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a new data came out showing that the five-day policy is not supported by evidence and at least more spread within the schools i've previously said that kids on days 6 to 10 according to need to eat separately from the rest of the children until their day 10 is complete in order to reduce spread i especially want to answer the question that was posted last school committee meeting why did destiny extend the masculine thing i've asked you to review the email that i sent you with this evidence and a really nice easy to understand uh that i asked out this evening um masks do work when worn over your nose there's a limitation however how long and how they are worn by children and adults the last chart i sent was from caitlin jenner that you're a local epidemiologist again and it showed that if someone was wearing an n95 and an infected person was wearing an n95 they would get 25 hours of protection in a perfect scenario if you look at the chart if one was wearing a surgical mask and someone was wearing a candy fine they'd have five hours perfection i sent my daughter into a fan and i hope that she can wear it the best she can throughout the day but at best she has five hours per fashion when the school day is six and this ignores lunch and snacks and water breaks and so this is why the entire class should be considered exposed and not the time-consuming tracing of three or six feet that cbc and jesse has laid out omicron is airborne it doesn't matter vaccinated and unvaccinated students need to be notified if there is a person in the same room as them i know that contact tracing has been eliminated in many districts but a known exposure should change your behavior and who you might expose contact tracing is indefinitely more difficult if you consult a seating chart and that is unnecessary and not supported by data i again remind you of the augmented reality from the new york times article that i showed in the spring and also dr zandi showed in the screen the virus is in the whole room by the end of the day i also heard that dustin's considered stopping the tests of state program and the pool testing program again sadly we don't participate in the pool testing and just have children test at home two times a week with home antigen tests i don't think this is sufficient even if all the parents truly did them at home i've had two close friends whose children had a negative rapid antigen in a hang and then a pile of pcr the next day who weren't notified for two more days one of their parents a co-worker of mine tested her son immediately with a rapid negative when he developed a fever the next day got a pcr and then waited 48 hours from his first symptoms tested again with an antigen flagged positive in a minute on that antigen test and then 24 hours later she had the phone call that he was indeed positive luckily they all stayed home suspecting it was such from school i again support the boylston merlin regional school district nurses in their plea for help and what they are requesting and the modifications to testing and quarantining policy please don't hesitate to ask me any questions especially in regards to policies made by destiny in regards to masks i think it would be embarrassment to the district if you wrote that letter to them i again asked you to review the email that i've sent emails previously sent to review the data so you understand where these policies come from thank you again for taking time to review the information before you make a decision thank you jessica okay i don't have quite the data that jessica does but my name is katrina and i have a child of bces third quarter and my approach is a little different than data including one doctor or another i'm going based on my child and how this has affected them and i didn't realize until today that there were hoops that we needed to jump through for this committee to ask jesse where is the evidence to keep our kids in mass desi is not made up of health officials and they're making health decisions for our children and for an entire population evidence should be provided well before we are allowed to mandate our kids to rename the masks that should be first not less there are multiple studies from doctors who say masks aren't very effective and we could go on and find them home and yes they're ones that say that we should wear kn and 95 nests everywhere well i don't think they should those aren't 100 effective unless they're properly fitted and are we just assuming that our children are walking contagious deadly viruses that can't be good for their mental health and i also asked where was everybody when flu was killing people i don't ever recall being notified of a positive flu case never mind extra precautions put in place to stop the spread of the flu spread the flu spreads up to six feet and through your nose and mouth and even on surfaces meanwhile classrooms were barely sanitized i couldn't be more frustrated that our kids are part of a i hope this works experiment while our states and schools while other states and schools are nascus and doing just fine my preschooler hasn't born a mask all year why is our class any different why is one state any different i think we all know it's politics with vaccine protection and our recent omicron surge a majority of our population in massachusetts is either vaccinated with natural immunity or just has natural immunity it seems foolish to continue with masks mass mandates they didn't seem to stop the recent surge some vaccinated and boosted and recently contracting coven wearing a mask after quarantine does not make sense to me it's only a sign of compliance and it gives false impression that we're protecting our community who is held liable for speech delays emotional physical issues is the superintendent going to be what about child suicide from all these restrictions and fears there are harmful effects i want evidence showing that there won't be harmful effects from covering my kid's face or i should have the right to not send my child in the mask tomorrow this is all being figured out at our child's expense and the finish line keeps getting moved up at a recent basketball game my rule following child unlike myself grabbed her chest looked pale and red at the same time and i thought for a minute i might have calm ambulance she couldn't breathe in the mess and she was too afraid to take it off at school she's told to eat in silence at snack break when it's indoors because of the recent omicrons book what evidence do you have to tell my child when her mask is off she needs to be silent and if not that she can't eat or any other child let's pretend for a second they're in a restaurant for their celebrity or a politician can they remove their mask then and it's okay how do i explain this to her other than tell her well those are the rules rules and mandates in history there were a lot of rules and mandates in history that were not right and they caused a lot of harm and some of them it was too late until we stopped them the updated data has shown that a majority of the coveted hospital cases and deaths had comorbidities i didn't i don't see mandating the way people live at home no cigarette bans no fast food bans no forced exercise and throughout all of this the data has remained the same that our kids have been fine yes some aren't some kids have risks but they always have for anything in their life we have come a long way with the virus in the beginning when things were unknown it made sense to protect everybody until we knew but now we know and it doesn't make sense as the data keeps changing why aren't we allowing people to make their own choices are you absolutely certain we aren't creating superbugs and suppressing our children's immune systems living this way are you absolutely certain we aren't creating anxieties and mental health issues for our children because if you're mandating an entire population and parents to force their children to do something you better be certain that it works and it's without harmful effects thank you [Music] we will take those thoughts into the business portion of the meeting later on closer to 8 45.

