your announcements please follow greensburg safety on instagram to stay up to date in your community have a great day and be sure to follow us on twitter snapchat instagram at
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
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 welcome everybody i said i we do have a couple different meetings we're going to do a board of finance meeting organization meeting and then a regular meeting we're going to start with further down in the agenda on the regular meeting and do a staff spotlight first or even a presentation first or presentation let's do that yes so i'd like to introduce mr josh moore athletic director at norfolkville junior c middle school and he has a great celebration here to talk about so well as you know last spring our softball team had a historic run after winning first ever school sectional and softball ended up winning the entire state championship so um in honor of that and and appreciation for all that you do and your support for athletics we got a state championship medal with the picture framed for you [Music] thank you thank you again thank you for all your support not only for that team which was very very special um you'll win one of those very often if ever in some cases for some schools or some programs so and again we appreciate all your support for not only the softball team but all the athletics and everything we try to do thank you this is one of our favorite times of our board meetings and so we actually have two things tonight so that's what i really need so we have um tisha who's going to actually talk a little bit about her spotlight she's a parent to alyssa dieter and so if we can come up here we'll go ahead and share a little information here no excuses no excuses all right well would you like to go ahead and share what you wrote when you nominated i did i added a little bit today because ambry wasn't going to be here because that was a big part of all of it so how long of speech is this no i nominated her because she really truly genuinely loves her students her career and the impact that she can make on the kids in her room is unbelievable um from what i've seen in the background on a daily basis as steer put the time effort care and concern into our students and their education she's truly concerned invested into our students education and what goes on in their daily lives as well it's very easy to see how she truly wants what's best for them the no no no yes yes yes that is awesome um and she truly invests herself in them and tries to help them in any way that she possibly can past or presence she has an incredible ability to make her students love to learn and love going to school each day my personal experience is having a student that struggles scholastically it's been a struggle with her wanting to go to school years um we kind of got out of that last year um and she's really came out of her shell a lot this year a lot um and when the more it's clicking the more confidence she continues to get and she pushes that a lot um she actually loves going to school and loves learning new things now she told me the other day that she wanted to be a teacher [Music] so that she can help kids get smart too i say you mean so you can help kids become smarter and she says that's what i said [Laughter] um she's a very self-conscious child that does not like to draw attention to herself in any way which unfortunately has also meant asking questions and trying to get help when she needs it the thought of it terrifies her and has been a huge issue educationally and yet somehow through plain care concern attendance creativeness and pure love for her students in the last couple of months my daughter will ask her for help with things she doesn't understand for most people they're like yeah she should have done that all along for me it's a big deal um i told you what she said her son subbed for her one day and ambry came home from school that day and she says mommy mrs dieter wasn't at school today and i said oh she's like but her son was my teacher and i'm like i bet that was super fun she's like well it was okay [Laughter] that in itself told me all i needed to know about who is responsible for the changes that i've seen in my own child since the beginning of the school school year and i can't wait to see what this year has in store for her i personally can't think and appreciate mrs theater enough for her time concern patience make sure to look but she gives my and from what i've seen all of her students um [Music] thank you very much [Music] so after mr rube do you want to share anything about mrs hater i echo everything and you know coaches a lot of times you know i'm talking about athletics talking about like uh the intangibles you know things that aren't going to show up in the box evaluation whatever um and mrs theater like she she loves the whole child loves the whole family and that just really shines through every day and echo fishes uh sentiments and you know multiply that times 15 20 25 to every student every day so thank you so on behalf of um tennessee walters county and our sponsor first farmers bank of trust we have something for you i'd like for you to read the card and you can look at the rest of it later can you read that out loud oh sure congratulations because you have dreamed big and worked hard we figured you might like a soft place to rest thank you for doing what you do so well step spotlight and so there's a blanket in there yay there you go [Applause] before before she leaves me i interrupt yeah we don't usually take the comment until later but if it's all right sure we're out of order anyway paula crafts says we love her jody boswell trizzler says mrs elise mr theater is awesome we've loved her every time we've had her shelly charles says wonderful and amy schmidt says so deserving way to go mrs beard so i don't get comments very often thank you very much i love my job so we're going to go ahead and continue um since we've done the presentations and the recognitions we'll go ahead and do the student and staff recognitions and we'll let mr moon go ahead and do his first and then i'll read the other ones and then we can get to our first meeting okay in our winter sports season and so we just wanted to recognize um we've got as far as just elementary at the winter time of basketball and so boys are a couple games away from being finished and wanted to thank coaches ryan bassett is our fifth grade coach and then um cole wyatt does our sixth grade coaching and so really appreciate um the time and the effort that those guys put in uh working with the guys now on the fundamentals but then also just on um you know lessons that are gonna go way beyond basketball teamwork and uh just overcoming different challenges throughout the season uh basket uh girls basketball is just getting started um they have their first 6 a.m practice tomorrow morning so that'll be fun and our basketball coaches for girls are sean klein and randy pershing so i'm looking forward to that season as well i appreciate our coaches and then the other one that i put on there we're kind of mid-season right now as far as robotics goes and last year because of the coba and different things that were in place we kind of went a different route on competing in robotics and you know with the the robotics league and we have all of our events so far have been at south of elementary and i think we've got two more that we will host but we've got 19 area teams uh from local schools and you know it's just the same same group every time and through the first two evenings of competition out of 19 teams uh msd elementaries um hold eight of the top 11 spots so um we are we are being good hosts i think the north elementaries might be a little higher on the standings at the moment but i look for that to change over the next couple days so i have nothing to do with scoring so i can't fix it but uh um yeah and there you go you know time and effort on behalf of coaches and parents to invest in our kids and it's just a really neat opportunity to appreciate mr drake um you know his efforts all along the way to really make um robotics whether it's been a team effort all the way and so we're proud of our kids and uh we're having another fun robot season so you're welcome i know you have to go somewhere sometime but sometimes all right i will just continue on then for sharp creek from mr martin shark creek would like to thank um the north's bus drivers for the daily care and concern for our students we appreciate their dedication and taking on this great responsibility he also mentioned that uh congratulations to the sixth grade boys basketball team as they defeated oak hill last evening also good luck to our fifth grade boys basketball team and their first home game this evening both these teams are pretty much effort and time into practices and representing us well in competition uh mr snyder at norfields in norfield would like to congratulate eli crowe hannah holmes and isaac burkhardt for honors received at the long beach county basketball tournament uh eli eli and hannah made all the all county teams and isaac received the jv boys bill rogge sportsmanship award also from mr snyder norfolk junior the varsity varsity girls basketball team has received an exemplary behavior report from official scott geist at the columbia city game on 1222 mr guys stated northwoods team and coaching staff showed great sportsmanship throughout the entire game our officiating team was appreciative of this great thing also from northfield would like to recognize and congratulate malachi higgins carson pratt and rosine for becoming certified drone pilots for the drone program at heartland career center while school was out over christmas break these three were busy pace uh passing the faa part 107 to obtain the remote pilot license cool and then from southwood with mr mcdaniel south we'd like to congratulate the following athletes for making an all-tournament team for the long range county tournament isaiah sutton jason priesic and cole winer for the boys and you know ella hopper elena weiner and aaliyah sweet for the girls team south would like to congratulate leah sweet cold warner for being named walters county tournament mvps way to go nice um i'm kind of reading this and backwards backwards but that's how we started so you guys are good at backwards south of athletics recently exemplary behavior report from ihs double a justin fall uh basketball official wrote the following about the game on 12 30 both teams exhibit great sportsmanship to each other and during officials during this game it's nice that as an official to work for coaches that coach their team and ask questions in a professional manner during a contest it's also nice to officiate for players that show respect for the officials in the game itself both of these teams are the face of sportsmanship in my eyes and obviously congratulations to from mr mcdaniel to our varsity boys and varsity girls teams for winning their championship games at this year's walrus county holiday tournament this marks the first year that our girls have won the championship game way to go knights and as always those are great to hear that's all i have at this time all right so at this point we're going to hop back into the regular scheduled agenda so we're going to start out with the board of finance meeting and the first thing that we'll do is we'll declare that the entire board of education will constitute the board of finance for msc first item of business for that then is to elect a board of finance president and nominate todd any other nominations okay we have one nomination and they have a second certainly has the board of finance okay next item is to elect a secretary for the board of finance i nominate kevin any other nominations okay motion in a second to nominate kevin as the secretary of the board of finance hall of famers all right okay next we have a report on investments and review the investment policy and that can be from dr kim yeah so i gave you a memo um that really we don't really have any investments per se and we don't really have an investment policy uh something that i think i mentioned before that i kind of like to look into establishing so really the only investments we get are the interests earned from the money that's in our account and that just kind of shows you um what we earn in interest for the 2021 calendar year 25 715.74 which actually is probably pretty good uh as far as interest rates are concerned in august of 2020 kind of right after the summer of coven i reached out to our bank and to see if we could establish some type of funding for so that interest rate can always go higher than that but it will never go lower than that and so in 2020 the funding floor was at point 2 and the new rate for 21.22 is 0.15 i think interest rates are below 0.05 right now even uh and so that would typically mean you get about 600 a month in interest whereas right now we're getting about 2 000 a month per interest just because of the funding for rate that we established uh with the bank and again if interest goes up higher than that then obviously we get that rate but at least we have a four established so that we don't hopefully get into those years like 2014 2015 2016 where we didn't really earn very much interest if any at all so that's that's a positive even though interest rates are interest is still low but at least um we have a little bit of a caveat there so just wanted to share that with you that's part of the requirement by indiana law to share any type of interest or investment money's earned for the calendar year moving on then as part of our other uh requirement through indiana law is there has to be a presentation of our finances using the do ab fiscal indicators that were established a few years ago and so i'm just going to kind of go over this if you have questions feel free to ask but i'll tie in to kind of how we ended this year financially and the outlook uh moving forward with some of the things that we've already done in our uh budget hearings so uh this is the 2022 finance meeting i wanted to establish what our actual expenditures were so that shows you in our our main funds i'm just kind of relating this back to the things that we do for the dlgf but in our main funds you can see in the column there that 2021 those were actual expenditures the next column shows our budget appropriations as far as what we submitted from our budget hearing the third column there represents what we got back from the dlgf in our 1782 notice of what our actual appropriations are remember our appropriations just give us the ability to spend money that doesn't necessarily mean we have the money or we don't have the money it's just what we're allowed to spend um and then the fourth column there represents what was on our 1782 notice as far as our tax levy rates were concerned show what our final assessed valuation was and what our final tax rate will be uh for this calendar year and then i just left the the last column there represents the tax cap impacts which we estimated in based off what was submitted to us by our county auditors uh in anticipation of that would be money that we may not likely see in our tax levy so even though for example our operations levy is 4.4 million dollars we probably will not see 4.4 million dollars because of the tax cap so this was the budget that we submitted from our budget hearing the overall was 26 million dollars 120.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
sharon's joining now too bob all right good all set all right um so i'd like to call the uh public budget forum for the brookfield board of education on today january 12 2022 to order so it's not as an agenda item but i'm going to do it anyhow let's stand for the pledge of allegiance you could i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all right so this is uh for those of you who are attending and thank you for the members of the public who have come every during every budget process we run a round table in november to get input from the public before we uh prepare the budget and gives input to the superintendent superintendent and the administration and to the board uh before we actually prepare the budget uh we did do that in mid-november um and then after we've been deliberating and we've actually talked about the budget i think in three different board meetings at this point and i think five different finance committee meetings uh the board is faced with making decisions on the budget that it will submit at our next um at our next board of education meeting it then gets submitted to the first selectmen by the end of january and then the whole deliberations process with the first selectmen the board of selectmen the board of finance public hearings of the board of finance and then the general vote in may so there's a long process ahead of us but the board of education is faced with submitting a budget um at our next meeting which is a week from today we put this public budget forum on the calendar to get any last input from our members of the public before we deliberate and so that's what the purpose of this is uh the agenda is limited to budgetary items there's no other business items on the agenda and we really are interested in hearing uh input from the public on but budget items they've heard us talk about or that they're not hearing about or things that are a priority and so with that what i want to do is open the floor to members of the public on any budgetary items they would like to discuss so let me start by if you could just use the raise of hand button uh on i'm using the reactions key under the zoom meeting if you would like to speak and uh we'll unmute you and um and then see where it goes on any discussion so i see jamie clavin's as uh jamie raised your hand you were quick so i'm gonna let you go first um so let's unmute you and uh um and go from there am i unmuted yep you are oh okay thank you thank you for coming thank you for coming tonight appreciate it oh thank you um i have a question about um how the budget is allocated for sports um i couldn't find it anywhere and i was curious to know how that how how it is allocated and the reason why i'll tell you why um is because i it's been brought to my attention that hockey is pay to play at the high school and it seems to be the only sport and correct me if i'm wrong um that is and it's it's quite a chunk of change okay so look um it's a good question so thank you for that um i'm going to ask dr brill if you could first walk through the process of how we establish the budget and then specifically on hockey how have we treated it in the in the budget sure so the direct answer to your question jamie yes there is a fee for hockey that's true we've discussed it over the years um it hasn't risen to the priority level uh at this point for us to have brought it forward again in budget but it is something we do need to think about and consider so thanks for bringing that up um in terms of to answer mr belton's question very briefly we start the budget process just so as a review for everyone the administrative team um begins talking about the budget for the following year in october uh october one first week of october the principals and the central office work together talk about priorities um at that time the principals begin to talk about priorities well they're always talking about priorities but prioritizing for the following year working with their staff at faculty meetings and so forth and then mr post puts out some frameworks for how we're going to collect data and submit the budget going forward we continue to have those conversations all the way through the rest of october and november we then have individual meetings with each principal uh that is the central office team with each principal and um we we weigh all the different priorities and then actually prioritize uh those priorities under each of our goals that we annually put forward with the budget and from there hone that down to a presentation that i bring forth as what we call the superintendent's proposal usually the first board meeting in december this year of this budget cycle it was december 1st so that's kind of the general process and then like mr belden said five or six finance committee meetings over the last two months we've been meeting almost weekly probably with the exception of the holiday break and then um at every board meeting we've been talking about the budget and and the and the athletic director brings forward as part of that process yeah the athletic the director brings the budget forward uh again he works with his coaches he has their input he receives uh anecdotally all year long from uh what what experiences uh the athletic department is having feedback from students and parents works directly with mr bellanda that's part of mr valentine's budget as well as a smaller part of mr renda's budget um but i could let mr post kind of tie this up with where where the athletic budget kind of lies in the overall budget as well okay it lies within the athletic sorry within the high school budget and the the process as you described is the athletic director brings his requests to uh principal olanda who then puts it together with all the other requests he's received from his other department heads it brings to me and we can certainly provide the uh details if anybody wants to see in the athletic department budget and did he bring forward a elimination of pay to play in this year's budget no okay so so it wasn't brought forward so it wasn't actually evaluated do we know how much money is actually in in process for the pay to play on the hockey they pay two thousand dollars each player and it's the only sport in the high school from what i understand that charges a fee to play and that's including the new sports that you know that are um this year like gymnastics boys volleyball um swimming which i know rents you know the pool they don't pay anything so i mean i'm just curious as to why hockey has such a huge fee there's a significant cost and so jamie i'm happy to answer some of that questions um obviously and whether you know or not i am i'm a parent of a seventh grade hockey player so i know you know who i see at the rink all the time so i do yeah so you know it it is certainly a challenge right and it's it's always been it has been one of my experience and um and talking to other uh principals and other places that have um uh hockey programs it's kind of ingrained in the system the the significant cost uh for uh rental of ice time um you know when you're looking at ice time at least for practices um three to four times a week in addition to um you know in addition to games that you're playing officials things like that ice time can be you know upwards of 600 an hour um and sometimes even more than that um so depending on when it is uh it's it's something that we certainly have looked at um you know it always steve baldwin and i do talk about it every year and clearly more frequently now that i'm more aware of the cost personally of what it is um you know we don't have a ton of players at the high school um it certainly has been that way we are currently in a hockey collaborative in case people don't know we do not have our own hockey team it is the um the bethel brookfield danbury co-op between those three schools um and each of those three schools um you know there there is a fee to play that particular sport um for all of us so we work together um and yeah it's a significant cost um and i think quite frankly hockey