oh really and before that it was three districts oh today it's on district yep it was a union [Music] so let's keep things moving do you have anything more to add about the committee rule and yeah i was thinking um attending um like school events i'm thinking specifically of just parent bootcamp that he does with the incoming sixth graders i know the company that i work for we were here we had a table which was talking to us that would be a great opportunity to have a table and have the school committee members there so people you can introduce yourself with a and when kindergarten starts things like that as a committee just so that people can know who we are it's a really good idea i don't think we are doing whatever you do uh [Music] there's all different like open house things that the school committee should i mean we did a pto event the pumpkin fest there was like all different i mean not to be there the whole time but just so some of the parents can or anybody else is it just school events or what about the broader community well it's funny because i had a memorial day on there [Music] as well so i'm going to ask you to take it one step further well because we've had we've had people go to selectmen for our school committee issues which i think is wonderful i mean whoever's going to advocate for them they should go to but you know when there's a problem with the road i don't go to the select when i go to the dpw you know i don't know that if there's something going on in school where there's a problem a plus like hey i want to bring in this program they should know who we are we should be a friendly face because otherwise they're all reaching out to jeff and his his inbox is probably pretty cool um but it would be like just a nice liaison a connection i guess is really what i'm looking for because i feel like people know what they know our names but they don't know who we are um i remember just recently someone said all that stuff and so oh my gosh next time all the time that's so-and-so so it's the same with us they may interact with us all the time and not realize oh that's coming on the school committee i could be telling them about this or asking them you know when the next meeting is or something along those lines that's the liaison yeah that's the appointment so if if that's what they're all doing if they're all saying that that okay we're gonna take that and then we're gonna we're gonna send that stuff to jeopardy as opposed to i'm to take it and i'm going to deal with it that's different that's not everybody okay so that's so they all said okay when we get something like that we're going to we'll be out there we'll all do them that's all acting in the same direction yeah yeah so that's the kind of thing i've talked about they're all you know known yeah so yeah we'll get to that more of that when we get into it now we can save some time had another thought and regarding what you guys just said i think jeff's getting on the point where individuals are going out and talking to people trying to solve the problem individually that's a bad thing going out and getting the problem bringing it back and dumping it on jeff's desk is your problem you feel it that's also a bad thing but there's some middle ground somewhere where if you tell the person out there you mean individually yeah i can't do anything for you right now but we'll take it to the committee and we'll depending on what the issue is that's a good thing but i wonder if you've run the risk of do that enough times and not get people solid answer that you might start to get the community saying well is my feedback even welcome am i gonna be hurt am i gonna be taken seriously or they just gonna pass it on the job and then you go wait three weeks for the next meeting and then maybe go on the gym maybe you did it it's busy that night we'll push to the next one that was two three months come by and they're just like i just want to know why there was greetings at lunches then and this gets this gets to what i'm constantly saying to the community since we spend a lot of time talking to committees about what your role is or against that government the people that don't understand that role are the whole rest of the community so when someone has a problem about readings the answer isn't i'll bring it to jeff it's why don't you go you know the person to talk to is the food service director yeah i think we have a policy on that we just maybe went over it so the other day right yeah so and we have a policy of that so i think you're right um that's a that's a fine line yeah you got a balance what category does this fall into versus that one what do i do so that's a that's a challenge uh what i was gonna say originally i think uh i don't even know what i was gonna say it was uh oh the someone mentioned something about i think the liaison the school committee is between the community and the schools yeah i know some people sometimes struggle like obviously they don't come to the meeting we do record it so they can watch it afterwards if they want that is going to take four five six hours there's the minutes that they can go through but then you know it doesn't read the minutes sort of tell you what actually happened or what was discussed or what the different sides were before was taken or anything like that so it's tough for the community unless they attend a meeting it's tough enough to actually know what's going on so what can we do to sort of educate them as to what's happening i was gonna say i was thinking about the same minds earlier when i thought about the fact that we've relied heavily on if we want information to be shared to building up suggests that's been the vehicle we've used to get communication out there to parents in particular you know other communities that do or communicate out to the community differently than that and they use their own channel their own communication to share information not relying on the superintendent's books a weekly newsletter yeah it's it um it gets difficult because because you have to sort of decide what the communication is going to be together it slows it down a lot of times our take on it is is really not like a lot of the communities will say we think we should have a community facebook position there's really but who's going to run into the side of the content you have to do that by committing right so really there's nothing that you can do that's much more than the district can do anything so that's a lot of times why the administration becomes sort of the main channel of outgoing communication so i find that reading the newspaper articles about our meetings tend to be the best source of information remember the communities want to know what's going on in the school committee those articles we want control over the fact that you know reporting on what we're saying here those who tend to be in my opinion some of the best sources for a community member to suggest seeing kind of i just wanted to expand a little bit on what i said i spoke specifically about a problem but i can think of several times when a parent has reached out to me and i said okay that's an issue that you want to take to here to diane or to ace or a certain principle or oh you know what that's a great thing oh you want to talk about that curriculum we have a whole curriculum you know where do we go about approving a curriculum you're going to want to go and talk to carol so that's what i mean about knowing where to send people rather than just jeff who's you know trying to do with his day but the other thing is just having some sort of familiar face where they feel like if they have a good idea or if they say hey this is going great it's something that you can pass along too it's basically the good and the bad and so that's what i mean about being just present and that's why i said than the other visible being seen i know i remember the training we did fairly recently um there were school committee members that go live on the facebook i'm not a fan of baseball however um i think that it's a great tool to communicate with on the committee as long there was an example there was a woman that after the meeting she just popped online it was maybe five minutes long and people can't i mean reading the minutes i agree with you might just you know get the sense of anything really that's happened there um and then to have to go through and watch the python recording is difficult but if you can just you know put that thing up while you're doing work in here the person you know i think that's a great way to have um engagement and i know it comes down to who manages it but you can figure that out if it's going to bed if there's going to be a benefit the only thing going live 11 o'clock other social media gonna stop this platforms not because it's not a good conversation limited time yeah and what we're getting to is a lot of ideas of implementing community engagement i want to get us back to the definition of learning conversation i feel like we did sort of talk about an individual community members anybody have any more thoughts about what's the role of an individual community member in community engagement certain research being accessible and understanding where information goes or where questions go or where concerns go in a sort of a common understanding of how it works and a common understanding is the administration [Music] i see some of the two-way proactive inclusive student achievement um foreign a definition of community engagement approach that that's why community engagement is not and you can step in and get this what have you got so kids um is a two-way proactive approach that is focused on student achievement responsive to community needs uh you know we have to put anything in here with budget um i think one thing you could say as a third bullet is it informs the school committee's decision making because that includes budget that includes other things to policies and other areas i think usually legions or interests perhaps to give a quality connotation uh i would say maybe attentive to the diversity of the community i mean attentive or solicits um i guess attentive to different special perspectives or something i'm trying to [Music] i think it's an approach that is built on integrity there's a lot of integrity with loss built on integrity uh i like susan's inclusive of all uh stakeholders that that covers anybody i attempted to put that police [Music] in terms of the beginning of this and maybe say that we could have a sentence that has some bullets after it but we agreed to because of what i've written community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the community and the communities we represent that is so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee in the communities we represent that is focused on study responsible community needs that is informing us that's good yeah so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee and the communities we represent that is corner semicolon [Music] more versus reactive right something happens let me respond kind of like what mike said that it takes forever to get there to have the solution you know what i mean to the problem so if we can kind of be thinking or listening to numbers right and proactively getting at the concerns of the community before is a balance of understanding community needs and being responsive to them but gathering that input like when jeff comes to you with goals he's gotten a lot of input about what those goals need to be based on data right based on data and feedback and you're proactively sort of addressing you might see these before they become huge problems right so when we talk about establishing goals it's because you want to be proactive instead of reactive in the work that you're doing you're looking at what's needed you're establishing the goals to address issues and you're setting instead of letting community members constantly come to you and say this is an issue this is an issue fix it it's effective you're the leaders saying this is where we sense based on feedback from the schools based on feedback from the community bringing together these are the goals [Music] of life yeah i think sometimes the issue there is that proactive can sometimes look like a knee-jerk response like you hear from some small portion of people and so you set something in motion in the interest of being proactive but you've actually not heard from the diverse constituents in your community before you take that move so sometimes i think proactive okay i would say i would say that if you're responding to a small number of constituents if that's more reactive that's what i would call an agent but also it gets to what we were discussing earlier about the silence right like no news is good news but we're being proactive it doesn't matter if there's silence or if there's a lot of activity going on we're being proactive where out there trying to do something whatever that something is will define it but instead of waiting for it to come by also remaining informed of what's going on districts both in the state and around the country to see that there are topics that are going to present themselves at some point in the future or highly likely to and be ready to address those or have already addressed them because we proactively talked about one of these issues that we all know are going to be you know from center over the course of the next year with a big election yeah we should have the five p's in there right preparation [Music] well just just to go up with julie's proactive i i like that because i find that you know facebook becomes an outlet it's almost like you know when when you think about two people that have just did they've been stuck down it down and then eventually something sets it off and it goes up that's what happens on facebook people have questions and concerns and and they may not have the right information like i've seen this information and if they simply went to someone who could say here i'll direct you here's the deputy guidelines we're here you know the principal would have this if that's proactive versus them feeling like the only person they can reach out to is a computer keyboard and then everybody else jumps on it and then it becomes something bigger than it really needs to be they might have gotten automatic oh here's the information so that's why i think the proactive approach is really good have we convinced you uh yeah no i wasn't saying that proactive is reactive i mean it is nature i'm saying that what i've seen sometimes is people in always surrendering the horizon um you know kind of reading the pulse what's coming down the line and reaching outside of your own community i thought that was a good example adam i'm thinking about you know what's happening in other communities what's happening in other states but how does that inform our people by you know looking ahead what's happening to their students with like what does that mean with your students yeah in terms of maybe student population changes or student changes or you know yeah i wish there was more data because i'm a data-driven person so i feel like um i'm sure it exists somewhere but it's hard um without you know if there wasn't like an analyst in the district or something that's analyzing all this but yeah like you're saying what happens with our students you know i'd love to send more surveys out um to the parents and jeff last year he did a ton of them i don't know if they were helpful or not um [Music] focused on student achievement responses to community needs and interests and forms that can be decision-making of all stakeholders proactive and somehow maybe in your introduction we want to build in the integrity i'm not sure that's [Music] community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the community in the communities we represent that it is like somewhere in the middle there you have built on or built with or integrity or founded with integrity or something yeah is now we're getting a little bit into more of the the nitty-gritty of the how maybe that way so i just i didn't want you peeking ahead [Music] so in the first the top piece in here is actually a a community engagement plan but i really i really wanted there was a bunch of charts in it that i thought were helpful um [Music] in in thinking about community engagement and the two-way part of it you know i think there's there's a lot of places where if you ask people about community engagement they're going to start talking about one way communications out to the community um but i think you know in this report on the on the second page there's a court who squared down that talk about steps to community engagement on the next page that we're about to history down at the bottom there's how to dialogue and foreign policy discussions and then on the next page there's the three arrows that talk about informing and firing and engaging so i just want to take just a couple minutes for you to just sort of look through that and get your to speak up your impressions does it resonate or do you see that might apply to anyone is [Music] whether it's the community or whether it's the district or whether it's the administration of this when i first a couple years ago when we first started really seriously thinking about community engagement there was a lot of there was a lot of articles i could find it's really important you should be doing this [Music] it's easy to find why you should do it and the importance of it it's really hard sometimes to think of how do we actually do this so trying to give you a couple resources we're not going to parse them a lot tonight unnecessarily but a couple of just resources to think about i'm going to really start to go about this as a committee by you know that outreach that you talked about and being out in the community isn't a piece of that as a committee thinking about what other pieces [Music] more decisions ah so foreign [Music] is there anything you see in there i also like what they have here on the second page our goal is to engage the community in something called forums and stakeholder dialogues and other activities to ensure district policy changes are informed by those who are impacted by them so i'm not so i'm not i i guess i'm not thinking you're going to change your definition but that these are things that as you're thinking about implementing these are things that you might want to keep in mind about love the quote that you put here a couple of definitions of effective community engagement um the purpose of community engagement is to ensure that school improvement is done with the community community not to the community but that was really just bullseye there is one there is one website there that i ate on their website it says please ask permission to reproduce our materials so i just gave you the website so you could go look at it and kind of go through the process of getting permission to reproduce something but there's some good stuff on there they talk about thinking about your purpose for engagement is it communication is it participation is it you know and and if you're doing if it's you know if it's supposed to inform or is it collaboration or participation and that your strategy will depend on your purpose okay so um so that they know some of the information do you have something yes yeah so i'm looking at uh this is the second page how to engage the community i've always been a huge fan of backward curriculum design teaching to me the most important part of this document is the [Music] activities because you know if you look at this little equation and i don't know um but i think you have to start with um you know so i'm playing with it right so you have you can't see this uh but it's almost like that's the middle piece that's not gonna stop that's the middle piece so to me it's you know the the whole objective of being a school community member it's not a job onto itself it's to improve student learning that's what we're all trying to do but they're not in schools right so they have a discrete set of functions right and and the schools do so if the outcomes the expected outcomes to improve student learning and maybe they define those and then here and then so if you work backwards from that that becomes the middle part so here you get all of these outcomes which have nothing to do with anything that they're connected to student learning maybe something that happens in schools that they never see on a regular basis and then you have all the stuff in the middle is okay we're gonna we're gonna engage the community to get to those it's the part that happens right before that is let's think of what our job is what do we do we oversee budget like mike said we oversee policy evaluation now you have three parts to an equation here's what our outcomes are here's what our job authority is and in the middle is how we're going to engage the community to achieve those actions to achieve those and so this is just like if you just look at this there's no place i can see to go with this in terms of if you think about this and if you was designing a curriculum just there there would be no place to go because you don't know what to expect you haven't even find your job if you haven't defined what your authority is you don't know your outcomes but now you have this thing in the middle the you're getting here as a community what are you even going to do all of this stuff in order to get it and what are you going to do all this together but then the boundaries of your job so it seems like you were defining this middle piece but if you just look at it and you take it on itself and it'll sell it doesn't make any sense if what what if what you're trying to do is improve student learning [Music] you know what i'm trying to say i do and this is and it makes 99 sense but what i hear is we know what our goals are and now we engage the community about how we get to those goals we haven't like say you have three of those so yeah here's the middle piece here's our goal and here's here's our authority in the district we oversee budget we oversee policy we oversee the superintendent you know some other stuff how did you decide what the goals are what did you get to decide what is the community that's what hasn't been decided how are you going to do that if you don't know what the goals are yeah when you say goals mean analytics awesome yeah but i guess i think so i'm thinking of goals in terms of like your overarching district strategy right outcome i'll come relative to no no no it all comes relative to we're talking about community engagement yeah so what are your outcomes what what what outcomes are you expecting so yeah so and i don't know that i mean that's what i'm thinking i think that's a good middle piece so you got that what so if you work that backwards i think i would think you have to stop like like you know if this was curriculum what am i expecting students to know i know you define that and then you work backwards yes right so like i mean yeah you know that means yeah and so i'm thinking of it the same way you get this middle piece but without knowing your goals and without knowing how you're good at it we have a lot of decisions to make on policy and other things by engaging in the community are we better able to make those decisions informed by that feedback engagement possibly i mean i think you have to go and define what the goals are i mean you know or your outcome once you define your outcomes our responsibilities how are we going to use this stuff to get to those outcomes so can you give an example [Music] um [Music] but maybe something around while we're in the middle of this colder thing so i'm going to get a little cold today they oversee policy so okay so they always see policy this is the middle community and stuff what would be the goal to check this out with policies [Music] what's the overall outcome for the year right no maybe it might be something i think you could use anything like yeah you could use curriculum backwards curriculum design to design a unit to design a lesson what kind of area would you and adam said together well you're saying what are the outcomes based on policy and uh your review which is annually what happens is uh we need to be informed on from the community on these things that's one of the month to month in our case right the between meetings you need that engagement because focusing around the agenda and the agenda is going to be topics to come up for a vote do you want to be informed by the community on voting one or another or do we not care what they think about the items because we think that they are something that's going to help us achieve one of these outcomes throughout the year by the end of the year to help us either impact the school improvement plan or impact the budget or impact the policy that needs to be written about something as little as coping it's a month to month in constant engagement on a regular basis uh continue to collecting that feedback to be informed we'll make those votes so that it's not just like i said earlier it's just not our own personal student it's being informed by other people who don't families want individual places so there's two ideas there and i understand what jeff's saying because you know and in leadership business no one just sit there talking around in circles but it works out and things like that you need to know what you're aiming at like you said you need to know how you're gonna get there you need to know what your authority is to get there right like a middle manager has no authority to get there a committee i think this could be used to develop a template for everyday decisions school can just you know monthly school community decisions or overarching high higher goals so you know we got we can do the exercise we we have an issue tonight what's the goal of the school committee to know put the stuff on is their goal is there an outcome you know relative to what i'm presenting that you you would think of yeah or we're making policy decisions tonight you're ready to go so i guess that my question would be there is the outcome of a particular decision or is the outcome decision it could be that you develop a template so you know so they're gonna they're gonna take a vote tonight right so you know so they have an authority to make a vote they've uh they've included stakeholders we just saw two people get up here yeah right and the outcome is to uh to to amend to amend the uh to amend the the the entry plan that could be something that simple just that's the bill enough to take a bow use that use that what they believe community engagement is they use it use one of them at least right you don't have to use every single one all the time but if you come up with an idea of what you think community engagement is and you're always going back to that to make that decision then you're following the template so in this case they used you know you had two speakers so you're using one of those to be inclusive of all stations they've been collecting data they've been selected data how do i know that they're going to run emails from them and some communities right so they've been locked in they've been collecting data so they've been doing at least one of those things and maybe they don't have to do all four because it's very one very specific thing they have to do tonight they have to amend if they want [Music] yes i do then the output my outcome that i'm expecting the committee is to follow me and he might be expecting what if we discuss a different outcome so that's why is the outcome a decision that you have an issue of something that needs an outcome and you use this as a tool to get to get to it's one of the tools you have to get to that outcome yeah so maybe so the outcome tonight is reach a decision on the new descent tested state protocols that's that's what the goal is to know that's the outcome whether they all whether she feels one way he feels another they have to come to a decision they got to take a vote that's where they stop so they're going to take a hold using these parameters in the middle to reach that yeah that's correct that was and then community community engagement informed that out so right so that's a that's a much bigger kind of decision so and that they're going to validate so maybe instead of four of those there's ten of them and they can use one to or all of them depending on what decision they have to make what outcome they have to come to in this case maybe they only needed to get information from all the stakeholders in order to make that decision maybe they don't have to have a focus group maybe they don't have to do any other stuff maybe just that one thing's enough but you've defined what it is well then plus the committee might then even say we're not ready to make this decision yet because we need to consult the community more we need to do more of these things correctly i think less about the outcome being the decision we made more about how we got to making that decision in the first place well that's the middle part right so that's what you decide but you've got to you've got to work it backwards and you'll put whatever we want to do in order to use this stuff without the authority of what what you're in the saying correct it's hard and when you approach it this way it does i think when you just without putting in the context of why why are we doing this the process isn't stated yes correct well not explicitly yeah it's not stated within the context of what their job is right so i so then my i would say that that bullet focused on student achievement [Music] regarding um community engagement that would be one of the big options it has an outcome you'll give you all of these community engagement beliefs right because that's your development and we're going to use policy and what other other tools you have at hand as community members to get there but now you have a defined set that everybody uses to get to them yeah that's the news i think so that's the first chart can be pulled right out of the msc charting course materials about the school committee's role you know biggie's role is to blow allah use policy budgets they use community engagement as a key strategy to advance their their key authorities toward achieving student so you're always going to have generals in budget right you're always going to have two constants you know what you your authority is that's a constant and then this is constitution that's the way you define that okay so you come up with all of these strategies and then the variable is the problem you know the outcome and so all the time you can say okay we want to have this outcome and then what you have to do is work properly well not all you have to do [Music] now you have to define now you have a direction you say okay well you know if it's community engagement we use these and then we have to think about those in terms of all the things we can and can't do i'm not sure that those things the things we're going to use i think we're going to probably come [Music] the goal is to inform our decision making and to do so by engaging the community my goal is to have is to for the community engagement to inform our decision yeah and i don't think jeff's saying anything different than that yeah what i'm saying is i think about what i would pull out it's like specific to the goal working back the goal to me would be to have our being formed by the king we represent well yeah yeah of course that's why you did it i mean that's that's why you're doing that no no i'm not saying anything yeah i'm just saying you you did to what your authority is yeah so so you could almost start that state statement with within our authority as a school committee and then dive into it [Music] thinking within our authority as school committee members our goal is now as a school committee as a school committee yeah uh our goal is for community engagement strategy our goal is to use community in our decision [Music] is [Music] i think so what i was thinking is within our authority of the school committee we will engage the community in an effort to inform our decisions [Music] also actually i'm going to change it a little and you can fix it [Music] uh everywhere she's a mom who's going to be tissues of [Music] facebook okay so this is what we have so far within our authority of the school committee we will engage our community to inform decision-making that is focused on student achievement i like it yes you have there's budget policy uh higher and evaluated yeah i'm really with our authority in those but within our [Music] what school committee what authority does the school committee have to engage the community can direct everyone's body i think the community gave you the authority to represent them yeah because they voted you yeah go back to them to um well i like that word responsibility see a good place to put it because i don't want to leave a place now you can tell it will and you could say we have the responsibility to engage the community you know what you can put authority and responsibility because you can make an argument with authority responsibility [Music] our authority and responsibility as a school community we will engage our community to inform decision making that is focused on due to achievement to inform the decisions we make to improve student outcomes what do you think the goals of the school is [Music] achievement student earlier within our authority and responsibility as a school committee to focus on student achievement i'd like to inform this evening you know what julie i don't like to inform decision making that's my struggle would you rather know that i'm struggling to find out what i would replace it with we feel like it should be more like a two-way street than just an inform yeah like help with working together conjunction but it's hard to articulate you know it goes back to this bullet point in here the quote that larry said to the community but engaging the community engaging is two-way um informing is a lovely word under this we're gonna bullet those things right so that the details i think as long as you can look at it and that's the committee to find what it is [Music] but seriously because if they're guiding our decision both on us but they didn't they don't elect the committee to then guide them into the decision they let the community make the decision we're kind of turning around saying [Music] yeah so where would you start i like that you said the word input you could say to add input yeah yeah if there was like a something right yeah but what mike is saying is that the way it's stated we're saying simply we're going to take what you know whatever this scoop is if that's going to then decide when there may be other parameters at play like and there may be qriket that we're designing on or something the teachers are doing with their you know [Music] oh okay so do we have enough here as an overarching statement and then this comes under that exactly um and i i think maybe i'm just wondering is there anything else we want to have on that list um because then we have we have um just a reminder to me that this is a long-term process this is not a thing tonight it's not a goal this year i think we should be really committing ourselves to a longer process of further refining what we need what our strategies are how we use this how what our goals are over time okay so everywhere [Music] so i'm curious [Music] we'll get the senior director of community engagement we won't do this situation what might be different what would be the most effective way to handle it i tried to do three different scenarios one that was really focused on um sort of a of one issue [Music] one that was apparent that initiative really kind of fell under policy for the school committee which would have a different path than you know a parent who might be me um and one that was something that school kids face all the time where there's a decision that has to be made by the administration and the community doesn't like it but you can't say so you know how how do you handle that and sort of the community engagement trying to some of that is having like the trust of being able to build the trust of the community you know when when people are coming to this i mean like i've had people come to the school meeting and say why did that teacher get let go i like that teacher you know i'm talking about things as these kinds of examples i think are really useful and others that brought them up when we did the training trainings before the meetings sometimes if megan would say well you know so you know how do we handle this scene right you've asked us that sometimes and we talked about those things and so i'm wondering if we might consider something like instead of a full meaning to to just talk about this session [Music] and shorter and get on to have a conversation about this sort of a continuation of their training whether it's something like that as people would want to do a time beneficial or not because otherwise these will [Music] so i just think we don't have time to go through them tonight and sort of finish up the other part of the discussion i'd like to have i'm just gonna um talk a lot about the importance of the opening line following law um a little bit of there's a quote in there which is directly from the open meeting world the purpose health and leading law is to ensure transparency and deliberations on which public policy is based because the democratic process depends on the public having knowledge about the considerations underlying governmental action the open meeting law requires with some exceptions that meetings help public bodies be open to the public it also seeks to balance the public's interest in witnessing the deliberation of public officials with the government's need to manage its operations efficiently so if you think about the open meeting law can you think of some ways where you feel like the open meeting law helps that public engagement or ways where you feel it might hinder is definitely social media there's something that's out there and we know we can respond to it or like usual whatever it happens to be but if so many of us happen to do that and all we're invitation right but it's only just to engage with the community and give the right information so and this is somewhere you see administration for a thinking about how we as a committee handle social media because it is giving information if if someone can get on and say you know the correct information is in this document there's a link to it or it's in the minutes of this meeting here's a link to it that doesn't violate one of you doing that it doesn't violate your remaining health because you're just giving your check you're not venturing that extent so something or you know i want to help jeff and saying this is out there can we is there a way we can get the right information but but you are absolutely right that sometimes been trying to do your work ensuring being done in public means that you're not on social media sites that are very with each other right either that would that would hinder the public's agency experience with do you ever feel like that might slow down your work have open to develop the agenda it's tough because you can't add something last minute yeah that's kind of frustrating yeah it's frustrating however if you remember the public you had an opinion about what you might want to add to your agenda and you didn't get a chance because you didn't see it you know and you just started talking about it then somebody slowed down your work but you served the public but i know that some things it's like you know like if a club from the high school just needs approval i mean is the public gonna care or you know then we're gonna wait a whole other month or a whole other two weeks or whatever so i think some certain things it's like you know you're gonna follow the process just slows it down but yeah absolutely something big like oh we're gonna have a covent boat or something yeah like people want to know they want to be informed and they want to be here or have their voice heard we have just a couple minutes to look through the social media social medias or school community members that's in there and see if you have any any questions anything that resonates with you particularly or anything you have so it is a tool that's out there and if you're careful about how you use the tool so that you're informing the public it's a really good tool for you to use um it's when it becomes back and forth into liberation or even sometimes back and forth into liberation with the public which would be better served having it in a more but it's just not consistent it's not managed by us i'm wondering into your point of sharing factual information nothing will direct any of us from posting a link to a reading agenda saying that the school companies yeah 26 times over but there are others yeah sometimes i think people don't know where to go to find things like they know people knew there was a code dashboard and somebody's like where's that thing again and it's like it's on the district website well what's that it's like okay yeah that's right you probably never just like go over this visitor website because jeff sends an email every week so people read that yeah they don't have to go to the website to get it well if it's on the web school district website [Music] usually if i'm looking for something i think i think we took a little bit longer to get to that definition but i think it was a good discussion [Music] part of the discussion but it's not it doesn't exist in a vacuum that it exists within the work that you do and so the next next step here um you'll you'll type something up here separate from these notes if i can do that oh [Music] yeah and then um we'll at least have that as a touchstone yet when we think about this going forward i'm not expecting that we'll be changing our goals a lot this year but this should be we should start to reference these um commitments and actions um as we're making decisions we should start to become part [Music] is there anything else people want to see happen from this work tonight uh in the short term i think maybe more surveys um probably any more work sorry yeah no i'll do a survey i just think that's the best way to get community yeah especially when we have big decisions and it's like you know some people again i only know what my people think but a lot of those people think like me so it's it would be helpful you know especially [Music] that's the other thing i was thinking like one time a year people do like a forum where like there's no official business it's just all parents open comments and we try to at least make commitments to what we're gonna do to address issues on the spot so they're not gonna you know all right we'll add that for our agenda in six months it's like all right we're gonna do this we're gonna do this i mean once a year that sounds difficult yeah dorothy do you know any school committees to do their own surveys i haven't seen them both schools no i know either they may work with the administration to say here's the information plus we also have access [Music] dorothy thank you very much for your time tonight um we will see if we can make use of it in the coming months and we will work at seeing this sort of on the page a little bit and with the assumption the person that we look at will want to revise it and sort of massage it but we hopefully get some poor ideas but yeah hopefully [Music] all right so we're going ready to move back into the business portion of our meeting everybody okay ready yes okay all right so we start with uh well actually the that would go to the discussion with the desi letter but i'm wondering if um with the group's approval if we could move back if we could hear from jeff first and then update here okay so um so one thing that doesn't mean that i did send you is we've got some um i gave my recommendations on them most of them did not none of them actually required a spooky action um in light of [Music] nurses were not able to get their work done so i did answer those and i sent those to you if you have any questions i'll answer them but what i really want to get to is the photo this [Music] so the background here is because preston state has identified very few positive cases both statewide and district data also parallels about the state data and because intestines say excuse me an associated contact tracer across the state beyond in our districts have overwhelmed uh but the nurses in keeping them from doing many of the other duties they have administering events and just treating other students who come down during the day the department recommended a different testing protocol than we used today and so what i talk about next has been endorsed by the emergency and in fact they wrote the procedure so the new protocol that's recommended by the department and by our nurses replaces test instead contact tracing replaces it with symptomatic testing and um at home testing we currently remember uh some of you weren't there but when we did the original reentry 2021 plan there were three options that the state has for testing so we could opt into a tested stay synthetic testing and tool testing we can opt into any one of those or all we opted for tested studying symptomatic testing now fast forward to today or now in order to be eligible for the new testament hall program you had to have either signed up for symptomatic testing or pool testing originally and if you did you can now go back and sign up for one of those we had to you have to be part of that so and so the idea is that you have to have a laid approach you can't just do the stakeholder testing you have to do pool testing symptomatic testing and staying long test so um the the protocol that is recommended that you're going to vote on is symptomatic testing along with the at home at home testing so if you look at that document just briefly the first part of the entire program is symptomatic now we already do symptomatic testing but in our district currently you voted the symptomatic testing but right now symptomatic testing triggers tested state growth laws so the only reason you're voting that is because this systematic test does not trigger tests instead and it also does not trigger contact tracing so that's why it requires that we refocus an amendment [Music] we had some some flexibility and visibility so in this program uh you know until the student comes down they have any one of these symptoms they could be vaccinated or [Music] the nurse will uh contact them child the child's parents um and then encourage the and then do some education with them just go through some protocol the nursing home covers to contact the child's primary care physician and um and then informable artists students out of school close contact informed christie christie uh the department the department of education still requires so christy does that um every week she does it on a monthly basis i don't know how she goes um deadline on that is wednesday on thursday and for the principal of the school and then enter the results of cic which we currently do now and that generates an automatic email that's all part of the probability that has to stay in place and then the nurse will be following protocol a which is assumed to test a positive form called it if the test is negative then the number would just treat the child just like they would treat any other child that comes down with a headache stomachache the second part of the program that's a symptomatic and it's just very straightforward [Music] just like any other kid who comes down with any other illnesses so many times they'll get sent back to the classroom uh depending on how sick they are yeah all the others nursing homes but that's what always happens there's no there's really no difference but remember you know on this step test and study um on the contact tracing test we've done we've done 16 1700 we've only had 14 15 that have been positive from from confessing i know kind of reported a higher number and i think that's an important thing to know there's only 14 cases for actual positives from testing today right we've had altogether those are symbolic positives and so roughly the transmission in school has been you know one-fifth twenty percent [Music] just simply every other week you'll kind of have to pop into this um you don't need to be set you need to knock into this because we're not actually doing anything every other week of parents who decide to opt in will get a kit some test kit will have two tests in it um and this there is one change here we've been working on this and had a leadership this morning many of the principles the optics have been talking to are recommending a waffle wednesday test and not a one-day test the reason wednesday test isn't being they are positive they're only out of school wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday so it's less less time for our school the state is our so the program's open to all staff and all students [Music] on friday same thing every other week [Music] are they even responsible is christian law of all of those things or is it just like you'll let us know if you're positive because it doesn't do anything except from log is positive all right so you take the question negative then from here and that's it well if you're positive you go through that protocol yeah the next part um so um the student test won't be sent out until later this month we'll hopefully get that program distributing to the students on the floor but again um we're still working out those difficult pieces i do have one thing that is not enjoyable we've just worked on it today i know you're gonna ask questions about it so you always want to know the logistical pieces so you know i just can't [Music] that's why is [Music] this is just basically it's probably public information right now this is a template that the conference has sent us it's an interactive template we just put all that in there so this is nothing we uh we made some edits to it just to introduce the program i'll tell you janelle is the first project and she's really knocked it out of the park um so janelle today we added a uh we thought parents would want to see at least a ten of the schedules this was sent to us from the department of ed these are all interactive links and so pan will go on they will be able to opt into the program this way into the home testing program and there's also a link i believe [Music] oh yeah right under the calendar you can see 12 and 19 uh testing programs at our school so in a lot of these lengths of repeats so if you miss it on one page you get it on another um and so you see there you get the iphone testing a google form they'll just go in and as soon as you log in this will be sent electronically tomorrow and then [Music] number three the symptomatic testing if you already opted into symptomatic testing you probably did you don't have to do anything if you did not um and you wanted to have and you want your child to be tested you want to give us permission to test them if they are sick or they have symptoms then you'll have to go in and you'll have to sign up with symptomatic testing what if a parent wants to remove the condition given previously um [Music] how do we know is there a way to check i guess you should be called [Music] it's just a google [Music] you may have thought okay i don't know if i sign up or not you will if your kid was tested but they did it you want to know if you're in the um and you go down and you watch it yeah if you sign up for one do you automatically get the other or you can sign up for both the show okay because there's a lot of money program so you can just sign up for the synthetic testing and then say i don't i don't want my i don't want to test at all don't sign up for it or you might say i want to test every week but i don't want you putting something in my kid's nose so it gives the path um flexibility so you should still get in the test you can't it's not like if you don't do this you can't do it yeah i appreciate that thank you you're hoping um the only days of dramatic testing then we will be participating in is the at-home testing correct and that would be once a week if you want to know yeah so you said those panel tests don't get reported to the school it's just hey you're wrong [Music] it's optional so if a kid a family doesn't choose to do it then what's the point they're not they keep going to school and if they're cinematic then they'll get noticed at some point otherwise it's just yeah and that's why it's voluntary i mean you know when your kid's sick you know again there's a responsibility you know you get sick you don't want to test them don't send them to school that's just irresponsible yeah i said one more question i was just thinking about the fact that if you test positive that you're asymptomatic it was one thing for vaccinated thanks for unvaccinated so if you're home and you do a test and you're asymptomatic what happened to them if you're positive then you have to follow the protocol you're going to record a positive test and then you you know you should get the more advancement yeah [Music] this test is a lot less sensitive than then i believe it's called the pci test but one of the things the physician said is that this is more likely to even though it's less sensitive it's more likely to pick up the involved once you have enough viruses that it will pick it up that's the thinking at least um i have two questions uh so the first one is in this letter that you guys wrote i think you said janelle wrote it it says um if your child has a potential contact in school they may continue to come to school do not have to quarantine does not address what happens if your child is in contact outside of school let's say a little sister has copic big brother doesn't have symptoms i think i think you wrote an email like that when you come to school there's no contact training so you come to school so even if you're well you stay home so there's no protocol if one kid has a coconut the other doesn't the one without hope the one in the household who still hasn't tested positive yet but they test positive can go to school it wasn't before there absolutely was if you were a close contact outside of school you automatically fell into protocol safe only you absolutely had to report it no you were in close contact outside of school no not if you noticed [Music] i believe that if you i thought it said in your brief entry plan i mean i won't go back and look but i thought if you were in close contact outside of school you fell into protocol we're not allowed to test and stay i'm not debating but you were supposed to quarantine you were not welcome in school now whether a parent did not report to the nurse but if you were close contact that was part of what the nurses had to do you were supposed to contact the nurse yeah i thought you were talking about the testing no you're definitely not welcome into testing state you are close contact outside school you not had cold and that was available out of school post process he could he was vaccinated but he couldn't if he was unvaccinated that would be this is that that is the current so now i'm asking what's the problem [Music] so that's how it was with the vaccinated before this like this wasn't this if you were vast native yeah and a sibling had called yeah yeah yes but if you're unvaccinated right which is this which i mean honda was this much of the population so like people like oh my god going to happen but if you think about it it's really been happening here we have close to 80 if you take out the preschoolers of vaccinated people and they've all been coming and going and we haven't seen our number soar or you know i mean it's been pretty it's been what it's been a long time but it's been it's just been that way for a while so i don't see a huge change because that's been the protocol unless you are unvaccinated in which case you know your health forever which berlin and but the two elementary schools i think the vaccine rate is still pretty low right yeah so i think in the elementary school that that was happening frequently which in high school quite honestly you're not really sharing germs with uh sibling versus like when you're you know five and seven whatever one kid gets the others gonna get it there was no policing of that there was no policing there was a lot of system absolutely yeah but it was the nurses were enforcing that they were saying you know and the same thing if one sibling in the school had let's say there's two kids at bes that other sibling wasn't coming to school that sibling wasn't even in testing state that simply was home so what's going to happen now there's two kids at bes one has symptoms and has clothed the other one has no symptoms are they welcome to come to school without being tested or anything they can just go to school yeah i mean you're a parent what would you do [Music] these are voluntary programs we've had very very low transmission rates in the school there's a point you know and we're trying to get i think you know the department of head um has said that the the rate of transmission inside school the actual positive cases inside the school versus in the community there's a there's an enormous difference between those two things so we're just saying the protocol is just saying that when you went to contact tracing if you're a child if you have a child that's it's positive and it's sick and you have another child that's in the house we don't have contact tracy you know as a parent you need to use your best judgment too you decide i want to send them to school but if there's no pause so what you said first i wanted to comment on that you're right we've had little transmission in school because of the protocols that the school has had in place the school i think because you don't think because of the protocols in school we've had low transmission well not necessarily i don't see what i don't see i mean we don't know we don't know we don't know either way we have no idea we don't have data i mean if we took away masks and all the protocols and went back to normal and that would travel i know i'm just saying we don't know i think because of some of the protocols in school that's why we have little school transmissions i don't have any data i'm just saying i mean like all right if one kid is sick the other kid stays home because the nurses have said in their letter the nurses said they think most cases are trans you know the transmission slows through the household if one kid gets it seems like the whole household gets it but what if they're asymptomatic and one kid has a therapy system and there's three kids they're gonna get sent to school anyway i mean there were many times before they wouldn't have a friend some people would have they just wouldn't have told correct but who was the same kid at the school the nurses would have known and it was a different situation yeah but i don't think we have no no what i'm saying is if one kid has it and they hate the matter and they don't get tested and there are two siblings but we need our kids [Music] and the sevens came to school [Music] so [Music] oh they did come to school because they're vaccinated well my point is if i had if we're all if we're all siblings here and i have and we all live in the same house but i'm asymptomatic you're all going to go to school because i have it i don't know i have it you might have it too [Music] we don't know that but then you spread it but then it's spread like you go to school siblings [Music] nurses can't help other kids that's the outcome we want is to improve the entire environment right so when we when we discuss this we eventually go out what we're trying to do we're trying to get back to some sense of normalcy to try to fix all the harm that's been done already so if a kid makes a fanatic and he's got food he's going to school his siblings is going to school the kid symptomatic he's going to school and his siblings are going to show science in class they don't have the nurse to get tested if they don't choose to opt in to get tested the nurse makes the decision which she's highly qualified to do as to whether or not in that class sometimes it's called fifth month we're simply voting on whether or not we believe the nurses protocol that they bring here is acceptable no that would happen before too if the kids agree symptomatic and many of these kids have an asymptomatic there's nothing before theory do you mean they wouldn't they would still even have to be on the protocol they're very symptomatic they would come to school and they they could have possibly spread right i didn't think that was the case but i don't know no it's talking about asymptomatics yeah oh yeah they're like julie like if your kids were at school you didn't know i don't know how how you found out but those are sports again we still had [Music] roughly spot over close to five days a week you lose roughly five hours of instruction i agree with that that's not happening that's a lot of time that you lose and it doesn't say to have a program in place that has that's been so inefficient i'm not against drop intestines day i agree with dropping tests day i don't necessarily think that it's um doing this i think it might be more harm than it's worth but i guess my concern is just um if we're not doing test and stay and people are gonna opt people have the freedom to opt out of symptomatic testing and they have the freedom to opt out of this at home testing um you know and now it's like okay if it's going through a household and then they're going to send the kids to school i guess my concern is you know well where are is the spread gonna increase well this double sim card there on the systematic piece even if they don't choose to test to synthetic doesn't if they're noticed gives the nurses more time to catch those we'll look at things or that teachers aren't having to do contact tracing gives them more time to pay attention to these things do you afford to go a parent who can't afford to stay home and have one kid that might have had other than three others that need to go to school very well there is no doubt and that's but that's not coping that's through the years i think you have to remember that this was written they wrote the message wrote that on the back of this document this protocol is what they wrote and and you know i trust their opinion and that they know how much time they spend during the week doing testing today they see the benefit of it but they also know that because they take so much time doing this what they can't all the other things they cannot do they also know how many how much time students are out of class because they're involved in the test and state protocol so you know this isn't saying making this up i don't go in there and do that so i trust with the nurses with the justices you know i'm telling you what they're putting forward how do we know if this new protocol is working are we relying on the state department to compile state level data to tell us that or do we have any local metrics to make decisions from i mean i don't even know who completely defined it except to say if the if the cases if the cases all of a sudden go through the move i mean that's certainly an indication so through the roof is very help defined right so how are you how how do you think about it i think we'll have to monitor i mean we're gonna have to have state data we'll see if where you know i think the data has to be collected so we're using to use state data to compare how we're doing to the state well yeah that's what we did now and that's how this happened we took we took state data and then we looked at our data we said okay this is we're not getting we're not getting many cases when you look at the percentage of tests we do versus how many positive effects we actually get up to the actionable and then we looked at the state data and said well we're roughly where the state is with this we have more public cases springing up than this data show well i guess we're gonna have this monitor and see if it's something that's you know you know with the reason among if it's if it's so high that we can't run the class classes anymore so i think it's a new protocol so we would need regular importance i think at upcoming school meetings right so we'll be able to see if the cases go up after this yeah but i think we also want some anecdotal information from the nurses as they are [Music] in many more sick children than we did we've had before or you know there could be a number of stories there um my understanding of this proposal is that there are three parts and i'm just going to reiterate these because i think i think we'll take one vote and encompasses these three parts one if we approve this proposal we will continue symphonic testing as described by the nurses here we will discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and three we will offer families the option to sign up for rapid antigen at home testing [Music] and receiving those kits at home [Music] pieces that come with this proposal okay are we ready to move on from here do you feel good i have one more question one more it's foreign i guess um i kind of feel that maybe this might need um maybe a little bit more community engagement i don't know how i don't know if just as you gauged how people feel about this i mean i'm sure some people are like yeah no big deal i think others are going to be like oh my god i'm not sending my kid to school this month there is going to be a group of people that feel that way so i guess i'm just wondering you know have you talked to anyone else i'll have the nurses talk to anybody do you have any viewers out on how people feel about this and what it makes sense to maybe gather some data we've planned on starting this program this week you don't want to vote on a real start program it's this this program is very highly subscribed to throughout the state by other school districts what we do plan to do is we're going to send an equity survey out and susan i had actually talked about this earlier we'll include some questions um and we can probably develop some more questions actually because um you know once we get a couple weeks of this going um we can you know maybe maybe you can help develop a couple more questions is not out here we're still developing it but maybe we can add a few more questions and just relative to this um and the equity piece that's really what it is i mean my child being treated treated unfairly because you've made this decision to build this program so it may be something very specific about switching from test and staying contact tracing to this i think that would be i think that would be a fair question i don't know how it would be it's actually quote uh what happened you don't you want to go back on it to go back i don't know it's a piece about community engagement you're saying this protocol has been written by the nurses there's protocols in there so yeah so the community over the weeks and months the years we've been doing this the community has been begging us to listen to our mobile health officials [Music] i would trust the nurses more than trust them i mean the community wants us to listen to global calculations and i would say i mean you know you know i i've been very upset about getting extra marriage [Music] at the time the nurses i don't think they can sustain the pace they're at right now i think these programs so i agree you know so we've got something in place that it seems to me does not a very effective effort that's slowing down of the goal of swarm down covered in our schools possibly you know in by nurses accounts so this freedom nurse has been back into school been endorsed by the united states has been endorsed by a department been endorsed by the massachusetts department of health so could it just blow up and you have to revisit and say okay this isn't working your vote isn't in strong i mean it's just it's a guiding it's a guiding vote to get the program going it's not like what are you going to you know the only district doing it i mean you made the decision we made the decision to opt into this already before the vote let me tell you that yes we did that so we could get in line because the department said if you don't then you then you're down here and what a smaller district so i'm always conscious of if we don't get in right away you know they're not gonna prioritize a thousand kid district over four thousand businesses so i always think okay we're gonna jump on this and then if somebody tells me not to do it later okay it's easy to pull it back but at least we're in the queue i want to just reiterate uh two things here one is the the question that i i'm hearing tim reagan's the answer to megan's question how do people feel about this do we know the answer is not really we know that they care about what the nurses recommend but we don't know how they feel about this um so i would i would i guess ask also where's the parent education piece on this because when i read this letter it doesn't share the information that's in your proposal which gives the rationale for why test and stay contact tracing [Music] if i were a parent in the district right now and i were not following this conversation with jessie's you know and i got this i'd be like wait what [Music] want us to put this on this susan has a fantastic point i think your first line needs to be based on the evidence we have from our current test and state program and state data in school spread is virtually non-visited i mean a message like that at the top i think somebody's perfectly right well this is just right here with the third education piece and definitely give the link to that bestie thing because i think a lot of people it means [Music] and contact tracy we put a lot of energy into this parents we're trying to figure out all the protocol a b c d and all of a sudden we're doing a mega shift here and i feel like you've got to bring people along with you you've got to show them why this is warranted and you know why you're making this change or else you're going to draw or run into the phone calls so i would uh i want to just ask again are we ready to move on to the other topic and then we'll take votes yes okay so the the remaining piece is about um sending a letter to jesse requesting evidence of mask and vaccine after the syria i don't know if you want to speak to this sure so i circulated a letter to everyone earlier today that essentially isn't on what we discussed at our last meeting where we will be coming out of today's meeting uh proposing this passage to sign the letter today requesting evidence related to items first being evidence that masking students prevents the transmission of cobia 19 in schools seven being achieving an 80 vaccination rate preventing the transmission of copenhagen schools this is all related to deci's continued continuance of the nascent requirement the end of this letter it does state that on march 8th the school committee will be reviewing its massive requirement as we go through the last meeting therefore we request to provide this evidence by february 25th so that our committee can interview and consider it in time for our meeting on march 8th questions comments just to see if you're clear what this is proposing and why [Music] um given that we know that the sandwich school committee kate has requested this information four times and not been successful getting any informative response from desi do you expect anything different from our letter not necessarily okay um [Music] um can you describe since you initiated this um can you describe what your motivation is behind the letter like what do you want to accomplish from this i think speaking to what we talked about earlier we've come to being proactive we know that destiny is going to make some kind of decision about extending fasting beyond february 28th in advance of february 28th and being prepared to handle that new dressing recommendation or requirement at that point would be good to see if we can get any information we need to appropriately discuss their next decision at that time so my goal was to get our hands on any information they might have demonstrating that either of these two mitigation strategies are actually effective at preventing the transmission of both eventually i agree to see india that educates that from interested um [Music] the i think that jeff has said to me once you know that really the desi's um information supporting that i think you called it a logic trail jeff follow their logic trailer the department of ed relies on the mass department of health cbc team of medical advisors they reference those groups often and they have links that take you to the cdc page in fact there is a destiny page that has featured links that take you out to um cbc and another page which you can't read because my printer and if you if you follow the links you can find reports and studies out there you have to do the work it's not like this is summarizing their two years of information and sources for us nicely but if you follow the links you can find i followed online today and took me to 22 studies that were cited in some other decisions um at the cdc page it takes you out in about um so are you looking for the department to give you something short and sweet uh here or are we are are you do you think the committee ought to be doing legwork to go follow their logic trailers their requirements footnote evidence that proves the point that either of these two strategies are affecting these two specific and so if they don't come back with that information which seems likely what would you think should happen then we are meeting on march 8th now we're going to discuss our mass department okay so we just have to decide what are we thinking about so whether we have the jessie's different or whether they respond or not we're still gonna discuss it i think you know i think you should be very careful about adding two variables to this equation you break out the equations we're talking about this program we don't know the effects of it i mean we know what the investors grow we know all of that when we talk about how we're going to monitor this we don't have you know we all have a definite way to do it really in terms of like you know what really knows is going to work or not so if and i think it's going to need some time to do that i definitely think it's worth trying he's done it now so i i think it's worth trying but if you now start to think about you know ultimately what you want to get what you're trying to get at is how we're going to get these massive operators right so and dusty already has you know there is an offering for that it's the 80 right now and maybe that comes down and so i don't know what your timeline is maybe you had to have something but given the amount of questions on this committee just on this program and i agree that it's a big show i would think anything now that introduces getting rid of the mask i won't think it's appropriate till we know where this is i mean if we're doing okay with this i would say okay then the next step is thinking about the mass because you know even if they do respond you know masking with mechanical devices i think you could argue that my kid wears it down down here it doesn't work but you know yeah okay but they can be made to work you know because they in the cabinet so they can be made to filter things out so correct yeah yeah so there's you know i mean you know i think the big question is maybe around why 80 percent versus herd immunity which is 60 percent why where they seems a lot more arbitrary than what the mass will work work this match works like maybe better than that mass so i think again i think we're we'll end up in a place where we had too many variables to this equation we don't know how this program is going to work i think it's worth trying i think the benefits may operate the risks but i don't know that and given the amount of questions that you guys have all legitimate questions five times between not getting this underway if if it goes okay then you know that's the next step how do we now move to them well the only challenge there is that the response will be so delayed so it's best i would say [Music] you know they're going to say okay we did this we did this pointing to the the the destiny website that has all of all of that including some of the things you just handed out so but i would just you know just caution that we don't want to have a lot of really a lot of balls of the year i would assume too that the department is thinking that same way they've just initiated this program and they're they're probably going to see how what's the trend now given this new program and that's going to inform their thinking about whether they're ready to tackle masks so probably they're pacing the same way i do hear a lot like you know rumblings from other districts and superintendents about the next piece so it's not like and i don't know what the school can do but i'm guessing it's probably reflected in what the school committees think but i would think that like the best course of action right now gives me concerns about this and it's not like i don't have anything i'm not concerned about the test and staying i mean i think as a committee there is some questions about it and certainly you know safety i have to think about that i want to make sure rewards it's not something we go into when it ends up being worse but i would say adding two variables is probably not prudent at this point because that's really your goal to get the mass off right six weeks in six weeks we have another attempt to discuss our math requirement six weeks from now yeah probably continue to come down i have every expectation that case scouts are going to continue to come down not only within our schools but also with our community yeah so six weeks from now we're going to be in a different place than we are today that we were six weeks ago and so i think six weeks for the new product i'll go into place and see how that falls given my appropriate time as we're probably going to do but reviewing the mass requirements of the march i will [Music] anyway you're gonna wait six weeks you can just have a discussion about it in six weeks without sending it together you know it down and i don't agree with that logic it looks like we're going in that direction which makes again complicated to know if this is actually working the cases are really going down um and you know if they're going down and we're doing good with this program i don't really care why it's better if they're coming down so man it's just my two cents i think it's reasonable it's it's a reasonable argument to make when it comes to but what you just said many people kind of discuss that when it goes on forward decided to do anything the idea of not sending the letter but still going to review our mass policy on march 8 it's a reasonable decision which we already voted on last meeting yeah so i mean i um i don't think there's harm in sending the water unless you unless jeff you're saying you think they'll take the letter and be like oh we're gonna deliver a home test or something but i don't know i don't think they're being malicious [Music] so there are we don't even need to wait until march 8th we know what the data is now we know we'll decide that i mean i'm almost emotionally removed right now and if we could if you want to until march 8th then wait for margie but um i'm not concerned i'm concerned about the other side of the equation is the learning we know the data around learning impacts especially young kids can you tell us anything about diabetes in terms of the learning yeah i mean how do you teach a kid to learn with facebook so we have [Music] i think last meeting and let me just interrupt for a second because our task isn't to talk about masks tonight no i'm referring to his letter but so that's incoming on march 8th no in regard to whether or not we sent a letter to get data that's my question okay it sounds like we're talking about the masks yeah so i think i think what he's saying is we want to do we want the letter out there to get the information rather than just jumping the shark and saying do we want to put the mask thing on the table we're trying to go through all of the avenues to get the information to give the time for this program to happen yeah what i want to know is we're asking for data on what the masks do as far as coping deals but what data do we have when i look at what the masks do to mental health to learning to the 17 of our kids in our districts who are economically disadvantaged and don't have the ability to get extra help the over the last few years i saw last meeting that the english learning students has grown 625 over the last few years how do you learn a foreign language with a mask covering your face covering the interface are you asking for more board items on this level uh if we need to yeah okay so you would need to maybe make that proposal or maybe there's general consensus do we have any information on that do we do this no just yeah i know you're going to be looking at that transition here it's all research getting on the research base yeah i mean i've seen there's plenty of articles out there plenty of research i mean and we know all that in terms of you know younger kids like women [Music] watching teachers model you know you need to certainly helps if you can see right now and also have socialization skills so there's all of that data um the assignment did you get any speech hang on that just put it aside for a second um i'm assuming adam that you did not include requesting that kind of information social emotional kinds of information um because you were looking for the information that they used to um to change this mass mandate to its current form and that doesn't include that kind of data is that correct looking for the information that you use to put the requirements that's a different set of data than uh maybe we would be requesting from the department that might be for instance you might request that information from the local board of health or from the from msc or some other sources that we can't identify probably tonight i think asking for the information behind this decision in the first place i mean it should include that i would imagine if i put this in place their response would be well there's no there's no impact otherwise why are they existing or they think the benefits of masking outweigh the costs and if they do that are you proposing anything here my first time i propose to remove the mask right now no no with no that's in the letter right so are you saying to modify this reference on the letter yes it says on march 8 the committee will be reviewing its mass requirement i'm suggesting we change out the federation i can't understand whether you're modifying this letter to something easy or whether you're proposing some different actions well there are no motions on the floor right this moment at all so but in a minute you'll have to decide what motion is pertinent to the motion on the floor which will be the desi letter first and i mean the protocol that jeff was describing to them jesse leonard and then if you want to propose like adam did it the last time to put something on an agenda [Music] all right i think we are ready for a vote um first with a couple of small business items here um the first is that i'm appointing adam wilbur to the negotiation subcommittee in the fall i appointed him as an alternate uh and right now he is being um it's turns out that that's really not the best way to do the negotiation community there's steady crew in there who might step in and step out [Music] okay do we want to solicit a third person take his place uh you should have to if you don't the cellar doesn't show anymore [Music] the union is asking who is coming to the table i mean i can say i can say there'll be three of us without naming people all right so you want to think about this february okay and we have uh we have a motion to approve the creation of the green team club by um [Music] okay now um do we have a motion to approve the super super men's and hayes recommendation um that includes these three pieces continue symptomatic testing as described in the proposal discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and offer desi's rapid antigen at home testing program option to families one amendment is changing monday to wednesday oh and the number two what was that and then the other amendment did the big thing long ago that's just a letter if that's not really that's just a communication on your part what do you mean monday to wednesday at home oh it would be blessed yeah um so is there a motion to accept a proposal of those three components as stated [Music] second adam and discussion okay all in favor of approving superintendent's recommendation to move to those three elements in the testing protocol [Music] and we will move to this protocol um as described here and jeff will manage the communications thank you for your thoughtful consideration of all the components and for i know that the parent input has been that you've heard that and also that's in your thinking as well so i appreciate your uh and so the last item then is to uh is there a motion to authorize the district to send an official letter to commissioner riley requesting evidence to be provided by february 25th 2022 to demonstrate asking students and are achieving an 80 vaccine threshold that's the transmission of 19.