parents and and for some person have been used to shelling out money um for so long for the cost of the sport it kind of rolls into it um you know it is it would be a significant cost and it does vary every year based on the number of players that we have sometimes we have more than a lot more you know we may have two players sometimes we have five um you know so it's certainly something we have talked about we have not brought it forward at any point in time um so that just gives you a little a little more background about specifically about hockey and and where we are but it is the only sport currently that is paid to participate uh in the sport mark what i had heard at one point in some conversations that um hockey also has very high insurance costs associated is that part of what goes into that rank rental fee you know i to be honest deb i would i assume absolutely there's high cost um you know i don't know exactly um you know what the i don't have the numbers in front of me is what i'm saying so i would need to talk to steve to get that exact specific breakdown um i we are not the lead school this year every year there's a different lead school that really takes the lead in terms of paying bills and one group pays for the buses one group pays you know so there is certainly money budgeted um for the hockey team i want to be sure and clear that everybody understands that it's not like the hockey team does not have any part of the budget um certainly whether it's paying for different officials or it's paying for buses or you know sometimes depending on the uniform cycle where we are you know so there is certainly supplies pucks things like that but the the rental cost is usually the highest thing that we have to pay but i can look into that more and get you that information uh in terms of what it is you know given particularly the most recent incident that happened last week and uh donna greenwich was pretty tragic so you can imagine the um insurance cost and what the overhead is there i remember dr brella at one point i must have been four or five years ago we brought forward a proposal to eliminate paper play for hockey and we just could never get it into the budget because it was i mean the budget's always struggling with priorities so um it was uh i remember that discussion yeah so i mean maybe there would be more players if the fee wasn't as high i mean it costs more to play high school hockey than it does to play you know midgets next year um that that i wouldn't know jamie that that seems um also heading after this meeting actually heading to my son's hockey game um as well uh there's a few of us here on the calls involved in this sport um that i'm not sure that i would say the the fee is as much as a full season of uh of youth youth uh travel type hockey um yeah but again wouldn't you you can do those comparisons yeah i mean i i can easily get the numbers for the local rank and what it costs for western junior colonials for um you know for a program programs and i apologize for these the term that's a hockey term um that they use for an age group um so it is uh you know typically there's a shortened season because some students will some athletes will play the shortened season in the fall and then they'll go and play high school hockey um and if you look at the combining what it costs for that program privately and then plus this it does it is pretty expensive there are also full year programs um kids don't play hockey uh at the high school so we can certainly run some numbers and get that stuff back to everybody if you want to if you'd like to let's look at it at our at our upcoming meeting absolutely i think that would be a good thing it's a good item to have been brought up so we can decide if we want to uh carry anything forward but i appreciate jamie you bringing it up joy were you did you raise your hand up because you wanted yeah yeah bob was just going to piggyback off but you said it would be helpful to get like a little bit of a snapshot of the history so maybe the past couple years our enrollment you know how many students have participated and maybe gage like jamie said you know it can be a missed opportunity for many students who may want to play but money is an issue um [Music] so if we can get like a snapshot of the history of enrollment and then maybe somehow gauge interest level too sure if we can get interest level we'll get that to you um if there's data on that and we certainly can get you a net cost of the pay to play with hockey bring that forward for the board to uh talk about considering okay good thank you and that's the whole reason we're doing this session right is you know item so we can take a look at them so thank you jamie for bringing that up i appreciate that thank you for letting me thank you [Music] um all right so as anybody else just lose the hand raising so mr korea um you've uh raised your hand you're next if you want to unmute yourself yeah can you hear me yeah yeah so um i had a question about the board of education legal budget line item 530 and um i noticed that it came down significantly in 2020 versus 21 and i was curious as if there was a reason why um mostly because you would i would have expected it to go up because it was projected higher um and then with covid and then going into 2122 how does it inform that mr post why don't i have you jump in on that and talk about the year to year trends usually it has to do with what negotiations we have or uh what's going on with special ed is usually the big driver so yeah so the i'm not talking about the the negotiation budget but the board of education budget and with the special ed that that was you know why i thought that with covid you would have had a lot of special ed legal spending but go ahead mr burst sure the the uh the budget did not go down in 2021 but the actual expenditures did go down um i think we had fewer negotiations that year that was a coveteer the legal budget is usually driven by negotiations employee discipline issues when you have to get the lawyers involved in the unions it could be investigations special education budget uh legal fees have been relatively flat uh in the five and a half years that i've been here but the the board of ed legal budget does fluctuate again based on how many times we need to engage a lawyer for those various factors and other like business controls around when and how to use the budget like potential clawbacks for things like services rendered you know in their quality level like the cheney investigation for example like will we be able to call back twelve thousand dollars for that um we're not gonna talk about specific investigations here that's that's not a matter here but uh if we're unhappy with the uh the work that's been done we would go and and try to work that for sure i'm not sure there's a automatic clawback clause in in contracts so okay you know are there policies in place for you know who manages the investigation in terms of if a investigation if they're if there ends up being a conflict in terms of um the content and who is managing it at the time well the superintendent's responsible for that and what if there's a conflict there uh superintendent is responsible for the budget it's much like the ceo of a company they're responsible there's no further oversight it just ends there if there's an issue that's raised to us as a board we would take it under consideration but the uh but in general operational matters are done at the superintendent's level that's correct okay good question okay thank you so much all right um so and next hand anybody um okay so both jamie and andy's hand are still up i don't know if that's a new hand or an old hand so you might want to hit your reactions and lower your hand you can do that um is there anybody else who had any input that they'd like to bring forward okay i'm presuming jamie your hand's still up just because your hands still up um i'm not seeing any pause and give it a second if somebody's not figuring that out on how to do the hand raising i just don't want to give it as much time and i do see uh susan and jeff and kathy and most of the rest of staff here right yep so let me just ask specifically um susan um and jeff i'm just gonna i'm doing a request to unmute just so you can speak up if you uh if you did want to say something you can unmute and bring it up if not it's fine hi good evening i'm all set thank you for the opportunity thank you susan i appreciate it yeah i'm fine as well i was just listening and i didn't have access to a tv to watch it on the channel so i i want my phone that's all oh that's perfect okay cool glad you're glad you both could come i appreciate it okay and i think that's it for tonight uh and any other board members wants items that you'd like to bring up while we're together and we have had plenty of times to talk about this so um okay so look the uh um would we have a comeback specifically on the hockey costs in history and participation you know basic fact pattern on that and uh and including ken what the total aggregate is because we can take it into evaluation as we look at what budget we're carrying forward and uh and we'll do that at our next meeting next wednesday and amongst our general deliberation so thank you all for attending tonight and i think unless there's any objection from the board members we're uh we're adjourned okay thank you all thanks everyone thank you good night thank you you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
thank you very much let's please stand for the pledge of allegiance all right good evening everyone welcome to the planning committee meeting of the whole tonight is january 11th 2022 of the cheshire board of education um so um put together a presentation and a lot of it is items that we've all heard before but we kind of just wanted to run through kind of a summary of where we were with school modernization and then where we're going you can notice that the slide show tonight is called cheshire public schools next generation phase one just like to point that out before we get started here tonight so with that i'm gonna move up to the podium all right let me take the mask off show a little bit better without a mask on um can everyone hear me okay all right well thank you for coming this evening um we're gonna jump right into the presentation and as i mentioned before you know at school modernization worked for over two years to put together the plan for our phase one approach to modernization for the public schools um you know there's been two different options and kind of been through this and so now i just want to point out this is phase one so school modernization never just never planned on there being one phase for school modernization for the district um so this is our first step towards modernizing um our school district first slide here which we've all seen before why did we even start this whole process as you can see our first school our oldest school building was built in 1912 which is now 110 years old all the way down to highland elementary school which is you know a pretty modern school it is our only school building with hva with folio air conditioning average age for our school building 78 years old so the school of modernization committee um was a was a group that was formed by an act of the town council to take a look deep into our school facilities tour various facilities and look at other buildings throughout the district and to do a full study of current enrollment trends as well as future projecting out over so let's consider available options to upgrade the school facilities which may include new construction renovation existing facilities closing and repurposing facilities and other creative viable proposals and the smc was tasked with developing recommendations for modern modernizing our schools they'll address the educational needs of cps students in the 21st century while considering the fiscal impact on the residents of cheshire district improving efficiency and ventilation considering more sophisticated early childhood special education needs and focus on opportunities for collaboration and there's other items here which i'm not going to read i don't think we all need to run through why we're doing the modernization i think we've all been through that before i think we all know that there's a need here recent projects and surrounding school districts um i often say they do and we do it here in cheshire um i think we all have said look forward to ourselves especially if any of you attend sporting events in any of our surrounding districts and you get to walk into their facilities and see these you think to yourself when you leave you get your car why don't we have that here in cheshire south windsor we did tour their district they've grown exponentially over the past several years and they have been able to add several new elementary schools um being guided by the same firm colliers who has helped us through this process over the past two years enrollment projections so slr was slr who at the time was at milan mcroom did the full study of both birth rates and then also development bends across the town of cheshire and put together the attached the sheet up on the screen up here in front of us like to point out that when this was put together 21 22 which is the school year that we're in now um the high enrollment that was projected at that time was 2185 students today our current enrollment is actually 2246 students so even what the high numbers was at the time that this was done back two years ago we've already exceeded the high projections by 65 students and growing one second um i'd also like to point out i i have this uh day job here in bataan treasure and uh i'm i sit directly across from the planning office and you know over the past month or so there hasn't been a day that hasn't gone by where we haven't been seeing additional subdivision it's being proposed here in cheshire the town is growing which is a good thing that people want to live here and choose to raise their families here so you know even though when this was put together they were looking at current subdivisions that were proposed at the time since that time i'd just like to run it through a couple that i know of there's a 13 additional lots proposed off of coleman road doors monica states phase two there's four additional lots at the end of moss farms road there's 24 lots on lease road there's 142 and three bedroom homes proposed in north end of town and a development that's soon to be coming to us with 340 apartments in the north end um and then also on east mitchell avenue went before the planning zoning last night 55 additional apartment units across from stop and shop so here we have the elementary school functional capacities the blue line is the capacity the dashed line is the target once you start hitting the capacity levels of the darcy chapman do little highland and norton you're starting to get into the spot where we're going to start exceeding the ideal number of students per classroom for the different grades so if we're looking for it to have 20 students per class and we're going to start pushing into the 22 23 24 range so it kind of really points the picture of where we need to focus our phase one of modernization so the final recommendation which came out in april of 2021 um which was a plan that was presented by the 13 member smc has phase one is two new k-6 elementary schools one located at the north end of town and one located south out of town possibly on the norton school site existing darcy enchantment buildings are taken offline norton is demolished pending the south end school location and redistricting is to be addressed as required phase two and three no i'm gonna so phase two and three or renovations do a little in highland so much has gone into phase one that i can't imagine that whoever is sitting in these seats if i'm not up here whoever is up here in the in the future that phase two and three is not going to be looked at it's going to be reassessed to see where we are as a district no one could have painted the picture of what was going to happen with covenant and what was going to happen with the development in the town and the amount of new families moving in and the enrollment shooting up so i would be hard pressed to believe that what you see up here these last four bullets is the way that this is gonna go after phase one is approved i could be wrong but that's just i'm gonna just throw that note in there so the estimated phase financial overview from the smc so this is what came out as in the april first document um and this basically creates a picture of what the total cost will be for both phase one and then the other phase two as we move forward which again i already cut through my candid remarks in there about that um so you're looking at a low district share of 73.3 million dollars 88.2 million and that's after state reimbursement so the actual total budget is 109 to 131.7 and um through discussions with coliers i believe those numbers are still pretty much on target but you know once we get a project moved from planning committee to the full board of education we'll have the time to further refine those numbers and come up with what exactly that bonding number would be that would go to voters hopefully in november of this year so steps taken subsequent to smc's final recommendation um so the site selected both the north norton and north and marion and jarvis road proper test fits were done so for those who don't know what test fit is is can we actually build what we're proposing on these school sites so when you do that there's other steps that are taken such as geotechnical analysis looking at the services both you know gas and water properties just to make sure that there's proper bearing capacity and that the sites could actually support construction educational specifications were done for darcy school to evaluate fit for highland or not an evaluation of homicide and central office needs to see if humberson could be incorporated either to the north end school or into the south end development so the darcy education specifications were put together so after reviewing the birth of three the early intervention program and other items that take place over at darcy school it was determined that the total square footage that would be need in order to support those programs would be 15 200 square feet um so that's space for eight classrooms plus resource rooms office space um totally in the 1520s there's circulation spaces and other things in there um also to see what we can do in order to incorporate darcy into the new north end school or highland school or then school um there's only four classrooms and five thousand suites five thousand square feet available in order to incorporate that fifteen thousand two hundred um that's necessary to support the darcy programs um so in discussions and in reviewing the educational specifications um i think we would be foolish darcy's programs into highland school um some of those programs are some of the flagship things that occur in this district and it's for our youngest people and so i really think that if we're going to be moving forward such a project is this that we ensure that we have production on both sites gold sites possess initial geotechnical and environmental evaluations darcy school will not fit in the highland site it needs to be planned for inclusion on the north on site human school and central office should be included in future phases subsequent phases will be necessary and require extensive review and planning independent of this process as circumstances change so again i'm not going to go through all this but this basically breaks down the required square footage for darcy and how it could be taken into the northern elementary school so the high growth square footage estimate of the new northern elementary school had an allowance for 8 400 square feet roughly um so the difference between the 22-4 needed for darcy program and the 8-4 requires 13 922 square feet would need to be added to the north end school in order to accommodate the programs that would be lost if we closed darcy school so the recommendation is at 22 4 square feet to the north elementary school as the highland property does not have adequate space for a building and parking addition frame your parents listing at home and for anybody who has had students at highland school it's pretty tight over there as it is so adding additional 224 to um that building would add include the darcy programming requirements into the educational specifications that will be prepared for the new north elementary school so the square footage of the building and the cost of the new building can be properly estimated um so basically what that says boil down is that the numbers that you're seeing the kohler was originally put together we'd have to adjust those in order to include the additional square footage that will be needed at the northland school for darcy so in summary phase one construction of a new north and elementary school to include the three preschool primary and programming from darcy school in the corner of marion jarvis road construction of a new norton elementary school on the existing site chapman elementary school and darcy school are taken offline when the new schools are built an elementary district redistricting will occur when the new schools are constructed so what are the next steps first and foremost move the cheshire public schools next generation phase one plan to the board of education for approval board of education would vote to approve that plan hopefully town council would vote to approve a plan hopefully the town council vote to appropriate the needed fund promotions which is all part of this oscr and the project would go to referendum sometime either in november or prior to june 30th 2022 which is this june it would be construction grant application to the state of connecticut um and again referendum held november 8th 2022.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
well good evening everyone and welcome to the regular board meeting of the azusa unified school district board of education on january 11 uh 2022 i will go ahead and call this meeting to order at seven o'clock and we will open up our session with the flag salute and i do believe that we have daniel torres here with us hey daniel looks like you're muted yeah hello there we go how you doing today i'm good all right you ready to lead us in the flag salute yeah all right take it away everybody please rise place your right hand over your heart ready begin i pledge allegiance to the flag of united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible and liberty and justice for all thanks so much daniel you're welcome have a good night youtube bye we'll move on to item 4.2 which is roll call uh board member cruz gonzalez president board member bo here board member rodriguez pena president board member adianas here and i remember great i'm here as well now we will move to item 4.3 which is approval of the agenda uh is there a motion to approve 4.3 and make a motion to approve 4.3 there a second second and discussion i'll start off the the request is the pool item 10.2 so uh and that's because uh antonio uh mr is out thick for the day so board member rodrigo would you um i make a motion to approve um 4.3 with the exception of item 10.2 i second all right any additional discussion then let's go ahead and vote and the motion passes five to zero moving on to item 5.0 report action of closed session matters there is nothing to report which brings us to 6.0 and specifically 6.1 recognition of 2021 2022 classified employee of the year mr ronquillo thank you board president greer uh good evening board of education and our astute community on a yearly basis the district recognizes its classified employees at a board of education meeting as part of this process each site and participating departments identifies an employee of the year we are here today to honor our classified employees of the year and i'd like to introduce dr alexis norman our director of human resources who officially start today's presentation hello oh there we go thank you so much okay um good evening board of education student board member if you're out there i don't see you here right now a super attendant ortega and cabinet my name is alexis norman i am the director of human resources i would like to thank the board of education and cabinet members for all of your support this year it has been and continues to be a very difficult road to navigate for our students staff and community this time of year when we celebrate our classified employees is one of my very favorite times of the year it is a positive sequence of events that culminates into the celebration we are currently having this year i had the honor of sitting with a group of my colleagues to interview all of our site's classified employees of the year thank you to miss laurie ray our president of our classified school employees association ms hilda secretary at azusa high school and the 2020-21 district classified employee of the year miss diana hernandez secretary at our family resource center miss lika juarez director of communications and mr antonio flores principal of paramount elementary school for being part of this year's selection committee i must say it was a true privilege to be a part of this committee we have amazing classified employees and each one of these very dedicated individuals told a story of their commitment to our students their colleagues and the community so thank you to each one of our sites classified employees of the year for sharing your story with us i think i can speak for the team and say that it was a privilege to listen to your words and learn about your very important work however i would like to share with everyone here or watching at home this evening a few words used to describe our people proactive compassionate flexible collaborative positive and open-minded and the phrases a shining star handles difficult situations with grace tenderness and wisdom pays attention to detail and is totally committed to serving the community over and over i heard that our classified classified employees guide our students and how our students flourished under their leadership one person even commented that one employee is a ray of sunshine it didn't stop the descriptions of our people continue to aw us our people build morale are extremely approachable do not shy away from work and respond with phrases like of course whatever our students need they play on the playground with our students and are dedicated to continuing their education some going to school to become teachers for our most vulnerable students and attending classes to keep up to date with strategies that support their specific job duties i would argue that our classified employees are institutional agents for our students and now more than ever do our children need them these individuals are not only supporting instruction but role models for our students they are patient and calm and when put in difficult situations always treat those around them with dignity and respect they are and i quote the glue that holds the place together as we read through the letters of recommendations and sat through each interview those were the words we heard and it became very apparent the level of love dedication and commitment our classified employees of the year embody our people take pride in their work i would like to also celebrate all of our classified employees for helping to keep our school district the azusa unified school district running even when districts around the country have been unable to do so our hard-working team of employees are here every day and serving our community there is no doubt in my mind that we could have not gotten through the last two years almost two years without them thank you for all that you do lastly i would like to thank yvonne marullo lori ray diana ochoa and sandra arkenberg for helping to make this evening special for our classified employees of the year they put together celebration boxes for each site to recognize our employees from their school sites or department offices each box has a gift from your cscaa union for our csva members and without further ado let's celebrate all of our classified employees of the year and end the night celebrating our district classified employee of the year we will start tonight with dalton elementary hi i'm laura clark can you hear me yes okay great hi i'm laura clark principal of dalton school project patricia sanchez is our school secretary and the wonderful recipient of our classified employee of the year anyone would be hard-pressed to find a person who serves people with as much dedication hard work and positive attitude as patricia she is the glue that holds the place together she's the one who alexis was talking about she responds quickly to every need because she loves our community and wants to make sure everyone is safe and learning the number of compliments i receive regarding the friendly and welcoming atmosphere of the front office cannot be exaggerated patricia gets a lot of credit for this everyone who comes in feels important she volunteers for special events and serves on multiple school communities on committees she has also served the district as a member of the csua board school reorganization committee covet committee azusa high school drama boosters and so much more patricia is totally awesome and she makes us laugh every day i'm so fortunate to have her as a partner congratulations patricia you truly deserve it good evening my name is adrian acosta that's right the proud principal of ellington tka school and it is my honor to present suzette hernandez as ellington's classified employee of the year suzette has been an integral part of ellington's office staff for the past five years serving in the capacity as attendance clerk suzette is a voice of the front office and clearly takes that moniker to heart just to listen to her one feels at ease she is exacting in her work while providing everyone who enters the office the space and respect to communicate their needs reading them all with a gentle voice and a genuine concern for ellington eagles suzette is definitely an important part of the ellington puzzle that one eagle you see soaring into the sky each and every day she is quick to recognize before they become issues her strong organization skills keeps things running fluidly and efficiently and if you think that you can walk past the office the second she turns her back without her noticing you you're wrong that's because she already spotted you in the rearview mirror she has at her desk yes just like an eagle congratulations to suzette hernandez ellington's classified employee of the year good evening i'm victoria velasquez principal of hodge elementary it's my honor to present to you sadly she's not here but here's her beautiful self navi lucille our honoree as classified employee of the year i had the pleasure of interviewing and hiring nevi this is her first job in the field of education and no one would ever guess that she's been working in public schools for less than three years she's an instructional aide working with our special education students in grades two through four in addition to our work in the sdc classroom she also works extra hours as an ssa during the regular and extended school year in her own words naveed loves her students shortly after she began working at hajj our schools were in the midst of responding to the pandemic she rose to the initial and ongoing challenges related to each change along the way amiable helpful professional and hardworking whether assisting with disbursements of materials logging on to virtual classrooms attending professional development to learn tech tips and strategies to support our learners or supporting her team naveed was always willing always present during distance learning she logged on daily to support individual and small group learning and when we returned to hybrid model she was engaged and supported that brings us to this year here we were setting up again and with her sped colleagues navi jumped right into the new normal and set her students for success as they returned to the new version of an in-person environment to this day she works with her classroom teacher her team and she supports each student in every way that they need jamie borg a long-term sub that works with her says naveed absolutely sparks the students thirst for knowledge she gives them the ability to feel successful in even the smallest steps they take she is truly their biggest cheerleader i have observed navi remain calm and focused in stressful situations while maintaining a warm and open attitude she nurtures her students and gives them a sense of stability during times of uncertainty naveed embodies the cougar credo of promoting positive learning environment in one which is safe respectful caring and productive parents students and staff members agree we are so proud to have navi lucio represent hajj cookers as our classified employee of the year congratulations navi it's diana roja good evening i am diana rojas principal of charles h lee elementary school and it is with great pleasure that i present andres martinez wieser as our classified employee of the year anders has been a student support assistant for associate unified school district for five years and has been at lee for the past three years along with working for ausd he attends cal poly pomona where he is obtaining a special ed teaching credential mr andres is an amazing student support assistant to all of the students that he is assigned to he's his positive attitude patience and calm demeanor are to be admired no matter the needs of a student or how busy that day may get he always stays calm remains positive and has a smile on his face his patience with students is never exhausted although i'm surely he's exhausted by the end of the day even at recess you will find him engaged with the students whether it be running around with them playing sports helping a child up the slide or on a swing or rescuing them off the monkey bars mr andres martinez lizard is most deserving of his recognition his work ethnic dedication and compassion for children is remarkable we are so grateful to have him as an essential part of our league team and excited to honor him as classified employee of the year for 2021 good evening my name is jenny lee director of ausd early childhood education program thank you for the opportunity to share about longfellow's classified employee of the year ms justine valdez she is not available to join us in person however she is online with the family and is featured on our school's facebook page ms valdez has been with the azusa unified school district as a student at ellington school at center middle school and at gladstone high school after high school she was an intern in our mental health program before joining the preschool instructional team three years ago this valdez is dedicated to student success and the success of our program and is always willing to support at other schools sites as well as at longfellow when working with young children all children we know that it is important that they feel welcome supported and connected ms valdez understands as well she is friendly and inviting when children enter the classroom she actively engages them through fun meaningful activities conversations and building relationships children seeks out ms valdez to engage in play she is hard working and is able to anticipate the needs of our students and our program she takes initiative in ensuring that those needs are met we are grateful to have a dedicated staff members such as ms valdez to help us to nurture our youngest students and help them to master foundational skills including on how to be successful scholars in preschool and beyond thank you miss valdez good evening everyone i am marcela fonsica the very proud principal of magnolia elementary school it is with great honor and excitement that i present to you our classified employee of the year valerie murett valerie serves as our superhero health aide and takes great joy in assisting our wild students and staff in keeping a safe and healthy school environment during these most extraordinary times miss valerie's superpowers are a gentle touch a kind word and a smile that shines through her mask she makes an ice pack warm and fuzzy a temperature scan super cool and a band-aid becomes a badge of honor this superhero travels the halls near and far to give aid wherever needed and we couldn't love her more so when you drive by magnolia school and see a wild heart shining in the sky it isn't a cry for help but instead a collection of the grateful hearts that have been cared for by our very own valerie muret congratulations for being named magnolia's wildly super classified employee of the year you're our hero good evening my name is jeanette flores and i am the proud principal at murray elementary and it is with great pleasure that i introduce to you murray elementary's community liaison and classified employee of the year ms sarah vallejo tonight sarah is at home celebrating safely with her family and here she is and sarah is a product of azusa schools she began her career at murray back when she was a little girl she attended murray moved on to center middle school and finally graduated from gladstone high school after graduation sarah attended citrus college and then moved on to work as an as a loan officer all while raising her family in 1999 sarah became aware of a position at murray and she knew immediately that she wanted to work there the rest is history she has been in the district for 23 years now she has worked as a newcomers aide health aide community liaison and think together pl and has rocked every role she has held however sarah does so much more sarah begins her day by meeting and greeting both parents and students as they arrive to school miss b or miss sarah is what they lovingly call her sarah is so valuable at marie and in the community she helps students and teachers and parents with anything they need these are a few phrases that i hear from sarah throughout the day i'm on my way what do you need me to do how can i help i got it and let me do it and so many more her smile is contagious and her laughter can fill any room she is in when i asked her what motivates her what motivates her she replied the students motivate me there's nothing better than hearing a student say thank you for helping me or thank you for teaching me for these reasons and many many more is why murray staff selected sarah to be murray's classified employee of the year congratulations sarah now moving on i have the honor of also presenting on behalf of principal antonio flores for paramount elementary so it is with great pleasure that i introduce paramount elementary's classified employee of the year miss issa leyva tonight ms leyva is joined by her husband luis leyva and her daughters alyssa and aileen isa has been working as a support aide for azusa unified for the last four years issa is an incredibly dedicated individual who cares deeply for her the needs of her students issa goes above and beyond what is asked of her she works effectively as part of a team and always carries herself in a professional and respectful manner her knowledge of implementing and reinforcing learning concepts supervising students in a variety of settings and problem solving while maintaining a positive and safe environment is a huge advantage to anyone who has a privilege the privilege of working with her isa has an undeniable gift for supporting students and she always offers valuable suggestions and fosters collaborative discussions focused on the betterment of our students all with a smile on her face thank you isa for everything that you do for the paramount students and it is with great pleasure to once again introduce to you issa leyva as classic classified employee of the year for paramount elementary thank you good evening i'm jenny weavey and i am the proud principal at powell elementary and i am so proud to present colleen versuela as our employee of the year colleen is celebrating at home tonight with her husband gilbert and her son nathan miss brazuela is an instructional aid for students with disabilities in our life skills classroom she has lovingly served students in this district for over 15 years colleen is calm caring and compassionate i remember one instance in particular when we were discussing a very challenging situation with a particular student the tears ran down colleen's cheeks and i saw firsthand the deep love and care that she has for her students i have watched her in extremely difficult cases proceed with tenderness grace and wisdom students respond to her gentle yet firm guidance parents appreciate and trust her and she is a fun and collaborative colleague the teacher that colleen is currently working with is in her first year of teaching she shared that her nerves calmed and her worries went away as soon as she met colleen she said and i quote colleen is an amazing instructional aide who shows willingness to work with each student regardless of their disability she makes sure that the students grow in every aspect by supporting them and loving them what more could i ask for colleen is always friendly always professional and brings an extra ray of sunshine to our school community we are so lucky to have her so please join me tonight in honoring our miss colleen brzezuela powell schools classified employee of the year good evening we can hear you okay thank you sorry good evening my name is adriana garcia medina proud principal of valley dale elementary school and it's my honor to present to you valley dale's classified employee of the year miss alejandra madrigal joining us online is her family celebrating with us her husband francisco and her two lovely daughters valeria and jimena i start with sharing this because family is so important to alejandra when she talks about her girls you see the sparkle in the in her eyes and you see the love in her heart i think this is what drives her to give our vikings the same level of support kindness and love we were extremely lucky three years ago when alejandra joined our team as our community liaison from that day on she has continued to impress me with her work ethic her dedication and her kindness alejandra takes pride in her role she understands and she exemplifies what it means to serve the asusa community she knows how to make parents feel welcomed students feel safe staff feel appreciated her warm smile and kind ways show up in every facet of her day alejandra is always up to something delivering resources to students making phone calls to parents answering emails making new spreadsheets greeting our little ones creating flyers networking translating gathering volunteers and encouraging our parents to be active participants in their child's education but she's never too busy to offer a helping hand during these challenging times alejandra did not skip a beat if there was new technology to learn she took it on and she learned it willingly she rose to every challenge and always kept our students our staff and our parents as a top priority it is alejandra's dedication and dependability and her passion that i admire her can-do attitude and her kindness are infectious we thank her family for allowing her to be part of the valley dell family and we congratulate alejandra as valley dale's classified employee of the year thank you dr contreras you can start hey good evening i'm dr anthony contreras proud principal of center middle school here tonight to present la mas fabulosa librarian this side of el paso mrs rosa reyes mrs reyes is at home surrounded by her loving family via zoom from azusa to carlsbad to minnesota mrs reyes is not just our librarian but a go-to person at center for years she has been on our literacy team and a champion for all students a lover of reading herself she instills and motivates students to read read read she embraced accelerated reader as a way to monitor student achievement and was part of the awards program when we moved to reading counts she was right there with the staff and students learning and implementing a new platform this year with iready she once again put on her learner hat and stated i need to know how to see where these kids are meaning their legs all levels so she could check out appropriate books last year during the pardema the pandemic could not stop our champion as she created a book pickup system for students utilizing online reservation of books and times to pick up and drop off rosa is also part of our social committee and has assisted parents with transitioning to the u.s school system and participates in parent coffees mrs reyes brings a bright smile and a positive attitude to campus daily we are lucky to have her at center congratulations center classified of the year mrs rosa reyes next we have dr martin good evening my name is donna martin i am signing in for our principal uh sam prodomo over at foothill middle school excuse me first of all we are going to be honoring miss diaz i'm going to put her picture up she's at home with her family right now celebrating online okay i am speaking on behalf of mr predomo so good evening i'm speaking for mr fadomo the principal the proud principal of foothill middle school it gives him great pleasure to present maria diaz as foothill middle school's classified employee of the year and again ms diaz is at home comfortably watching online with her family maria has worked for the foothill middle school for 15 years and the district for 26 years during the time that she has been work that mr padoma has worked with maria he's observed a school clerk that has gone above and beyond to focus on the needs of foothill middle school office staff parents and students here at foothill middle school mrs diaz is the first person anybody sees when they enter the front office the person who nominated maria quoted maria always greets staff students and parents with a smile and has a good attitude she's always willing to help this is so true however the deciding factor for the foothill middle school nominating committee to select maria diaz was the fact that during the pandemic when the office staff was the only personnel required to be on campus maria was one of the few employees working hard to make certain the functions of the foothill middle school office were met most importantly one of these functions was maintaining the daily attendance by keeping it up to date with the new distance learning protocols that were in place finally maria takes pride in her job and makes the staff students and parents feel at ease by making herself approachable with any concerns or assistance they may need once again foothill middle school is proud to recognize our clerk miss maria diaz thank you i'm carol fieri and i represent slosa middle school and i'm standing in as the assistant principal for missy vette walker we're very proud to announce this year our classified employee of the year is ms jonay