so about 24 of the 1718 budget was allocated and dedicated to provide for students that were identified as having special education needs and you could see down the lower part of that same column at that year we had 521 special education students which was about 12.3 of our total population and 33 219 was the average expenditure per student so now if we look all the way over to the right uh you'll see that there's a there's a couple of things that are worth noting but as far as in 2122 the percentage of total budget that was allocated for special ed didn't change much it's still in that 24.8 percent of total range of course the cost has increased because our budget has increased over that period of time but what i've circled at the lower portion of the screen is that the number of students increased you know pretty dramatically as compared to increases in per year so we went from 556 to 584 students and then we're projecting uh next year to go to 610 so there is an increase in the number of special education students that we are seeing and miss carrie will cover that in her presentation and you can see the percentage of students with individualized education plans you know has increased to 13.9 this year and we're estimating it will be about 14.6 in the 2223 budget year that we're we're presenting um so i'll pause there for some questions because robin i assume you're ready to load up your presentation so i'm gonna stop presenting um when we finish answering questions and so mr gripper i see that there's at least one question from mr white yes mr white go ahead oh thanks adam yeah i'm wondering about the um i'm not sure if robin will be speaking to this but uh sorry i got a pop-up window on here um i'm just wondering about the cause if we have an idea of the the reason that the number's going up is it better identification of students changing in law a change of laws nice picture then um yeah i will try to answer that okay okay okay no that's fine i was just making a note to myself because when i get to the part where i'm talking about some of the um what our numbers look like um so let me go ahead faith um thanks all right thanks you i raised my hand and you gave me permission um if i could and been i don't know if you have this number available um can you give us a cost per general ed student the the cost per general ed student if we look at 20 122 is about a little over 18 000 185 i can give you the exact number but it's i thought that was the average cost per student which included the special ed uh it does okay so the the per pupil expenditure that 18 000 um that we quote that the state provides is all students yeah but if we carve out and that's what this illustration is doing if we just look at special ed costs divided by special ed students it's higher than the per expenditure i understand so i guess i would like to know what the average cost for non-special ed student is as well i if we could see that and what you're budgeting what you anticipate the budgeted amount per student to be yeah i'd have to do some math on that faith but i'll write that down as a question thank you sam you had your hand up what other variables is well like title one money or uh you know idea money you know wherever i mean if you're looking for a true local cost versus just generic cost sam go ahead i'm going to wait until robin finishes she might answer this already in her presentation sure okay okay first i wanted to thank you for having me here tonight um to share some information with you i'm going to try and keep away from the special ed jargon but it's very difficult to do that so if i do mention something or use an acronym and you have questions about it please don't hesitate to ask me for some clarification okay there we go okay so some of you um who had come to our showcases last year when we focused on special education may remember this slide here showing our continuum of services when you look to the right hand side of the um of the slide and we're looking at the continuum we're looking at students that are fully included into the general ed classroom so special education services are pushed into the classroom supporting the students with the general curriculum and they're learning amongst their peers we consider this to be the least restrictive setting for students because they're in the same setting and getting the same type of instruction along with supplemental instruction and accommodations in order to be successful you'll also notice that i only i also included not just the classroom as the least restrictive setting but i also included the community because we do have students in our 18 to 22 year old programs that go out into the community as they learn their vocational skills and their transition skills and so they are amongst the um the uh their peers within the community in the community settings um as you move across the um the continuum towards the left um you're getting more specialized instruction you're spending less time in the general ed setting and more time in the specialized setting so you can see we have what we call resource support and typically resource support is provided in a small is in a smaller setting and what i mean by that is not that the classroom's smaller but that the groups of students are smaller and so we have smaller groups of students we have us we have a smaller adult to student ratio to provide those added supports and to provide that specialized instruction typically this is in the core subjects of reading writing and math as you move farther to the left and you're getting farther away from the general ed classroom we're now looking at more of a self-contained program and what that means is that our students are with for the majority of their day they're with disabled peers so their peers um that they're learning along with in that classroom setting are being serviced under an iep and have more intense needs um the smaller setting also you're going to get more specialized instruction and you're going to have more supports and you're going to have more um a smaller adult to student ratio and that's because their needs are much more um much more impactful so we provide services across this continuum and students at some points in their school career can move from one um setting to another setting depending on how their needs change and as they grow so here's what we were just talking about the number of students so you can see over time our our numbers have crept up slowly um typically the change from one year to another year has been pretty small um until you get to the very end of our chart here where we can kind of see more of a steeping um uh increase um this in this uh typically we do see some changes it's very fluid with our students and our student numbers the numbers that i um pulled from are our october 1st state um recording numbers so on october 1st when i pulled the numbers for this school year we were looking at 582 students being identified as students with disabilities and having an iep as of a week or so ago i pulled the number again just out of curiosity just by going into power school and we were up to 600 so even between october 1st and now we're seeing an increase we're steadily still seeing an increase on that um some of the reasons that i think that we're seeing that increase those numbers i did actually meet with our school psychologists and our school counselors last friday and i kind of pulled them because i wanted to get their impression they're in those ppts they're in those the decision making when deciding whether student qualifies or is eligible for special education services so i wanted to kind of hear from them about it one of the things that they did point out is that they are seeing that the impact of cobit so we went through a period of time where our students were remote totally remote in 2020.

when we look at our grade 8 through 12 or 12 plus because remember we're educating students up to some students up through their up till their 22nd birthday we're looking at 258 students so that's about 44 of our population is falling into that 14 to 22 age range and i'm gonna go back to these numbers a little later in the presentation if we break it down a little more and we look at the primary disabilities the prevalence of those different disabilities you can see how they break out here the largest or the the most students we have that are identified under a disability are falling under learning disabilities keep in mind learning disabilities that includes that group that is identified under dyslexia it includes kids that are identified on dysgraphia under discalcula and those are disabilities that lie in the reading writing and math area i want to make sure i did it in the right order it's how i how i said them the ohi or other health impaired in the aqua there those students under that classification typically are identified as students with attention deficit or attention hyperactivity disorder it can also be our students that are identified under anxiety and or depression sometimes you will find that students with anxiety and depression are identified under what we call our emotional disturbance classification that's in the orange at 80 percent we in the past most of our students would fall under that classification but over time we've really teased out and distinguished the difference between emotional disturbance and students that are impacted by mental mental illness such as depression or anxiety um through ohi um emotional disturbance um students who identified under that tend to be more students that are more behaviorally impacted and um exhibit also exhibit those behaviors over a period of time into a marked degree oftentimes you'll see the diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder and that is a diagnosis that a student would qualify for special education services possibly under emotional disturbance autism spectrum disorders make up about 15 percent of it in our population and again i'm going to emphasize spectrum disorders because students that are impacted by autism can vary in how it impacts them we can have students that are very um bright and um and intelligent and uh pick up on instruction very quickly and and are able to excel in the area of the academics but then they have those deficits in the areas of social skills and pragmatic skills um and they have difficulty maneuvering through the social realms and the social environments at the other end of the spectrum we can have students that are highly impacted by their autism in many cases they will have cognitive deficits they'll have delayed language delayed development in their they might have occupational fine motor motor skills delays as well and and need the services of an ot or a pt they can also have a very a variety of behavior behaviors that they exhibit or that they that becomes very impactful on their ability to access instruction um intellectual disabilities are ours typically has falling around four percent of our population um these students show can show from mild to severe cognitive deficits and they oft and they also um show deficits in the areas of adapters life skills they need to be taught explicitly those life skills and those functional skills that many of us conduct on a daily basis just in our daily living the last piece of this pie that we're looking at here in the maroon is at eight percent is our students that that fall other on other other categories under other categories so those categories might be multiple disabilities hearing impairment visual impairment developmentally delayed or traumatic brain injury and there are others when we look at the prevalence over time you can see how each one of them how it change has changed over time within our district um when i look over at the far right hand side and i'm looking at that that you can notice the very difference in the growth of our students under learning disabilities and that goes back to what i was saying earlier about some of the causes and how it's impacting us um you can also see as you look at the um the green bar that's the that's covering our students identified under ohi other health impaired and again we're starting to see that uptick in that area as well as autism in the red when we compare our prevalence to the state prevalence or the state average our bars are in red here and you can see the state in yellow we can see that in across the state the prevalence rate for learning disabilities speech and language impairment and let me just look real quick are typically um more prevalent in other districts across connecticut in our district we find that we are um we have a higher prevalence of students impacted by autism emotional disturbance intellectual disabilities and and ohi ohio and so you know i i wanted to delve a little deeper into that because when you're looking at those four disabilities you're really looking at some very um students that are very impacted by their by their disabilities okay all right so if we take a look at our students with autism students that are identified under emotional disturbance intellectual disabilities and multiple disabilities we're looking at approximately 170 students out of that 500 plus number which is about 29 of our population students that are impacted by these disabilities usually require intensive supports now i'm not saying that all students under autism require intensive supports but there's a high chance that many of them are needing more intense supports those supports could look like many of the things i have listed here they may require there is a safety issue they may require ex very explicit discreet instruction some of that instruction may involve daily living skills such as toileting feeding dressing some students especially when we look at students with multiple disabilities many times there's a mobility um disability in there that they need help with transitioning from place to place many of our students require breaks such as movement breaks or sensory breaks there are communication needs which we then often incorporate assistive technology to help the students be able to share what their wants and needs are and we do a lot of following on data collection um to be able to address those behavioral needs of this of students impacted by some of these disabilities oftentimes you'll find that um there's the need to really reduce the adult to student ratio in order to address the needs the intensive needs of these students and in many cases you might find that the student requires a one-to-one and so we we do incorporate um many ias or instructional assistants in order to support these students and help to give them access to various settings okay looking at a quarter of our students having these intense needs we've developed over time several in-district programs to meet the needs of these students so there are two two types of programs i categorize them as two types of programs in our district we have our intensive need programs and we have our therapeutic programs um we went over these in um in detail in our showcase last year um for most of you um and so just to briefly overview them we have our darcy our highland and our god programs that address mostly students that are on the autism spectrum that have a much more severe needs um and may service other students within those programs too but those are fairly self-contained programs and so they're on the far left of that continuum of services where you have a smaller adult ratio and you'll be able to fi to provide very specialized instruction i forgot i should have included the cheshire high school life skills program as well that's our our program that um works with our students that may fall into those four categories of autism spectrum disorders or multiple disabilities and intellectual disabilities on the right hand side we have our therapeutic programs these are our programs that typically address the emotional needs of our students in district or our behavioral needs of students and district not too long ago we opened up our doolittle bridges and our dodd bridges programs to address the needs of our students that are impacted by anxiety and depression and or trauma and then you also have our self-contained program at the high school the rise program and the new start program i did include hummuston alternative education program on here while it's not a special ed program it's an extension of the high school and in some cases we have found that our students that are dealing with a lot of stress or a lot of anxiety do flourish and and require a smaller setting as the hummus and alternative program can provide because we've been able to have these programs in district and we've had the um resources to run these programs the way they should be run and with the supports that they need in order to meet the needs of these students we've been able to really keep our out of district placements down it was back in i think it was 1718 that we started to introduce our bridges programs the therapeutic programs for kids with anxiety and depression um and so you can see our numbers had gone up but then as we began to develop the program we're able to pull students back into the district and we'll be able to keep those students that were coming up and through the um process being identified as students needing those types of supports we were able to keep them in district as well so we've really been able to reduce our numbers um in out-of-district placements when i looked at the numbers of the students that are in out of district placements over half of those students are falling under our autism spectrum disorders and or emotional disturbance and they require a much higher level of support than we were able to provide within district okay so that's kind of a picture of what we have in district what our population looks like and um how and in some of the supports that we've been able to use and be very successful at providing programming for students with disabilities um i don't know if some of you um might recall but last summer um there was a state statute that was changed that required districts to now keep our students that are eligible for transition um transition planning through the age of when uh through the age of 21 and exiting them at age 22.

so again this is what you've seen on the maintenance operations fund so looking at the upper maintenance operations fund you can see that we are anticipating a budget of very close to 286 million to to date we have expended and uncovered about 236 million leaving an available balance of about 50 million again as is monthly as stated monthly there are some purchases that are have not yet been encumbered some of them are our extra duty pays and those sorts of things so roughly about 15 million of that we can expect to be spent the classroom site fund please note that we do have the pay for performance encumbered in the year-to-date expended encumbered column so truly we expect at the end of the year that we will have close to 14 million dollars carried over in classroom site fund again a reminder classroom site fund in the past has been reported in three separate funds now due to statutory changes last spring we have one fund and all activity is coming out of that fund 10.

before i go on are there any questions about that okay great again these are the just the details that i just shared the state funds i just wanted to point out results based funding you can see the dollar amount that we were notified we will be receiving and you have an item under consent to approve that payment we plan on making that payment on the 1st of march um let's see and then the final other fun details looking at the internal services fund which is print shop the doodle credit and then other apps that are purchased by schools in an enterprise manner we did encumber the amount of salary that we expect to move out of maintenance and operations and put it into the dual credit fund representing the salaries and benefits paid to those teachers who are educating dual credit students and that is the end of my report if there are any questions i'm happy to answer those board members are there any questions good thank you very much thank you miss bets we appreciate that we will now move to six on the agenda consent agenda items miss wood before you go i just want to let everyone know about a change on 6.03 certified classified and substitute personnel we'll have to reclassify mr french was set to retire on the 31st we will have to move that to separation of employment thank you for the update dr mccord do i have a motion 6.01 approval of consent agenda items do i have a motion i move that we approve the consent agenda items as presented thank you miss you jetty is there second a second thank you miss humphries it's been moved and seconded that we approve the agenda items as presented with the change given by dr mccord board members may we um let's vote any all those in favor will you please say aye aye aye any opposed please say nay all right the it passes 5-0 now we're moving to action items we will begin with 7.01 the results-based funding payment dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members uh item 7.01 is results-based funding payment and i'll just read to you what we have in public competent content the purpose of this agenda item is to form you of the arizona revised statute 15-249-08 results-based funding and its implications for gilbert public schools this is the fifth year results-based funding has been allocated the funding consists of legislative statewide appropriations that the arizona department of education administers and distributes to eligible school districts or charter districts based on the statutory formula through applying the statutory formula gilbert public schools received three one million three hundred fifty nine thousand three hundred seventy nine dollars and fifty five cents the ten identified results based funding schools include ashland ranch canyon rim elementary carroll ray ranch elementary gilbert classical academy greenfield elementary harris elementary highland park elementary neely traditional academy patterson elementary and quartz hill elementary spring 2019 the state student performance data was used to distribute results-based funds to districts receipt of the funds is dependent on the number of students who attended the school on the 100th day of the school year during the 2020-2021 school year a stipend will be given to current qualifying staff in those schools to include payroll taxes and benefits professional staff will receive 800 based on their full-time equivalency and support staff will receive 400 based on their full-time equivalency these results-based funding monies will be distributed to qualifying employees in one check scheduled for march 1st 2022 pay date after the governing board approves the distribution of the rfb funds the remaining results-based funding balance will be utilized by the district to assist in replicating and maintaining successful school programs in gps such as traditional acceleration and other school choice programs we ask for your approval thank you dr mccord may i have a i move that we approve the results based funding payment thank you mr jetty is our second second thank you mr parker it's been moved and seconded that we approve the results-based funding payment is there any discussion uh yes i just have a couple comments about results-based funding this is not this is something that was put in place and i am not in favor of results-based funding because i feel like it is um all of our teachers work hard they really do to bring their children to a place of learning and to accomplishment and when we measure that by a standardized test i don't really feel like it is a fair measurement to many of our students people are learning whether they reach a certain place on a standardized test or not and i just wanted to say that i'm going to vote in favor because obviously we're receiving the money and it should go out and to those who have worked hard but i feel like it is not the fair a fair program for teachers and staff for everyone in the district i'm very happy for these 10 schools but i think that every school should be recognized in that way because i know they work hard so put that on thank you mrs humphries is there any other discussion all right it has been moved and seconded that we approve the results-based funding payment board members all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please say nay all right the motion passes 5-0 thank you now let's move to 7.02 policy development first read a policy db annual budget dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members we have policy db before you annual budget all budgets you see this evening all budgets all policies you see this evening have been through our policy committee meeting for the first read we bring those here for you tonight this policy in particular deals with rolling over balances and i'll let ms betts explain a little bit more deeper yes the the main change to the annual budget db is reflecting that we would like to allow our um our schools to carry over unused discretionary maintenance and operations funds into the new year the intent is to allow them to one consider careful spending so at the end of the year they're not just spending just to spend it because they know that they're going to lose it it also gives them an opportunity if they have a spend that might be more than they would have in any one year they could they could actually accumulate it over a year or two to spend it in a subsequent year and then it also accounts for the fact that we are funded in current year average daily membership putting some of our schools at risk in the event that their enrollment goes down so it gives them some flexibility in terms of being able to pay some of those discretionary dollars back so the other details regarding the various definitions of fund balance are added to allow us to account for the carryover of these discretionary monies on our financial statements at the end of each year thank you miss betts may i have a motion i move that we uh passed the sorry we've already had a motion oh sorry this is the policy my mistake i move that we passed the policy db annual budget thank you the there's a motion is there a second second thank you miss humphries and miss eugetti it's been moved and seconded is there any discussion board members all right if there's none we will take this back to the policy committee as well and then bring it back for a second read as well but um let's go ahead and vote on the motion that's as it's been moved tonight all those in favor please say aye aye any opposed please say right it passes 5-0 that takes us to 7.03 policy development first read of policy gbevc gifts to and solicitations by staff members dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members we bring before you policy gb ebc uh gifts to and solicitations by staff members basically there's an addition to this policy it's called food for staff and this gives the ability providing a working breakfast or lunch for staff shall not be considered a gift the use of mno funds for this purpose shall be limited to district-wide events sponsored by superintendent and shall be limited to no more than four times annually again this policy went through policy committee as well thank you dr mccord may i have a motion i move to prove policy geb sorry gb ebc gifts to and solicitations by staff members thank you miss humphries is there a second thank you mr parker it's been moved and seconded is there any discussion i just again i think this is a good addition because you know sometimes just having some food can really build relationships and and help people to have something to visit over and and just kind of builds the trust in our in our district i think that's really important uh to build relationships mrs wood yes miss bets if i could add at the bottom the legal reference we have we have that confirmed that the legal reference was incorrect on the original uh policy and we have changed that so it was identified in the previous policy as 15312 and you can see the change it's now 15 213 which is the correct statutory reference thank you going along with that there's nothing in statute statute that that would prohibit this no this policy change is in direct response to new legislation that was added regarding the governing board discretionary powers and so a whole paragraph was added paragraph 39 and this is in direct response to that paragraph edition last legislative session thank you is there any other discussion seeing none i'll call for the vote all those in favor of approving policy gb ebc gifts too and solicitations by staff members please say aye aye all of those opposed please say nay right that passes 5-0 and again that will go back that's the first read so we'll take that back to the committee and then bring it back here for and for a second read that will take us to 7.04 policy development first read a policy ikf graduation requirements dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members this is essentially our graduation requirements but in our graduation requirements we have a section for gilbert classical academy and what we are currently doing is just updating some language like world language instead of modern language and then changing fine arts from three credits to two credits and adding one to the elective credit so moving that from three to four credits essentially giving those students ability one more elective credit to be able to use thank you dr mccord may i have a motion i move that we adopt the first read of policy uh jfb open enrollment oh wait sheila we're one above that that's okay i know you're good you're good first read of policy ikf graduation requirements thank you mr jetty is our second second thank you mr parker it's been moved and seconded do we have any discussion i guess my one question would be when would that go into effect for the next school year correct yes it would begin 22-23 school year okay thank you are there any any other questions or discussion in this first read see none i ask for the vote all those in favor of approving the first street of policy ikf graduation requirements please say aye aye any opposed please say nay all right that passes 5-0 and we are now to 7.05 policy development first read a policy jfb open enrollment dr mccord thank you madam president governing board members policy jfb has to do with our open enrollment policies state legislature passed some laws that require us to do some things and post some things on our website and i'll read through part of this in accordance with state law the district has established an open enrollment policy and program is set forth by ars 15-816 and ars 15-816.01 no tuition shall be charged for open enrollment except as authorized by applicable provisions of ars and 15-764-15-797-15-823-15-824-15 and here's the section that truly uh makes us do some things a little bit different and that's okay says the open enrollment program described this policy shall be placed on the district website made available to the public upon request the district will update on each school's website the school's capacity whether the school is currently accepting open enrollment students by grade level and at least once every 12 weeks unless there are no changes to report for the individual school so again we would have a section on our website that would have this information posted and we would update it on a regular basis just to make sure it's as current as possible and then there's some other language that was added except provided ars 15-816 the school may not limit admission based on the following ethnicity or race national origin sex income level disability proficiency in english language or athletic ability and so then there's the legal references down there which is 15-341 thank you dr mccord board members may i have a motion yeah i move and get it correct this time i knew that we approved the first read of policy jfb open enrollment thank you mr jetty is there a second second thank you mr parker it's been moved and seconded is there any discussion seeing none i will call for the vote uh all those in favor of approving the first read of policy jfb open enrollment please say aye aye any opposed please say nay all right those pass 5-0 and again like we've said before they will go back to our policy committee and then back to the next public meeting for the second read great all right mrs wood yes since this is the for the first actual business meeting of the year yes would you kind of explain to the to our public how we how we get to this part to these policies how we um our process in this district about how we do it uh you know and we think we we talk about it every now and then it might not hurt to just explain it to the public each year sure i will give my thoughts and then if anybody wants to add so typically when typically either a law changes and so we need to add or adjust our policies based on that or there's a question or concern that comes up within the district from either a staff member or our district staff or a parent and so we will address and look at the policy around it and see if we can address that and so typically we'll start by we have a policy meeting this second tuesday second and third tuesday of every month it's a public meeting we hold it at 11 30 in the board in the board meeting room over there um it's you will see the agenda it's it's open to the public as well and we just will go through and discuss the policies and we have staff members come as well to be present to give feedback as needed and then we will wordsmith whatever we need to make some changes and then we bring it to the first read at the public meeting at our at our regular board meeting we'll go through that what you just saw tonight that will be the first read then we'll take it back to the policy meeting again if we have any other input from from emails or phone calls or other things along the way then we bring that back to this the second meeting and a second policy meeting go through it again make sure that we said what you need to make sure it addresses the law as it needs to be get legal reference if we need to those kinds of things and then we'll bring it back here for the second read before we approve it is that that's perfect thank you thank you thank you for asking for that i appreciate that great with that we will move on to 8.01 items for future agenda if any have anything they'd like to request right now to be put on the agenda or please let dr mccord or myself now or miss wilson know if we'd like to have something on the future agenda all right from that then we'll move on to 9.01 with the board committee reports we'll begin with myself gilbert education foundation i've contacted miss dudeson and am getting up to speed on everything that's going on and i know we have a breakfast business breakfast meeting this february 7th monday morning here so looking forward to that that's the extent of my report tonight 9.02 city of mesa liaison miss humphreys i want to report on two things that i've been involved with this last couple weeks one was a virtual town hall put on by the maricopa county superintendent of public instruction where he he sent out a just a survey to teachers and was concerned about the results that that there is a lot of stress on teachers this year and it's been a very difficult year for them so um he sent out an email i i think anybody could have answered the invitation i chose to do so and i thought it was a very beneficial he is offering that if if the district would districts would like to have him work with them and survey their teachers to to get some understanding of what their stress level is or thoughts on what could help them and i know we're working on that issue very hard here but i just wanted to share that also today i attended the school connect summit school connect is a non-profit group that works very hard to support schools by connecting business and government and faith-based leaders with schools and local communities so that we can work together to provide for our schools and help them have the things that they need and i have to say it was a very uplifting presentation for me one of the guest speakers talked about the the trauma that children have gone through and and addressing some of that and helping with their behaviors and i got to listen to some superintendents share what they're doing in their districts and then we also had time to talk at our table with the people that we were with and share some of the things that have been going on and it was just a really um good opportunity to just appreciate what our public schools are doing across the maricopa county and across the state so i just want to share that thank you 9.03 town of gilbert liaison dr santa cruz president wood i have nothing to report i still need to make contact with the town liaison and we'll do that soon great thank you finance audit committee mr parker nothing new thank you insurance trust representative mrs eugetti we met last week and everything's in very good shape once again and i think more to report thank you legislature legislative representative mrs humphries just to announce that the asba equity event will be march 3rd and 4th and it will be in maricopa so registration is available for that now and i would encourage attendance thank you 10.01 future meeting dates dr mccord madame president governing board members meetings for february february 1st board work study and brief board business meeting february 8th board policy committee meeting and on our agenda says february 14th which is valentine's day and we don't have a meeting that night it's actually february 15th so there you go you all have the night off for your significant others and that is our last board business meeting for that month thank you appreciate that seeing no further discussion on anything we will go ahead and call for adjournment 11.01 is there a motion make a motion for german thank you mr parker is our second second thank you miss humphries and eugenie appreciate that um it's been moved and seconded all those in favor please say aye any opposed nay all right we are adjourned thank you for your attendance tonight and for all that you're doing for our schools and our students