domiti during her three years at slauson above and beyond her duties as special education instructional aide she has successfully worked with our 7th and 8th grades by supporting our students in the administration of testing working with students in small groups and assisting the teachers in the general classroom she also as mentioned before goes above and beyond and she took on extra hours this year working as our front office sub clerk her knowledge of technology as well as people skills has shown to be invaluable when necessary joni arrives early and stays well beyond her professional work day to accomplish any test that needs doing her support with the daily happenings of our front office the greeting of parents and the supporting with clerical tasks has been tremendously helpful joni has won self-imposed standard of excellence and that has guided her through all of her successful years with us at slauson middle school this is why we are so proud of our little joni um and having her represent us as classified employee of the year good evening i'm kent stout and i'm the principal at sierra high school and our classified employee of the year is miss carmen hara carmen is an extremely dedicated and humble person she has been the secretary at sierra for the past 18 years even though her job title is school secretary carmen supports sierra in many other ways translating for our spanish-speaking families assisting students who are ill and covering the reception desk when needed as our social committee chairperson carmen helps celebrate all staff members making sierra a fun and positive work environment carmen goes above and beyond in her efforts to work with all students and staff members she does it with grace and patience she cares deeply about the students and encourages them to succeed and graduate she often asks them how they're doing in their classes to make sure they're staying on track we especially me because she always has my back are lucky to have carmen as our school secretary the students and staff are very proud that karman hara is our classified employee of the year congratulations carmen the azusa adult education center is proud to present missy bon yuro is our classified employee of the year ms udo started with azusa unified 42 years ago and has worked at most every elementary site in the district she finally remembers when the computer labs were first installed elementaries in all the elementary schools and refers to the big white one that was installed at murray fortunately for us miss udo is no stranger to adult education she worked at the old site in 1998 as a clerk before moving on to magnolia and we are excited to have her back for a second time her immediate contributions to our wasp process our testing center practices and input into our data and testing procedures have played a major role in our transition from paper pencil registration and testing to computer-based support for all of our students and stakeholders her passion for helping adult students and love of learning has made her an invaluable member of our staff her contributions are priceless and words of kindness touch the hearts of all of our adult students and make them feel at home students and staff can always be expected to be greeted with a warm smile and a pleasant word please help me congratulate missy von niro as our classified employee of the year you may begin miss benitez okay am i on we can hear you you can hear me okay good evening trustees cabinet and superintendent ortega i'm betty benitez coordinator of the special education resource center i am representing and speaking on behalf of everyone in our program for students with visual impairments it is an honor to present and recognize deborah frazier as our district office classified employee of the year i had i have had the pleasure of working with deborah for the last 10 months but you don't need much time to see the impact she has made in this department her dedication and passion are evident in all that she does she has been part of the azusa usd family for 35 years where she prides herself in the support she provides to our students staff and families deborah is not only a huge asset to our department and our district she is highly dedicated and committed to her community where she has offered over 15 years of volunteer service as a cub scout leader a community emergency response team member a member of her church as well as helping to feed homeless and low-income families deborah's work ethic is commendable i can't say enough about debra we thank her for her service and we are honored to recognize her tonight [Applause] evening good evening i'm stephanie ortiz coordinator of special education for magnolia adult transition program i have the honor of recognizing maria roscoe as our mitp classified employee of the year she has worked for azusa unified for 10 years maria joined our staff last year during distance learning hit the ground running and has become such an integral part of our matp team she is celebrated today by her husband francisco her two sons francisco and santino who both attend azusa schools maria has served our district long before she was a staff member by volunteering for her son's class years ago at longfellow that is where she was lucky enough to meet miss aguilera who convinced her to apply and then we were lucky enough to bring her on maria shared that her number one job is being a mom she has a wealth of knowledge in supporting our students her kindness and compassion shines through as she builds relationships with students and staff maria's love of cooking comes through when she teaches our students recipes and kitchen safety our staff bonds over our love of everything disney and maria is right there with us we are so very proud to have maria as our matp classified employee of the year congratulations [Music] mr allen you're up all right welcome azusa unified community family friends fans everybody uh i want to present mot maintenance operations transportation and facilities motif um our candidate was uh lorena gomez she's our secretary um for mot and i'm gonna be a little different just go off to heart uh three points that three words that i just wanna share that kind of describe lorena number one is strength i must share a proverb without fighting a day of adversity thy strength is small lorena's helped us tremendously in finding subs every day for our school sites she calls on a daily basis and make sure we have coverage at all our sites um she also has to deal with you know i hate to say this but uh bad attitudes you know we don't get the friendliest calls every day so so uh lorena has to deal with that and um strength is determined by how much you can resist and put up with um she doesn't bench press anything but um she does have to deal with a lot of um resistance and she does it with grace which brings me to my next characteristic which is patience um you know there's another proverb that he that is soon angry dealeth foolishly uh she has a way of attacking the problem rather than the person um since we do get a lot of phone calls that are are negative in in nature um she has an art a craft that she de-escalates the situation attacks the issue instead of attacking the person which i appreciate and then lastly uh she's faithful um most men will proclaim everyone his own goodness but a faithful man who can find she's dependable um her attendance is great uh in these times where it's hard to find staff and everything like that and i can always depend on her and when you usually know the value of a staff member when when they go missing or when they are absent and i know that today we thought lorraine wasn't going to make it in and everybody was disappointed because of how much we depend on her so with all that said i just want to say congratulations lorena i don't know if you're out there in the cyber world listening but uh we'll see you tomorrow at six o'clock appreciate it bye-bye mr mall yes we have deborah amos that is on right now oh pardon me now we'll go ahead it is our pleasure to introduce the food service employee of the year miss stephanie stephanie has been a part of the azusa unified school district food service department for more than five years she has started the food service as a substitute and because of her dedication and hard work she has moved her way up to a permanent position during the time she has gone over and beyond to provide students with nutritious meals incredible customer service and she is currently involved with our fresh fruit and vegetable program at murray which interacts with our students and sharing exotic fruits and vegetables she has also been very involved with our curbside distribution during covert rainy rainy days wind smoke sleet stephanie is always willing and happy to provide meals to our families of azusa city she always has a smile on her face and an infectious laugh that is very addicting on a personal note stephanie manages a household of three and i mean a three three children and a husband she also can be found at the local soccer field on the weekends cheering on her children during their sporting events if you were to ask her co-workers who they wanted on their team stephanie will be the first one on the first round pick we are very proud and honored to have stephanie represent the food service team as the employee of the year thank you stephanie for all your dedication to the students and staff and we will see you tomorrow to celebrate you thank you mr jamal thank you so much to our site administrators for highlighting each one of our very special employees now it brings me great pleasure to introduce our 2021-22 azusa unified school district employee of the year miss celia castro i would like to present you with the plaque come on up and then i will turn it over to mr fernandez good evening uh board of education superintendent ortega and cabinet um my name is gabriel fernandez great principal over at glass high school it is my pleasure to introduce stelia castro as gladstone high school's classified employee of the year 23 years in this district in this year of return ms pastor has gone above and beyond daily to make sure the needs of our newcomer students are met she shows up to work with joy and humility in her heart and her service to our international students is probably the reason why we keep attracting new international students but working hard with the teachers at gladstone high school miss castro makes their students understand the content in different disciplines this is not an easy task going from fast fast and daily based translating make sure they understand the content helping them acclimate to life and take everything sum it up watching her students cheer for her when they found out that she won the classified employee of the year and then district employee of the year does more justice outstanding job i appreciate it yes it is really a great honor to be specific employee of the year i don't really know what i do the third piece and i i'm very appreciative i just know that i work with that love i keep the best and really you know when i tell them everything is everything in life is possible if they set their mind to it if they dream and they have work are you telling them to embrace you know their culture their act and they can do anything everything is possible it's really a great pleasure to be here and thank you unified school district for giving me the opportunity to work for 23 years really played on thank you ms castro thank you miss fernandez you are just contagious just so charismatic um we do have a special treat for you ms castro and it is presented by miss melissa alcantar from foothill credit union are you here miss kentar i am here can you hear me we can oh awesome yes hi everybody thank you so much for allowing me to join um so my name is melissa and i'm with foothill credit union and um i'm here to join the celebration of azusa's classified employee of the year um as a community partner we are happy to always show support in any way we can and these are my favorite events hearing all the stories and the highlighting of the passion behind everyone's hard work is so beautiful and heartwarming to hear so it brings me great pleasure to announce that we always award a hundred dollar check to the district employee of the year so congratulations celia castro will be delivering your check so congratulations on being azusa's classified employee of the year thank you miss alcantar we have one more surprise for you miss shauna laba from schools first is another person here to celebrate you so she has a few words she'd like to say as well so good evening everyone again i'm shawna with school's first congratulations to all the winners and especially you my dear thank you for everything that you do for the students for the community your passion just dudes so it's my absolute pleasure on behalf first for you with this little basket i've made uh and a hundred dollar uh gift card to target congratulations thank you ladies all right and lastly i would like to present miss castro with a certificate of recognition from assemblywoman blanco rubio district 48 it reads on behalf of the california state legislator and residents of the 48th assembly district i thank you for your unwavering dedication to the students and the families of gladstone high school your commitment to our future generation of leaders is admired by many congratulations on this well-deserved recognition and best wishes for future success thank you so much at this point i will turn it over to our board president mr greer well just once more congratulations to all of our classified employees who are are recognizing and we're we are just absolutely blessed by the opportunity to hear the stories and be reminded of just how great ausd is because of the those people who make up ausd and so thank you and congratulations to everyone out there and specifically mrs castro congratulations to you i have the i've have had the distinct privilege of knowing you for many years and ha and as well as your children and knowing the the care and the love and attention that you that you give to them it shows that that extends beyond them to the other young people here in our community and so thank you for your decades of service and it is a well-deserved honor and we are so grateful uh that that you are in our family um any of my colleagues yes i have something to say i'd like to congratulate estelia castro um he's so passionate about her job as an instructional agent and i have seen her in action i was reminded that you were from mountain view yeah i remember seeing you on and congratulations um congratulations to all the classified employees of the years i've seen many of you in action i want to thank you all for your hard work and dedication to the students at ausd especially at this dur this very hard time during covet i have known sarah from murray school since she was in kindergarten he went to kindergarten with my daughter serena so uh when i seen her name on the list i thought well that's fantastic um you know i i just imagine a day without a classified employee just imagine that and um i totally know that you have all worked very hard for this award um and congratulations again and hopefully in the future well we'll we always have some great employees every year we have so many um employees receiving this award and next year we'll have another bunch of them because all of our class 1 employees do a fantastic job you'll get your turn thank you congratulations ms castro this is the first time that we've met personally but as some as many of my colleagues have said your enthusiasm and your love for students signs through your mask and really reverberates throughout this entire presentation but congratulations to you and you almost brought me to tears when you said i tell my students i tell them everything is possible and it was just such a heartwarming sentiment and i'm glad that you shared it with us here tonight i'm glad that you share your work and your passion with your students and all of the issues unified community so congratulations uh so i would also like to thank all of the classified employees of the year um i think we we know we know and it's been very clear over the last few years especially with the pandemic that you are all very critical the function of our district and you've been there through this whole time so really appreciate all of you gracias thank you for all you do with our students um especially our newcomers i think it's so important that they have somebody who can relate to them and make them feel like they belong here so thank you board remember adianas do you have anything to add okay well again congratulations to everyone out there uh this is the highlight of our meeting and now we go we go from this into the other stuff but but the other stuff is still calling us but once again congratulations and moving along to item 7.1 on our agenda which is public comment on agenda or non-agenda items this is an opportunity for the public to address the board of education on agenda or non-agenda items individual speakers may be given up to three minutes to address the board of education on any agenda or non-agenda items uh when the public wishes to address the board uh on any agenda item it will fill out a blue card stand at the podium or raise their hand while in zoom attendance the board will take blue card requests first followed in order by speakers at the podium and then those in zoom attendance i do want to remind for anyone who is here that we do have a three minute limit and i i will be holding us to that three minute limit so if we get to it i will i will interject and interrupt and that will let you know that your time has expired so please keep a close eye on the clock um lika i don't see anyone here in person so i don't imagine we have any blue cards do we have anyone in zoom with their hand raised we do first we have mr adrian acosta mr acosta oh hello go ahead and take it away no i i must have clicked the wrong button i'm sorry everybody first of all without the talk i'll talk for like 20 seconds thank you everybody congratulations to all the recipients it was an honor to be here that's all all right okay and then we have cecilia del tori good evening hello hello good evening let me go ahead and begin good evening board members cabinet members ausd families and friends my name is cecilia delatorre and i'm currently a teacher at paramount elementary tonight i would like to voice my concerns in regards to the last two years without a pay salary increase this inadequate pay schedule along with the increase of the cost of living including groceries gas electricity and other household items has been a struggle for myself and other ausd teachers please consider at least the full cola to ausd teachers the cola's purpose is to support public employees with up to the the date cost of living and the realization that we are ranked lowest within the surrounding school areas with the quality compassion dedication and hard work we ausd teachers deserve to be recognized through compensation as are those districts within the surrounding area i appreciate your time i'd like to very quickly congratulate all the classified employees of the year at each school site and a special congratulations to ms celia castro for ausd's classified employee of the year thank you and i hope you have a lovely evening thank you miss deletori next we have alan french hi can you hear me okay yes we can great thanks first i just want to take a moment to congratulate all of the classified employees of the year tonight it's a great honor for all of them and folks like them are the glue that keeps these schools going uh i did watch the board meeting three weeks ago which of course featured school reorganization as the primary topic and being a proud aztec i was happy to see that the name azusa high school will be retained that being said i would like to talk about the mascot and colors for both azusa and gladstone i don't know if a decision is going to be rendered on this tonight so i felt it proper to speak on this now i am a firm believer that the aztec and gladiator mascots should remain as should the respective colors for each school all of this is part of a story tradition going back decades when you think of azusa high you think of the aztec and the black and blue colors and when you think of gladstone white black and red all come to mind as does the gladiator though some will point to the rivalry between the schools the reality is that this has been a friendly rivalry to be sure school pride is on full display during the annual sports meetings particularly the football games but this has never been a rivalry fueled by negativity there's simply no reason to change either the mascots or the colors the discussions for school reorganization along with the final decision rendered has been difficult for all involved though it has been many years since i attended palo and foothill i am still a proud panther and trojan and i speak for many who are sad about these schools as well as several others closing in the next couple of years therefore i ask the board to retain the school colors and mascot of both azusa and gladstone particularly for the alumni of both campuses it is difficult enough to lose powell ellington magnolia and all three middle schools in the coming years and keeping the aztec gladiator and the colors of both campuses would at least be a consolation with a reorganization plan now in place the time has come to focus on giving our students the education they deserve this includes discussions of curriculum and programs as someone who received a great education from outstanding teachers at azusa unified i want the students of today and tomorrow to have that as well and i want those who are lucky enough to attend azusa high to experience that pride of being an aztec and that goes for those lucky enough to become gladiators too both azusa aztecs and gladstone gladiators have a nice ring to them and neither ring should fade away thank you so much alan french next we have ron do you guys hear me now yes we can okay first of all um i want to congratulate all the classified employees of the year uh throughout our district you all do an outstanding job at our schools i mean i know that you know working with my instructional aides throughout the years and how how great of a job you know they do in my classroom each and every single day i really appreciate everything our classified employees do and to miss castro wow you know when i when i hear about miss castro and her passion it's true you can't believe the amount of passion that she has to work with her students i had the pleasure of working with ms castro uh last year when i co-taught with mr hart for earth and space and i got to see first hand how she worked with her students and the amount of love and respect that her students have her so congratulations mrs castro on district employee of the year very proud of you good evening board members assistant superintendents and superintendent my name is ron tressel and i am a teacher at gladstone high school i am speaking tonight on behalf of the teachers in our district who need an increase in pay the district's team's offer during bargaining was not only extremely low but also embarrassing teachers are asking for at least the full cola because of the rising cost of living this is not a lie but just pure facts the following are examples of how the cost of living has increased over the last two to three years according to gas prices.aaa.com the