um and don't continue to think about the issues we're going to take care of two items i don't want to ask for a motion to approve the consent agenda secondly all right thank you for allowing me thank you for not saying the word uh we have a motion in a second to accept okay the consent agenda all in favor [Music] um we have uh two parent emails in the communications folders from them as well uh and are there any other communications [Music] all right then i think we're ready to move on into the governance let's see workshop we can get done in the next couple of hours okay well bye everybody um it's nice to see everyone again and be back here um so what i want to work on tonight what the purpose of the workshop is to talk about community engagement so my plan is to have us first talk about what is community engagement i get sort of your ideas and spend a little bit of time talking about how you view community engagement and try and get a definition we can sort of all agree on or some of these good points that technology contains um and then i have a few i want to talk about how lucy the committee's role versus the administration's role of community engagement i have a couple of scenarios for you to kind of tease apart um and then talk a little bit about the open meeting law and how that interacts with your work and your community makes sense so and my goal is to back up like 8 30 morning and night as i know it's going to be a long night so unlike my postmates you can keep these when you're done but what i want you to think about i want you to take about five minutes and just jot down how you define community engagement for you know some of the key concepts that you think are really important in community engagement and we'll have a discussion and put some of those thoughts and definitions up on the chart paper and see where we can get some commonality in people's names i'm actually going to set a timer for you know go a long way that the five minutes so what [Music] okay um [Music] um hmm okay i've got a minute left and i see some people still writing oh so it's a two-way communication between the community and for us to school and then to have a proactive approach with the goal of making student achievement a priority that fall right under that team [Music] a a proactive approach with student achievement as a priority we might want to bring those charts up a little bit okay i don't know if anybody else is i think as we've thought about it and talked about the things we're trying to do i think a lot of it's about communication and information sharing and particularly a lot of kind of things on the engagement side kind of the few years i can put there using student achievement as a priority how can we how do we leverage the community to enhance the student experience so can you talk a little bit more about what and transparency and access to us to administration to coordinators so talk a little bit more about what you mean by transparency first and then asked a little bit more about leveraging the community just transparency into decision making and the information that's used to make those decisions and making sure it's a transparent process that anyone in the community can see and be a part of it so okay so transparency is not only seeing understanding how a decision is made being able to participate in the decision making or the kind of diversity of the community and resources in the community to help enhance the student experience we talked a little bit and i'll release a recent meeting on internships and job shadowing those kinds of opportunities where members of the community could help enhance the educational experience okay i pretty much echoed julie um [Music] where i said community members kind of coming to the meetings and then school committee members going out to the community and being part of different community groups so that we could you know share information but it definitely is a two-way and proactive i think those are really good words this is yeah and i i know it's hard for people but i wish more parents would come to the meetings it was great to have because it's like sometimes i have no idea what people are thinking besides the people in my circle so so part of that is understanding that the people that you know may not be represented of course [Music] i wrote saying what you mean and doing what you say with no hypocrisy as an individual word there's a lot of thoughts i like to write okay so i heard equity right be inclusive of promoting equity i also said integrity is that what you meant by integrity or is that something different uh no that's inclusive okay what i technically wrote was show integrity by saying what you need and i'm going to close that with uh without your progress [Music] so when you talk about being inclusive is just some of the the things that have said before encapsulate that or is very thinking differently than that um two-way communication will be inclusive transparency is certainly part of being inclusive communication access certainly so okay okay um i think i would say being visible and by visible i mean because i know a lot of us go to different things but i'm not sure people know who we are um and i don't know if that's something that maintains situations or if it's like a social media thing where your picture is there and they can associate a face with the name because sometimes i feel like people don't reach out because they don't realize oh that's who julie is i've talked to her and told her what i thought but i don't think so i think visibility people knowing who we are and that they can get to us anything else the advantage of my glasses everybody said what's on your list never follow students people have opportunity to speak with school team members and um the committee seeks out fraud the breadth of perspectives in the community not just those in our inner circles as many was saying but uses tools like surveys and forums and talks a variety of tools and places to try to hear from a breadth of the community people feel informed of and committed to improving student learning in the district that's the focus and that people in the community report that they've been heard by the committee now you all know why i will never be a classroom teacher that's good you read all your writing too um so yeah i'm going to check with you yes sorry no no not yet i'll ask you a little [Music] so talk a little bit more about how people see that as part of community being called what's happening well i mean i think one of the goals is to engage people in thinking about what's best for students and people may have different perspectives on that but the people bring those perspectives into conversation uh within the united commitment to support students in our life okay you say more yeah yeah it is it is it i just had just kind of one general umbrella topic that you just thought which is responsiveness to community needs and then you know so i had some other kind of sub topics um that those are a little bit cyclical and i found that um just like my experience that so for example like these committees other committees in the town you typically don't really wanna you don't really re interact with them [Music] it's that time of the year so you know so the time of the year was you know you know in time a lot talks to you after you when uh this time of the year when the planning board will want to talk to you and then you don't see them you know and then you know obviously you have to have a tribulation but if you have you go to that for something so planning for the chapel might want to talk to you if they're putting out the units you know housing you because it affects involvement they all know that stuff but then you need to go to the you know the building inspector when you need to know how many units are being built so you can do your request too but those things are cyclical so you probably don't you know it's not like you do that stuff all the time um and then i also think this has been this has been addressed here is that you have enough you have to find time to listen to people's concerns one of the things that mike was saying i don't know what people think and that's typically i think because when everything's going well you know people pay their taxes and they hire you to do the job and that's how they feel about it like just getting educated and there's no problem i got a job i come home i do what i have to do and i'm busy too and i think they're really in the field you know this is what we pay you to do and i always agree with them so you know you hit things when they're not right so um yeah you've got to find time to listen to those people who who have issues and that's how you know i mean i think that's how you have you get a gauge of what you're doing if everything's quiet in my experiences everything's going okay it depends on the community too i guess too so yeah you know i might have to give you something tonight so if things are quiet do you feel like there's enough less need at that moment for community engagement no i mean i think i think it depends on community and i think it depends on who the community is i worked at a community with a high um puerto rican population and i wondered why nobody said anything i have a friend who worked at top hall who was puerto rican you know it doesn't seem like everything's going well here but i don't hear anything and she said well it's cultural you know that's before they rebuild it then you're gonna they're not gonna question they see you as an authority person they're not gonna question them um that's definitely national communities they don't necessarily see you that way you know they'll step right up to you so um i think you have to be the community you know i mean i think in a lot of communities where um people may be a little more i want instead of something less engaged if everything's going well you know they're satisfied and so i think you know you do the other things with the communities in town i think there's always i'm going to reach out and i i'm still working more things parents told me the first hundred days i was here um when i was out you know meeting folks and yet another community and i still have a whole list of things that karen said to me that i'm still thinking about says expansion of the you know the internship the internship shadowing program came from a conversation i had four years ago um expanding uh ap courses came from a conversation and the guy called me up claire blue and said you know you're no superintendent so i talk to you about a few things that's what i think so that's an interesting question that you raise about when things are quiet does that mean we have to think about community engagement less what what how would you guys answer that question i feel like it's the same people that voice voices are heard there's like this is going to sound weird there's like a group of people and i think it's the majority of people that just kind of do their job do their thing they're busy and they kind of go along to get along we don't really know those people's opinions because it's like the same group of people and i don't want to use the word complain i feel like that participates or engages i don't know if you guys feel that okay all right i kind of see you saying i agree with you uh i think uh it is quiet that's the challenge nobody's coming to you you still need to figure out what's going on what's in their minds and then thought it's quiet a lot of people don't agree with one thing or another but they got to go to work they got to put their kids home they've done homework they've got to do this thing that thing whatever activities they don't have the time and so they're just like whatever something else is happening about it yes so and that's why that's a challenge when it's quiet right you have to go out there and get it yeah that's what community engagement is you figure right so and it may be well i'm a little bothered by it but not enough right it doesn't rise to the level of coming to a school but that assumes that when it's quiet there's no input coming in and that's not true you get a thousand kids engaging teachers every day there's anybody coming into the schools all the time every day with everybody so and and in a super science in school principals in the school so it's not like you know that's when you get paid for you make observations you ask questions you know um yeah if i know the difference in the administration has one set of challenges and one set of activities from a school community perspective not in that building every day that's a different channel oh yeah no that's that's that's fine yeah i don't think again community is the school right now [Music] you know i think school administrators and school teachers see engagement very differently in school because they don't see the only thing they get is for me for you know facebook so you know that's that's what there's a lot of women with that facebook yeah there's like i think we got a guilty clown communities engage with so it's a slightly different audience or subset of the same one or more of one audience the other in your ear okay you've got students you've got staff um you've got parents community members more so not that you not that you don't have students and staff not that you don't have cancer but the balance of who you hear from more is different for the administration but i feel like as school committee members we're only hearing from our people so like we're all kind of from different uh groups like our kids are different ages so that's our circle yeah i mean i would never have somebody like from tahasha they don't know who i am everyone you know like in all seriousness i think that's a huge challenge um it's like i'm literally only hearing from my people which may be similar to me so i'm not getting the full spectrum so that's like a huge challenge i think for me um how can i or we be better at hearing what everybody i mean i think susan said surveys [Music] um especially for me i'm kind of difficult for me to draw the line in the sand and say okay this is your parent opinion and now you're going to put your school company hat on and think like the school committee member just your natural instinct is obviously i'm sure all of us can agree to love on your babies and want whatever's best for their specific situation so i want to ask you a couple other continue this questions and then um here and then once we've talked about the different aspects we'll see if we can come up with something that is sentence or two that incorporates a lot of these thoughts is actually the definition of how you see community engagement and how you would like to be a little bit of a stretch for tonight but how you would like to think about it if you know how likely you've defined it then implementing it becomes a little bit easier so the first um we asked about the role of community engagement how do you well how do you see the role of the committee not the role of individual members that's the next question how do you see the role of the committee in community engagement i'm not going to have you write it down here if you have enough if you want to write down some thoughts but i just sort of want to do a little bit of around robin julie do you want to start sure maybe i would say i i think we're sort of doing that we started that so that each member on the committee is going to go to the various groups in the schools or the community i meet with them periodically throughout the year to engage with those groups the ptos the pbs foundation yeah um uh i was literally gonna say exactly what julie was sorry [Music] um i guess i would say go back to [Music] adam's concept of transparency because it's hard you can't really engage the community unless they're getting they can understand what you're doing um and so i guess that is something that we're always working on is how to explain what we're doing instead of just doing it become prepared we've read a bunch of materials we've already been thinking about topics when we sit down at the table but then how to really make our thinking put our thinking out for the community when we sit down here in this room so each of us can understand each other's thinking but also so the community can hear our thought processes as we talk together because it kind of ties back to later the topic of the meeting law too you know where where do we make that transparent this is where we should arena you know i like the first one i would maybe maybe uh be a little more specific i always like to think of them as liaisons between the schools between the school district and community so i think that a lot of times uh uh school okay so that the school committee is a liaison between the schools and the community not the individual people that are liaisons yeah so you see the school committee is going to schools oh you've been trying to get a school system so if you think about when we talk about roles and responsibilities that this fits right in right that we talk about the committee being representing the vision and value of the community but you're also making sure you're also you know at the community table you are making sure that the community is well informed about the schools right that's that's kind of yeah how they they live in the communities they they go to places and they get stopped by you know community members who may or may not may have like have an idea or something about something it's not true or is true so if you need to confirm it or say oh that's that's not that's not how we interpret what's going [Music] another that's another issue but if they have a unified voice in there i can have one i don't see that yeah i'd like to hear more about that i mean i'm not saying you can't be an individual but i'm uncertain that i mean i i don't to me it's no different than in leadership you know we both leadership meetings and they may disagree with me and they disagree with them but when we leave if we're saying something different then one principle is telling their staff something different than another principle it becomes a problem so um i think a school committee speaks with a unified voice like say they think about somebody might go along with that bubble yeah people that's you know they can't then go in the community and say well you know five of them did but i would have done that yeah and that happens so i'm going to i'm going to tease this out a little bit granularly 100 agree with that but if but i guess what i'm thinking about is is not when the committee has made a decision enacted but gathering information that may inform decisions or getting ideas from community members they may be acting more as individuals dan has a community of bringing that to the table so my example is two principles might come to a leadership meeting and one of them says you know my teachers are thinking this way and another principle is saying my teachers in my building are thinking this way and you get to a decision they're going to bring the decision forward but they came to it with different viewpoints based on the input they were receiving that am i making any sense yeah but you know what again you know might be a function of where the team is or where the community is you know i think if you've set up those sort of protocols before that and things are put in place so that when they get there and they're collecting information there there isn't that why the discrepancy between what they say when they come to the table there are things to hatch out but yeah you know like it's not going to be might come with any other kind of you know maybe it won't come it's a little bit closer but you have to do work we need to work on the leadership team to make sure that that that's not the case that we we've already set those parameters but you know you know maybe that's maybe that's the issue for the you know the development of the committee that haven't had time to formulate that you know to get that those things in place am i making that um i think in the big picture yes because you're thinking about processes develop over time or information comes in and then that's how you get to a decision that everybody connects together as more information comes in and you have the discussions and people have the input and consensus okay i'm going to take a week on you guys can fill me in if i want but you decided to regionalize right and you've had a lot of opinions out there about whether or not you should be regionalized but there's a lot and i know a lot of some of you were or weren't involved in that whole process because it was a different committee but at the beginning opinions might have been all over the place and then it was a big decision that over time got more information you got more information out and then you got to the point where your community and the committee made a decision that was moved forward yeah that's an interesting example because during that time also the the members of the committee uh uh some of you that were charged with that held a lot of community reforms and had a lot of listening going on at the same time they were sharing information out they were also collecting a lot of perspective about him yeah and they did that quite a bit [Music] but to honda was always a regional high school right so it was just that the district was not regionalized until how many years ago 2018.

um [Music] um that's that's a point again so if you want to entertain a motion to change the march 8th session to february [Music] and then talk about as much suggested an earlier day trippy masking requirement or the same day with the mastering requirement i do think that the information we learned from the sandwich school commitment in particular and some others saying that they sent similar letters and received a lackluster response for lack of better terms could change the necessity for the rationale for sending this letter in the first place because i don't expect we're going to get an answer that is different from what those other schools okay so um so we will if we have a motion and a second we'll go ahead and vote on whether to send this letter correct all right the flutter as is as is okay i'm gonna go back all right so i understand that right okay so are we ready to vote this letter s is okay let's just go around make sure i've never been julian do not send as is yes adam now okay so the letter does not go out now um mike are you looking to make a proposal for um a meeting date first i would like to move our discussion agenda again on the discussion on the masks i'd also like to have any information you can have on how masks impact teaching and learning from america from heading onto that can we maybe we need to break those two things apart let's deal with the date first move discussion of masks from march 8 2022 to february 8.

last year we had um depending on what level students were in um whether they were getting a full in-person program or they were getting a hybrid program and then of course we had families that actually um opted to do a full remote program um because of various reasons and and the needs that are presented by their their own family um situations um so one of the things that we felt what that was impacting our numbers and our increase was the impact of cobit so during that time we did see some students lose their engagement in learning and when you're talking about a remote learning setting or situation often oftentimes these students are um learning off of you know their their in class through their computer through the remote learning there's lots of distractions that are going on within the home and there's lots of distractors that teachers as they're instructing can't really control so one of those factors i think that is impacting our rise in numbers was a loss of engagement now currently in district we're working very hard on acceleration because we recognize that there is an impact from cobit and that we are seeing that student we need to bring that student engagement back um the other thing that um we felt that was also impacting our numbers was social emotional needs so again looking at what some of the impact of what we saw with goat with coven our students that are impacted by anxiety and depression being remote or being out of school being away from their peers being away from that structure has impacted their anxiety and their depression and so again we are seeing some students that may have been functioning fairly well even with their anxiety and depression but since returning and since now having a full day full program all in person you know we're seeing some of that impact that was uh one of another uh thought um also um dyslexia so there's we've been having a real focus on dyslexia over the last few years and in doing that we've gotten better at um diagnosing at assessing and at determining eligibility for dyslexia and so i again i think that that is another area that has impacted us um i believe dr solin shared with us the predictions of what we thought we'd be looking at as far as our numbers in this fall and we're finding that we are having students that are moving into the district and some of our numbers are actually higher um in our population and so along with a increase in population you're going to get an increase in special ed as students move into the district um so i don't know tim if i did i answer your question uh yeah yeah definitely okay all right so i'm gonna use the number 582 because that's the number from our october one reporting and if we delve a little deeper into that number um if i divide that into two groups and there's a reason why i'm doing that and i'm breaking it up between seventh and eighth grade and not putting dodd all together in one of these groups so we have our pre-k through grade 7 students we're looking at approximately 324 students that have ieps and pre-k through grade 7.

prior to that the way the mandate was um interpreted was that once the child turned 21 we then exit them from the program so since last year we are seeing that because of the change we are keeping our students longer now comes this summer a new mandate comes out effective this july we now are required to provide transition programming for students no later than their 14th birthday so if you have a child who has an iep and um require it um all students that have an iep prior to turning 14 during that year you're reviewing their iep you must address transition needs so we're now looking at a a group of students from 14 to 22 to they turn 22 that we're providing these transition services for when i looked at the numbers of eighth grade students you're looking at anywhere from 35 to 40 students that are identified with ieps at that grade level at some point during that school year they're going to they're probably most likely going to turn 14 some will turn 14 in seventh grade some will turn 14 just as they enter ninth grade but a majority of them are going to fall into their eighth grade year um so you're looking at 35 to 40 students and then for our transition programs we have 10 students that are currently in our transition programs that will be supporting up to the age of when they turn 22.

finally looking at unrestricted capital we can see the normal spend that's been ongoing and you can see that again the revised budget two pending is increased slightly over adopted due to the budget balance carry forward from the afr and we do right now have an available balance of about 13.4 million dollars however you are approving a couple of items tonight that will be encumbered out of unrestricted capital as well so you can see that available balance go down throughout the remainder of the fiscal year and this slide just gives the the reader the background that i just shared on our federal funds the change the biggest change here is to show the activity in sr3 we made our first one and a half percent stipend payment that last pay in december so you can see that a spend is reflected under sr3 also note the education plus up grant i've shared with you in the past that we have been formally approved now for that and that is 3.8 million dollars generally speaking we plan on taking existing maintenance and operations expenditures and moving those into this epu grant again with the whole objective of increasing budget balance carry forward into fiscal 2023.