current cost of gasoline in california is 4.84 cents from 2019 to 2021 food prices in the us have increased by three to four percent they are expected to increase again this year this report is from ers.usda.gov according to narada real estate investment the median price of housing in the la county metropolitan area is seven hundred and twenty thousand dollars this is fourteen point three percent higher than a year ago as evidenced by the facts i have presented to you these are reasons why teachers need at least the full cola i appreciate your deliberation on these numbers thank you mr tressel and i believe finally we have esther compost i am here uh board members um president greer superintendent cabinet members um i come to you tonight to speak to you about a concern that i have i'm speaking as a teacher of asusa high school as well as my fellow colleagues at my school site um the reason i'm addressing the board tonight is because of the situation with our sub system and the fact that we don't have enough subs to cover classes i am asked on a daily basis to cover a sixth period class that is my prep time um that is time that i have to grade ib ap and regular student work it's extremely difficult to get that work done as you are very well aware those i have three very high level classes um and to get the correct feedback that i need to give to my students on writing or any type of work is just not there because i'm being asked to cover classes with that said i know that we are currently in negotiations to increase the amount of pay that teachers receive to cover classes when the opportunity or the time comes i would like to beg and implore you to please consider the time that we are giving to cover these classes every hour that we have for our prep time that is given to another teacher to cover their cost is one less hour that we have with our family at nighttime and so you know i know that when the time comes i would really greatly greatly appreciate it if you would consider um fair compensation for our time that we have to give up at school during our prep um i keep hearing a common theme of the increase of cost of living i would also um support my colleagues that have spoken here um yeah the cost of living is very high i'm a constituent here in asusa i live here i know how much the home prices have gone up everything's going up so please consider fair compensation when the time comes i would also like to congratulate our classified employees and our classified employee of the district ms castro congratulations to you for all of your hard work at gladstone high school thank you board members and have a good night thank you so much moving on then to item 8.1 comments reports and requests by the board of education uh board member cruz gonzalez i have nothing tonight board member bo no comments tonight board member rodriguez pena yes um good evening everyone uh happy new year hopefully uh 2022 is gonna bring a better year for all of us um i just wanna announce that i went to glaston high school um before the winter break uh for coffee with the principal and we had uh the glaston high school sonic boom and the jazz band played beautiful christmas music for the parents and as usual i'd like to thank director jade clavacio and principal fernandez it was a very nice afternoon i want to put a middle school where students from moca concert course the beginning advanced orchestra also were playing in the mariachis it was a bit chilly out there but the students did a fantastic job and i want to thank also directors mary turner and carlos rodriguez rios um clauston middle school mr coburn sent us a video the video from studio 26 they had um episodes one three and four it was the christmas stocking the years were 1967 1980 and 1997.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you very much would you also then take roll yes we don't need a quorum tonight but it looks like we have one because this is a working session we're not going to conduct any official business but for the purpose of the minutes if you could do that that'd be great absolutely and just reminder uh chairmanship did a great job if you could state where you're calling from uh just for notes chair mursky uh again i'm here uh uh attending from edmonds washington thank you vice chair coleman garcia uh yes here from ann arbor thank you commissioner mccomber here from uh my house in ann arbor thank you commissioner i am here for my house in ann arbor thank you commissioner mccoy here from ann arbor commissioner george here from ann arbor commissioner kerber mary you're muted i'm gonna say you're from ann arbor but tell me if that's not right yeah uh i'm here from auburn washington oh oh great great thank you just one second uh commissioner overpack hi i am not here from georgian bay but in ann arbor commissioner juno here from ann arbor uh commissioner hook um you're from ann arbor good evening commissioner stevenson commander councilmember radina you're in ann arbor hey councilmember breaks karen ann arp awesome uh you have a hundred percent attendance chair didn't get me wait who did i forget mr cleavy i'm so sorry i could never forget you but i did oh no it's easy to forgive me uh mr cleavy uh attending from my 100 solar house in harbor springs michigan right next to the ski harbor spring very good so um first step on the agenda or for tonight is the approval of the agenda uh can i have a motion or no yeah right excuse me then the minutes come after that yeah so approval of the agenda a motion to approve uh mo so moved by uh commissioner mccoy and seconded by commissioner stevenson um any discussion so all those in favor please raise your hand and say i i i think that was unanimous and then approval of the minutes minutes are posted to legistar um do we have a motion to approve the minutes so approved by commissioner levin second from commissioner mccumber any discussion all those in favor please raise your hand say hi hi commissioner hook um i just wasn't sure if he had a comment yeah real quick comment um i didn't see thanks didn't see any uh publication relative to the um recommendation to the com to the council on the missilization ordinance maybe somebody could brief us i saw the status of that in the minutes maybe someone could advise us where that stands and where that's headed do you want to do that now chair let's let's do it later with updates from council members that's okay and then that will be covered then in the meeting minutes as well so okay uh this is an opportunity for public comment um as you may have noticed um the bylaws indicate that we have public comment um for all of our meetings and so even though this is a work session um there's still an opportunity for the public to be able to call in and comment and so this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn call again 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5247 and enter the meeting id 937-6751-6819 this information is also displayed in the meeting agenda and the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number you know like in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments are ending in one three four thank you dr stelson chair mursky this is ken garber 28 haverhill court happy new year everyone i'm calling about fossil fuels in new construction this is an area i actively follow the burning of natural gas in buildings accounts for about 32 percent of the city's total emissions strategy 2 action 1 of the 820 plan includes this assumption quote all new residential and commercial buildings are designed and built to operate without the use of natural gas end quote if we take our mission seriously then the forced air gas furnace is a technology that no longer has any role in new construction we had some real wins in 2021 console approved valhalla glenn lockwood senior living 2111 packard and near north town homes combined 698 all electric units plus some retail space they'll all use efficient air source heat pump hvac systems the bad news is we still get still get lots of projects that burn gas console last year approved 130 000 square feet of gas heated commercial space using eia figures and a conversion factor that takes into account upstream emissions i calculate that these buildings will emit about 100 metric ton co2 equivalent a year that will add about 1.4 percent of the city's roughly 80 000 metric tons commercial co2 emissions from gas council also approved 106 townhomes 57 single-family homes 95 hotel rooms and six apartments all gas heated these will emit 2200 metric ton co2 equivalent per year about a 1.5 percent increase over baseline it's not stopping planning commission recently approved the large gas heated sartorius biotech building at 3874 research park drive which will add 573 metric tons in annual emissions and council will be looking at the looking to annex this coming monday 59 acres off duverin road that will become the village with 564 homes and apartments keep these with gas as the oakland county developer intends and you get 7 300 metric tons co2 equivalent per year that would be a 3.4 addition to the city's current total residential emissions from gas combustion that's 7 300 tons every year for the rest of the century so what can we do eight to zero strategy three action two is quote working with the state to pass the 2021 building code and zero code appendix so that all new developments and major renovations in ann arbor can be necessary end quote the zero code appendix to the 2021 international energy conservation code requires that most new buildings be net zero carbon the state is revising its energy code this year for the first time since 2015.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
also monica the the bolts training in tucson i believe has been changed to february 9th yes that is correct so they did send an email they moved it to february night and i will be attending yes okay in monday we are having a meeting about the february sweet art gallon whether we need to do it via auction or do it live again so the jury's still up in here i know we're still looking for items for the senate option because if we cancel the in-person data we'll still do the online option for auction would be nice to have a force in the quail creek switch we'll work on it i'm sure yeah you need to we need to get a gift card for a foursome at quail creek or golf on the show for the okay yes that should that's not thirsty that was on your list and you get to cross it off delegation that's good that's good that's good there i will do that thank you um okay so one um okay that's good so we'll go to the description um just for discussion um we're looking at the february 14th board meeting that is valentine's day so i just want to make sure that the board is aware of that and the march meeting we just realized is march 15th and that's on spring break and and that is when our teachers and our administrators are off work on the 15th so we are it's march 14th march 14th is that monday that's monday okay first day of spring break so we'd like to propose that we move that meeting to march 21st which would be the following monday um we can put it on the agenda for next month for approval but i just wanted to make and do we need to announce the study session next we can uh-huh so we'd like to have a study session on february 7th on monday at 4 to discuss board goals and our current strategic plan and start at the end with miss kais and work our way around the table for any last discussion well i see that our we have a fifth grade class that's out we had six kids that tested positive with covet and i guess i'm i'm wondering we have 14 students that are now at home for five days is that correct yes why did we make that decision this is over the course of two school days we had six students who tested positive for colby in a fifth grade classroom that cohort right before we went on our break was one that had a lot of positive cases two of our teachers tested positive and it started to spread throughout that whole entire cold war so to stop the spread from happening that's why the decision had been made for that to occur we did contact puma county health department and the health liaison they were going to get a hold of the epideal epidemiology epidemiologist department and then they never returned our call they said that they do recommend that if there are two cases that are positive there are not siblings that a classroom should shut down but that's a highly recommended case in this case here we had six students and that's not including the close contacts that have been testing to state to come into the classroom so moving forward if more cases like that happen throughout our school that's something that i think as a board and as side administrators we really do need to start discussing so we know what the game plan is going to be and we also have further directions to what you know as the site leaders what we need to do in making those calls and those decisions but with stopping this friend and having to lose a lot more of our students over the course of this month in that great level because they already got hit hard already and it's beginning again some of those students already had it in less than two months and are getting in again so that's a big that was a big um first semester we did have to close one first grade class and one second grade class at different times when we did have a number of positive cases and it it worked and we didn't have to close any other classes so we were anticipating after winter break that we would have more people testing positives so um i think you know we really are sitting in a good spot with our being able to contain and close contact and have these students be home monday is a no school day because of martin luther king day and they'll be back on tuesday so we're hoping that this will be the worst of it okay thank you i i actually asked that question because the the metric that they're using nationally is 40 and that was 30 so we have 14 families that have had to address what they're going to do for five days and i think that we need to have a little bit clearer definition as we spoke at our last meeting you know if they ask for an attorney we have to provide them with an attorney so those are some things that i think we need to consider when we're making these kinds of decisions that we we closed down a classroom with 30 infections and did i understand you to say that a child who had been infected previously was infected again yes and it's not the first case we've had a few others within that were infected at the beginning of november it's less than the 90-day window and they've already come positive again and stuff not just students so people people are getting it again and again yes and there may be other comorbidities that there are with that and but i just again with the national average of 40 so the the national statistic or metric that uh educational institutions are using is 40 we're shutting down at 30 um and we have students who are are not they obviously don't have the antibodies or they have comorbidities that are extreme such that we you know we can anticipate that we know that as a board we have some legal potential legal requirement um i think that may be something that we want to put on an agenda to talk about how we're going to address that then also we the good thing is is that we have parents when we call them and let them know we have parents who are supportive and in agreement who are also still very leery that we don't have a mandatory mass mandate so we still have some of the parents who are feeling like you know since we don't have a mandatory mass mandate that they are okay with trying to help mitigate kobed and are willing to keep the kids home for the virtual instructions so that still kind of were but our parents we contact every single one of them and i think our community also appreciates that we are transparent with them and we do let them know we've called it we've you know closed a class we do have a number of kids absent who are with just colds and flus and not feeling well and parents calling us to say they're just not feeling good and we're gonna you know keep them safe and make sure that they don't have coped before we send them back which is good which i think is why we've been able to keep our numbers where they are and they weren't they did stay in session all of yesterday so it's the tuesday through friday which doesn't you know four days to five days but they were we did um have them stay yesterday and contacted all campaigns to discuss the markets okay so pima county health department is the one that um you guys were in contact with and so they run them in closing with two that's that's probably what it had been it was two students non-related if their siblings and live in the same household and but there again those are recommendations so which we were at three then we're at four then it was five and we had a student test again from that same class and it was six and that's that's where you know i agree i think we like to have this on an agenda too to further discuss another thing we're starting to see with perhaps this year that we weren't seeing before was a lot of the students who are falling ill are having favors so going back to the drawing board and discussing our mitigation plan maybe just doing some health checks again in the mornings and just bringing that back because that wasn't something that was occurring in the in past past we had also talked about possibly the kids who were in school putting them in the other classes but then again we're just exposing kids who were in contact with their peers to another classroom and also for a little bit we had our teachers teaching virtual and in person simultaneously which is very difficult as well and this way all the entire class is virtual and the teacher is still teaching all of them because if she was only doing in person for the kids then the kids at home would just be doing homework packets and keeping up with the curriculum as best they could so don't they usually rotate like the math to the ela not anymore they don't no their cells can take now yes yes so the test two stages we're very grateful for that because it is keeping our students here a lot more than happening in the past and we've also had some test to stay students test positive like on day three or two of them coming to test to stay do you have a guess approximately how many tests that um maureen's given today well by 8 30 this morning she had already and maureen's probably listening but i'm pretty sure she had already ran about 21 tests yeah she still test through the day by nine am this morning i was here with her and i know that yesterday morning probably by 10 am she had 84 voicemails because people wanting to come in and get tested and we tell them they have to leave a message and she gets back to him schedules an appointment but she had over 84 voicemails so i'm sure majority of those work for appointments does that 84 students want to come in and get justin i'm not i'm not going to say yes but i know 84 voicemails because parents are told just to call her and make an appointment it could be the state parents it could be three times but we also so speaking of that with we did post our position for the health clerk help we have not had any applicants so what we are going to look at um for next board meeting is a possible proposal for an addenda um a stipend for miss marie because she is testing on the weekends and well into the evenings documenting and reporting and she's here early in the morning to be ready to start testing at seven so we'll be bringing something to the board next month but we're still hoping we can find a house nobody does that we don't have any so and i'd like to think right now take the time to thank um mrs evan our registrar mrs molina and jenna our attendance first because they have been helping so much with the close contact calls but also tracking because if our students are doing test to stay we also have to track if they're an after-school sports tutorials or clubs because starting yesterday they have to test to stay every day students who aren't have to test they test to stay every so many days so the first 35th day so now we have two groups that we have to keep track of um and have to they have to make their parents decide for them to do that test to say they'll be working masks but there's a lot of keeping track and some a lot of moving parts that are happening since we've returned so miss marie just reported she did 40 tests today and a lot of phone calls from other districts trying to get allow their parents or kids to come test and also we had 11 staff members out today so again that's this morning does spending nights and evenings and starting at five o'clock in the morning um contacting and getting our subs to fill these positions i also did a shout out to our support staff because we have miss romanelli miss marilla miss collay and miss sable covering for teachers as well throughout the day which takes them away from their normal job duties but there really is a team effort to try to keep everybody healthy and in school um i was just going to give a shout out to maureen um i passed by the test to stay line of recording to drop off addie and i feel like it's kind of a not if i'm going to be in that line but when and i really like we've got something special with maureen and this achievement gap that's developed over the last couple of years and quarantining and isolation do not do not work together and so i'm really really happy we have this test to say program because it's going to keep more kids in school and help us with this achievement gap but um it is a lot of work so mr over yeah i've got some comments on on this whole situation um i've been wanting to say a few things for the past few months but when the fifth grade class went to virtual learning this week it kind of just took the bucket for me um i read this seven page document that we passed out to the staff last week and a lot of these guidelines i think come from the cdc pima county department of health um trying to understand what these things say is is absolutely unbelievable just unbelievable and how we expect our parents to monitor their kids at home according to all these guidelines on these seven pages is beyond imagination to me i read an article yesterday in the in or in the january 6th issue of the atlantic that included comments from other health experts that criticized cdc guidelines as being convoluted wishy-washy and even unscientific and yet this is what's governing what we're doing in our school and schools throughout this state and the nation as my colleague kelly just said i am alarmed at the long-term and in many cases i believe permanent damage that we're doing to our kids educationally mental health that's caused by virtual learning isolation and quarantine guidelines absences and yes mask requirements masks are not stopping the spread of it they're not kids can wear masks they can be vaccinated and they're still going to get coped with the omicron variant now i want to stress in no way am i attempting to minimize the fact that 800 000 people across this country have died because of this disease but it's also been pretty proven that our kids are the least vulnerable to this disease least full of infection and spreading infection or having serious health problems if they do get infected and the omicron variants are even less dangerous than previous variants in this of this disease rachel wolinski who's a director in this centers for disease control admitted in the last couple of days that the overwhelming number of deaths over 75 of the 800 000 plus deaths due to this disease happened to people that have at least four comorbidities that's diabetes that's heart disease that's obesity and elderly could probably be thrown into one of those too they were 80 or 60 percent i'm sorry 75 of all those are sick of over 600 000 people who are already unwell when they get traffic our kids need to be in class they need to be in class now rest assured there's going to be a capping period there's going to be a gamma variant there's going to be a sigma variant and we're just going to have to learn to live with this disease just as much as we deal with the flu and we deal with cotton colds our kids need to be in class i think that kids ought to stay home if they're sick if they've got symptoms and if they're well they return to class thank you and again i'm honored to take this position and do my best to serve everybody i might be a little rough and running some of the meetings to start but i'm a quick learner so they tell me so andrew and um mr mcgibbon i'd like to also thank you for your um service as president and in leading our board and um glad that you will continue to be with us and look forward to our continued growing relationships and growth as a board as professionals as we move our students forward in teaching and learning so thank you albert does have a updated numbers just for the calendar for you that we can we we didn't include them when we put the counter because we just put the days uh but our hours our k-8 hours are 1140 for the year um what 1140 hours for the year our k-3 students uh from uh the ada numbers only have to attend 712 hours for the year our 4-6 students only have to attend 890 hours for the year and our seven and eight students have to only have to attend a thousand hours for the year so we are well over uh the hours the minimum hours needed for ade for the year on based on the days the number of full days and half days that we are attending thank you okay okay so now we're going to uh