oh really and before that it was three districts oh today it's on district yep it was a union [Music] so let's keep things moving do you have anything more to add about the committee rule and yeah i was thinking um attending um like school events i'm thinking specifically of just parent bootcamp that he does with the incoming sixth graders i know the company that i work for we were here we had a table which was talking to us that would be a great opportunity to have a table and have the school committee members there so people you can introduce yourself with a and when kindergarten starts things like that as a committee just so that people can know who we are it's a really good idea i don't think we are doing whatever you do uh [Music] there's all different like open house things that the school committee should i mean we did a pto event the pumpkin fest there was like all different i mean not to be there the whole time but just so some of the parents can or anybody else is it just school events or what about the broader community well it's funny because i had a memorial day on there [Music] as well so i'm going to ask you to take it one step further well because we've had we've had people go to selectmen for our school committee issues which i think is wonderful i mean whoever's going to advocate for them they should go to but you know when there's a problem with the road i don't go to the select when i go to the dpw you know i don't know that if there's something going on in school where there's a problem a plus like hey i want to bring in this program they should know who we are we should be a friendly face because otherwise they're all reaching out to jeff and his his inbox is probably pretty cool um but it would be like just a nice liaison a connection i guess is really what i'm looking for because i feel like people know what they know our names but they don't know who we are um i remember just recently someone said all that stuff and so oh my gosh next time all the time that's so-and-so so it's the same with us they may interact with us all the time and not realize oh that's coming on the school committee i could be telling them about this or asking them you know when the next meeting is or something along those lines that's the liaison yeah that's the appointment so if if that's what they're all doing if they're all saying that that okay we're gonna take that and then we're gonna we're gonna send that stuff to jeopardy as opposed to i'm to take it and i'm going to deal with it that's different that's not everybody okay so that's so they all said okay when we get something like that we're going to we'll be out there we'll all do them that's all acting in the same direction yeah yeah so that's the kind of thing i've talked about they're all you know known yeah so yeah we'll get to that more of that when we get into it now we can save some time had another thought and regarding what you guys just said i think jeff's getting on the point where individuals are going out and talking to people trying to solve the problem individually that's a bad thing going out and getting the problem bringing it back and dumping it on jeff's desk is your problem you feel it that's also a bad thing but there's some middle ground somewhere where if you tell the person out there you mean individually yeah i can't do anything for you right now but we'll take it to the committee and we'll depending on what the issue is that's a good thing but i wonder if you've run the risk of do that enough times and not get people solid answer that you might start to get the community saying well is my feedback even welcome am i gonna be hurt am i gonna be taken seriously or they just gonna pass it on the job and then you go wait three weeks for the next meeting and then maybe go on the gym maybe you did it it's busy that night we'll push to the next one that was two three months come by and they're just like i just want to know why there was greetings at lunches then and this gets this gets to what i'm constantly saying to the community since we spend a lot of time talking to committees about what your role is or against that government the people that don't understand that role are the whole rest of the community so when someone has a problem about readings the answer isn't i'll bring it to jeff it's why don't you go you know the person to talk to is the food service director yeah i think we have a policy on that we just maybe went over it so the other day right yeah so and we have a policy of that so i think you're right um that's a that's a fine line yeah you got a balance what category does this fall into versus that one what do i do so that's a that's a challenge uh what i was gonna say originally i think uh i don't even know what i was gonna say it was uh oh the someone mentioned something about i think the liaison the school committee is between the community and the schools yeah i know some people sometimes struggle like obviously they don't come to the meeting we do record it so they can watch it afterwards if they want that is going to take four five six hours there's the minutes that they can go through but then you know it doesn't read the minutes sort of tell you what actually happened or what was discussed or what the different sides were before was taken or anything like that so it's tough for the community unless they attend a meeting it's tough enough to actually know what's going on so what can we do to sort of educate them as to what's happening i was gonna say i was thinking about the same minds earlier when i thought about the fact that we've relied heavily on if we want information to be shared to building up suggests that's been the vehicle we've used to get communication out there to parents in particular you know other communities that do or communicate out to the community differently than that and they use their own channel their own communication to share information not relying on the superintendent's books a weekly newsletter yeah it's it um it gets difficult because because you have to sort of decide what the communication is going to be together it slows it down a lot of times our take on it is is really not like a lot of the communities will say we think we should have a community facebook position there's really but who's going to run into the side of the content you have to do that by committing right so really there's nothing that you can do that's much more than the district can do anything so that's a lot of times why the administration becomes sort of the main channel of outgoing communication so i find that reading the newspaper articles about our meetings tend to be the best source of information remember the communities want to know what's going on in the school committee those articles we want control over the fact that you know reporting on what we're saying here those who tend to be in my opinion some of the best sources for a community member to suggest seeing kind of i just wanted to expand a little bit on what i said i spoke specifically about a problem but i can think of several times when a parent has reached out to me and i said okay that's an issue that you want to take to here to diane or to ace or a certain principle or oh you know what that's a great thing oh you want to talk about that curriculum we have a whole curriculum you know where do we go about approving a curriculum you're going to want to go and talk to carol so that's what i mean about knowing where to send people rather than just jeff who's you know trying to do with his day but the other thing is just having some sort of familiar face where they feel like if they have a good idea or if they say hey this is going great it's something that you can pass along too it's basically the good and the bad and so that's what i mean about being just present and that's why i said than the other visible being seen i know i remember the training we did fairly recently um there were school committee members that go live on the facebook i'm not a fan of baseball however um i think that it's a great tool to communicate with on the committee as long there was an example there was a woman that after the meeting she just popped online it was maybe five minutes long and people can't i mean reading the minutes i agree with you might just you know get the sense of anything really that's happened there um and then to have to go through and watch the python recording is difficult but if you can just you know put that thing up while you're doing work in here the person you know i think that's a great way to have um engagement and i know it comes down to who manages it but you can figure that out if it's going to bed if there's going to be a benefit the only thing going live 11 o'clock other social media gonna stop this platforms not because it's not a good conversation limited time yeah and what we're getting to is a lot of ideas of implementing community engagement i want to get us back to the definition of learning conversation i feel like we did sort of talk about an individual community members anybody have any more thoughts about what's the role of an individual community member in community engagement certain research being accessible and understanding where information goes or where questions go or where concerns go in a sort of a common understanding of how it works and a common understanding is the administration [Music] i see some of the two-way proactive inclusive student achievement um foreign a definition of community engagement approach that that's why community engagement is not and you can step in and get this what have you got so kids um is a two-way proactive approach that is focused on student achievement responsive to community needs uh you know we have to put anything in here with budget um i think one thing you could say as a third bullet is it informs the school committee's decision making because that includes budget that includes other things to policies and other areas i think usually legions or interests perhaps to give a quality connotation uh i would say maybe attentive to the diversity of the community i mean attentive or solicits um i guess attentive to different special perspectives or something i'm trying to [Music] i think it's an approach that is built on integrity there's a lot of integrity with loss built on integrity uh i like susan's inclusive of all uh stakeholders that that covers anybody i attempted to put that police [Music] in terms of the beginning of this and maybe say that we could have a sentence that has some bullets after it but we agreed to because of what i've written community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the community and the communities we represent that is so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee in the communities we represent that is focused on study responsible community needs that is informing us that's good yeah so community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the committee and the communities we represent that is corner semicolon [Music] more versus reactive right something happens let me respond kind of like what mike said that it takes forever to get there to have the solution you know what i mean to the problem so if we can kind of be thinking or listening to numbers right and proactively getting at the concerns of the community before is a balance of understanding community needs and being responsive to them but gathering that input like when jeff comes to you with goals he's gotten a lot of input about what those goals need to be based on data right based on data and feedback and you're proactively sort of addressing you might see these before they become huge problems right so when we talk about establishing goals it's because you want to be proactive instead of reactive in the work that you're doing you're looking at what's needed you're establishing the goals to address issues and you're setting instead of letting community members constantly come to you and say this is an issue this is an issue fix it it's effective you're the leaders saying this is where we sense based on feedback from the schools based on feedback from the community bringing together these are the goals [Music] of life yeah i think sometimes the issue there is that proactive can sometimes look like a knee-jerk response like you hear from some small portion of people and so you set something in motion in the interest of being proactive but you've actually not heard from the diverse constituents in your community before you take that move so sometimes i think proactive okay i would say i would say that if you're responding to a small number of constituents if that's more reactive that's what i would call an agent but also it gets to what we were discussing earlier about the silence right like no news is good news but we're being proactive it doesn't matter if there's silence or if there's a lot of activity going on we're being proactive where out there trying to do something whatever that something is will define it but instead of waiting for it to come by also remaining informed of what's going on districts both in the state and around the country to see that there are topics that are going to present themselves at some point in the future or highly likely to and be ready to address those or have already addressed them because we proactively talked about one of these issues that we all know are going to be you know from center over the course of the next year with a big election yeah we should have the five p's in there right preparation [Music] well just just to go up with julie's proactive i i like that because i find that you know facebook becomes an outlet it's almost like you know when when you think about two people that have just did they've been stuck down it down and then eventually something sets it off and it goes up that's what happens on facebook people have questions and concerns and and they may not have the right information like i've seen this information and if they simply went to someone who could say here i'll direct you here's the deputy guidelines we're here you know the principal would have this if that's proactive versus them feeling like the only person they can reach out to is a computer keyboard and then everybody else jumps on it and then it becomes something bigger than it really needs to be they might have gotten automatic oh here's the information so that's why i think the proactive approach is really good have we convinced you uh yeah no i wasn't saying that proactive is reactive i mean it is nature i'm saying that what i've seen sometimes is people in always surrendering the horizon um you know kind of reading the pulse what's coming down the line and reaching outside of your own community i thought that was a good example adam i'm thinking about you know what's happening in other communities what's happening in other states but how does that inform our people by you know looking ahead what's happening to their students with like what does that mean with your students yeah in terms of maybe student population changes or student changes or you know yeah i wish there was more data because i'm a data-driven person so i feel like um i'm sure it exists somewhere but it's hard um without you know if there wasn't like an analyst in the district or something that's analyzing all this but yeah like you're saying what happens with our students you know i'd love to send more surveys out um to the parents and jeff last year he did a ton of them i don't know if they were helpful or not um [Music] focused on student achievement responses to community needs and interests and forms that can be decision-making of all stakeholders proactive and somehow maybe in your introduction we want to build in the integrity i'm not sure that's [Music] community engagement is a two-way approach to communication between the community in the communities we represent that it is like somewhere in the middle there you have built on or built with or integrity or founded with integrity or something yeah is now we're getting a little bit into more of the the nitty-gritty of the how maybe that way so i just i didn't want you peeking ahead [Music] so in the first the top piece in here is actually a a community engagement plan but i really i really wanted there was a bunch of charts in it that i thought were helpful um [Music] in in thinking about community engagement and the two-way part of it you know i think there's there's a lot of places where if you ask people about community engagement they're going to start talking about one way communications out to the community um but i think you know in this report on the on the second page there's a court who squared down that talk about steps to community engagement on the next page that we're about to history down at the bottom there's how to dialogue and foreign policy discussions and then on the next page there's the three arrows that talk about informing and firing and engaging so i just want to take just a couple minutes for you to just sort of look through that and get your to speak up your impressions does it resonate or do you see that might apply to anyone is [Music] whether it's the community or whether it's the district or whether it's the administration of this when i first a couple years ago when we first started really seriously thinking about community engagement there was a lot of there was a lot of articles i could find it's really important you should be doing this [Music] it's easy to find why you should do it and the importance of it it's really hard sometimes to think of how do we actually do this so trying to give you a couple resources we're not going to parse them a lot tonight unnecessarily but a couple of just resources to think about i'm going to really start to go about this as a committee by you know that outreach that you talked about and being out in the community isn't a piece of that as a committee thinking about what other pieces [Music] more decisions ah so foreign [Music] is there anything you see in there i also like what they have here on the second page our goal is to engage the community in something called forums and stakeholder dialogues and other activities to ensure district policy changes are informed by those who are impacted by them so i'm not so i'm not i i guess i'm not thinking you're going to change your definition but that these are things that as you're thinking about implementing these are things that you might want to keep in mind about love the quote that you put here a couple of definitions of effective community engagement um the purpose of community engagement is to ensure that school improvement is done with the community community not to the community but that was really just bullseye there is one there is one website there that i ate on their website it says please ask permission to reproduce our materials so i just gave you the website so you could go look at it and kind of go through the process of getting permission to reproduce something but there's some good stuff on there they talk about thinking about your purpose for engagement is it communication is it participation is it you know and and if you're doing if it's you know if it's supposed to inform or is it collaboration or participation and that your strategy will depend on your purpose okay so um so that they know some of the information do you have something yes yeah so i'm looking at uh this is the second page how to engage the community i've always been a huge fan of backward curriculum design teaching to me the most important part of this document is the [Music] activities because you know if you look at this little equation and i don't know um but i think you have to start with um you know so i'm playing with it right so you have you can't see this uh but it's almost like that's the middle piece that's not gonna stop that's the middle piece so to me it's you know the the whole objective of being a school community member it's not a job onto itself it's to improve student learning that's what we're all trying to do but they're not in schools right so they have a discrete set of functions right and and the schools do so if the outcomes the expected outcomes to improve student learning and maybe they define those and then here and then so if you work backwards from that that becomes the middle part so here you get all of these outcomes which have nothing to do with anything that they're connected to student learning maybe something that happens in schools that they never see on a regular basis and then you have all the stuff in the middle is okay we're gonna we're gonna engage the community to get to those it's the part that happens right before that is let's think of what our job is what do we do we oversee budget like mike said we oversee policy evaluation now you have three parts to an equation here's what our outcomes are here's what our job authority is and in the middle is how we're going to engage the community to achieve those actions to achieve those and so this is just like if you just look at this there's no place i can see to go with this in terms of if you think about this and if you was designing a curriculum just there there would be no place to go because you don't know what to expect you haven't even find your job if you haven't defined what your authority is you don't know your outcomes but now you have this thing in the middle the you're getting here as a community what are you even going to do all of this stuff in order to get it and what are you going to do all this together but then the boundaries of your job so it seems like you were defining this middle piece but if you just look at it and you take it on itself and it'll sell it doesn't make any sense if what what if what you're trying to do is improve student learning [Music] you know what i'm trying to say i do and this is and it makes 99 sense but what i hear is we know what our goals are and now we engage the community about how we get to those goals we haven't like say you have three of those so yeah here's the middle piece here's our goal and here's here's our authority in the district we oversee budget we oversee policy we oversee the superintendent you know some other stuff how did you decide what the goals are what did you get to decide what is the community that's what hasn't been decided how are you going to do that if you don't know what the goals are yeah when you say goals mean analytics awesome yeah but i guess i think so i'm thinking of goals in terms of like your overarching district strategy right outcome i'll come relative to no no no it all comes relative to we're talking about community engagement yeah so what are your outcomes what what what outcomes are you expecting so yeah so and i don't know that i mean that's what i'm thinking i think that's a good middle piece so you got that what so if you work that backwards i think i would think you have to stop like like you know if this was curriculum what am i expecting students to know i know you define that and then you work backwards yes right so like i mean yeah you know that means yeah and so i'm thinking of it the same way you get this middle piece but without knowing your goals and without knowing how you're good at it we have a lot of decisions to make on policy and other things by engaging in the community are we better able to make those decisions informed by that feedback engagement possibly i mean i think you have to go and define what the goals are i mean you know or your outcome once you define your outcomes our responsibilities how are we going to use this stuff to get to those outcomes so can you give an example [Music] um [Music] but maybe something around while we're in the middle of this colder thing so i'm going to get a little cold today they oversee policy so okay so they always see policy this is the middle community and stuff what would be the goal to check this out with policies [Music] what's the overall outcome for the year right no maybe it might be something i think you could use anything like yeah you could use curriculum backwards curriculum design to design a unit to design a lesson what kind of area would you and adam said together well you're saying what are the outcomes based on policy and uh your review which is annually what happens is uh we need to be informed on from the community on these things that's one of the month to month in our case right the between meetings you need that engagement because focusing around the agenda and the agenda is going to be topics to come up for a vote do you want to be informed by the community on voting one or another or do we not care what they think about the items because we think that they are something that's going to help us achieve one of these outcomes throughout the year by the end of the year to help us either impact the school improvement plan or impact the budget or impact the policy that needs to be written about something as little as coping it's a month to month in constant engagement on a regular basis uh continue to collecting that feedback to be informed we'll make those votes so that it's not just like i said earlier it's just not our own personal student it's being informed by other people who don't families want individual places so there's two ideas there and i understand what jeff's saying because you know and in leadership business no one just sit there talking around in circles but it works out and things like that you need to know what you're aiming at like you said you need to know how you're gonna get there you need to know what your authority is to get there right like a middle manager has no authority to get there a committee i think this could be used to develop a template for everyday decisions school can just you know monthly school community decisions or overarching high higher goals so you know we got we can do the exercise we we have an issue tonight what's the goal of the school committee to know put the stuff on is their goal is there an outcome you know relative to what i'm presenting that you you would think of yeah or we're making policy decisions tonight you're ready to go so i guess that my question would be there is the outcome of a particular decision or is the outcome decision it could be that you develop a template so you know so they're gonna they're gonna take a vote tonight right so you know so they have an authority to make a vote they've uh they've included stakeholders we just saw two people get up here yeah right and the outcome is to uh to to amend to amend the uh to amend the the the entry plan that could be something that simple just that's the bill enough to take a bow use that use that what they believe community engagement is they use it use one of them at least right you don't have to use every single one all the time but if you come up with an idea of what you think community engagement is and you're always going back to that to make that decision then you're following the template so in this case they used you know you had two speakers so you're using one of those to be inclusive of all stations they've been collecting data they've been selected data how do i know that they're going to run emails from them and some communities right so they've been locked in they've been collecting data so they've been doing at least one of those things and maybe they don't have to do all four because it's very one very specific thing they have to do tonight they have to amend if they want [Music] yes i do then the output my outcome that i'm expecting the committee is to follow me and he might be expecting what if we discuss a different outcome so that's why is the outcome a decision that you have an issue of something that needs an outcome and you use this as a tool to get to get to it's one of the tools you have to get to that outcome yeah so maybe so the outcome tonight is reach a decision on the new descent tested state protocols that's that's what the goal is to know that's the outcome whether they all whether she feels one way he feels another they have to come to a decision they got to take a vote that's where they stop so they're going to take a hold using these parameters in the middle to reach that yeah that's correct that was and then community community engagement informed that out so right so that's a that's a much bigger kind of decision so and that they're going to validate so maybe instead of four of those there's ten of them and they can use one to or all of them depending on what decision they have to make what outcome they have to come to in this case maybe they only needed to get information from all the stakeholders in order to make that decision maybe they don't have to have a focus group maybe they don't have to do any other stuff maybe just that one thing's enough but you've defined what it is well then plus the committee might then even say we're not ready to make this decision yet because we need to consult the community more we need to do more of these things correctly i think less about the outcome being the decision we made more about how we got to making that decision in the first place well that's the middle part right so that's what you decide but you've got to you've got to work it backwards and you'll put whatever we want to do in order to use this stuff without the authority of what what you're in the saying correct it's hard and when you approach it this way it does i think when you just without putting in the context of why why are we doing this the process isn't stated yes correct well not explicitly yeah it's not stated within the context of what their job is right so i so then my i would say that that bullet focused on student achievement [Music] regarding um community engagement that would be one of the big options it has an outcome you'll give you all of these community engagement beliefs right because that's your development and we're going to use policy and what other other tools you have at hand as community members to get there but now you have a defined set that everybody uses to get to them yeah that's the news i think so that's the first chart can be pulled right out of the msc charting course materials about the school committee's role you know biggie's role is to blow allah use policy budgets they use community engagement as a key strategy to advance their their key authorities toward achieving student so you're always going to have generals in budget right you're always going to have two constants you know what you your authority is that's a constant and then this is constitution that's the way you define that okay so you come up with all of these strategies and then the variable is the problem you know the outcome and so all the time you can say okay we want to have this outcome and then what you have to do is work properly well not all you have to do [Music] now you have to define now you have a direction you say okay well you know if it's community engagement we use these and then we have to think about those in terms of all the things we can and can't do i'm not sure that those things the things we're going to use i think we're going to probably come [Music] the goal is to inform our decision making and to do so by engaging the community my goal is to have is to for the community engagement to inform our decision yeah and i don't think jeff's saying anything different than that yeah what i'm saying is i think about what i would pull out it's like specific to the goal working back the goal to me would be to have our being formed by the king we represent well yeah yeah of course that's why you did it i mean that's that's why you're doing that no no i'm not saying anything yeah i'm just saying you you did to what your authority is yeah so so you could almost start that state statement with within our authority as a school committee and then dive into it [Music] thinking within our authority as school committee members our goal is now as a school committee as a school committee yeah uh our goal is for community engagement strategy our goal is to use community in our decision [Music] is [Music] i think so what i was thinking is within our authority of the school committee we will engage the community in an effort to inform our decisions [Music] also actually i'm going to change it a little and you can fix it [Music] uh everywhere she's a mom who's going to be tissues of [Music] facebook okay so this is what we have so far within our authority of the school committee we will engage our community to inform decision-making that is focused on student achievement i like it yes you have there's budget policy uh higher and evaluated yeah i'm really with our authority in those but within our [Music] what school committee what authority does the school committee have to engage the community can direct everyone's body i think the community gave you the authority to represent them yeah because they voted you yeah go back to them to um well i like that word responsibility see a good place to put it because i don't want to leave a place now you can tell it will and you could say we have the responsibility to engage the community you know what you can put authority and responsibility because you can make an argument with authority responsibility [Music] our authority and responsibility as a school community we will engage our community to inform decision making that is focused on due to achievement to inform the decisions we make to improve student outcomes what do you think the goals of the school is [Music] achievement student earlier within our authority and responsibility as a school committee to focus on student achievement i'd like to inform this evening you know what julie i don't like to inform decision making that's my struggle would you rather know that i'm struggling to find out what i would replace it with we feel like it should be more like a two-way street than just an inform yeah like help with working together conjunction but it's hard to articulate you know it goes back to this bullet point in here the quote that larry said to the community but engaging the community engaging is two-way um informing is a lovely word under this we're gonna bullet those things right so that the details i think as long as you can look at it and that's the committee to find what it is [Music] but seriously because if they're guiding our decision both on us but they didn't they don't elect the committee to then guide them into the decision they let the community make the decision we're kind of turning around saying [Music] yeah so where would you start i like that you said the word input you could say to add input yeah yeah if there was like a something right yeah but what mike is saying is that the way it's stated we're saying simply we're going to take what you know whatever this scoop is if that's going to then decide when there may be other parameters at play like and there may be qriket that we're designing on or something the teachers are doing with their you know [Music] oh okay so do we have enough here as an overarching statement and then this comes under that exactly um and i i think maybe i'm just wondering is there anything else we want to have on that list um because then we have we have um just a reminder to me that this is a long-term process this is not a thing tonight it's not a goal this year i think we should be really committing ourselves to a longer process of further refining what we need what our strategies are how we use this how what our goals are over time okay so everywhere [Music] so i'm curious [Music] we'll get the senior director of community engagement we won't do this situation what might be different what would be the most effective way to handle it i tried to do three different scenarios one that was really focused on um sort of a of one issue [Music] one that was apparent that initiative really kind of fell under policy for the school committee which would have a different path than you know a parent who might be me um and one that was something that school kids face all the time where there's a decision that has to be made by the administration and the community doesn't like it but you can't say so you know how how do you handle that and sort of the community engagement trying to some of that is having like the trust of being able to build the trust of the community you know when when people are coming to this i mean like i've had people come to the school meeting and say why did that teacher get let go i like that teacher you know i'm talking about things as these kinds of examples i think are really useful and others that brought them up when we did the training trainings before the meetings sometimes if megan would say well you know so you know how do we handle this scene right you've asked us that sometimes and we talked about those things and so i'm wondering if we might consider something like instead of a full meaning to to just talk about this session [Music] and shorter and get on to have a conversation about this sort of a continuation of their training whether it's something like that as people would want to do a time beneficial or not because otherwise these will [Music] so i just think we don't have time to go through them tonight and sort of finish up the other part of the discussion i'd like to have i'm just gonna um talk a lot about the importance of the opening line following law um a little bit of there's a quote in there which is directly from the open meeting world the purpose health and leading law is to ensure transparency and deliberations on which public policy is based because the democratic process depends on the public having knowledge about the considerations underlying governmental action the open meeting law requires with some exceptions that meetings help public bodies be open to the public it also seeks to balance the public's interest in witnessing the deliberation of public officials with the government's need to manage its operations efficiently so if you think about the open meeting law can you think of some ways where you feel like the open meeting law helps that public engagement or ways where you feel it might hinder is definitely social media there's something that's out there and we know we can respond to it or like usual whatever it happens to be but if so many of us happen to do that and all we're invitation right but it's only just to engage with the community and give the right information so and this is somewhere you see administration for a thinking about how we as a committee handle social media because it is giving information if if someone can get on and say you know the correct information is in this document there's a link to it or it's in the minutes of this meeting here's a link to it that doesn't violate one of you doing that it doesn't violate your remaining health because you're just giving your check you're not venturing that extent so something or you know i want to help jeff and saying this is out there can we is there a way we can get the right information but but you are absolutely right that sometimes been trying to do your work ensuring being done in public means that you're not on social media sites that are very with each other right either that would that would hinder the public's agency experience with do you ever feel like that might slow down your work have open to develop the agenda it's tough because you can't add something last minute yeah that's kind of frustrating yeah it's frustrating however if you remember the public you had an opinion about what you might want to add to your agenda and you didn't get a chance because you didn't see it you know and you just started talking about it then somebody slowed down your work but you served the public but i know that some things it's like you know like if a club from the high school just needs approval i mean is the public gonna care or you know then we're gonna wait a whole other month or a whole other two weeks or whatever so i think some certain things it's like you know you're gonna follow the process just slows it down but yeah absolutely something big like oh we're gonna have a covent boat or something yeah like people want to know they want to be informed and they want to be here or have their voice heard we have just a couple minutes to look through the social media social medias or school community members that's in there and see if you have any any questions anything that resonates with you particularly or anything you have so it is a tool that's out there and if you're careful about how you use the tool so that you're informing the public it's a really good tool for you to use um it's when it becomes back and forth into liberation or even sometimes back and forth into liberation with the public which would be better served having it in a more but it's just not consistent it's not managed by us i'm wondering into your point of sharing factual information nothing will direct any of us from posting a link to a reading agenda saying that the school companies yeah 26 times over but there are others yeah sometimes i think people don't know where to go to find things like they know people knew there was a code dashboard and somebody's like where's that thing again and it's like it's on the district website well what's that it's like okay yeah that's right you probably never just like go over this visitor website because jeff sends an email every week so people read that yeah they don't have to go to the website to get it well if it's on the web school district website [Music] usually if i'm looking for something i think i think we took a little bit longer to get to that definition but i think it was a good discussion [Music] part of the discussion but it's not it doesn't exist in a vacuum that it exists within the work that you do and so the next next step here um you'll you'll type something up here separate from these notes if i can do that oh [Music] yeah and then um we'll at least have that as a touchstone yet when we think about this going forward i'm not expecting that we'll be changing our goals a lot this year but this should be we should start to reference these um commitments and actions um as we're making decisions we should start to become part [Music] is there anything else people want to see happen from this work tonight uh in the short term i think maybe more surveys um probably any more work sorry yeah no i'll do a survey i just think that's the best way to get community yeah especially when we have big decisions and it's like you know some people again i only know what my people think but a lot of those people think like me so it's it would be helpful you know especially [Music] that's the other thing i was thinking like one time a year people do like a forum where like there's no official business it's just all parents open comments and we try to at least make commitments to what we're gonna do to address issues on the spot so they're not gonna you know all right we'll add that for our agenda in six months it's like all right we're gonna do this we're gonna do this i mean once a year that sounds difficult yeah dorothy do you know any school committees to do their own surveys i haven't seen them both schools no i know either they may work with the administration to say here's the information plus we also have access [Music] dorothy thank you very much for your time tonight um we will see if we can make use of it in the coming months and we will work at seeing this sort of on the page a little bit and with the assumption the person that we look at will want to revise it and sort of massage it but we hopefully get some poor ideas but yeah hopefully [Music] all right so we're going ready to move back into the business portion of our meeting everybody okay ready yes okay all right so we start with uh well actually the that would go to the discussion with the desi letter but i'm wondering if um with the group's approval if we could move back if we could hear from jeff first and then update here okay so um so one thing that doesn't mean that i did send you is we've got some um i gave my recommendations on them most of them did not none of them actually required a spooky action um in light of [Music] nurses were not able to get their work done so i did answer those and i sent those to you if you have any questions i'll answer them but what i really want to get to is the photo this [Music] so the background here is because preston state has identified very few positive cases both statewide and district data also parallels about the state data and because intestines say excuse me an associated contact tracer across the state beyond in our districts have overwhelmed uh but the nurses in keeping them from doing many of the other duties they have administering events and just treating other students who come down during the day the department recommended a different testing protocol than we used today and so what i talk about next has been endorsed by the emergency and in fact they wrote the procedure so the new protocol that's recommended by the department and by our nurses replaces test instead contact tracing replaces it with symptomatic testing and um at home testing we currently remember uh some of you weren't there but when we did the original reentry 2021 plan there were three options that the state has for testing so we could opt into a tested stay synthetic testing and tool testing we can opt into any one of those or all we opted for tested studying symptomatic testing now fast forward to today or now in order to be eligible for the new testament hall program you had to have either signed up for symptomatic testing or pool testing originally and if you did you can now go back and sign up for one of those we had to you have to be part of that so and so the idea is that you have to have a laid approach you can't just do the stakeholder testing you have to do pool testing symptomatic testing and staying long test so um the the protocol that is recommended that you're going to vote on is symptomatic testing along with the at home at home testing so if you look at that document just briefly the first part of the entire program is symptomatic now we already do symptomatic testing but in our district currently you voted the symptomatic testing but right now symptomatic testing triggers tested state growth laws so the only reason you're voting that is because this systematic test does not trigger tests instead and it also does not trigger contact tracing so that's why it requires that we refocus an amendment [Music] we had some some flexibility and visibility so in this program uh you know until the student comes down they have any one of these symptoms they could be vaccinated or [Music] the nurse will uh contact them child the child's parents um and then encourage the and then do some education with them just go through some protocol the nursing home covers to contact the child's primary care physician and um and then informable artists students out of school close contact informed christie christie uh the department the department of education still requires so christy does that um every week she does it on a monthly basis i don't know how she goes um deadline on that is wednesday on thursday and for the principal of the school and then enter the results of cic which we currently do now and that generates an automatic email that's all part of the probability that has to stay in place and then the nurse will be following protocol a which is assumed to test a positive form called it if the test is negative then the number would just treat the child just like they would treat any other child that comes down with a headache stomachache the second part of the program that's a symptomatic and it's just very straightforward [Music] just like any other kid who comes down with any other illnesses so many times they'll get sent back to the classroom uh depending on how sick they are yeah all the others nursing homes but that's what always happens there's no there's really no difference but remember you know on this step test and study um on the contact tracing test we've done we've done 16 1700 we've only had 14 15 that have been positive from from confessing i know kind of reported a higher number and i think that's an important thing to know there's only 14 cases for actual positives from testing today right we've had altogether those are symbolic positives and so roughly the transmission in school has been you know one-fifth twenty percent [Music] just simply every other week you'll kind of have to pop into this um you don't need to be set you need to knock into this because we're not actually doing anything every other week of parents who decide to opt in will get a kit some test kit will have two tests in it um and this there is one change here we've been working on this and had a leadership this morning many of the principles the optics have been talking to are recommending a waffle wednesday test and not a one-day test the reason wednesday test isn't being they are positive they're only out of school wednesday thursday friday saturday and sunday so it's less less time for our school the state is our so the program's open to all staff and all students [Music] on friday same thing every other week [Music] are they even responsible is christian law of all of those things or is it just like you'll let us know if you're positive because it doesn't do anything except from log is positive all right so you take the question negative then from here and that's it well if you're positive you go through that protocol yeah the next part um so um the student test won't be sent out until later this month we'll hopefully get that program distributing to the students on the floor but again um we're still working out those difficult pieces i do have one thing that is not enjoyable we've just worked on it today i know you're gonna ask questions about it so you always want to know the logistical pieces so you know i just can't [Music] that's why is [Music] this is just basically it's probably public information right now this is a template that the conference has sent us it's an interactive template we just put all that in there so this is nothing we uh we made some edits to it just to introduce the program i'll tell you janelle is the first project and she's really knocked it out of the park um so janelle today we added a uh we thought parents would want to see at least a ten of the schedules this was sent to us from the department of ed these are all interactive links and so pan will go on they will be able to opt into the program this way into the home testing program and there's also a link i believe [Music] oh yeah right under the calendar you can see 12 and 19 uh testing programs at our school so in a lot of these lengths of repeats so if you miss it on one page you get it on another um and so you see there you get the iphone testing a google form they'll just go in and as soon as you log in this will be sent electronically tomorrow and then [Music] number three the symptomatic testing if you already opted into symptomatic testing you probably did you don't have to do anything if you did not um and you wanted to have and you want your child to be tested you want to give us permission to test them if they are sick or they have symptoms then you'll have to go in and you'll have to sign up with symptomatic testing what if a parent wants to remove the condition given previously um [Music] how do we know is there a way to check i guess you should be called [Music] it's just a google [Music] you may have thought okay i don't know if i sign up or not you will if your kid was tested but they did it you want to know if you're in the um and you go down and you watch it yeah if you sign up for one do you automatically get the other or you can sign up for both the show okay because there's a lot of money program so you can just sign up for the synthetic testing and then say i don't i don't want my i don't want to test at all don't sign up for it or you might say i want to test every week but i don't want you putting something in my kid's nose so it gives the path um flexibility so you should still get in the test you can't it's not like if you don't do this you can't do it yeah i appreciate that thank you you're hoping um the only days of dramatic testing then we will be participating in is the at-home testing correct and that would be once a week if you want to know yeah so you said those panel tests don't get reported to the school it's just hey you're wrong [Music] it's optional so if a kid a family doesn't choose to do it then what's the point they're not they keep going to school and if they're cinematic then they'll get noticed at some point otherwise it's just yeah and that's why it's voluntary i mean you know when your kid's sick you know again there's a responsibility you know you get sick you don't want to test them don't send them to school that's just irresponsible yeah i said one more question i was just thinking about the fact that if you test positive that you're asymptomatic it was one thing for vaccinated thanks for unvaccinated so if you're home and you do a test and you're asymptomatic what happened to them if you're positive then you have to follow the protocol you're going to record a positive test and then you you know you should get the more advancement yeah [Music] this test is a lot less sensitive than then i believe it's called the pci test but one of the things the physician said is that this is more likely to even though it's less sensitive it's more likely to pick up the involved once you have enough viruses that it will pick it up that's the thinking at least um i have two questions uh so the first one is in this letter that you guys wrote i think you said janelle wrote it it says um if your child has a potential contact in school they may continue to come to school do not have to quarantine does not address what happens if your child is in contact outside of school let's say a little sister has copic big brother doesn't have symptoms i think i think you wrote an email like that when you come to school there's no contact training so you come to school so even if you're well you stay home so there's no protocol if one kid has a coconut the other doesn't the one without hope the one in the household who still hasn't tested positive yet but they test positive can go to school it wasn't before there absolutely was if you were a close contact outside of school you automatically fell into protocol safe only you absolutely had to report it no you were in close contact outside of school no not if you noticed [Music] i believe that if you i thought it said in your brief entry plan i mean i won't go back and look but i thought if you were in close contact outside of school you fell into protocol we're not allowed to test and stay i'm not debating but you were supposed to quarantine you were not welcome in school now whether a parent did not report to the nurse but if you were close contact that was part of what the nurses had to do you were supposed to contact the nurse yeah i thought you were talking about the testing no you're definitely not welcome into testing state you are close contact outside school you not had cold and that was available out of school post process he could he was vaccinated but he couldn't if he was unvaccinated that would be this is that that is the current so now i'm asking what's the problem [Music] so that's how it was with the vaccinated before this like this wasn't this if you were vast native yeah and a sibling had called yeah yeah yes but if you're unvaccinated right which is this which i mean honda was this much of the population so like people like oh my god going to happen but if you think about it it's really been happening here we have close to 80 if you take out the preschoolers of vaccinated people and they've all been coming and going and we haven't seen our number soar or you know i mean it's been pretty it's been what it's been a long time but it's been it's just been that way for a while so i don't see a huge change because that's been the protocol unless you are unvaccinated in which case you know your health forever which berlin and but the two elementary schools i think the vaccine rate is still pretty low right yeah so i think in the elementary school that that was happening frequently which in high school quite honestly you're not really sharing germs with uh sibling versus like when you're you know five and seven whatever one kid gets the others gonna get it there was no policing of that there was no policing there was a lot of system absolutely yeah but it was the nurses were enforcing that they were saying you know and the same thing if one sibling in the school had let's say there's two kids at bes that other sibling wasn't coming to school that sibling wasn't even in testing state that simply was home so what's going to happen now there's two kids at bes one has symptoms and has clothed the other one has no symptoms are they welcome to come to school without being tested or anything they can just go to school yeah i mean you're a parent what would you do [Music] these are voluntary programs we've had very very low transmission rates in the school there's a point you know and we're trying to get i think you know the department of head um has said that the the rate of transmission inside school the actual positive cases inside the school versus in the community there's a there's an enormous difference between those two things so we're just saying the protocol is just saying that when you went to contact tracing if you're a child if you have a child that's it's positive and it's sick and you have another child that's in the house we don't have contact tracy you know as a parent you need to use your best judgment too you decide i want to send them to school but if there's no pause so what you said first i wanted to comment on that you're right we've had little transmission in school because of the protocols that the school has had in place the school i think because you don't think because of the protocols in school we've had low transmission well not necessarily i don't see what i don't see i mean we don't know we don't know we don't know either way we have no idea we don't have data i mean if we took away masks and all the protocols and went back to normal and that would travel i know i'm just saying we don't know i think because of some of the protocols in school that's why we have little school transmissions i don't have any data i'm just saying i mean like all right if one kid is sick the other kid stays home because the nurses have said in their letter the nurses said they think most cases are trans you know the transmission slows through the household if one kid gets it seems like the whole household gets it but what if they're asymptomatic and one kid has a therapy system and there's three kids they're gonna get sent to school anyway i mean there were many times before they wouldn't have a friend some people would have they just wouldn't have told correct but who was the same kid at the school the nurses would have known and it was a different situation yeah but i don't think we have no no what i'm saying is if one kid has it and they hate the matter and they don't get tested and there are two siblings but we need our kids [Music] and the sevens came to school [Music] so [Music] oh they did come to school because they're vaccinated well my point is if i had if we're all if we're all siblings here and i have and we all live in the same house but i'm asymptomatic you're all going to go to school because i have it i don't know i have it you might have it too [Music] we don't know that but then you spread it but then it's spread like you go to school siblings [Music] nurses can't help other kids that's the outcome we want is to improve the entire environment right so when we when we discuss this we eventually go out what we're trying to do we're trying to get back to some sense of normalcy to try to fix all the harm that's been done already so if a kid makes a fanatic and he's got food he's going to school his siblings is going to school the kid symptomatic he's going to school and his siblings are going to show science in class they don't have the nurse to get tested if they don't choose to opt in to get tested the nurse makes the decision which she's highly qualified to do as to whether or not in that class sometimes it's called fifth month we're simply voting on whether or not we believe the nurses protocol that they bring here is acceptable no that would happen before too if the kids agree symptomatic and many of these kids have an asymptomatic there's nothing before theory do you mean they wouldn't they would still even have to be on the protocol they're very symptomatic they would come to school and they they could have possibly spread right i didn't think that was the case but i don't know no it's talking about asymptomatics yeah oh yeah they're like julie like if your kids were at school you didn't know i don't know how how you found out but those are sports again we still had [Music] roughly spot over close to five days a week you lose roughly five hours of instruction i agree with that that's not happening that's a lot of time that you lose and it doesn't say to have a program in place that has that's been so inefficient i'm not against drop intestines day i agree with dropping tests day i don't necessarily think that it's um doing this i think it might be more harm than it's worth but i guess my concern is just um if we're not doing test and stay and people are gonna opt people have the freedom to opt out of symptomatic testing and they have the freedom to opt out of this at home testing um you know and now it's like okay if it's going through a household and then they're going to send the kids to school i guess my concern is you know well where are is the spread gonna increase well this double sim card there on the systematic piece even if they don't choose to test to synthetic doesn't if they're noticed gives the nurses more time to catch those we'll look at things or that teachers aren't having to do contact tracing gives them more time to pay attention to these things do you afford to go a parent who can't afford to stay home and have one kid that might have had other than three others that need to go to school very well there is no doubt and that's but that's not coping that's through the years i think you have to remember that this was written they wrote the message wrote that on the back of this document this protocol is what they wrote and and you know i trust their opinion and that they know how much time they spend during the week doing testing today they see the benefit of it but they also know that because they take so much time doing this what they can't all the other things they cannot do they also know how many how much time students are out of class because they're involved in the test and state protocol so you know this isn't saying making this up i don't go in there and do that so i trust with the nurses with the justices you know i'm telling you what they're putting forward how do we know if this new protocol is working are we relying on the state department to compile state level data to tell us that or do we have any local metrics to make decisions from i mean i don't even know who completely defined it except to say if the if the cases if the cases all of a sudden go through the move i mean that's certainly an indication so through the roof is very help defined right so how are you how how do you think about it i think we'll have to monitor i mean we're gonna have to have state data we'll see if where you know i think the data has to be collected so we're using to use state data to compare how we're doing to the state well yeah that's what we did now and that's how this happened we took we took state data and then we looked at our data we said okay this is we're not getting we're not getting many cases when you look at the percentage of tests we do versus how many positive effects we actually get up to the actionable and then we looked at the state data and said well we're roughly where the state is with this we have more public cases springing up than this data show well i guess we're gonna have this monitor and see if it's something that's you know you know with the reason among if it's if it's so high that we can't run the class classes anymore so i think it's a new protocol so we would need regular importance i think at upcoming school meetings right so we'll be able to see if the cases go up after this yeah but i think we also want some anecdotal information from the nurses as they are [Music] in many more sick children than we did we've had before or you know there could be a number of stories there um my understanding of this proposal is that there are three parts and i'm just going to reiterate these because i think i think we'll take one vote and encompasses these three parts one if we approve this proposal we will continue symphonic testing as described by the nurses here we will discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and three we will offer families the option to sign up for rapid antigen at home testing [Music] and receiving those kits at home [Music] pieces that come with this proposal okay are we ready to move on from here do you feel good i have one more question one more it's foreign i guess um i kind of feel that maybe this might need um maybe a little bit more community engagement i don't know how i don't know if just as you gauged how people feel about this i mean i'm sure some people are like yeah no big deal i think others are going to be like oh my god i'm not sending my kid to school this month there is going to be a group of people that feel that way so i guess i'm just wondering you know have you talked to anyone else i'll have the nurses talk to anybody do you have any viewers out on how people feel about this and what it makes sense to maybe gather some data we've planned on starting this program this week you don't want to vote on a real start program it's this this program is very highly subscribed to throughout the state by other school districts what we do plan to do is we're going to send an equity survey out and susan i had actually talked about this earlier we'll include some questions um and we can probably develop some more questions actually because um you know once we get a couple weeks of this going um we can you know maybe maybe you can help develop a couple more questions is not out here we're still developing it but maybe we can add a few more questions and just relative to this um and the equity piece that's really what it is i mean my child being treated treated unfairly because you've made this decision to build this program so it may be something very specific about switching from test and staying contact tracing to this i think that would be i think that would be a fair question i don't know how it would be it's actually quote uh what happened you don't you want to go back on it to go back i don't know it's a piece about community engagement you're saying this protocol has been written by the nurses there's protocols in there so yeah so the community over the weeks and months the years we've been doing this the community has been begging us to listen to our mobile health officials [Music] i would trust the nurses more than trust them i mean the community wants us to listen to global calculations and i would say i mean you know you know i i've been very upset about getting extra marriage [Music] at the time the nurses i don't think they can sustain the pace they're at right now i think these programs so i agree you know so we've got something in place that it seems to me does not a very effective effort that's slowing down of the goal of swarm down covered in our schools possibly you know in by nurses accounts so this freedom nurse has been back into school been endorsed by the united states has been endorsed by a department been endorsed by the massachusetts department of health so could it just blow up and you have to revisit and say okay this isn't working your vote isn't in strong i mean it's just it's a guiding it's a guiding vote to get the program going it's not like what are you going to you know the only district doing it i mean you made the decision we made the decision to opt into this already before the vote let me tell you that yes we did that so we could get in line because the department said if you don't then you then you're down here and what a smaller district so i'm always conscious of if we don't get in right away you know they're not gonna prioritize a thousand kid district over four thousand businesses so i always think okay we're gonna jump on this and then if somebody tells me not to do it later okay it's easy to pull it back but at least we're in the queue i want to just reiterate uh two things here one is the the question that i i'm hearing tim reagan's the answer to megan's question how do people feel about this do we know the answer is not really we know that they care about what the nurses recommend but we don't know how they feel about this um so i would i would i guess ask also where's the parent education piece on this because when i read this letter it doesn't share the information that's in your proposal which gives the rationale for why test and stay contact tracing [Music] if i were a parent in the district right now and i were not following this conversation with jessie's you know and i got this i'd be like wait what [Music] want us to put this on this susan has a fantastic point i think your first line needs to be based on the evidence we have from our current test and state program and state data in school spread is virtually non-visited i mean a message like that at the top i think somebody's perfectly right well this is just right here with the third education piece and definitely give the link to that bestie thing because i think a lot of people it means [Music] and contact tracy we put a lot of energy into this parents we're trying to figure out all the protocol a b c d and all of a sudden we're doing a mega shift here and i feel like you've got to bring people along with you you've got to show them why this is warranted and you know why you're making this change or else you're going to draw or run into the phone calls so i would uh i want to just ask again are we ready to move on to the other topic and then we'll take votes yes okay so the the remaining piece is about um sending a letter to jesse requesting evidence of mask and vaccine after the syria i don't know if you want to speak to this sure so i circulated a letter to everyone earlier today that essentially isn't on what we discussed at our last meeting where we will be coming out of today's meeting uh proposing this passage to sign the letter today requesting evidence related to items first being evidence that masking students prevents the transmission of cobia 19 in schools seven being achieving an 80 vaccination rate preventing the transmission of copenhagen schools this is all related to deci's continued continuance of the nascent requirement the end of this letter it does state that on march 8th the school committee will be reviewing its massive requirement as we go through the last meeting therefore we request to provide this evidence by february 25th so that our committee can interview and consider it in time for our meeting on march 8th questions comments just to see if you're clear what this is proposing and why [Music] um given that we know that the sandwich school committee kate has requested this information four times and not been successful getting any informative response from desi do you expect anything different from our letter not necessarily okay um [Music] um can you describe since you initiated this um can you describe what your motivation is behind the letter like what do you want to accomplish from this i think speaking to what we talked about earlier we've come to being proactive we know that destiny is going to make some kind of decision about extending fasting beyond february 28th in advance of february 28th and being prepared to handle that new dressing recommendation or requirement at that point would be good to see if we can get any information we need to appropriately discuss their next decision at that time so my goal was to get our hands on any information they might have demonstrating that either of these two mitigation strategies are actually effective at preventing the transmission of both eventually i agree to see india that educates that from interested um [Music] the i think that jeff has said to me once you know that really the desi's um information supporting that i think you called it a logic trail jeff follow their logic trailer the department of ed relies on the mass department of health cbc team of medical advisors they reference those groups often and they have links that take you to the cdc page in fact there is a destiny page that has featured links that take you out to um cbc and another page which you can't read because my printer and if you if you follow the links you can find reports and studies out there you have to do the work it's not like this is summarizing their two years of information and sources for us nicely but if you follow the links you can find i followed online today and took me to 22 studies that were cited in some other decisions um at the cdc page it takes you out in about um so are you looking for the department to give you something short and sweet uh here or are we are are you do you think the committee ought to be doing legwork to go follow their logic trailers their requirements footnote evidence that proves the point that either of these two strategies are affecting these two specific and so if they don't come back with that information which seems likely what would you think should happen then we are meeting on march 8th now we're going to discuss our mass department okay so we just have to decide what are we thinking about so whether we have the jessie's different or whether they respond or not we're still gonna discuss it i think you know i think you should be very careful about adding two variables to this equation you break out the equations we're talking about this program we don't know the effects of it i mean we know what the investors grow we know all of that when we talk about how we're going to monitor this we don't have you know we all have a definite way to do it really in terms of like you know what really knows is going to work or not so if and i think it's going to need some time to do that i definitely think it's worth trying he's done it now so i i think it's worth trying but if you now start to think about you know ultimately what you want to get what you're trying to get at is how we're going to get these massive operators right so and dusty already has you know there is an offering for that it's the 80 right now and maybe that comes down and so i don't know what your timeline is maybe you had to have something but given the amount of questions on this committee just on this program and i agree that it's a big show i would think anything now that introduces getting rid of the mask i won't think it's appropriate till we know where this is i mean if we're doing okay with this i would say okay then the next step is thinking about the mass because you know even if they do respond you know masking with mechanical devices i think you could argue that my kid wears it down down here it doesn't work but you know yeah okay but they can be made to work you know because they in the cabinet so they can be made to filter things out so correct yeah yeah so there's you know i mean you know i think the big question is maybe around why 80 percent versus herd immunity which is 60 percent why where they seems a lot more arbitrary than what the mass will work work this match works like maybe better than that mass so i think again i think we're we'll end up in a place where we had too many variables to this equation we don't know how this program is going to work i think it's worth trying i think the benefits may operate the risks but i don't know that and given the amount of questions that you guys have all legitimate questions five times between not getting this underway if if it goes okay then you know that's the next step how do we now move to them well the only challenge there is that the response will be so delayed so it's best i would say [Music] you know they're going to say okay we did this we did this pointing to the the the destiny website that has all of all of that including some of the things you just handed out so but i would just you know just caution that we don't want to have a lot of really a lot of balls of the year i would assume too that the department is thinking that same way they've just initiated this program and they're they're probably going to see how what's the trend now given this new program and that's going to inform their thinking about whether they're ready to tackle masks so probably they're pacing the same way i do hear a lot like you know rumblings from other districts and superintendents about the next piece so it's not like and i don't know what the school can do but i'm guessing it's probably reflected in what the school committees think but i would think that like the best course of action right now gives me concerns about this and it's not like i don't have anything i'm not concerned about the test and staying i mean i think as a committee there is some questions about it and certainly you know safety i have to think about that i want to make sure rewards it's not something we go into when it ends up being worse but i would say adding two variables is probably not prudent at this point because that's really your goal to get the mass off right six weeks in six weeks we have another attempt to discuss our math requirement six weeks from now yeah probably continue to come down i have every expectation that case scouts are going to continue to come down not only within our schools but also with our community yeah so six weeks from now we're going to be in a different place than we are today that we were six weeks ago and so i think six weeks for the new product i'll go into place and see how that falls given my appropriate time as we're probably going to do but reviewing the mass requirements of the march i will [Music] anyway you're gonna wait six weeks you can just have a discussion about it in six weeks without sending it together you know it down and i don't agree with that logic it looks like we're going in that direction which makes again complicated to know if this is actually working the cases are really going down um and you know if they're going down and we're doing good with this program i don't really care why it's better if they're coming down so man it's just my two cents i think it's reasonable it's it's a reasonable argument to make when it comes to but what you just said many people kind of discuss that when it goes on forward decided to do anything the idea of not sending the letter but still going to review our mass policy on march 8 it's a reasonable decision which we already voted on last meeting yeah so i mean i um i don't think there's harm in sending the water unless you unless jeff you're saying you think they'll take the letter and be like oh we're gonna deliver a home test or something but i don't know i don't think they're being malicious [Music] so there are we don't even need to wait until march 8th we know what the data is now we know we'll decide that i mean i'm almost emotionally removed right now and if we could if you want to until march 8th then wait for margie but um i'm not concerned i'm concerned about the other side of the equation is the learning we know the data around learning impacts especially young kids can you tell us anything about diabetes in terms of the learning yeah i mean how do you teach a kid to learn with facebook so we have [Music] i think last meeting and let me just interrupt for a second because our task isn't to talk about masks tonight no i'm referring to his letter but so that's incoming on march 8th no in regard to whether or not we sent a letter to get data that's my question okay it sounds like we're talking about the masks yeah so i think i think what he's saying is we want to do we want the letter out there to get the information rather than just jumping the shark and saying do we want to put the mask thing on the table we're trying to go through all of the avenues to get the information to give the time for this program to happen yeah what i want to know is we're asking for data on what the masks do as far as coping deals but what data do we have when i look at what the masks do to mental health to learning to the 17 of our kids in our districts who are economically disadvantaged and don't have the ability to get extra help the over the last few years i saw last meeting that the english learning students has grown 625 over the last few years how do you learn a foreign language with a mask covering your face covering the interface are you asking for more board items on this level uh if we need to yeah okay so you would need to maybe make that proposal or maybe there's general consensus do we have any information on that do we do this no just yeah i know you're going to be looking at that transition here it's all research getting on the research base yeah i mean i've seen there's plenty of articles out there plenty of research i mean and we know all that in terms of you know younger kids like women [Music] watching teachers model you know you need to certainly helps if you can see right now and also have socialization skills so there's all of that data um the assignment did you get any speech hang on that just put it aside for a second um i'm assuming adam that you did not include requesting that kind of information social emotional kinds of information um because you were looking for the information that they used to um to change this mass mandate to its current form and that doesn't include that kind of data is that correct looking for the information that you use to put the requirements that's a different set of data than uh maybe we would be requesting from the department that might be for instance you might request that information from the local board of health or from the from msc or some other sources that we can't identify probably tonight i think asking for the information behind this decision in the first place i mean it should include that i would imagine if i put this in place their response would be well there's no there's no impact otherwise why are they existing or they think the benefits of masking outweigh the costs and if they do that are you proposing anything here my first time i propose to remove the mask right now no no with no that's in the letter right so are you saying to modify this reference on the letter yes it says on march 8 the committee will be reviewing its mass requirement i'm suggesting we change out the federation i can't understand whether you're modifying this letter to something easy or whether you're proposing some different actions well there are no motions on the floor right this moment at all so but in a minute you'll have to decide what motion is pertinent to the motion on the floor which will be the desi letter first and i mean the protocol that jeff was describing to them jesse leonard and then if you want to propose like adam did it the last time to put something on an agenda [Music] all right i think we are ready for a vote um first with a couple of small business items here um the first is that i'm appointing adam wilbur to the negotiation subcommittee in the fall i appointed him as an alternate uh and right now he is being um it's turns out that that's really not the best way to do the negotiation community there's steady crew in there who might step in and step out [Music] okay do we want to solicit a third person take his place uh you should have to if you don't the cellar doesn't show anymore [Music] the union is asking who is coming to the table i mean i can say i can say there'll be three of us without naming people all right so you want to think about this february okay and we have uh we have a motion to approve the creation of the green team club by um [Music] okay now um do we have a motion to approve the super super men's and hayes recommendation um that includes these three pieces continue symptomatic testing as described in the proposal discontinue contact tracing and test and stay and offer desi's rapid antigen at home testing program option to families one amendment is changing monday to wednesday oh and the number two what was that and then the other amendment did the big thing long ago that's just a letter if that's not really that's just a communication on your part what do you mean monday to wednesday at home oh it would be blessed yeah um so is there a motion to accept a proposal of those three components as stated [Music] second adam and discussion okay all in favor of approving superintendent's recommendation to move to those three elements in the testing protocol [Music] and we will move to this protocol um as described here and jeff will manage the communications thank you for your thoughtful consideration of all the components and for i know that the parent input has been that you've heard that and also that's in your thinking as well so i appreciate your uh and so the last item then is to uh is there a motion to authorize the district to send an official letter to commissioner riley requesting evidence to be provided by february 25th 2022 to demonstrate asking students and are achieving an 80 vaccine threshold that's the transmission of 19.