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um i pledge allegiance to the life of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice this is alan here mrs kais here mr australia here mr ellery here mr mcgivern here call our president thank you very much first of all uh election of governing board officers i just like to say i i really appreciate the opportunity to serve the board for the last couple years i think at this time it's probably best that i've passed a gamble onto someone else to lead us forward so uh with that in mind i uh yeah let's open nominations for president i'd like to nominate steve bosterling for president on board i'm sorry this is kelly i would like to nominate steve sterling for president of the work oh sir i'm sorry are there any other nominations [Music] okay uh but that's fine uh mr absolutely congratulations our president well we still need to um to vote so being that there's no other nominations then we will move for a motion i move we close nominations and accept mr uh mr osterly by acclamation yes mr astrali yes commissioner congratulations um this is yours it's a quick turn off no transition you have two seconds to transition all right where are we here all right oh so now we've got to um nominate a new clerk which basically is um you do some stuff in the executive session and then you run the meeting should the president not be able to attend so with that i open the nominations for the office of clerk i nominate rich hillary any other nominations okay with that um can i have a motion to close the nomination i move we close nominations and accept by acclimation okay i've moved that the uh nominations is closed do i have a second and call for the vote second all for uh mr already as claire this is alan yes this is kite yes mr ashley yes mr ellery now we're on the number four true league um there is discussion to remove um 6a and 6b which is the introduction of the cult and the cult of the month and the employee of the month so due to um coping what we did was let the students know that we would acknowledge them formally in our march or february or large board meeting since we have so many kids on quarantine in isolation so we're asking them to remove that from the agenda today okay so we need a second second real call all right so with that it is time for our executive session to meet a motion a motion to move to executive session to meet informally with our superintendent all right we'll see on the other phone
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
the 1782 notice after adjustments was reduced a couple hundred thousand dollars so our overall budget will be 26 million 794 000 and you can see the difference in how that adjusted in education operation that service or anything fun this is what we submitted in our education fund as far as appropriations were concerned 14.3 our budget came back to us from the 1782 motors notice exactly the same so we didn't have to reduce any appropriations there in our education fund budget we don't have to click on that you can go through there and see uh historical comparisons on tax rate and levies i just kind of threw up some things here uh just to pay attention to our assessed valuation we had the largest increase our assessed valuation uh that we've had in like seven years um so that was pretty uh good because we all know that the higher assessed valuation is the lower our tax rate ends up being and so that obviously helped offset some of the impact on our taxes uh just having that increase in assessed valuation that's just the visual of that and how that has looked over time this is just a comparison if you recall a few years ago we had asked policy analytics to kind of run a forecast into what our assessed valuation may look like over the next 10 years and there it was just kind of really a bad time just because when we did this that's about right when covet started so there was a lot of assumptions being made and not being made and so forth um and so it looks like based off of their projection you know we weren't supposed to see that kind of number until 2030.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
all right coming out thing i can answer questions colliers is here this evening to address any questions um as well as the superintendent and vincent we obviously know enrollment's going to increase based on that information these are for the elementary schools the hope is that we're going k-12 because all those elementary kiddos are eventually going to come to god do we have capacity at dodd to hold the size that we're projecting um my lawn in the group which is now slr conduct a an enrollment study and based on the information they had at that time that was certainly this build currently we're at about 600 a little more than 600 students here when i worked here 10 years plus ago we had 900 students um it was overcrowded at that time it's not the best case scenario but it'll take us a long time to get there we have a more pressing problem obviously with our elementary enrollment and being able to accommodate that i think it was like the fourth slide that andrew showed with the different buildings running out of capacity right and that's facing a real dilemma in a matter of a few years if we don't immediately address elementary issues i just worry about the increase being more than clearly with that one example that he showed that was more than projected and therefore they're going to have to funnel through dots somehow and eventually we might reach that 900 threshold sure quicker than we foresee yeah i think you know when andrew prefaced his remarks by indicating that this is phase one um you know it's a blessing and a curse to grow rapidly because andrew said it's a assignment we've created community in a school system that people want to be a part of which is certainly validating but it also uh presents challenges and so you know we you know based on all the information we have there is time to be able to accommodate that middle school demand but you know i know chuck i can see is eager to chime in here but um when we move forward more extensive study will be done that will probably give a better indication of the timeline and i think you're certainly afraid to ask the question it's not um out of the it's a natural progression right i mean like you said if we're bulging in elementary schools eventually students matriculate you know so chuck is there anything you want to add to that capacity for this this school is 906 students and um going out to 29 30 they're projecting 789 all that 29.30 for so just to give you um comparison so there is there is room for for growth there and we'll we'll certainly if there continues this growth pattern um the recommendation would be to moderate year by year to see how that's affecting your your um my other concern is class size right if we can have capacity great but class size has always been a priority with most educators so i think when they when they calculate the capacity and like when zuma is our enrollment person that we use he's not here but i think they took that into i believe they took it into account um what your current ideal you know you know classroom sizes a range of 25 city views education yeah putting features on cards it's very uncomfortable and that's we're facing that already at the elementary level particularly next year will be true class into that building from darcy because we just don't have the space at darcy to accommodate that anymore and these are you know pressing issues no doubt but i think his we're still okay it's not perfect but certainly it's not perfect i can't believe it's 20 22 we started almost three years ago again time flies right but uh but back in september i think was september october uh we met informally this past fall second phase two there's just the recommendations not set in stone so uh you probably heard it discussed in the modernization committee's discussions with the south windsor things going so we planned this year for phase two i guess is we're gonna be forced to do another moment correct uh who did the enrollment projections and to clarify that because we were doing that during um the south windsor we were changing so much and we were kind of moderated that was a really say unique pace i think in the state they've grown like 12 which is unheard of um the state of connecticut we submit this this june the base numbers from this past october are the numbers you're going to use in year one of those eight will be next fall for 2022 so we don't have to redo it talking to the monkeys that we don't need the next phase because if property has to be acquired for any you know for new developments you know uh migration into the district and then birth rates um certainly looking at what you know what's going on with those with the problems with three of the bigger factors ago is it continuing to grow just you know obviously wouldn't be looking at is there a lot of growth yes no and then obviously with the central office of today we projected x amount of you know kindergarteners this year um you know we're seeing an uptick you know there's sort of red flags along the way if necessary given the data that we'll receive from the new enrollment rejections and so forth and if that's part of the process that i would be comfortable moving forward but if it's not by in so as part of the plan as we look at the god phase um so jeff i think this question for you in terms of the enrollment what have you seen so far this year in terms of students being like coming into the school system is it a normal year are you getting more than expected yeah this but i don't know that it's been a normal year in any way but yeah anyway um we are substantially beyond what we would typically experience over the course of a year uh in terms of people moving in to our school system 85 um beyond what the projection was for this year and we had about 60 students move in since october 1 on our um yeah but we are significantly ahead of where we anticipated we are beyond where for total enrollment where um so it's definitely you know when you asked the question about growing room i think this pandemic has accelerated some of what we've seen with some folks moving out selling with the high price of housing two years but um is continuing it's not and i'm thinking i'm thinking this is morally related to the trends that have been identified in a projected moment rather than uh code let's get out of the high currency all right [Applause] [Music] and i do want i do want this to pass uh i also recognize that this needs to have some fairly widespread support across town and so one thing just for from a years perspective they look at not only more from school but an expansion school and giving people an idea of what the cost differential would be on that i think that's important um and then my last concern right now is so i'm looking at these nice guys here jeff says darcy are you looking at the dark stamps but yeah yeah you would send me in yeah earlier today [Music] that's not happening in chapters [Music] had a very specific purpose that purpose was to determine whether the educational programming that currently exists in darcy could be accommodated in ireland that island school because as the smc drew it up that was the proposal through that effort we've identified that you know we would need in addition built on that highland school to accommodate that and if you've ever been there with the traffic uh it's already nightmarish there's no space there's no parking we have people to park on the grass and or snow now with the current back even with redistricting and pulling people out to work in other buildings the addition of the entire darts and staff there would overwhelm the space and capacity therefore it was this recommendation this is part of the work we've been doing over the last couple months that that darcy program be accommodated at the north bend site where there's adequate space to be able to do so what we're looking at you know right moving into the future is evaluating here what's the cost of that through professional estimator uh versus the cost or the time and obviously there's a financial cost and then just because you can't do it doesn't mean you should do it in ireland we'll evaluate that as things move forward but you know today is more of less about committing to go into that process because we need to commit to uh path so that we can expend the time money and resources to actually come up with a not the i crossed the plan for that which would include educational specs for those is um right so what has happened is formal education specs have to be drafted okay there's a cost there so unless count counts that's the plan there's no constraint so i'm not going to talk about these steps when does the board actually have to go [Music] right now we're projecting um in april we're drafting on our timeline the recommended time rings from now through roughly march parallel with that is the update of the enrollment projections we have a quote from so while he's updating the enrollment projections using you know your current data we're drafting up the ed specs at the same time and then ultimately those specs obviously drive the budget through the square footage so i think our timeline is looking in april whether we do two readings or not so yeah between this is called featherwork in april there's so many so all we're trying to support at this point is just put a formal plan on them uh so they can move forward but we're actually going to vote on the actual plan numbers sustainable i just wanted to comment actually that i think as presented this evening i think this will be a great thing for our school system and for our town knowing that things two and three are out there and that we do need the plan without knowing how how long it took to get the phase one now we know that these two also happened and a lot of people have processes as soon as this part is in the rear viewer i guess um but uh i was happy to see that after i picked up our december meeting when it was determined that um it looked like the darcy school programs were necessarily going to be uh optimized and at the higher location and i think it's a great idea to be able to move those to the north end uh site um this also gives us time to make sure that we have these population projections to make sure that they stabilize by the time we we're well into phase one we'll know you know is is 900 students coming to dodd is that is that going to be real are we going to need a larger middle school we need to go to 6 to 18 and accommodate for more room in our elementary system all those things i think we'll definitely have a better idea uh in in a few years so i think that this phase one plan should be supported thank you sorry that last plan could be meeting uh onto it um is saying this is the process it's a modernization process so sam i don't think it's a one-and-done by any sort to the imagination that i think many people are thinking okay we'll get to test this and then we're done for a while we can take a breather we've been taking breathers for about 100 years and really pass the ball up we had to emphasize to people that 37 mill rate almost 38 as of this year i mean if we're looking at that kind of increase we've got to make the case to persuade us [Music] there is a financial spreadsheet calculator that the foundation developed where you're going to actually plug in your property value that calculates basically your personal estimated cost implications based on all metal capital projects over the next 10 years so that's there i think uh whatever cost analysis colliers comes back with moving the birth rc programs to the universe middle school i'm sorry on every school um you know we don't yet know if it fits in with that ball for our destination or not so we might be looking for now the point is all right yeah the only the one the point i want to make about the middle school assuming anything ever happened there is that we are still 50 years away and probably old and there are probably a middle school could make sense things could change are we voting on this today our goal is tonight yes um it probably just comes with no surprise to anybody that um i will not be voting to approve this project i believe it's flawed from this concept um which doesn't mean that i'm going to try to bomb the project in any way i just um i cannot come to terms with agreeing with this two and the process that the way the process has evolved um and the way that um we really didn't take the into account the curriculum and many of the things on page two of this presentation of blind modernize i feel like will not be taken into account without addressing the middle school and by the middle school and uh chapman school we could also um i have many of the concerns beyond what sam um mentioned earlier and those go all the way back to when we toured god middle school a couple of years ago renovating this building on this site is just it makes no sense it really does and um you listen to lots of uh public commentation on the benefits of having a sixth grade middle school and i i can't move away from that everything from when you look at the classroom sizes it's more than just um fitting 900 students into this building space according to what the state says you can do it's about as sam as it stated about classroom size and taking care of that it's about the new furniture and space requirements for 21st century learning that you won't be able to accommodate in the classrooms as they exist in this building it's about um optimizing traffic patterns that cannot happen on this site where this middle school is living and i'm i believe that the process went from considering the educational value of the modernization as a whole for all of the for all of the schools to a financial consideration and i take a lot of heat for that for saying that but i truly believe that we do have to consider the financial impact but it's not the only thing there are other ways to take therapy enrollment and the financial aspects but still address the real reasons for modernizing our school which is to build the district's 21st century educational goals and i with this project i feel like we are leaving a lot of that behind especially for the middle school project so i'll leave it at that and i appreciate what you're saying i really do um and i know there is not a stronger advocate for a switch to six to eight um venue and i respect you for that but i guess my question is um it sounds as if the most i i just i i guess explain to me how this burgeoning elementary population is not the most present issue we're facing and why that needs to be um sideline to um you know along with a sixth grade middle school need to build a second school school i mean that i yeah you have that quote because the enrollment issue is that somebody else alluded to we need we need another property hypothetically if you take the sixth grade come here yes but we're still going to have enrollment increases either way it would definitely be more gradual than trying to add 300 more students in next year but [Music] you're pushing 900 for um this year um based on the whole projections six seven eight total would be eighty-six for the old ones 6th graders so if we're having right now we'd be in excessive capacity i would have to look at five through seven to be clear sam i would never advocate for putting sixth grade in this building on this site because i i don't think the building or the site handles that no i'm just absolutely good that again part of the next phase would be to look at the potential of having to because of our curriculum in the state 50568 that's one of the areas where we have to consider alleviating the elementary schools and appropriately putting 68 together downwards in the candidate but [Music] uh [Music] another [Music] i'm over the next few years [Music] i'd like to make a motion i'd like to move the planning committee recommended full board of education reviews public schools next generation phase one plan counseling discussion so this is basically the motion right here what is this one [Music] the them from my experience on this award and then my experience working with our town council i think that this is our opportunity to at least foreign [Music] opinions [Music] yes is [Music] is [Music] so as i there's a lot more um i don't yet know you know somehow the town council awards are working together on phase one uh the bible comparison budget money et cetera uh the painting towards the discussions there's going to have to be uh my guest is probably he's going to sign the billing commission they'll be working down there and once this goes to referendum or iran's plan there is a pretty much a quiet time where the board of town council cannot advocate for this point so i suspect we're gonna i would recommend that the board have a discussion something this year about the forward on the next days maybe maybe there's a opportunity for another community as far as i know that's deceived hydrated but probably not um is so um [Music] but once the education specs come back [Music] for chocolate that's part of the packaging yeah that's your procedure for two readings you have to prove the inspector so we need to add that i will put those detail steps in there too because the way it reads tonight is and we vote tonight and we're done uh probably after the third bullet i'm thinking just really endorse the plan it's somewhere in that third or fourth