is that correct yes um is there a second for that motion [Music] any discussion ready to vote let me go around that picture here everybody julie i'm going to say um yes i'm going to move the discussion to february 8th i didn't yeah okay adam yes megan no mike yes glory yes and i am i know um motion carries um i do need to look at the agenda for march 8th because i know we have a lot of budget uh conversation and a few other items already on your agenda so i'm not exactly sure how the time goes if the meeting needs to go wrong because of the being such a central piece in february are we going to go long on that meeting you're saying odds yeah okay all right um so i just want to be clear here committee review um so the topic that you're saying is being moved to february 8th is and so um i guess i want to be clear on the agenda what we're actually doing what does it say margie well all we have is adam's language is review the mass candidate so do you want to keep that or are you going to change that to your group no i mean i can the language of head is not exactly clear what it is the committee will be doing well what's the task what's our task what and pulling out everything that says something about masks i mean you can write down what you like and simply saying review the mask requiring whether it's still needed in our district so we're not going to take a vote on february we're just going to discuss it i think it could become a little discussion i mean the vote would be two parts against [Music] the mask requirement policy and vote whether to keep or change it to make it awesome this sounds like a different motion and survey results in two weeks good luck the is uh i think the intent of that was to have both on whether to keep the requirement whether to keep jesse's requirement in place or whether to follow jesse's mandate sure because their mandate will still be in place on february 28th right yeah i mean i i guess my question is would the district have to propose this to us how are we just saying okay we're designing like wouldn't generalize yeah but usually jeff makes uh i mean reactions as well but our re-entry plans as jeff brought this new dusty thing and conversation at that point was full committee can change policy whenever however it likes bible so i think that's what we're talking about here so you're saying now that you what you want on february 8th what you're proposing here is a discussion to review to ask mass requirement to vote whether to keep it as is or change it sure i mean we heard parents speak tonight about how passionately they want this to be going i mean that's our engagement right there [Music] is to review the mass requirement on february 8th and to vote on whether to keep it or change it i think that's well understandable [Music] so um [Music] any further discussion so just just can i just ask a question so let's say we come to february 8 and things look horrible we can then decide at that point that we might want to move it up a little bit later like we're not committed we're not committing to it at all or nothing on february 8th or nothing we're committing to discussing the mass requirements and whether to keep them or not right but what i'm saying is during that you can also can you make sure you extend it it was to keep or change changes to the defined changes in the day to change the mass candidates as it says whether to keep it as it is the district on board with us or is this just it seems like the school committee right now is kind of operating in the bathroom again i'm just um [Music] you've given the school district the authority to follow the dds which which is what was yourself in effect here what you want to say is that [Music] all right that's what you're but i guess i'm asking can we even come out and say hey we want to review the mass policy or does the district have to say we want you to review as a discussion point here too we're going to hit a [Music] a meeting problem because we know that the budget is already going to take a major part part of february and uh [Music] so we're we're talking about a meeting that is probably really realistically not fatal in one one sit unless you want to cast a separate meeting can't we just can we just have a meeting just for the basketball finally mm-hmm uh i think that is going to be if you want in february would be the third really all right and it would have to be february first vacationist maybe next week yeah it would be next week or the last week in february oh uh that's march 1st i mean after listening to the parents who spoke tonight i think we all wanted them to do it well there's two parents who spoke tonight they both had a complete opposite opinion so one wanted it and one just stormed out of here against yeah i took most of hers around the nurses [Music] whether or not we would want to consider a pulling meeting on february 1st to discuss the same topic to just do masks on february 1st which is a week from now so okay all right you want to change that mic to february 1st is that better for everybody so we have a meeting february 8th and 15th 15th is the budget through the budget okay yes that's the public and then the 22nd is the school break and then the following week would be march 1st so that would mean we have meanings straight for the next three tuesdays so we essentially have three options either create a new one february first grade meeting on march 1st or particularly march 8th as the day can be discussed from the students and trying to propose a list for february 1st if that works for everybody i'm well some of the questions is february 15th i'm going into oh it's a budget meeting nevermind a public budget here i just was trying to find the agenda but then i saw their budget i um during let's see we have that's the motion adam are you seconding this motion to have this meeting on february first yes um discussions so my discussion point is i have no idea what the race is to this all of a sudden it feels sloppy to me it doesn't feel thoughtful it feels um chaotic and unplanned for such an important topic i i would not be able to support it i agree and i think we're talking about opening up ourselves to potential litigation and by going against jesse um [Music] no i just think it's rushed and if if we are gonna if the vote does pass i think jeff needs to make sure he makes note of it in this newsletter because i think you're gonna get a lot of people that are here is contagious and it's not going anywhere and it's not the virus is lying it's speedy right um [Music] um i've watched two kids this past weekend up as i have the best the time has come the landscape is different and we have to kind of start making decisions for the health of the health of these kids breathing like this oh you think that's the asthma attacker for the mask no i think it's dry hair cold air outside you add a mask on top of that um neighbor breathing so is this your argument for why triggering first is important i can see why it's rushed you know i think this is a very hot topic and i think community members will want to voice their opinion on this um such a fun journey of two meetings scheduled for february because this is such can we move any of that stuff all budget stuff has to be eight and fifty yeah that's the only thing on that budget is nothing well i don't believe so no it's a matter of fact the town has yeah i agree i think that i think that we should hear what people have to say i'd love to do a survey before we vote on this um [Music] as it is yeah i agree with susan i think it it's just um a little hard not yet [Music] this is a lot of years i feel like it might be much better overseas like in march like hopefully like to your point cases are down like we're going to say yeah we'll show up next week you know personally i don't think a week or three weeks or a month [Music] the motion is to uh review the mask requirement on the district's mass requirement on february 1st an added meeting to the school committee and to vote on whether to keep the mass environment place for the changes adam mike's amount motion seconded um can you go around julie i'm gonna vote yes yes second no right yes glory yes [Music] that's the only thing called a young age [Music] uh the role i mean uh the prestigious republic on it and i know when i came in to speak to school committee i was unaware so quick let me know if it's not a back and forth conversation yeah just uh okay i think that's well everything all right you gotta mention [Music] um so when i looked at it i thought i really want to address all that stuff issue to the life and i said to them i said to the principals and to the nurses um and to the nurses that i would just like professor will decide on some of those issues some of the spacing issues some of them have more cases than others some have watches where they can't move kids a little further apart but i wasn't specific enough so well also as you know in in a nurse's memo there were things on there about silent eating which i wasn't referring to so when i said that to the principals that was one of the things that one of them decided to um you know one of the teachers it wasn't conveyed to them that [Music] that what i was really talking about was anything in that nurse's memo that had to do with distance if they had space they want alienated kids then it would be fine so the piece about the eating in silence was in the middle i just forgot to tell them not that [Music] um thank [Music] over you

when we look at our grade 8 through 12 or 12 plus because remember we're educating students up to some students up through their up till their 22nd birthday we're looking at 258 students so that's about 44 of our population is falling into that 14 to 22 age range and i'm gonna go back to these numbers a little later in the presentation if we break it down a little more and we look at the primary disabilities the prevalence of those different disabilities you can see how they break out here the largest or the the most students we have that are identified under a disability are falling under learning disabilities keep in mind learning disabilities that includes that group that is identified under dyslexia it includes kids that are identified on dysgraphia under discalcula and those are disabilities that lie in the reading writing and math area i want to make sure i did it in the right order it's how i how i said them the ohi or other health impaired in the aqua there those students under that classification typically are identified as students with attention deficit or attention hyperactivity disorder it can also be our students that are identified under anxiety and or depression sometimes you will find that students with anxiety and depression are identified under what we call our emotional disturbance classification that's in the orange at 80 percent we in the past most of our students would fall under that classification but over time we've really teased out and distinguished the difference between emotional disturbance and students that are impacted by mental mental illness such as depression or anxiety um through ohi um emotional disturbance um students who identified under that tend to be more students that are more behaviorally impacted and um exhibit also exhibit those behaviors over a period of time into a marked degree oftentimes you'll see the diagnosis of oppositional defiance disorder and that is a diagnosis that a student would qualify for special education services possibly under emotional disturbance autism spectrum disorders make up about 15 percent of it in our population and again i'm going to emphasize spectrum disorders because students that are impacted by autism can vary in how it impacts them we can have students that are very um bright and um and intelligent and uh pick up on instruction very quickly and and are able to excel in the area of the academics but then they have those deficits in the areas of social skills and pragmatic skills um and they have difficulty maneuvering through the social realms and the social environments at the other end of the spectrum we can have students that are highly impacted by their autism in many cases they will have cognitive deficits they'll have delayed language delayed development in their they might have occupational fine motor motor skills delays as well and and need the services of an ot or a pt they can also have a very a variety of behavior behaviors that they exhibit or that they that becomes very impactful on their ability to access instruction um intellectual disabilities are ours typically has falling around four percent of our population um these students show can show from mild to severe cognitive deficits and they oft and they also um show deficits in the areas of adapters life skills they need to be taught explicitly those life skills and those functional skills that many of us conduct on a daily basis just in our daily living the last piece of this pie that we're looking at here in the maroon is at eight percent is our students that that fall other on other other categories under other categories so those categories might be multiple disabilities hearing impairment visual impairment developmentally delayed or traumatic brain injury and there are others when we look at the prevalence over time you can see how each one of them how it change has changed over time within our district um when i look over at the far right hand side and i'm looking at that that you can notice the very difference in the growth of our students under learning disabilities and that goes back to what i was saying earlier about some of the causes and how it's impacting us um you can also see as you look at the um the green bar that's the that's covering our students identified under ohi other health impaired and again we're starting to see that uptick in that area as well as autism in the red when we compare our prevalence to the state prevalence or the state average our bars are in red here and you can see the state in yellow we can see that in across the state the prevalence rate for learning disabilities speech and language impairment and let me just look real quick are typically um more prevalent in other districts across connecticut in our district we find that we are um we have a higher prevalence of students impacted by autism emotional disturbance intellectual disabilities and and ohi ohio and so you know i i wanted to delve a little deeper into that because when you're looking at those four disabilities you're really looking at some very um students that are very impacted by their by their disabilities okay all right so if we take a look at our students with autism students that are identified under emotional disturbance intellectual disabilities and multiple disabilities we're looking at approximately 170 students out of that 500 plus number which is about 29 of our population students that are impacted by these disabilities usually require intensive supports now i'm not saying that all students under autism require intensive supports but there's a high chance that many of them are needing more intense supports those supports could look like many of the things i have listed here they may require there is a safety issue they may require ex very explicit discreet instruction some of that instruction may involve daily living skills such as toileting feeding dressing some students especially when we look at students with multiple disabilities many times there's a mobility um disability in there that they need help with transitioning from place to place many of our students require breaks such as movement breaks or sensory breaks there are communication needs which we then often incorporate assistive technology to help the students be able to share what their wants and needs are and we do a lot of following on data collection um to be able to address those behavioral needs of this of students impacted by some of these disabilities oftentimes you'll find that um there's the need to really reduce the adult to student ratio in order to address the needs the intensive needs of these students and in many cases you might find that the student requires a one-to-one and so we we do incorporate um many ias or instructional assistants in order to support these students and help to give them access to various settings okay looking at a quarter of our students having these intense needs we've developed over time several in-district programs to meet the needs of these students so there are two two types of programs i categorize them as two types of programs in our district we have our intensive need programs and we have our therapeutic programs um we went over these in um in detail in our showcase last year um for most of you um and so just to briefly overview them we have our darcy our highland and our god programs that address mostly students that are on the autism spectrum that have a much more severe needs um and may service other students within those programs too but those are fairly self-contained programs and so they're on the far left of that continuum of services where you have a smaller adult ratio and you'll be able to fi to provide very specialized instruction i forgot i should have included the cheshire high school life skills program as well that's our our program that um works with our students that may fall into those four categories of autism spectrum disorders or multiple disabilities and intellectual disabilities on the right hand side we have our therapeutic programs these are our programs that typically address the emotional needs of our students in district or our behavioral needs of students and district not too long ago we opened up our doolittle bridges and our dodd bridges programs to address the needs of our students that are impacted by anxiety and depression and or trauma and then you also have our self-contained program at the high school the rise program and the new start program i did include hummuston alternative education program on here while it's not a special ed program it's an extension of the high school and in some cases we have found that our students that are dealing with a lot of stress or a lot of anxiety do flourish and and require a smaller setting as the hummus and alternative program can provide because we've been able to have these programs in district and we've had the um resources to run these programs the way they should be run and with the supports that they need in order to meet the needs of these students we've been able to really keep our out of district placements down it was back in i think it was 1718 that we started to introduce our bridges programs the therapeutic programs for kids with anxiety and depression um and so you can see our numbers had gone up but then as we began to develop the program we're able to pull students back into the district and we'll be able to keep those students that were coming up and through the um process being identified as students needing those types of supports we were able to keep them in district as well so we've really been able to reduce our numbers um in out-of-district placements when i looked at the numbers of the students that are in out of district placements over half of those students are falling under our autism spectrum disorders and or emotional disturbance and they require a much higher level of support than we were able to provide within district okay so that's kind of a picture of what we have in district what our population looks like and um how and in some of the supports that we've been able to use and be very successful at providing programming for students with disabilities um i don't know if some of you um might recall but last summer um there was a state statute that was changed that required districts to now keep our students that are eligible for transition um transition planning through the age of when uh through the age of 21 and exiting them at age 22.

when you put that together you're looking at anywhere from 40 to 50 students that are impacted by this just in this school year that are impacted by this transition mandate so what does that really mean you know you hear the word transition what does that really mean well um the state has identified um 16 transition standards those standards are really focused on ensuring that our students with disabilities have the skills once they leave us to either to to live their adult lives to ensure that those that are a able to be employed will be able to find a job and hold a job and and be successful those that are are able to go on to college or college or university will have the skills to maintain and remain in colleges and universities and not fall into um uh into leaving early and not finishing their degrees and then those students that may go on to continue to need supports through state agencies or through various different settings such as a home for student for p adults with disabilities they their need to learn those independent skills skills such as budgeting skills such as how to um dress appropriately how to do laundry how to make a sandwich how to um take care of themselves to the best the most extent possible for them so you can see some of these standards focus on self-advocacy and independence recognizing strengths recognizing when there are challenges and what supports are out there to help and um also looking at demonstrating appropriate social skills and social interactions being able to access health resources health care resources and community resources and um and also technology so the state identified these standards and this is what we're these are the goals what we're looking at for our students to be able to do once they leave us excuse me okay so what are transition services so transition services are provided through the development of goals and objectives for a student's iep students are provided service hours of direct instruction and that instruction takes place in three two or three areas it takes place in training and education it can take in it takes place in employment and in some cases for some students with um cognitive deficits and or adaptive skills that are delayed they require independent living skills in order to determine the needs of our students we employ a result-orientated oriented process okay so this chart as busy as it is i'm going to simplify it for you but this is basically what looking at transitioning services the process that we go through as we begin to look at a student so just make it simple a little simple first thing that we do is we employ assessments we identify and we um uh use these assessments to identify students strengths to identify a student's area that needs to grow and then we take those assessments and then we determine what goals and objectives we're going to incorporate into the students iep or the students plan the students program we look at the three areas that we want to address that career employment area that post-secondary education or training area and then for some students the independent living area so we develop the goals and objectives and then over the course of of time we addre we explicitly teach them and we monitor them we monitor for progress there um this also helps us to identify other areas that we incorporate within the students program such as there might be some job shadowing or some employment opportunities or some job training um there and that's where we move to the community and so our students will go into the community with supports and will explicitly be taught some of those skills that are needed in order to be successful once they move to that next stage in their life and we continuously this is kind of we continuously employ this process you know we might do this at a younger age and then as the student gets closer to finishing up at the high school we might again go through the process of assessing and determining those goals and objectives and we're our next um direction that we're going in so it's a very um result oriented process so i'm bringing you back to this slide again because i want to go back to how that mandate impacts us in that process so out of our 582 students with ieps we are looking at approximately 258 students that will go through some piece of that process of looking at what their strengths and weaknesses are what we need to work on in order to make them successful in their if they decide they're going on to a college or university or if they're going straight into the work world or if it's a student with mark with more needs that is going to be educated up till their 22nd birthday and will need far more explicit instruction in employment skills social skills and um in the daily living skills any questions so far looks pretty quiet okay oh see sam go ahead yeah robin can you this kind of goes back to somewhere at the beginning what is the typical case load per sped or if you can delineate versus resource room question versus pull out too okay all right so you've got a couple things in that question so i'm going to make sure i answer all of it so when we talk about typical caseloads okay when we're looking at students that are in self-contained classroom those caseloads we tend to keep them smaller because as i said before they have they require a lot more supports they have more intense needs and this teacher-to-student ratio is smaller so when we're talking about self-contained classrooms um we try to in our autism program we tried to keep it around eight um because once you put eight adults in there eight students in there and those students oftentimes require instruction to take place within a cubby so that they are fewer distractions it doesn't leave you a whole lot of room in that room um and so we do try to keep those ten to be on the smaller side um as uh also as you move up into your transition programs again we want to try and keep those numbers down because of the needs of the students um for a resource room teacher that can vary on school it can vary on the level um we with the resource room teacher they can provide services as you stated in the general ed classroom where they're pushing in those services or they can they can also provide them where they're pulling students out too small group and a more more restrictive setting less distractions and provide more explicit specialized instruction so the those case loads in looking at those right now um we're averaging at the elementary level we're averaging around 15.

um [Music] um that's that's a point again so if you want to entertain a motion to change the march 8th session to february [Music] and then talk about as much suggested an earlier day trippy masking requirement or the same day with the mastering requirement i do think that the information we learned from the sandwich school commitment in particular and some others saying that they sent similar letters and received a lackluster response for lack of better terms could change the necessity for the rationale for sending this letter in the first place because i don't expect we're going to get an answer that is different from what those other schools okay so um so we will if we have a motion and a second we'll go ahead and vote on whether to send this letter correct all right the flutter as is as is okay i'm gonna go back all right so i understand that right okay so are we ready to vote this letter s is okay let's just go around make sure i've never been julian do not send as is yes adam now okay so the letter does not go out now um mike are you looking to make a proposal for um a meeting date first i would like to move our discussion agenda again on the discussion on the masks i'd also like to have any information you can have on how masks impact teaching and learning from america from heading onto that can we maybe we need to break those two things apart let's deal with the date first move discussion of masks from march 8 2022 to february 8.

prior to that the way the mandate was um interpreted was that once the child turned 21 we then exit them from the program so since last year we are seeing that because of the change we are keeping our students longer now comes this summer a new mandate comes out effective this july we now are required to provide transition programming for students no later than their 14th birthday so if you have a child who has an iep and um require it um all students that have an iep prior to turning 14 during that year you're reviewing their iep you must address transition needs so we're now looking at a a group of students from 14 to 22 to they turn 22 that we're providing these transition services for when i looked at the numbers of eighth grade students you're looking at anywhere from 35 to 40 students that are identified with ieps at that grade level at some point during that school year they're going to they're probably most likely going to turn 14 some will turn 14 in seventh grade some will turn 14 just as they enter ninth grade but a majority of them are going to fall into their eighth grade year um so you're looking at 35 to 40 students and then for our transition programs we have 10 students that are currently in our transition programs that will be supporting up to the age of when they turn 22.

so it it runs somewhere some case loads are as high as 19 and some are a little lower than 15 but we're averaging around 15. our case loads at the middle school middle school each middle school team has a special education teacher on the team as well and so those case loads are running somewhere around 10 to 12. also keep in mind that we do utilize our special education teachers to help support at tier 3 of srbi so at the elementary level at the middle school level you might find that a special education teacher is pulling in a student who has been pulled into the srbi process because they are showing that they have some deficit areas that need to be addressed and they may require special education down the road once the srbi process is completed and so many times at tier three we utilize our special education teachers to also support those students too that was going to be my next follow-up question yeah yeah the secondary level case loads are much higher and it is much more difficult at the secondary level because students are not pulled within a team students are all off in following their own schedules through their own choices of coursework and so up there we're averaging around 16.

when you put that together you're looking at anywhere from 40 to 50 students that are impacted by this just in this school year that are impacted by this transition mandate so what does that really mean you know you hear the word transition what does that really mean well um the state has identified um 16 transition standards those standards are really focused on ensuring that our students with disabilities have the skills once they leave us to either to to live their adult lives to ensure that those that are a able to be employed will be able to find a job and hold a job and and be successful those that are are able to go on to college or college or university will have the skills to maintain and remain in colleges and universities and not fall into um uh into leaving early and not finishing their degrees and then those students that may go on to continue to need supports through state agencies or through various different settings such as a home for student for p adults with disabilities they their need to learn those independent skills skills such as budgeting skills such as how to um dress appropriately how to do laundry how to make a sandwich how to um take care of themselves to the best the most extent possible for them so you can see some of these standards focus on self-advocacy and independence recognizing strengths recognizing when there are challenges and what supports are out there to help and um also looking at demonstrating appropriate social skills and social interactions being able to access health resources health care resources and community resources and um and also technology so the state identified these standards and this is what we're these are the goals what we're looking at for our students to be able to do once they leave us excuse me okay so what are transition services so transition services are provided through the development of goals and objectives for a student's iep students are provided service hours of direct instruction and that instruction takes place in three two or three areas it takes place in training and education it can take in it takes place in employment and in some cases for some students with um cognitive deficits and or adaptive skills that are delayed they require independent living skills in order to determine the needs of our students we employ a result-orientated oriented process okay so this chart as busy as it is i'm going to simplify it for you but this is basically what looking at transitioning services the process that we go through as we begin to look at a student so just make it simple a little simple first thing that we do is we employ assessments we identify and we um uh use these assessments to identify students strengths to identify a student's area that needs to grow and then we take those assessments and then we determine what goals and objectives we're going to incorporate into the students iep or the students plan the students program we look at the three areas that we want to address that career employment area that post-secondary education or training area and then for some students the independent living area so we develop the goals and objectives and then over the course of of time we addre we explicitly teach them and we monitor them we monitor for progress there um this also helps us to identify other areas that we incorporate within the students program such as there might be some job shadowing or some employment opportunities or some job training um there and that's where we move to the community and so our students will go into the community with supports and will explicitly be taught some of those skills that are needed in order to be successful once they move to that next stage in their life and we continuously this is kind of we continuously employ this process you know we might do this at a younger age and then as the student gets closer to finishing up at the high school we might again go through the process of assessing and determining those goals and objectives and we're our next um direction that we're going in so it's a very um result oriented process so i'm bringing you back to this slide again because i want to go back to how that mandate impacts us in that process so out of our 582 students with ieps we are looking at approximately 258 students that will go through some piece of that process of looking at what their strengths and weaknesses are what we need to work on in order to make them successful in their if they decide they're going on to a college or university or if they're going straight into the work world or if it's a student with mark with more needs that is going to be educated up till their 22nd birthday and will need far more explicit instruction in employment skills social skills and um in the daily living skills any questions so far looks pretty quiet okay oh see sam go ahead yeah robin can you this kind of goes back to somewhere at the beginning what is the typical case load per sped or if you can delineate versus resource room question versus pull out too okay all right so you've got a couple things in that question so i'm going to make sure i answer all of it so when we talk about typical caseloads okay when we're looking at students that are in self-contained classroom those caseloads we tend to keep them smaller because as i said before they have they require a lot more supports they have more intense needs and this teacher-to-student ratio is smaller so when we're talking about self-contained classrooms um we try to in our autism program we tried to keep it around eight um because once you put eight adults in there eight students in there and those students oftentimes require instruction to take place within a cubby so that they are fewer distractions it doesn't leave you a whole lot of room in that room um and so we do try to keep those ten to be on the smaller side um as uh also as you move up into your transition programs again we want to try and keep those numbers down because of the needs of the students um for a resource room teacher that can vary on school it can vary on the level um we with the resource room teacher they can provide services as you stated in the general ed classroom where they're pushing in those services or they can they can also provide them where they're pulling students out too small group and a more more restrictive setting less distractions and provide more explicit specialized instruction so the those case loads in looking at those right now um we're averaging at the elementary level we're averaging around 15.

so some of our teachers can have into the 20s and some of our teachers can have less than 16 but it depends on the needs of the students the number of hours that the students are requiring in services and whether those services are being provided in the general ed classroom in a um inclusionary setting or if they're being provided in a resource setting okay and out of your whole total is i'm gonna assume that you're including the 504s in that 582 i think it was no 504s are separate 514 is a general ed accommodations plan so those students are not special ed students they're students that have been identified with a disability but they require not specialized instruction they require accommodations or modifications and so typically their services they they are in the general ed classroom all day but they have these accommodations or modifications so they are not included in that number okay i just wanted to make sure thank you yeah faith you had your hand up i did thank you um i actually have a lot of questions okay might answer them okay i just want to make sure i'm understanding um the graphs various graphs and data points correctly so out of out let's go back to out of area placements we are actually seeing a precipitous decline in the number of out of area placements because of the quality of our in-district program but our actual funding is holding at either holding steady or rising if i recall i'm looking at or out of district well for our district as appointments that's good actually okay so what we're seeing is that the students that aren't out of district placements require a very intense program those programs are more expensive than some of the out of district programs we've utilized in the past because we've been able to keep many of our students in district and we have the resources to be able to provide them with the appropriate program we're able to um the ones that are then that we end up having to outplace we've exhausted our resources we don't have what they need in this setting and they require a much higher level of care and so those individual placements are more expensive so that we've fallen from 2040.

so it it runs somewhere some case loads are as high as 19 and some are a little lower than 15 but we're averaging around 15. our case loads at the middle school middle school each middle school team has a special education teacher on the team as well and so those case loads are running somewhere around 10 to 12. also keep in mind that we do utilize our special education teachers to help support at tier 3 of srbi so at the elementary level at the middle school level you might find that a special education teacher is pulling in a student who has been pulled into the srbi process because they are showing that they have some deficit areas that need to be addressed and they may require special education down the road once the srbi process is completed and so many times at tier three we utilize our special education teachers to also support those students too that was going to be my next follow-up question yeah yeah the secondary level case loads are much higher and it is much more difficult at the secondary level because students are not pulled within a team students are all off in following their own schedules through their own choices of coursework and so up there we're averaging around 16.

so roughly okay i'm not a mathematician but i get the percentage i can see it in my head um okay um so the cost yeah if i can maybe explain it this way um so when we started our bridges program many of our students that exhibit behaviors similar to those of the students in the bridges program would have required an out placement um had not had the program in the supports in district um i would say the average cost of an outplacement for that type of program would run you about 60 seventy thousand dollars today sixty to seventy for just the tuition not the transportation okay but we have some students that are in out placements that are costing us well uh costing us in the high hundreds uh hundred thousand dollars because of the severity of the needs and like i said the level of care that they require is um is far more in many cases that you know you're paying a tuition cost there might be other costs that are involved such as a one-to-one some some placements also have additional costs when you're looking at a one-to-one order two on one so situation where some students have required two adults to be assigned to them for the day because of the level of aggression or the level of behavior that they're exhibiting okay we have some students that are medically fragile too so when a student is medically fragile that programming tends to be on the higher level too okay thank you um and then a couple of questions regarding dyslexia how young are we diagnosing dyslexia um they're we do a lot of benchmarks in the general ed um through our general ed curriculum and um we are working very closely the special ed department kevin hanlon and myself um kevin has actually pulled us into some of the srbi meetings um some of our special educators to really look and focus on dyslexia and so we are looking at those benchmarks so oftentimes i i you know i would say second third grade we are dead we have identified students even in first grade as dyslexic we've gotten better tools we've gotten more knowledge on it and so we've been able to kind of pinpoint and be able to provide the very explicit instruction and systematic reading that they need in order to make progress because any pro any any strategy that you apply for a student with dyslexia is going to take time for them to close that gap um even with the specialized instruction and the systematic reading so the earlier the better so we are where i'm seeing more of a trend of really moving down those primary grade levels of identification yeah okay i just um and again i am not a reading specialist or anything but i mean how it's such an early age i guess i question how does one distinguish and this is probably a discussion another time it's not really a budgetary question but how does one distinguish between a child just learning to read versus a child with dyslexia and and there are red flags there are red flags that you can there are lots of red flags that you can look for but every dyslexic child now has to have an iep if you're if your student is is found to have dyslexia they would um you would well that's kind of do they have to have an iep if they still require the explicit instruction the specialized instruction then yes they need an iep we have some students with dyslexia who have gone through several years of explicit direct instruction and are now reading close or on grade level and only require accommodations so we do have some students a small small percentage i would say of students that are identified as dyslexic that only require accommodations and they only require a 504 plan okay so that was another question there are perhaps degrees or uh where okay um the intervention is not as extensive for some others that's good um okay so of the um the new mandate for transitions um what was our age before age 14 um well they identified a few years ago they identified age 14 for students with autism but now it's the age 14 for all disabilities um so prior to that it was by their 50 their iep going into their 15th 16th year and does the state provide any support funding for this or this is carried by the district um there's no mandate that i mean there's no funding that's attached to transition um i i expect i suspect that you know it comes under special education so you have your idea grant that we get each year that's supposed to supplement the cost all right i liked your word supposed to well it's never 100 it's never been a hundred percent right and um this reduc this bringing it down to age 14 this is all backed by data um the efficacy and the outcomes are backed by data well no just generally the decision by the legislature or the department of education they've got data to back this up that this is actually going to be a benefit um when the mandate came out um from the state i it did not include data or it did not include i'm sure there must be some reports out there that they made and pulled this together i you know i think in general um we see that getting our students to start thinking about long-term goals and think about um where where they want to be at some point and it changes over time you know someone who's 14 years old might be sitting here saying i want to go to school and i want to be a doctor or might be saying i don't want to go to school i want to i want to i want to learn how to be a mechanic i enjoy doing things with my hands but that can change over time i think at one point i said i wanted to be a doctor then i wanted to be a lawyer then when i said i wanted to be a teacher you know so and and i knew that by the end that's where i was going so it can change over time i think what the state is doing and recognizing is that our students with disabilities tend to um need more time to gain skills and so i think what they're doing is trying to target particular skills that will make our students successful when they go on to a post-secondary education or they go on to seek employment i know there is data and research out there on college students when students with disabilities enter college their success rate and what they were finding is is that there was a high percentage of students with disabilities that were not finishing their degrees they were leaving school at the college level for various reasons and part of that was were they really fully prepared to enter college with those executive function and those independent skills that are so necessary to be successful there okay thank you okay sam sorry robin just one more i'm just going back to the um the budget here we don't offer extended school year or is that incorporated into services somewhere do we extend this school year is offered and we do uh we run an extended school year program every summer okay so the where is which line does that fall under as far as in instruction i'm trying to figure out it's probably under special education services it's probably incorporated within that i don't know vinnie do you know if it's separated out it's not separated out so to the extent there's a payroll expense it's going to fall under the certified or non-certified staff we don't break out explicitly the cost of extended school year services we could look into doing that but they're not readily available i'll answer that way i'm just trying to figure out how much the extended school year cost separate from the typical school year have to work on that sam to get the number thank you you're welcome okay tim go ahead yeah i was wondering um you were talking about kids who get moved from some kids do get moved from i believe your words were from an iep to an accommodation to a 504 plan okay what's what does that mean to the kids when that happens well if a student if it's i'm wondering specifically the the child the student what is the student's reaction does it matter to them are they indifferent are they happy are they sad i'm just curious i think it varies and i think it probably would also vary with age you know i hear from parents and i hear from students as students get older that they don't like being taken out into separate settings sometimes some students don't like to be taken out from separate settings um some students find being taken out into a separate setting reduces their anxiety and they like it so it can vary it can really vary i couldn't pinpoint exactly what how people or how students feel about it so you know when teams are making that decision we look at a lot of information a lot of times there's assessments involved and we're looking at the students readiness and you know do they still require if they still require explicit instruction then they're going to still require an iep if they're flourishing and they're doing very well but they require some accommodations such as extended time or breaks or maybe um you know being able to take a test in a quiet area with few distractions then moving to a 504 makes sense okay thank you some students some students come right off an iep and don't and are exited they no longer require the special ed or the instruction and go right back into the general ed setting with no no accommodations so it depends on the situation and one other one other question for vin and i this is intended as a very very i'm hoping for a very brief response on this though i imagine it could be a big response but brief is what i want or hoping for so what i what i'm just thinking what's going through my mind is for the last uh so i'm thinking about school modernization and in the past 15 years we've had a downward trend of students drop what from about 5 200 down to 4 200 students something like that and in the numbers and that was generally a downward trend then at the numbers that we're looking at here earlier in this presentation we saw the past eight years where um this was trending up from 500 up to 600.

so some of our teachers can have into the 20s and some of our teachers can have less than 16 but it depends on the needs of the students the number of hours that the students are requiring in services and whether those services are being provided in the general ed classroom in a um inclusionary setting or if they're being provided in a resource setting okay and out of your whole total is i'm gonna assume that you're including the 504s in that 582 i think it was no 504s are separate 514 is a general ed accommodations plan so those students are not special ed students they're students that have been identified with a disability but they require not specialized instruction they require accommodations or modifications and so typically their services they they are in the general ed classroom all day but they have these accommodations or modifications so they are not included in that number okay i just wanted to make sure thank you yeah faith you had your hand up i did thank you um i actually have a lot of questions okay might answer them okay i just want to make sure i'm understanding um the graphs various graphs and data points correctly so out of out let's go back to out of area placements we are actually seeing a precipitous decline in the number of out of area placements because of the quality of our in-district program but our actual funding is holding at either holding steady or rising if i recall i'm looking at or out of district well for our district as appointments that's good actually okay so what we're seeing is that the students that aren't out of district placements require a very intense program those programs are more expensive than some of the out of district programs we've utilized in the past because we've been able to keep many of our students in district and we have the resources to be able to provide them with the appropriate program we're able to um the ones that are then that we end up having to outplace we've exhausted our resources we don't have what they need in this setting and they require a much higher level of care and so those individual placements are more expensive so that we've fallen from 2040.

in terms of school modernization and projected enrollment is this how detailed does the projected enrollment get does it sort of incorporate uh these students i mean the the short answer is yes okay and then in the educational specifications when those are done you'll see that there are specialized carved out spaces for special ed in each of the two buildings that we're talking about okay so it is so it is addressed via school modernization okay yeah that might be i i might have more questions at another time but i don't think for right now so thank you then okay i would add to tim that right now we're just initiating a whole another uh enrollment review so sure no but i'm assuming that what you're doing is you'll be putting in new assumptions but the model that you have should already the the projected enrollment should already be incorporating these two sort of opposite trajectories at least over say the past 10 years they're very they're very opposite um yeah all right thanks jeff um i would also add that the um the increase in special ed that we're seeing is not unique to cheshire it's happening across the state okay all right so now looking at um how this um mandate this mandate sorry robin i'm sorry andrew yeah one easy one robin and thank you very much for the presentation as always ieps excuse the ignorance on the on the topic who develops the iep is it a combination of certain teachers and parents and the student is it can you just i just don't know i just hear the iep tournament to use it's thrown on all the time and i just don't know sure so um there is a what we call a ppt process it's a planning and placement team and that team is made up of several people it's the general ed teacher who is the expert on what happens in instruction in the curriculum at that grade level you have a special education teacher who services or or supports students in that grade level and then you have of course an administrator which is typically the principal um and the parent is part of that team and you may so have some other support services or therapy such as a speech and language pathologist a counselor could be a school psychologist or a school counselor an ot occupational therapist or a physical therapist depending on the needs of the student so when when the ppt or the referral process is initiated that team comes together and determines whether they're going to move forward and do some assessments and determine eligibility and so there's various assessments that they use to develop the iep so we use standardized measurements we use curriculum-based measurements we use observation we use feedback from the parents feedback from teachers um sometimes in some cases it's feedback or information that the student provides and in taking all of that information we look at the strengths of the students and then we look at those areas that are areas of concern and then then we begin to to develop the goals and the objectives in the areas that are identified and then those goals and objectives will guide the instruction and included in the students iep is also accommodations and modifications so there might be accommodations for their environment there might be accommodations that are for testing or for behavior and then we address state mandated testing because our students have to take the espa and and then of course for depending on the age of student when they hit 14 you have your transition transition goals and objectives and so then it's all laid out what those services are going to be how those goals and objectives are going to be addressed and that plan is good for one year um you have to revisit it before it's a year is up and then every three years you redo the testing you redetermine eligibility you go back to those standardized measurements and conduct that evaluation to redetermine eligibility so that's kind of the process in a nutshell and that's what makes up your iep great i really appreciate that thank you you're welcome okay uh sam uh yeah one last one then we'll continue on with the presentation sorry i was you know i was gonna ask this earlier but andrew's question kind of reminded me so i know it's obviously ever fluctuating um did we have we have an increase but we also have hopefully students you know testing out of or leaving you know special ed within the year two and what are our numbers there for this year did we have a larger amount versus the increase into you know the goal of regular education is to make sure that we don't get to special education um so in the reverse hopefully we are able to provide services where students are able to you know exit special education you know i don't have the numbers of how many students we have exited um but uh i think it would make it interesting data to look at um to see how many students are exited across the year but i think that it can very it can vary it can fluctuate um just like our numbers um coming into district can vary and fluctuate throughout the year um so you know we some students once they're identified do complete their their school career on in having an iep and some don't some do me they close that gap and are able to um exit out of special education but i i don't have the numbers on that okay thank you okay should i go on yes please yeah i'm almost done almost done so um so in looking at the impact of our new state statute that requires us to provide transition planning and transition um goals and objectives for our students from age 14 to 22.

so roughly okay i'm not a mathematician but i get the percentage i can see it in my head um okay um so the cost yeah if i can maybe explain it this way um so when we started our bridges program many of our students that exhibit behaviors similar to those of the students in the bridges program would have required an out placement um had not had the program in the supports in district um i would say the average cost of an outplacement for that type of program would run you about 60 seventy thousand dollars today sixty to seventy for just the tuition not the transportation okay but we have some students that are in out placements that are costing us well uh costing us in the high hundreds uh hundred thousand dollars because of the severity of the needs and like i said the level of care that they require is um is far more in many cases that you know you're paying a tuition cost there might be other costs that are involved such as a one-to-one some some placements also have additional costs when you're looking at a one-to-one order two on one so situation where some students have required two adults to be assigned to them for the day because of the level of aggression or the level of behavior that they're exhibiting okay we have some students that are medically fragile too so when a student is medically fragile that programming tends to be on the higher level too okay thank you um and then a couple of questions regarding dyslexia how young are we diagnosing dyslexia um they're we do a lot of benchmarks in the general ed um through our general ed curriculum and um we are working very closely the special ed department kevin hanlon and myself um kevin has actually pulled us into some of the srbi meetings um some of our special educators to really look and focus on dyslexia and so we are looking at those benchmarks so oftentimes i i you know i would say second third grade we are dead we have identified students even in first grade as dyslexic we've gotten better tools we've gotten more knowledge on it and so we've been able to kind of pinpoint and be able to provide the very explicit instruction and systematic reading that they need in order to make progress because any pro any any strategy that you apply for a student with dyslexia is going to take time for them to close that gap um even with the specialized instruction and the systematic reading so the earlier the better so we are where i'm seeing more of a trend of really moving down those primary grade levels of identification yeah okay i just um and again i am not a reading specialist or anything but i mean how it's such an early age i guess i question how does one distinguish and this is probably a discussion another time it's not really a budgetary question but how does one distinguish between a child just learning to read versus a child with dyslexia and and there are red flags there are red flags that you can there are lots of red flags that you can look for but every dyslexic child now has to have an iep if you're if your student is is found to have dyslexia they would um you would well that's kind of do they have to have an iep if they still require the explicit instruction the specialized instruction then yes they need an iep we have some students with dyslexia who have gone through several years of explicit direct instruction and are now reading close or on grade level and only require accommodations so we do have some students a small small percentage i would say of students that are identified as dyslexic that only require accommodations and they only require a 504 plan okay so that was another question there are perhaps degrees or uh where okay um the intervention is not as extensive for some others that's good um okay so of the um the new mandate for transitions um what was our age before age 14 um well they identified a few years ago they identified age 14 for students with autism but now it's the age 14 for all disabilities um so prior to that it was by their 50 their iep going into their 15th 16th year and does the state provide any support funding for this or this is carried by the district um there's no mandate that i mean there's no funding that's attached to transition um i i expect i suspect that you know it comes under special education so you have your idea grant that we get each year that's supposed to supplement the cost all right i liked your word supposed to well it's never 100 it's never been a hundred percent right and um this reduc this bringing it down to age 14 this is all backed by data um the efficacy and the outcomes are backed by data well no just generally the decision by the legislature or the department of education they've got data to back this up that this is actually going to be a benefit um when the mandate came out um from the state i it did not include data or it did not include i'm sure there must be some reports out there that they made and pulled this together i you know i think in general um we see that getting our students to start thinking about long-term goals and think about um where where they want to be at some point and it changes over time you know someone who's 14 years old might be sitting here saying i want to go to school and i want to be a doctor or might be saying i don't want to go to school i want to i want to i want to learn how to be a mechanic i enjoy doing things with my hands but that can change over time i think at one point i said i wanted to be a doctor then i wanted to be a lawyer then when i said i wanted to be a teacher you know so and and i knew that by the end that's where i was going so it can change over time i think what the state is doing and recognizing is that our students with disabilities tend to um need more time to gain skills and so i think what they're doing is trying to target particular skills that will make our students successful when they go on to a post-secondary education or they go on to seek employment i know there is data and research out there on college students when students with disabilities enter college their success rate and what they were finding is is that there was a high percentage of students with disabilities that were not finishing their degrees they were leaving school at the college level for various reasons and part of that was were they really fully prepared to enter college with those executive function and those independent skills that are so necessary to be successful there okay thank you okay sam sorry robin just one more i'm just going back to the um the budget here we don't offer extended school year or is that incorporated into services somewhere do we extend this school year is offered and we do uh we run an extended school year program every summer okay so the where is which line does that fall under as far as in instruction i'm trying to figure out it's probably under special education services it's probably incorporated within that i don't know vinnie do you know if it's separated out it's not separated out so to the extent there's a payroll expense it's going to fall under the certified or non-certified staff we don't break out explicitly the cost of extended school year services we could look into doing that but they're not readily available i'll answer that way i'm just trying to figure out how much the extended school year cost separate from the typical school year have to work on that sam to get the number thank you you're welcome okay tim go ahead yeah i was wondering um you were talking about kids who get moved from some kids do get moved from i believe your words were from an iep to an accommodation to a 504 plan okay what's what does that mean to the kids when that happens well if a student if it's i'm wondering specifically the the child the student what is the student's reaction does it matter to them are they indifferent are they happy are they sad i'm just curious i think it varies and i think it probably would also vary with age you know i hear from parents and i hear from students as students get older that they don't like being taken out into separate settings sometimes some students don't like to be taken out from separate settings um some students find being taken out into a separate setting reduces their anxiety and they like it so it can vary it can really vary i couldn't pinpoint exactly what how people or how students feel about it so you know when teams are making that decision we look at a lot of information a lot of times there's assessments involved and we're looking at the students readiness and you know do they still require if they still require explicit instruction then they're going to still require an iep if they're flourishing and they're doing very well but they require some accommodations such as extended time or breaks or maybe um you know being able to take a test in a quiet area with few distractions then moving to a 504 makes sense okay thank you some students some students come right off an iep and don't and are exited they no longer require the special ed or the instruction and go right back into the general ed setting with no no accommodations so it depends on the situation and one other one other question for vin and i this is intended as a very very i'm hoping for a very brief response on this though i imagine it could be a big response but brief is what i want or hoping for so what i what i'm just thinking what's going through my mind is for the last uh so i'm thinking about school modernization and in the past 15 years we've had a downward trend of students drop what from about 5 200 down to 4 200 students something like that and in the numbers and that was generally a downward trend then at the numbers that we're looking at here earlier in this presentation we saw the past eight years where um this was trending up from 500 up to 600.

this impacts approximately 258 students in the district um so in order to address and comply with that state statute we're looking to add a transition coordinator a transition coordinator is someone who supports the transition process so it will this position will support our students from age 14 to 22. it's going to support the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives that we've identified um if appropriate the development of objectives that address daily living skills are going to uh can be addressed and also those functional vocational skills now keep in mind that one-fourth of our special education students are going to require that explicit instruction with those daily living skills and with those vocational skills so a transition coordinator coordinator will support our teachers in supporting these types of programs and this type of instruction for our students transition coronary also oftentimes is the liaison between the community and the school and is able to incorporate and find job related experiences for our students with disabilities currently right now we have several students many students that are utilizing the goodwill site as a a place for them to job shadow and learn those job related experiences we really would like to expand and look at other community places of employment to help our students and a transition coordinator is someone who can help bridge that between the community and the um schoolings um there are assessments and progress monitoring tools that are necessary in order for us to identify those goals that students need to work on and then to monitor them to see if we're making the progress we need to make in order to as we progress towards our goals you see listed here maps and paths planning that is a specialized planning that that can take place for students as they get into the 14 and to 22 age bracket and that planning is person-centered planning it really helps families and the school to come together and to be able to project or look into the future at where do we see this child once they leave cheshire public schools and then it helps the family to then identify these steps need to be taken in order for us to get there in order for their children to reach their highest potential and so maps and paths planning are something that you we have people we have a few people in the district that are trained for that one being myself but a transition coordinator is someone who would help and assist with training people to do this to do this type of programming and also to actually conduct a maps or paths planning the transition coordinator is the liaison as i said before between families students state and local agencies and community partners those state and local agencies are dds and brs the department of developmental services and the bureau of rehabilitation services those are the resources that our parents are going to need for their children once they leave cheshire public schools those students with that are far more impacted by disabilities are going to need the support of those agencies and the programs that they provide and lastly our transition coordinator is going to support our department and our team into employing a consistent results oriented process excuse me uh faith you had a question i do um robin who will do this job if this position is not approved how will you accommodate these these tests well um we are doing some we are doing this are we doing it to the level and the quality that i would like to see and that i think our families expect um i don't i i it's falling on our teachers our special education teachers it's falling on our school psychologists as i said i'm trained in maps and when i was the elementary supervisor i did conduct a couple of those um those pro those meetings for families um so you know we we do pull from different places and different resources um but i think that if we really um need to up our game in that and i think that um pulling a transition coordinator onto our team would really allow us to do that i made a few phone calls around because i was curious to see our other districts in the area and many of them incorporate at least one transition coordinator within their district um and in some cases some of them have more than one i would add to that you know the question also i mean it would be in essence a reduction in service provided spread across the people who already service this population the infusion of special education students as they move into the community particularly at the middle and early high school age but also the addition of another year at the transitional level after traditional high school is a significant infusion of students with the same demands so if you know it'd be the equivalent of saying that the elementary grades we're going to put x number of new kids into fourth grade what happens if we don't add a teacher there to address that well there's a diminished level of service and a substantially higher ratio i mean i think you know that's part of it now what robin is suggesting is not only you know balancing the ratio by adding this position but this is somebody with a specialized capacity that not only balances the ratios back out with the infusion of students but also makes the work more efficient because this person's a specialist and given the volume of students that we have uh it makes sense to have one person being able to appropriately service at a high level many more students efficiently and and i appreciate that very much um i i understand what this will do um i'm just i'd be remiss i'll take my hand out oh definitely a fair question i just wanted that balancing you know that you know i know and i understand so is there um you know the process that's going to come back at us and so we're going to have to we're going to have to look and so is there is this something that could be if we did a a hat you know a half-time ft position is that something and then eventually add the hours i'm just anticipating sure the whole process yeah i think that's a really good question faith and it's a you know it's definitely um a question of somebody who's kind of been through the process and is trying to anticipate some of these challenges and it makes a lot of sense i think you know the the piece about half time or something one of the real challenges that we run into is that to get some someone in more of a specialized uh skill set the halftime almost has to be a flukey accident like i just had a baby and i don't want to work full time and those things can periodically happen i mean we've we've kind of caught lightning um here and there on random experiences where somebody's like well you know i'm ready to retire but maybe i'll just cut back to 0.4 and it's like wow we need a 0.4 this is a you know fell in our lap um but generally speaking it is harder you know when you reduce away from full time to get some somebody uh like i said not that we haven't been lucky before and and been able to do that but uh that makes a little bit more difficult i think it when we present uh when we start to look at the consequences of making reductions i think that would be a presentation point you know like the consequence of making reduction here versus in other areas i mean i'm sure at some point we'll be covering that yeah i have some kind of concerns about that too because our 14 to 22 year old students range across several different buildings and so you have dodd students at dot you have students that will be at the high school we have our qu students that are at two sites on qu we have our um program that is our community to life program um that is currently housed at the park and rec and we have our hummuston students too that would would benefit from the transition coordinators level of expertise and knowledge tim um would you mind holding on uh robin it looks like maybe you're in the home stretch here i am i am uh okay just i just wanted to summarize that you know um we're looking at a a 1.0 transition coordinator really the most important thing if i had to stress it would be that in order to comply with the state mandate in the state expectations as when it comes to transition services we really want to support a consistent oriented process with fidelity we want to support our growing population in the need of transition planning and services we want to support our families as they connect with agencies and think about where how they can best support their students once they leave cheshire public schools and then we want to support our school-based teams in their ability to assess plan and implement our transition programming um you know my hope is is that we're going to be able to maintain our current resources you know i described all those in-house programs that we have that do require resources as well as those students that are being serviced through resource rooms and in the general ed setting my hope is to be able to maintain and support the quality program that we've been providing up until this point so that's my presentation if there's any other questions tim you had your hand up before did you still have a question go for it yeah well i'll just make the comment right now that uh jeff i hope you have um with regard to a part-time transition coordinator i do hope that you have that in mind if something might pop up like that because you have a pretty big staff and i imagine you might have that happen again uh if you have the budget for that so anyway just something to have in mind thank you thanks okay uh well robin um thank you for that fantastic presentation um i guess i do have a few questions um i guess uh firstly as far as staffing goes several years back we had a large increase in our ias i was just wondering if if you thought that you know we were kind of good on that front or uh was there an expansion in positions um for this uh coming year or is there an ask for coming additional positions there um i haven't requested additional positions um but what does impact our ias is when we have students that move into the district that are currently identified and have an iep and on that iep it states that they're to have ia support um then we have to adopt that iep so sometimes that is when we are making a request for an additional position um so as students move into the district if the other thing that i see is that when you're talking about supporting our in-house programs again these are students with some very intense needs and so it's really necessary in order for them to make the progress and get the instruction that they need that we really have to reduce the adult student ratio and so in that case that's when we utilize our instructional assistants to help us do that um when you're talking about supporting students in the general ed setting in an inclusion setting um oftentimes our ias are there to help us support do that too so if the special education teacher is in the resource room providing direct instruction but a student is in need of supports and accommodations while in the general classroom we utilize our ias to do that as well so while we're always very very careful and we look at when we're talking about adding instructional assistance we try to look at it at a more process oriented procedure like this year we're talking a lot about using an ia protocol where we're kind of really having some deep conversations about when and where does this student need support and what would that support look like and so as the supervisors and myself are looking at ias and where we're placing them and where we're providing the support we're also utilizing that ia protocol in making those decisions one of our other biggest goals in district four special ed is we're focusing on executive function skills and building independence so for those of you who aren't familiar with executive function skills those are the skills that allow us to play plan be engaged sustain through tasks start tasks um really understand time management and to really self-regulate and when we you go back and you look at those areas that i said that often require additional support for students a lot of them fall under executive function so one of our initiatives that we're really focusing in on is helping to build those executive function skills in our students with disabilities and which should result in students being more independent so that we can pull away from those supports such as an ia they may not need that kind of support if they can develop their executive function skills so that's just another way we're approaching and trying to address that um in regards to the to the bridges program sounds like you've it's been a a great success um as you said it it's it resides uh mainly at doolittle school um and so i guess the sort of piggybacks i think it was andrew where tim had mentioned about modernization um is there any thought to leaving the bridges program at doolittle or when we um have the i guess the new new potential campus let's say in the north or in the south um constructed that bridges would move uh to one of those spots or did you think it would probably remain it do little um well i do know that um doolittle um is filling up um whether the bridges program would be moved to the new norton or the news i i haven't had conversations about that as of yet um but i know that um you know as we look at um right now we know that kindergarten for doolittle is located in two locations it's located in darcy's locating doolittle so that's i think another thing that has to be taken into consideration so it may very well mean that do little moves but i haven't had any conversations happen yeah i would say right now um and for the foreseeable future the answer is no we wouldn't look at making a change there it's not part of the educational spec process that we've engaged in for both norton and for the north end school so you know of course over time you know things evolve and we make changes and you know we would um evaluate the conditions on the ground you know years down the road but uh in terms of an initial move when buildings open no that's not in the plans yeah what's nice about it being at doolittle is it is kind of centralized so because it does pull from all of the elementary buildings i was thinking that but i wasn't entirely sure yeah yeah um so i and my next question is um for the uh out placement you know every year i think was a couple years ago we we had outplacement unexpected unexpected outplacement expenses i think they went up to almost as high as 500 000.