bullet yeah and chuck after the third took the actual drafting of the expects that was approved a couple months ago that's already taken care of as far as um but it's yeah the town council goes to appropriation appropriate needed funding um and the town council approved the state required those are kind of together because basically you know we're going to do a referendum here's a number for the rough round and we're going to hold it in november or whatever it's going to be the state of connecticut needs to know that they need to see that the district government body endorses this move um yeah the final number for this budget and again whether it's before the approval plan i think we just gotta maybe fine-tune that with tom council just to confirm um the final number's gonna be based on your aspect we cannot finalize the budget without that inspection that closes this workforce in the building which provides 80 percent so when we vote on the typically what we do this the grant application doesn't require port event to improve the budget but we recommend they they kind of go hand in hand if you think about it and we in other districts we've you know reviewed the budget with the board event so we know okay here's the pets i can usually associate the budget because otherwise it's you know what's going to happen is there so they they're going to put the plan uh they're going to have the final numbers whatever they are on optimism during that process we're going to have education specs complete okay so i would like to get that back as soon as possible uh because [Music] i think he's got amazed about this and i think uh once was it can [Music] you know [Music] sustainability energy and then uh yeah i'm trying to remember that myself the whole world the whole time the committee wasn't working but [Music] i know that'll take at least so yeah so the grant application is comprised of approximately 12 or 13 different parts and pieces to it it's not like we're writing a whole after like a grant like you might think of a grant for you know a different type of project there's a checklist from the state of connecticut it's all submitted digitally through the core ct system they'll have a lot of general questions that we will we will draft we have a paper copy of that and we draft that for submission by the superintendent's office that's who technically submits the grant application but we will draft that in a pdf form so that when they can get into the computer it's basically just data entry you have to make sure for example the certified meeting is for board of approval that specs is complete that the three local resolutions that we noted from town council is complete that they're going to hold the referendum no big report findings the way of november 15th that's got to be so a lot of it's meeting minutes and certifications it's actual head starts themselves uh we'll be submitting a budget um there's a couple of different budget formats that we have to submit the state request we'll be preparing a lot of that um but a lot of it's it's a little bit everybody yourselves town council hustle and what we do is we compile one digital folder that has all those items in it so we go onto the computer upload upload upload and hopefully in a couple hours it's all uploaded but it's a very specific process so then uh let's say at the end of may you know um you know for from jeff and ben hey can we get certified business for the grant application as we get the certified minutes from top council approving the resolutions okay we got to get that that's got to be certified by the time clerk put that into the folder so that when we go to like you said early june you want to have 90 of it done and it depends when those those local certifications get done uh and then once we have them all right so to tim's point we do need some kind of exactly what town council meeting they're going to be voting for these resolutions that's in that is in the process of what you're thinking is correct exactly so we know exactly who's voting when on what what day so the you know you also you have two weeks typically a couple weeks or so until the next meeting until they work through the meeting with that yeah well as soon as we get that number distributed we have more of a macro schedule we're going to extract out all these dates uh probably in the next couple weeks of the exact timeline so everybody's on the same year it's going to joke we're going to ask i'll tell you exactly what you're trying to yeah so for the new it's roughly 35.72 for new construction uh 10 higher 45 okay so there's always a ten percent difference between those two okay and it's always the year that you vote for the quantity the funding is approved but that that's the year that it costs right correctly all right generation one plan but in board of town councils um all right i'm going to ask just a truly wild question this is a question coming from a layman uh there are when we take state funding there are many many many requirements that come with statements right it's really almost like a state it's billionaires this is crazy what happens we build it ourselves like are we freed from all those state applications for everything from you know um travailing wage and all of those other requirements that we have in the problem um i've never seen a district do so [Music] entity so um there are predominantly trade laws for construction for public construction and whether it's the state or local before that so for bell and wager you would um you know if you didn't go through the state so some of the some of the there's some nuances here because um you know they have guidelines they they have right they say you want to overfill this state standard i'm not sure what the ramifications would be say 18 years from now or 15 years hey we built the school on our own now we want to do improvements to the school district but we were never involved with that in the first place i'm not really sure how that would play out to be honest that i've never seen it smaller projects like group replacement projects a lot of districts will do those on their own but major projects like this because the department of education the ocgr is really acting on behalf of the department of education that's really kind of important to understand they didn't completely charge statutorily to manage the grant process i think you probably want them involved you know because they are department of education [Music] there's a certain size that the auditorium can be under sd guidelines right so if we were to build that in our they use that as a guideline to go are you and if we exceed that number you can exceed it you can't exceed the whole lot the state's going to go you're and we're not going to participate he maybe say hey we're we're going to take the bill problem is not the state legislation comes into play everybody wants to go that's all our debt that's going on in connecticut because of not the standard um so when they review the grant application they want to make sure that what we've done for the spec is reasonable that we justify like for example the darcy program that's a space hungry program um if you take the pupils multiply by space and how would we fit into it what there are the state realizes that that program has certain needs that have to be um that need to be met so you know they don't say exactly what the auditorium should be some elementary schools we've done 4 500 square foot uh the first three schools in southwind over 4 500 square feet property the last one we do we're one we're starting right now is six thousand square feet it's a bigger school 800 students 100 000 square feet so we're able to absorb that square footage because there's pushing poles you have common areas when you go through the process you see there's certain things you can fit and as you get smaller populations it gets harder to fit those in because you just have less square footage but you still have common areas like the administration areas the nurses office the cafeteria those those don't really shrink down too much between the 400 students so you can build it it just depends how far over you are you get to justify this program though we wouldn't be able to stay you have to check with the state i haven't experienced that i've or done it um there'd have to be discussion with them um i suspect they probably want to say okay well when you design your school locate on the site where you want to build and build your school then maybe build that later but we've never gone through that so i don't have any experience to really say if you can or can't do that it might be unauthorized funding you'd have to watch that very closely because your dollars start getting mixed and the state gets i think a little nervous on that um [Music] you said department of education that's where their interests lie it's not our we're not the first priority and and we we're we're agents of the state i know but thank you and i'm sorry i guess i i i i don't i it's not gonna get solved it's just not having fault but it just you mean something bigger than no just um it's i'm looking at what we're going through and again it's not it's actually just moved because it's never going to go anywhere but it's this idea that we are determining this and that has meant based on that what we feel is best for necessarily trustworthiness and you know this is where we are so um [Music] that's it okay
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
in 1967 the background it was posters with hard day's night the beatles the mom was wearing rollers the phone had a long court and i'm like wow where do you find all this stuff i mean i used to have that stuff you know i'm i'm telling my age now but i don't know where mr coburn finds all this but the students did a fantastic job he himself was in every episode and also did a fine job i want to thank mr coburn and all the student filmmakers from studio 26 i really enjoyed that the azusa rotary interact students from azusa and glaston high school made over 150 gift bags with color books and crayons we went to the zooto police department on a saturday afternoon to present them to azusa police department chief mike burtison and captain robert landeros for the children they um mentioned that they were going to use him and as a the police officers go in there and the police cars and they see children they would hand them this packet with the crayons on them so i want to thank myra rico and all the students the supervisors from glaston high school with darla elliott and azusa high is mary turner for putting these packets together i also want to uh announce a said announcement that mr rosalie's putting rosatus passed away on january 3rd i have known mr rosales for over 15 years we were in many committees together jorge was a photographer and he said actually right in that seat he came to our meetings periodically and also went to the city council meetings he spoke his mind so he also came to my um kids christmas parties that i have in my home la fosa de carlos ninos over 10 years he would sit there for over two hours taking photos of children over 200 children taking pictures with santa then he would give me a video at the end of all the students or all the children and um at no charge he just did it all the kindness of his heart he volunteers time through many events throughout the community azuza community and he will be truly missed thank you board member rodriguez pena uh board member arianes is ill and she's here joining us online but uh has no comments for tonight i would just like to uh one wish everyone a happy new year um and just remind and encourage everyone to to be uh safe out there um as i know we're experiencing somewhat of a of a surge here and now and so know that uh uh community you are in my prayers moving on to item 9.1 comments and reports by superintendent cabinet and student board member i do believe that we have chris no we have annette online this evening you can mute your mic and then if you're there can you make sure your mic is unmuted okay if you're able to we'll check back after uh comments and reports by uh superintendent and the cabinet to see if annette is here with us um i'll turn it over to cabinet good evening board um and community members i'd like to start by saying happy new year to everyone i wish i could be there with you um i want to use my time to thank uh the business services leadership team um from robert zamora to brian to jesse and debra shannon and my right hand man one man i'm sorry miss melissa um we have a lot of trying times coming ahead of us um we use our business shop talk me you know meeting um monday where we just open up the doors for anyone to come in and ask us questions well we actually use that time to identify how we're going to get the mask based on the new state order of what type of mask our staff have to wear we want to have make sure we knew what adequate inventory we had on stack how we're going to get those out make sure we have a clean system and it's just showing the testament to our team of how they're willing to pivot even though they already have a full day full schedule at any time we call them meetings they're willing to pause and say hey let's make sure we have our best support and to serve our students and staff so i just wanted to publicly use this time to thank them um we're also um starting their budget development for the 22-23 fiscal year so we had our first meeting and cabinet on staffing bashan and i have started the rollout plan of how we're going to meet with our sites we're trying to re-imaginary reinvent the will of how we actually allocate funds and resources to make sure we're servicing all of our students and using the funds today for the students that i earned them so i want to continue to thank my team and thank the support of our cabinet thank you good evening uh board and community i just want to join in celebrating and congratulating all of our csea employees of the year you are such a critical component of our district and uh we are so appreciative of what you do day in and day out and today we are so proud to have congratulated and recognized such amazing talent in our district um i want to welcome all of our students back to school tomorrow wednesday we are i want to thank all the classified management certificated staff that has put in quite a bit of time to get ready for tomorrow these are challenging times and things are changing rapidly but this is kind of our second go run and so we're just i'm just very thankful to all the staff that has really rolled their sleeves to get ready to welcome our students back tomorrow thank you good evening board i just want to also echo uh just uh congratulations and celebration of all of our classified employees many many heartfelt thanks from from the team from the ed services team we just appreciate everything that you do whether you are at the school site supporting whether you're at the district office all over the district what you do is vital to the organization and uh we are just all again just so thankful and grateful and um it's an honor to to celebrate uh to celebrate all of you this evening uh yesterday and today we kicked off uh the second semester with professional learning uh and a professional day for our teachers we had professional learning that was site-based all across the district that went very well a couple of highlights the teachers were able to uh to finish the first module of seal which is the sobrato early academic language and i got lots of really awesome feedback from uh teachers and so that went really well um also one other highlight from today we had 22 teachers participating in an action research project with dr doug reeves who was uh with us today um kicking that off and so we're super excited about that project and looking forward to uh just the different um research uh action research projects that the teachers are gonna be doing and we're looking forward to hearing their findings at the end of the year so it's a very exciting thing so thank you very much and i do want to congratulate our classified employees of the year and i want to thank all of our classified employees for their dedicated work uh day in and day out as you can see by tonight's presentation our classified employees are absolutely essential to the work we do here and this is the unified school district i also want to thank our amazing csda executive board for their support of our recognition today i particularly want to thank our csva president laurie ray our csda secretary diana joy and our csda treasurer sandra arkenberg for their time and energy and putting together our celebration boxes for each of our sites and department and i would be remiss if i didn't extend a heart about happy birthday to our laurie ray today is her birthday uh may this year bring you um all that you wish for and much much more thank you good night thank you i will check back one more time lika do we have a net with us hi yes hey now um good evening board members cabinet and superintendent ortega in december all students participated in a school-wide writing prompt many students received awards at our first trimester awards assembly on december 17th this this week students will have an opportunity to participate on our soccer team and begin practices mr stout and mrs wyan will hold the virtual parent meeting for juniors at 5 30 on thursday january 20th teachers will be available for a conference with parents from 6 to 7 pm the students and staff are looking forward to finishing the school year strong thank you thank you so much moving along then to 10.0 general functions and 10.1 we have the presentation of the 2020 2021 district audit report good evening board again board president at this time i'm happy to introduce you all to mr andrew park who is currently the partner of um edie bailey who is our audit firm that honors our district financials he will present the auto report for both the district um general fund and measure k mr enter i'm here instead kirtan i'm so sorry you're fine nice to meet you nice to meet you um good evening uh thank you for allowing me the opportunity to present the results of the audit for the district um would you like me to share my screen or should i just go over the results of the audit and do you all have the copy you're able to go over the results of the audit and the board has the auto report in front of them perfect okay so the board if you if you remember back in september the district uh presented the unordered actuals to you so our job was to audit them as of 6 30 21 and uh this will be the results of those audit excuse me if we could would you be able to actually go on ahead and share your screen can we make sure he has the ability to do that absolutely actually oh yeah there it is thank you we have the report in front of us but the community may not all right so this is the thank you this is page 92 of the report um and the title is summary of auditor's results so during our audit we have three main areas that we look at and we have three main opinions the first one is financial statements our auditor's report was unmodified which is the highest and a clean opinion that we can give to a school district we did note one material weakness and it's on the next page the finding related to it we had no significant deficiencies identified and we noted no material non-compliance to the financial statement so that's a little summary of the financial statement audit with again unmodified opinion which is the highest and clean opinion that we can provide um then we have federal awards these are the grants you get from the federal government um and if you remember this uh in past year there's a lot of talk about the federal stimulus chronovirus relief funds so the district did receive quite a bit of money during fiscal year 2021.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
architect jan culbertson of the 2030 district and environmental groups are pushing the zero code appendix but the realtors and homebuilders associations and the state chamber of commerce are lined up against it i will certainly comment at a future public hearing in lansing and i hope others do the same thank you and thank you any other callers missy no other police chair yeah okay very good so um i trust that um everyone has had a chance to look at the agenda that is posted on legistar and what we thought we would do by the way um i just wanted to make sure that everybody understood um the way we set agendas is missy and carlene and i have a phone call um eight days before these meetings on the the monday the prior of the week uh we uh talked generally about the agendas going out um one to two months and um we set the meeting agenda at that time we've been doing so based on the topics that we brainstormed and prioritized at the beginning of last year presumably we will do the same thing this year and one of the things that we thought would be helpful is uh just to start the meeting out on a positive note is to hear from commissioners regarding what you thought were highlights from uh our work and the meetings that we held in 2011.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and obviously we hit that number sooner which is good this is a comparison of our certified tax rates over time um it's too recent for the 2022 to be in the system that i use to gather this so i use the black line to kind of show what our new tax rate is for 2022 so you can see that this year's tax rate will be 83 cents shows you how much of that is related to debt service how much of that is related to operations so over these last i think that's 11 years we show an 81 cent tax rate average and you can see how that's fluctuated since up to this point now how does that relate to statewide comparisons you can see that i don't really have an update on those as far as 2021 is concerned so the last i have is 2019 i assume some of those rates have increased to some degree but anyway the median statewide is about a dollar when we're looking at comparison for tax rates so we would fall in that 25 percentile same comparison here that just kind of breaks it down by the numbers as far as how many fall into those quartiles and again we were falling to that 80 cent quartile towards the front i always like listening to larry devore uh he's a retired professor now uh from purdue um and he always gives good presentations about the economy and what the outlook and forecast might be but anyway this is more related to the interest rate components as far as borrowing money is concerned lowest that's been in 70 years and so in a good position there i think when we borrowed money last summer we brought two million dollars and it was less than it was half a percent i think was our interest at that point in time so uh pretty good interest rates happening with that this is nothing new we've seen this before as far as our comparisons with our border schools and tax rates you can see where we fall in relation to our surrounding areas you can also see how much money on that second graph how much levy is generated based off of that tax rate so like for example huntington has is that a dollar what is that mike i can't see that what are you looking on us on the right side on the left side yeah 1.03 so that's showing that their tax rate's a dollar three and the money that they generate from that because they have high such a high assessed valuation is over 16 million dollars that's what their levy generates and so for us last year and i don't have new ones for like i said 2022 yet because not all of that is gathered in uh to the system but for us our tax rate last year was 87 cents and so for us it generated just over six million dollars in tax rate or in levy dollars so that's just kind of a comparison of how much money um is generated per entity based off of their tax rate so like wabash city for example their tax rate was 1.65 and they only they generate less than four million dollars in their taxes on that tax rate go down to the next slide uh our operation fund this is what again we submitted to the dlgf in our budget hearing 8.9 million dollars that came back in the 1782 notice on the next slide as the same so we didn't have to reduce any appropriations in there just made our adjustments based off of new information you realize that when we submit these budgets usually i've completed those in august so there's new information that comes out in september october november december and that makes some adjustments on what our final distributions may be with that so last year we'll look at our fiscal indicators which is put out by the do ab which is the distress units appeal board which is a state entity that puts out these indicators to try to show constituents and boards the financial possible impacts that schools may see so that they can identify uh if the unit will become distressed financially and that they can plan accordingly now this information is always a year in the rears so this information will represent the end of december 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so again our opinion on the federal awards was unmodified which is again the highest and clean opinion we can provide we had no material weaknesses identified no significant deficiencies reported and no audit findings that require disclosure according to 2 cfr and normally for your district we only audit one federal program but due to the new funding received by the district we ended up testing three programs chronovirus leave fund education stabilization fund and your special education cluster and as i stated before our opinion was unmodified so the clean opinion and lastly we have state compliance so these are the programs that the state of california requires us to audit that are present at all school districts um our opinion again was unmodified which is the clean opinion except for school accountability and report card and the finding related to it is on the subsequent pages um that's the summary a brief summary of the district's audit any questions on this before i move to the measure k audit questions looks like we have no questions please proceed thank you uh so now we go to measure k um in here we have this is a two part audit financial audit which is the audit that we do for a school district but only for measure k or 121 and there's a performance piece so for the financial audit we had a unmodified opinion with the mature weakness that we had identified which was related to this fund but again we had unmodified opinion which is the clean opinion and the second piece is the performance audit so i'm gonna go to that page here and i'm gonna show you performance audit so in this piece of the audit what we do is we look at the ballot measure that was approved by the voters that approved the language of what the monies will be spent on using measure k funds and it's pretty much a yes or no audit did the district spend moneys on the water approved measures and i'm happy to report that it was correct we did not find any transactions that were outside of order approved language and during 2021 fiscal year the district spent seven point seven million dollars of measure k and we tested 7.6 million this is about 98.6 percent and based on our testing we had no expenditures identified that were outside of order of food language and so our opinion is clean any questions on measure k audit any questions it does not look like we have any questions thank you so much moving on then to item 10.3 this is an info action item which is a discussion and decision on school excuse me uh let me just remind you that 10.2 was pulled so we're moving directly to 10.3 discussion and decision of full reorganization oh excuse me thank you we need to back up and and take action on item 10.1 thank you so much so back up to 10.1 is there a motion on the floor i'll make a motion on 10.1 all second removed by board member rodriguez pena second by board member cruz arianis any additional discussion yes yeah chris gonzalez um yeah i have a question for the staff um so how do we plan to address the issue of the um internal um internal control or internal control yes so those um we've addressed those um through training um in this particular case what we had is we had a transaction that was paid in the month of july um that effective july 1 is the new fiscal year but that payment should actually been accrued so could it hit the current fiscal year so it would have showed that the payment should have been part of the expenses as of june 30th but since the staff member paid the expenditure in july it was going to be reported in this current fiscal year so we are we taught that and we did a training with our staff to help to understand the proper accrual and then we've also put controls in place so so that way when transactions are going through during the closing process we have checks and balances so that way we have different levels of accruals uh check off to make sure we're properly accruing all of our transactions okay thank you you're welcome any additional discussion hearing none we'll move to a vote and the motion passes five to zero now item 10.2 again was pulled and so we will move directly to item 10.3 which is an info action item discussion and decision of a school reorganization just as a as a quick reminder of where where we are we we had a our our last special meeting on the 21st and there were a number of things we were looking to address and we were able to get through a good number of them but we did not complete all of them so we did make we did give direction and vote on secondary and elementary as well as the timeline we also gave direction on the names of our secondary campuses we did not make a decision on uh branding and meaning mascots and or colors for either of the uh what what will be azusa high school and what will be gladstone middle school we also did not uh yet talk about longfellow and what would happen with with that campus um which we were hoping to address on the other side of the break same with programs um we did not yet address in in conversations with with uh superintendent ortega about the the the best process forward i want to to suggest a course of action for how we will handle this um we could address these things tonight and we could have we could have conversation and look at look at these things a secondary option is this upcoming week next week there is a on the 18th we have a study session that is currently scheduled for us to look at the lcff as well as the lcap we have not yet received our information on the lcff we could hold that meeting continue to hold that meeting next week and just discuss lcap which means that we would need to schedule another meeting later at another date to address lcff an alternative would be since these items are timely we can address school organization as a primary uh point of conversation and topic for a study session this upcoming uh or it'd be a special meeting that we'd have this upcoming tuesday and reschedule that especially the study session that we have for a later date which looks like it would make sense to do that on february 2nd 2022 so these are things that we can address in the next item when we're looking at our calendars for both this year and next year but wanted to open up the conversation is there a desire to continue the conversation tonight and address these other items or is uh what is the wish of the board as it pertains to uh using next week's meeting for for this purpose um i would like to just make a recommendation i would like to continue to have special board meetings um to discuss the reorganization you know there are times we'll sit here two three hours just discussing budget or schools or programs and and i don't want to be rushed during the board meeting knowing that you know we have other things on our agenda that we have to continue i would like to continue family organizations just discussing the reorganization so it does give us more time and more input it's just a recommendation that i have um i i agree with board member rodriguez pena um i would because these action items potential action items are timely i'm in favor of keeping our january 18th board meeting time and converting that to a special meeting to discuss only school or reorganization okay so then that that appears that board member audience still feel free to chime in if you have something to add um i that would i would i would be in support of that as well um just to gain clarity and and specific direction then which we can formalize this or or or in our next item 10.4 but if we were to look at 118 for school reorganization as a special meeting this upcoming tuesday we would then discuss or the items that are that are are still left outstanding is the other side of branding as it pertains to both gladstone middle school what will be gladstone middle school and azusa high school as well as a decision on longfellow programs is another piece that staff is saying that they would be ready to to share with us the the full scope of what what program their recommendations for a program on march 15 2022.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so uh i would like to recognize anyone that wants to comment on that obviously we received comments in the survey but we thought this is an opportunity to maybe highlight some of those or to elaborate on any of them and no one is obligated to to talk but we'd like to hear what you felt were positive aspects of the work that we did last year go ahead commissioner me yes sorry about that um i thought one of the great things we did was added some younger members that there's a whole fleet of you on the call i see at least four faces that are way younger than me some of you well everybody else is probably younger than me except maybe you john but great to see the influence influx of our new members um and those that are older too as well with new different ideas i think this group is really well suited to support council going forward on energy i hope that the council looks at us and points to us and uses us effectively especially on any topics that do affect the future and um those of us that still have a few few years left in our tank to support the energy future of the city um please call on us as we can help you all achieve those goals so great to see all the new faces on our commission thanks thanks chuck anybody else colleen sorry i didn't miss you thanks john um so one of the things that i really appreciated about what we did last year was um educating all of us the number of the presentations that we had were very very informative and um they they helped us to get onto the same page as far as our understanding of the different um different aspects of renewable energy and and bringing us closer to our our um carbon neutrality goals it was a very very educational year last year and i'd like to see that continue this year thanks carlene any other commissioners while we're waiting for you to gather your thoughts then i'll share mine and this is really not all that original because it was something that many of us included in our survey responses but one of the things that i thought was a highlight were the presentations and the discussions that we had about municipalization and cca and those spawned the idea of an seu or at least partly were responsible for doing that um and also uh generated a lot of discussions about various forms of municipalization and that fed into the resolution that we passed um recommending a feasibility study and along with that resolution we also advanced a couple of other resolutions and ordinances that ultimately pass counsel and i think that we could be proud of that and hope that we're able to do that again in the coming year council member riggs concur with what everybody has already stated um and also to add that you know in addition to educating ourselves and obviously us as council members um i think it's served an important role in terms of educating the community as well i know that a lot of folks have i've been sharing the presentations that happened here and people have really appreciated having those as resources to dive into because you know civilization and seo are complex subjects and so um so that's been great and there's been a number of initiatives that have kind of moved on to council for um over the past year that um great you know yeah serving energy commission is serving its role as a as a strong advisory council thank you commissioner mike yes hi everybody again um today we had a meeting uh of the governor's climate solutions council and it dawned on me uh where we first saw the first glimpses of the report that we made public on friday and delivered to the governor and it made it dawned on me at that that we we didn't do something that was important um and i wonder if we could do it in ann arbor um at a different level and that is to do a systematic look at all the other municipal maybe not all but a range of other municipal energy carbon neutrality options and in doing so it would educate us certainly educate me and i apologize on behind the eight ball perhaps but we would understand what others are doing but also allow us to understand maybe how we fit in because part of what we need to do in ann arbor i feel is be a shining light an example a leader and that's the same thing i really was hoping from our state effort just as uh i was hoping we'd get there from the university of michigan i think the university of michigan plan was indeed a leaders you know it we're in a leadership role if we implement it and the other thing that came out today that it was interesting was sam stopler a colleague of mine at seas who's also on the council he's an environmental economist and he highlighted the literature for sort of energy economics makes the point that there are some technologies primarily renewable energy and electrification of everything and particularly mobility that are well developed and economically very viable now whereas there are other types of mitigation strategies that are still not at that point of being a deployable at um what will likely be the the least cost in other words we're not gonna wait forever for the cost to go to zero or something but we um we we there are some things that are economically make more sense now and other things that make uh economically make more sense later uh and it'd be interesting to apply that analysis to all the different things that we could do here in ann arbor and part of the reason i'm saying all this is um not only do we want to be a leader and you know maybe that's going to help propel the state but we really want to i think everyone here views what we're doing in ann arbor as the way to develop scalable ideas that then can be adopted more easily by other communities large and small and it would be interesting for us in the sort of by putting the economic lens on there that would also help there because there are things that ann arbor can do that some of our less affluent communities in michigan you know will never be able to do um and so what we need to do in those cases is advocate for the r d or other solutions uh that are necessary to create uh cost-effective ones um so i i'm just arguing uh arguing i'm not arguing at all i'm just advocating that we sort of get a more systematic approach to what we're doing and i love the you know 820 and building on what missy and her team and you all have gotten going um to me that is uh very cool thank you very much um i made a few notes hopefully missy captured a few things as well we can always refer back to um the video um comments uh commissioner cleavy yeah i like the uh the ideas that uh commissioner taylor is raised up i think that um we might want to get be a little more i guess uh fine-tuned in in reaching out and talking to other communities there are lots of programs out there uh michigan municipal league is one and there's there's other sort of green community programs and stuff um those that that have you know real teeth and metrics back nets the ones that have signed on to the mayor's climate compact which ann arbor has which requires a greenhouse gas inventory identical to what the city of ann arbor has so there's a real real difference between those who have done a greenhouse gas inventory and facts are driving the public policy and those who you know lack credibility how's that um bordering on green green washing um so i think the sustainability network is a great place this is a part of that um but it's easy enough to get a list of of communities that have done their the greenhouse gas inventory have signed on to the climate's climate um compact and um get a sense of what they're doing because as we're learning from watching uh what's what's happening with with cop 22 and stuff um we can make play pledges and stuff all day long i was reading today and and uh the economist about how most of the net zero things um don't really come into play until until 2040 2050 and basically all the people that are making the pledges won't be in their positions and jobs when that happens so you know don't it is only that small number that are doing things now and as we've seen in the last year how difficult it is to get things done we can't even get you know electrification in our buildings and it's going to be an uphill uphill struggle so i would strongly suggest that we you know take the top five um and uh look to miss you to help us identify those and see you know are there lessons learned from those groups maybe get presentations maybe even see if it makes sense to start a top five uh group of some sort special group and and uh you know see if we can highlight uh the successes that are that are happening um i think ann arbor would be at the top of the list um um because we're actually trying to do the hard work but um i'm tired of listening to people come up and you know talk about you know what they're gonna do in 2050 including dte energy i think those days are over let's get down and listen to people that are actually doing it find out how they manage to get it done so real really quick i totally agree with you that was something we brought up i brought up at the state meeting today too is that we have some uh near-term goals specified in the report that will go the governor but not nearly enough you know and i think it's just as ridiculous to go with even 2035 or 2045.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
even though we just completed 2021 these indicators are a year in the lab so these indicators will reflect what hap what where we're at or what the financial status is as of december of 2020 okay so this this first slide shows what rss valuation was uh and the estimated population people can go to the website here they can click on some of these buttons and get some more detailed information if they choose to but one of the indicators that they look at is adm because adm is where we generate our estate dollars based off the number of students that we have so a potential indicator could be that if they if it the school district is losing enrollment then they would be losing state dollars which could put a distress on the school okay so anyway this shows what our average daily membership has looked like since the 2012-2013 school year and it gives you a breakdown of what the fall count was and what the spring counts were during those years i've given that to you guys before in presentations this is just something similar that we've used that does show that we do have a decline in trend when it comes to avm the other thing that they look at are fund balances and so they want to see whether or not if there are distresses if you have a balance that may be able to support that distress over a period of time and so you can see based off of all the different types of funds what those fund balances were over a period of time so like for example you can see that brown line which is in the red okay which was that self-insurance fund that we had been dealing with uh over a number of years and and we know now that line has disappeared because we did that at the end at the beginning of 2021 so obviously it would not be reflected based off the end of 2020 but it kind of it shows you those changes and fund balances for some of those funds over that period of time which we can see that many of those have improved uh up to the point where we're at where we're showing here at the end of 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so that means if if everyone is in alignment with that then we would this upcoming uh 18th january 18th we would discuss branding as well as a longfellow is that fit please miss our ticket board just a little nuance uh no later than march 15. thank you i agree um for president i have a clarifying question when we say a discussion or ready for a staff presentation on staff recommendations on programs no later than march 15th um i know we've had a couple of board meetings where we've tossed around ideas about programs including international baccalaureate academies vaffa um what what would be the the meat of recommendations is it building off of what we've already discussed and getting um more operational and more budget information for the program implementation or are we talking about um programs that we have not yet discussed it's an extension of the conversations that we have had um just really getting our our current desire is to get a little bit more uh input from different stakeholders um we have um committees like our aaa we have our uh a parent roundtable just having a little bit more input and collaboration with others and then coming forth again no later than march 15 with a recommendation or recommendations that have been flushed out and that steam would fit in alignment with the convert the previous conversations that we have had would that require us a special board meeting in mart if that's the desire of the board if not that could just be part of a board meeting maybe i'm not looking at the right calendar but if i'm looking at the board agenda calendar for this year i don't see a march meeting march 15th march 1st are you on esb yes yeah they might not be on esp yet okay yeah thank you i also wanted to add um if we're making that decision on um the 18th on the um change of mascot or colors or whatever will we have the report regarding any budget anything by that time our intent right now is on thursday to supply the board with the most updated information regarding that okay thank you okay then the only other piece if we could look at our calendars because we would look to reschedule the this study session that we have on february 22nd which would allow us we expect to have that and the information to lcff as well as lcap information to be able to present on that date so we would schedule an additional meeting does does that work for february when what time he's still keeping the is still keeping the the tuesday tuesday february february 22nd i imagine this would be at seven seven o'clock that was that's that's again wishes of the board uh typically study sessions uh we don't have a closed session and we start about 5 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above