in terms of school modernization and projected enrollment is this how detailed does the projected enrollment get does it sort of incorporate uh these students i mean the the short answer is yes okay and then in the educational specifications when those are done you'll see that there are specialized carved out spaces for special ed in each of the two buildings that we're talking about okay so it is so it is addressed via school modernization okay yeah that might be i i might have more questions at another time but i don't think for right now so thank you then okay i would add to tim that right now we're just initiating a whole another uh enrollment review so sure no but i'm assuming that what you're doing is you'll be putting in new assumptions but the model that you have should already the the projected enrollment should already be incorporating these two sort of opposite trajectories at least over say the past 10 years they're very they're very opposite um yeah all right thanks jeff um i would also add that the um the increase in special ed that we're seeing is not unique to cheshire it's happening across the state okay all right so now looking at um how this um mandate this mandate sorry robin i'm sorry andrew yeah one easy one robin and thank you very much for the presentation as always ieps excuse the ignorance on the on the topic who develops the iep is it a combination of certain teachers and parents and the student is it can you just i just don't know i just hear the iep tournament to use it's thrown on all the time and i just don't know sure so um there is a what we call a ppt process it's a planning and placement team and that team is made up of several people it's the general ed teacher who is the expert on what happens in instruction in the curriculum at that grade level you have a special education teacher who services or or supports students in that grade level and then you have of course an administrator which is typically the principal um and the parent is part of that team and you may so have some other support services or therapy such as a speech and language pathologist a counselor could be a school psychologist or a school counselor an ot occupational therapist or a physical therapist depending on the needs of the student so when when the ppt or the referral process is initiated that team comes together and determines whether they're going to move forward and do some assessments and determine eligibility and so there's various assessments that they use to develop the iep so we use standardized measurements we use curriculum-based measurements we use observation we use feedback from the parents feedback from teachers um sometimes in some cases it's feedback or information that the student provides and in taking all of that information we look at the strengths of the students and then we look at those areas that are areas of concern and then then we begin to to develop the goals and the objectives in the areas that are identified and then those goals and objectives will guide the instruction and included in the students iep is also accommodations and modifications so there might be accommodations for their environment there might be accommodations that are for testing or for behavior and then we address state mandated testing because our students have to take the espa and and then of course for depending on the age of student when they hit 14 you have your transition transition goals and objectives and so then it's all laid out what those services are going to be how those goals and objectives are going to be addressed and that plan is good for one year um you have to revisit it before it's a year is up and then every three years you redo the testing you redetermine eligibility you go back to those standardized measurements and conduct that evaluation to redetermine eligibility so that's kind of the process in a nutshell and that's what makes up your iep great i really appreciate that thank you you're welcome okay uh sam uh yeah one last one then we'll continue on with the presentation sorry i was you know i was gonna ask this earlier but andrew's question kind of reminded me so i know it's obviously ever fluctuating um did we have we have an increase but we also have hopefully students you know testing out of or leaving you know special ed within the year two and what are our numbers there for this year did we have a larger amount versus the increase into you know the goal of regular education is to make sure that we don't get to special education um so in the reverse hopefully we are able to provide services where students are able to you know exit special education you know i don't have the numbers of how many students we have exited um but uh i think it would make it interesting data to look at um to see how many students are exited across the year but i think that it can very it can vary it can fluctuate um just like our numbers um coming into district can vary and fluctuate throughout the year um so you know we some students once they're identified do complete their their school career on in having an iep and some don't some do me they close that gap and are able to um exit out of special education but i i don't have the numbers on that okay thank you okay should i go on yes please yeah i'm almost done almost done so um so in looking at the impact of our new state statute that requires us to provide transition planning and transition um goals and objectives for our students from age 14 to 22.

um and it looks like our the need has dropped significantly and you you've explained that for the most part and i was just wondering is it because our in-house um programs are so successful or is there a little bit of a covered concern in there where some of them may be more fragile students their parents don't want them to be outplaced or have there been any other additional accommodations where they have to be where they've been schooled at home instead of being outplaced or anything like that um no i have not seen an increase in students being um homebound um where they're schooled at home or be or students um opting to disenroll and be homebound or to be home schooled i haven't seen any numbers that have made any kind of impact on our outplacement numbers um i i think that um you know i'm hoping we're not going to jinx ourselves now that we're talking about this but you know we are in a good place um right now but you know things can change you get a student that is moves into district that has you know incredible needs or you have a student that is placed in district through uh dcf um in a foster placement in cheshire we you know there's there's all sorts of things that can occur and i do recall several years ago we had a couple dcf placements in cheshire that were students that weren't out or very expensive outplacements and that that impact our um our budget there and um my last question before i get to and i see your hand there ann um is the only position you're asking for this year is that transition coordinator yes yes it is okay thank you and go ahead robin thank you for that um wonderful illuminating uh presentation you're welcome as always um and going back to the number of students with ieps and the fact that you gave that um we've seen an increase in that due to covid yeah correlated to covet uh related so do we expect to see as um kovitz stuff has kind of starting to at least um dissipate a little bit or students are becoming more comfortable with um with their situation in school under covert restrictions are we seeing already those numbers sort of going away due to covid stresses or or not yet or and do we expect to see some num some of those numbers go down um right now i i think we're still on kind of the upswing i'm not i'm not really seeing that the numbers are coming down but i think that as our ppt teams and as our school-based teams begin um to grapple more with is this a result of cobit or is this the sign of a learning disability and begin to tease that out i think that we're going to find that um that where that the growth is not going to happen at the rate that it is happening right now um it will probably return back to more of a normal growth rate my hope is is that if it's truly that these are students that were impacted by cobin and some of the the things that were presented through um over the past year that we're gonna see those kids that were identified as make that they'll make good progress once they have their plan in place and those um those interventions are in place and then they'll they'll um respond to them and then maybe we'll see them actually make progress and maybe close that gap and then be able to exit off of the iep if if it's truly a learning disability then they're going to continue probably on that iep then a little longer but my hope is is that we would see those numbers start to decline and not to grow as rapidly as they have this past year great thank you for that answer and i didn't mean to suggest that you or anyone else has a crystal ball and right so thank you you're welcome faith uh you had your hand up yeah um i did robin and i i too want to say thanks really this was um quite a job that they're you know presentation that you put together and i don't think i thanked you appropriately but um and at the risk of adding one more thing to your already full plate i do agree with sam um i think it would be helpful for everybody including your team to track how many kids exit the the program annually because that's truly the success story uh if you can get these kids off their ieps and into a 504 or something or even off of 504 i mean that's that's a coup and a win and so um it would be a good way to measure the the success of the program sure i'll see what i can do see what i can pull up yeah we definitely track that on an annual basis i mean we don't have year-to-date numbers on that but it is something that we monitor um i've uh two more questions um for now that the transition program has expanded to 22 uh 22 years old um i'm trying to think of the timing was there any at any time a gap where like someone who was 21 had matriculated out but then you did they have to decide to come back or did you find that you they had been sufficiently transitioned that they didn't need that extra year yeah that that did happen that when that came into play of um july of 20 um there at that time the pps director tracy hussey reached out to those families of those students that had aged out at 21 and offered them an additional year so that they would then be with us through until their 22nd birthday so that did occur some some families did take us up on that some families did not they had already had their students placed in programs or had already gotten them settled into um um you know services um and did not opt to come back thanks for that i appreciate that um and my final question is um so you had you said that the the numbers the numbers you used for your report were i think was a 352 right for total special ed students it was something like that 558 552 five bill gee sorry yeah um and then but when you looked at it more recently we're up by like 12 students or something like that do you know what aid yeah do you know what age group of those students were was it across uh all ages or was it like let's say just in the elementary age or anything do you know um i didn't look that deep into it to see if it was one particular age group or not um but i think um based on my conversation with our school counselors and our school psychologists i think at the upper grade levels the students that we're seeing more more likely to be identified are students that are being impacted by anxiety or emotionality there may have been some hospitalizations that have occurred and then so now and and the student is now eligible for special ed um at the lower levels i think at the elementary levels i should say i think that the school psychologists were seeing more of the ld learning disability students coming coming across the table for them and in that case that's where they felt that um the impact of covid and looking at standardized assessments and the impact on standardized assessments it makes it very it convolutes making those decisions as to whether a student is really being impacted but is this student really being impacted by a learning disability or is this a result of remote learning less engagement maybe was um to you know engage in out of school um for a period of time so so these students uh post october one weren't necessarily like newly identified um let's say learning disabled students these were potentially mental health um i think i think it's probably both it's probably both because like i said i think that what what i'm hearing more so at the high school tends to be towards the mental health at that age typically if this child has a learning disability it's been teased out by that it's very rare that we identify students with a learning disability by the time they're in ninth to twelfth grade majority of the time it's it's we can we identify that at the early stages so it's so just so i'm understanding so when if there's a mental health issue issue with the student it's more like um their issue has been identified in this so when they when they're perhaps are entered into your program it's more of on on the recovery phase and not like or a treatment phase and not um uh i'm trying to say like you know there's the initial incident and then when they've kind of come back from that when they're trying to transition back is that kind of how it's used or is it not it may be someone who has been treated in the past or maybe seeking outside out of school private services for to help them deal with any kind of anxiety or emotional issues that they're having but now it's risen to the level where it's blowing over into school and so when that happens and now and you might see students that are maybe their uh their rate of um absence is rising they might be pulling themselves out of some of the social activities that they used to be involved in you might see them their grades dropping and so those might be some of the red flags or the indicators anytime we have a child that is hospitalized um because they're struggling with something we or we always go to ppt to at least review the information to see if we sh if we should go forward and do some evaluations and see if this that child is actually impacted by a disability thank you i appreciate that um are there any additional questions can i just add a real point a real quick point for clarity around special education identification and in that process um you know the team evaluates a student and identifies a particular learning disability perhaps or sometimes as robin said there are other emotionality issues that are connected and special education doesn't cure those things right special education teaches compensatory practices the skills for kids to be able to work through them work around them learn different strategies to tackle problems um so i want to be careful with the idea that you know exiting is very much a goal um to and what that you know would mean is that the child has developed the skills necessary to compensate for whatever the original identification was and that's really the goal it's not a cure and we identify goals for students to meet um along that process and and that's really what the emphasis is in that ppt meeting that you know andrew was talking about earlier we once you're identified we come back and we take a look at what compensatory strategies are we focused on teaching this child to to what end what goals are we trying to you know get them to accomplish um and the team agrees on those things and then we move forward and so over time it's tricky because you know the things become more challenging academically and more sophisticated and we teach new skills and the goal is that like you know we've said before to exit special education but um our the child's success and failure is not grounded in whether or not they are exited from special education and you be continuing special education for an extended period of years and be very successful in that process to the point where you know i as a high school principal and i know that you know robin's seen this plenty of times where students okay we've we've met these goals and then parents and students may say well you know to tim's point earlier i don't know i don't want to get out like no this has been it's been great for me um so you know i don't want to caught in a trap where success and failure means whether or not you got in or out but it's about how you're meeting those goals so just want to throw those two cents in and rob certainly you know if i i missed anything there no no you said you said it well because we know that our many of our students with disabilities go on to college and there's no iep at college you know they they can get accommodations they can disclose their disability they can get accommodations but they're they won't be getting a a plan such as an iep when they go there and and you're absolutely right that they learn how to compensate for those areas that they that are deficits for them or that they struggle with um so they find the strategies of the tools um in order to um you know build that bridge so that they can be successful so yeah you said it well jeff who knows uh sam you got a question yeah actually now that dr zoe mentioned compensatory did we have um are we playing catch up to compensatory i know there was a huge issue obviously over when we went into covid and it's across the state that you know we owed our kids instruction um so where are we as far as cheshire is concerned where are we with that and are we continuing to make that up as we go along this year uh well we um we are applying the same um strategies that er that general ed is applying as far as acceleration goes um i mean that's been what special ed has done all along and as you know we were very fortunate in cheshire that um when the stage when we shut down it was just a couple days before our teachers were on um on the computers and were providing that remote instruction and um i have to you know hand it to them how they really uh really thought had were thinking out of the box on how to present specialized instruction through a remote venue um i i actually had seen many screencastifys and and wilson instruction programs for students with dyslexia that they um that they were utilizing and how they were presenting it through the remote avenue and then fortunately for our elementary students which are most impacted by um by um their disabilities um they were in person all last year so for them they were they were present in getting that direct instruction for our students that were at the high school level that um were in participating in a hybrid model if we came across students that were struggling in that hybrid model then they went back to ppt or they pulled those students in and some students were able to come in for four days a week versus the two days a week um and so you know we tried to accommodate um our students that um just weren't having a difficult time with that remote so as far as compensatory services that's a decision that's made um in with individuals and through individual ppts um and so as they look at the students progress and they look at if there was some regression or some loss of skills and the rate of that recovery that that student is experiencing then they are making those decisions as to how they're going to address that that loss no great i definitely you know obviously cheshire was at the forefront in providing that and having kids are all in especially in the elementary side i just didn't know where we where we fell on that spectrum as to um ensuring that you know students were receiving the hours of services that we were supposed to be receiving to a certain quality obviously um yeah i mean we when we were um on remote um you know we had to develop our remote learning plans and we had to take a look at our students ieps and look at the amount of hours of services they were supposed to be provided when in person and we had to determine what were we still able to do from the remote remote classroom and what could we still apply in really you know the state wasn't looking for us not to reduce services during that time they were really looking for us to implement the iep to the best extent possible as it was designed so thank you robin thank you okay there any further questions all right well uh robin ann uh thank you so much for another excellent presentation we thank you for your time this evening thank you and uh we have a lot to think about thank you thank you i guess uh we hand it back to vin i think okay well thank you so i'm going to um wrap up instructional expense which you know this is the section we were just covering with some noteworthy information related to curriculum writing and professional development you should be able to see that on the screen so for curriculum writing just a few bullet points here um you know the summer curriculum writing uh workshops went extremely well last year so you know it's certainly being planned for already for this summer uh some of the work that needs to be done has to include new standards and incorporating district focus areas the curriculum council focus the curriculum is is reviewed on a five-year rotation for 22-23 the sections that are being reviewed by the curriculum by the cheshire curriculum council excuse me are language arts in english and special education on the next generation science standards front there is training that's needed to support the alignment to those standards again all this is being incorporated and planned for within our budget and then the next to last bullet there talks about the social studies curriculum revisions are needed to align with new state standards on the instructional materials and resources we do need new textbooks and or resources for the earth science programming and also for the manufacturing fundamentals which is part of the cte program and then on the professional development front similar to what we've done in the past you know the pd will focus on complex thinking and social emotional learning which are key district goals also a big focus will be on english learners this is in line with the state's emphasis and also we've seen growth of english learners in cheshire and so they'll be coaching you know sessions to implement strategies for english learners um and then that last bullet talks about instructional shifts necessary to deliver the next generation science standards so those are all factors that will be incorporated into professional development as far as instructional expense overall as a percentage of our budget this is similar to what we saw with all the other areas we presented instructional expense has been relatively flat as a percentage of our budget it's not been funded over the years just as a percentage of the budget it's it's held in that 5.6 to 6 range is what you see on the chart here so with that i'm just going to go back and ask if there are any specific questions on the line items related to instructional expense and then we move into support services uh vin just a quick question on instruc instructional supply firstly um you had budgeted uh 440 for this year but we're way above that um but so for next year was there so what what caught what's causing that bump right now and so is that funding level uh still appropriate as do all of our classrooms have the supplies that they need for excellent education i think the answer to that adam is that we'll prioritize to make sure that that education isn't compromised and when you say the bump are you looking at the 482 that we expended in 2021 um yeah am i looking at the wrong year yeah no well the 480 000 that's what we expended in 2021 yeah i'm i'm sorry that's okay about so as long as you think that we have enough uh our that 440 numbers is a good number for uh to keep our levels steady that's all i guess that's what i was asking i i think we're good there thank you stay i'm glad ben what we can't really see this as well but um what's this 60 000 it seems pretty consistent to maintain the library periodicals is that what i'm seeing right now yes the 60 000.

this impacts approximately 258 students in the district um so in order to address and comply with that state statute we're looking to add a transition coordinator a transition coordinator is someone who supports the transition process so it will this position will support our students from age 14 to 22. it's going to support the development of employment and other post-school adult living objectives that we've identified um if appropriate the development of objectives that address daily living skills are going to uh can be addressed and also those functional vocational skills now keep in mind that one-fourth of our special education students are going to require that explicit instruction with those daily living skills and with those vocational skills so a transition coordinator coordinator will support our teachers in supporting these types of programs and this type of instruction for our students transition coronary also oftentimes is the liaison between the community and the school and is able to incorporate and find job related experiences for our students with disabilities currently right now we have several students many students that are utilizing the goodwill site as a a place for them to job shadow and learn those job related experiences we really would like to expand and look at other community places of employment to help our students and a transition coordinator is someone who can help bridge that between the community and the um schoolings um there are assessments and progress monitoring tools that are necessary in order for us to identify those goals that students need to work on and then to monitor them to see if we're making the progress we need to make in order to as we progress towards our goals you see listed here maps and paths planning that is a specialized planning that that can take place for students as they get into the 14 and to 22 age bracket and that planning is person-centered planning it really helps families and the school to come together and to be able to project or look into the future at where do we see this child once they leave cheshire public schools and then it helps the family to then identify these steps need to be taken in order for us to get there in order for their children to reach their highest potential and so maps and paths planning are something that you we have people we have a few people in the district that are trained for that one being myself but a transition coordinator is someone who would help and assist with training people to do this to do this type of programming and also to actually conduct a maps or paths planning the transition coordinator is the liaison as i said before between families students state and local agencies and community partners those state and local agencies are dds and brs the department of developmental services and the bureau of rehabilitation services those are the resources that our parents are going to need for their children once they leave cheshire public schools those students with that are far more impacted by disabilities are going to need the support of those agencies and the programs that they provide and lastly our transition coordinator is going to support our department and our team into employing a consistent results oriented process excuse me uh faith you had a question i do um robin who will do this job if this position is not approved how will you accommodate these these tests well um we are doing some we are doing this are we doing it to the level and the quality that i would like to see and that i think our families expect um i don't i i it's falling on our teachers our special education teachers it's falling on our school psychologists as i said i'm trained in maps and when i was the elementary supervisor i did conduct a couple of those um those pro those meetings for families um so you know we we do pull from different places and different resources um but i think that if we really um need to up our game in that and i think that um pulling a transition coordinator onto our team would really allow us to do that i made a few phone calls around because i was curious to see our other districts in the area and many of them incorporate at least one transition coordinator within their district um and in some cases some of them have more than one i would add to that you know the question also i mean it would be in essence a reduction in service provided spread across the people who already service this population the infusion of special education students as they move into the community particularly at the middle and early high school age but also the addition of another year at the transitional level after traditional high school is a significant infusion of students with the same demands so if you know it'd be the equivalent of saying that the elementary grades we're going to put x number of new kids into fourth grade what happens if we don't add a teacher there to address that well there's a diminished level of service and a substantially higher ratio i mean i think you know that's part of it now what robin is suggesting is not only you know balancing the ratio by adding this position but this is somebody with a specialized capacity that not only balances the ratios back out with the infusion of students but also makes the work more efficient because this person's a specialist and given the volume of students that we have uh it makes sense to have one person being able to appropriately service at a high level many more students efficiently and and i appreciate that very much um i i understand what this will do um i'm just i'd be remiss i'll take my hand out oh definitely a fair question i just wanted that balancing you know that you know i know and i understand so is there um you know the process that's going to come back at us and so we're going to have to we're going to have to look and so is there is this something that could be if we did a a hat you know a half-time ft position is that something and then eventually add the hours i'm just anticipating sure the whole process yeah i think that's a really good question faith and it's a you know it's definitely um a question of somebody who's kind of been through the process and is trying to anticipate some of these challenges and it makes a lot of sense i think you know the the piece about half time or something one of the real challenges that we run into is that to get some someone in more of a specialized uh skill set the halftime almost has to be a flukey accident like i just had a baby and i don't want to work full time and those things can periodically happen i mean we've we've kind of caught lightning um here and there on random experiences where somebody's like well you know i'm ready to retire but maybe i'll just cut back to 0.4 and it's like wow we need a 0.4 this is a you know fell in our lap um but generally speaking it is harder you know when you reduce away from full time to get some somebody uh like i said not that we haven't been lucky before and and been able to do that but uh that makes a little bit more difficult i think it when we present uh when we start to look at the consequences of making reductions i think that would be a presentation point you know like the consequence of making reduction here versus in other areas i mean i'm sure at some point we'll be covering that yeah i have some kind of concerns about that too because our 14 to 22 year old students range across several different buildings and so you have dodd students at dot you have students that will be at the high school we have our qu students that are at two sites on qu we have our um program that is our community to life program um that is currently housed at the park and rec and we have our hummuston students too that would would benefit from the transition coordinators level of expertise and knowledge tim um would you mind holding on uh robin it looks like maybe you're in the home stretch here i am i am uh okay just i just wanted to summarize that you know um we're looking at a a 1.0 transition coordinator really the most important thing if i had to stress it would be that in order to comply with the state mandate in the state expectations as when it comes to transition services we really want to support a consistent oriented process with fidelity we want to support our growing population in the need of transition planning and services we want to support our families as they connect with agencies and think about where how they can best support their students once they leave cheshire public schools and then we want to support our school-based teams in their ability to assess plan and implement our transition programming um you know my hope is is that we're going to be able to maintain our current resources you know i described all those in-house programs that we have that do require resources as well as those students that are being serviced through resource rooms and in the general ed setting my hope is to be able to maintain and support the quality program that we've been providing up until this point so that's my presentation if there's any other questions tim you had your hand up before did you still have a question go for it yeah well i'll just make the comment right now that uh jeff i hope you have um with regard to a part-time transition coordinator i do hope that you have that in mind if something might pop up like that because you have a pretty big staff and i imagine you might have that happen again uh if you have the budget for that so anyway just something to have in mind thank you thanks okay uh well robin um thank you for that fantastic presentation um i guess i do have a few questions um i guess uh firstly as far as staffing goes several years back we had a large increase in our ias i was just wondering if if you thought that you know we were kind of good on that front or uh was there an expansion in positions um for this uh coming year or is there an ask for coming additional positions there um i haven't requested additional positions um but what does impact our ias is when we have students that move into the district that are currently identified and have an iep and on that iep it states that they're to have ia support um then we have to adopt that iep so sometimes that is when we are making a request for an additional position um so as students move into the district if the other thing that i see is that when you're talking about supporting our in-house programs again these are students with some very intense needs and so it's really necessary in order for them to make the progress and get the instruction that they need that we really have to reduce the adult student ratio and so in that case that's when we utilize our instructional assistants to help us do that um when you're talking about supporting students in the general ed setting in an inclusion setting um oftentimes our ias are there to help us support do that too so if the special education teacher is in the resource room providing direct instruction but a student is in need of supports and accommodations while in the general classroom we utilize our ias to do that as well so while we're always very very careful and we look at when we're talking about adding instructional assistance we try to look at it at a more process oriented procedure like this year we're talking a lot about using an ia protocol where we're kind of really having some deep conversations about when and where does this student need support and what would that support look like and so as the supervisors and myself are looking at ias and where we're placing them and where we're providing the support we're also utilizing that ia protocol in making those decisions one of our other biggest goals in district four special ed is we're focusing on executive function skills and building independence so for those of you who aren't familiar with executive function skills those are the skills that allow us to play plan be engaged sustain through tasks start tasks um really understand time management and to really self-regulate and when we you go back and you look at those areas that i said that often require additional support for students a lot of them fall under executive function so one of our initiatives that we're really focusing in on is helping to build those executive function skills in our students with disabilities and which should result in students being more independent so that we can pull away from those supports such as an ia they may not need that kind of support if they can develop their executive function skills so that's just another way we're approaching and trying to address that um in regards to the to the bridges program sounds like you've it's been a a great success um as you said it it's it resides uh mainly at doolittle school um and so i guess the sort of piggybacks i think it was andrew where tim had mentioned about modernization um is there any thought to leaving the bridges program at doolittle or when we um have the i guess the new new potential campus let's say in the north or in the south um constructed that bridges would move uh to one of those spots or did you think it would probably remain it do little um well i do know that um doolittle um is filling up um whether the bridges program would be moved to the new norton or the news i i haven't had conversations about that as of yet um but i know that um you know as we look at um right now we know that kindergarten for doolittle is located in two locations it's located in darcy's locating doolittle so that's i think another thing that has to be taken into consideration so it may very well mean that do little moves but i haven't had any conversations happen yeah i would say right now um and for the foreseeable future the answer is no we wouldn't look at making a change there it's not part of the educational spec process that we've engaged in for both norton and for the north end school so you know of course over time you know things evolve and we make changes and you know we would um evaluate the conditions on the ground you know years down the road but uh in terms of an initial move when buildings open no that's not in the plans yeah what's nice about it being at doolittle is it is kind of centralized so because it does pull from all of the elementary buildings i was thinking that but i wasn't entirely sure yeah yeah um so i and my next question is um for the uh out placement you know every year i think was a couple years ago we we had outplacement unexpected unexpected outplacement expenses i think they went up to almost as high as 500 000.

that's this year's budget we've and that's what we're budgeting for next year so what's happened um you know with library over the years is these line items have decreased because we're relying so much less on printed materials and we're using more online resources so that that budget seems like a reasonable number you could see in in 2021 we expended 43 000 does that answer the question sam yeah i just i mean because we're going so digital what would be the need for the 60 i just don't yeah the expenditure is not zero for you know the items that we need for library so there are still expenditures that go against you know library periodicals and the two lines below that for library media supplies if i could jump in i would also add that that 43 000 in 2021 was also the school year where we shut down in march right so that's important to remember i want to stress that while we have certain textbooks and i hate to even call them textbooks because they're not their platforms which have material in them that are videos um that are more manipulatives those things certainly are electronic but i want to stress the importance of getting hard copy regular books in the hands of students and how we don't want to shortchange that in our libraries for our schools or in our individual classroom libraries you know you we've recently done a lot on our ela progressions across elementary and middle school we'll have one at the high school soon and the focus that we still have on reading hard copy text hope that helps and for anybody that i mean this might be difficult to read in the budget book itself um you know under the instructional tab this is on page 11 the you know and basically ben's just walking through you know the line items here and it kind of outlines what the library books periodicals is and library media supplies and i'll just keep we'll just keep subsequently walking through it make it easier if it's easier to follow that way hey you had your hand up i did thank you um i i probably should have written out this but i'm i'm looking at this um budget i have to say i am incredibly distressed by it um and and then the reason i asked for the per pupil expenditure on um you know the the non-special ed student the the general ed student is that and i don't want to take away from the special ed um but i we're taking away from the general ed students and as a if i were a parent i would be mightily concerned i mean i look at replacement equipment we spent 326 000 in replacement and 236 000 plus um you know in 2021 and now we're saying that we're gonna be able to get by or we said that we would get by with a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty and a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty for both categories last year and we're going to do the same there we're working against high inflation this equipment has to be has to be suffering from wear and tear [Music] every category is not what it is even though the dollar value is the same as last year it is not what it was last year because it has just been reduced by an inflation factor of six percent or whatever we're looking at and you know i'll say more at the final meeting but to have to cut we're beyond cutting to the bone we are in the bone and we're at a real rock and a hard place here because i don't know how much this town can carry um so i just am expressing my dismay over this it's it's i there's nothing i can do but i don't know if anyone else is seeing the same thing i am if i could just add one one point before um the next question so if you look at the line replacement and new equipment in particular um expend it for 2021 keep in mind as you know as we manage through the budget year as we get into april may june if we have accounts that are below their budget and we can allocate funds to replace or buy new equipment that's what we do and that's what's reflected in the 2021 expended and so my point is yes the budget for 22 23 is below that level but if we wind up at the end of 2223 where we have availability and we have a need and replacement or new equipment or any other of these accounts we would allocate it but from a budget point of view you know we're certainly trying to strike this balance i think that's what you're getting at faith between you know what we can afford to budget and what we would budget if we didn't have right this year's limitation you know being driven by the enrollment and medical benefits so we'll do it what we always do is we'll prioritize as the year goes goes through and then um you know make expenditures accordingly spam i i have to say i'm with your face because as i look at the binder it just stresses me out a little more so um and and i guess to help with the decision making i'm hoping that we can if doctor sullivan or vin can can prioritize the that wish list and the needs you know obviously the medical expenses you already have a plan to work on it to collaborate with the town to try to find a solution for that but it's right now it's just hard pressed to find solutions for the other items and still maintain and accelerate our students you know so i guess what will be easier going back to my comment is what are the top priorities if we had to do without certain things what would what can we not do without medical obviously being already on the table well i don't wanna i don't wanna throw gas on the fire salmon and faith but when you look at the um the binder you'll see that you know pretty much as you flip through line by line there's a graph for each item that shows the historical you know allocation for those various lines in a lot of cases you'll see that you know there's a downward trend in spending in those lines because over time you know the budget's just been squeezed over the course of you know my experience here you know dating back to when i worked at it dot but um we've also worked very hard as a board and is a leadership team to identify core priorities that yield high return on investment and in doing so we've able to be that much more pinpointed as i think you're suggesting sam you know what what are the high leverage areas here and our achievement has dramatically improved and our services have you know diversified in and improved so um yeah i think we've just been leaner and more effective in terms of the items that were moved forward on day one in our budget presentation in terms of like these are new positions that we're adding those were all designed as i think i mentioned that day to sustain services so to not you know really make leaps and bounds if we're talking about making which i think is pretty good by the way sustained services what we provide is is you know pretty darn good for our community to build upon what we're providing is definitely important um and that i sent that document to the board uh i don't know a week and a half ago and feels like a week and a half ago and covet time that could have been like tuesday i don't know but um tomorrow why don't we or excuse me thursday during when the time lapse again why don't we go through that um because you would ask that question in one of our i think the first night i presented the budget and we can go through that together i can kind of pinpoint you know like for you and the community what we're looking at and why is priorities yeah that would be actually very helpful dr solon um you know just speaking as an individual you know i personally would not want to take away the direct impact on students anything that would have a direct impact on students and the growth and progress of students moving forward because we do need to accelerate our students to be competitive right or to maintain our our competitive status so um i think that you know we have all these numbers thrown at us i i am looking at the binder every single night and i just go back to what is truly doable here what is what is reality at this moment in time and i also think that you know we need to be paid back what was given last cycle and that's going to be a bigger argument but that would be helpful thank you sure um ben continue on please okay so this wraps up instructional expenses i will jump into support services which is 8.7 percent of our budget you see up at the top the support services accounts uh the 22-23 budget request totals 7 million 85 879.

um and it looks like our the need has dropped significantly and you you've explained that for the most part and i was just wondering is it because our in-house um programs are so successful or is there a little bit of a covered concern in there where some of them may be more fragile students their parents don't want them to be outplaced or have there been any other additional accommodations where they have to be where they've been schooled at home instead of being outplaced or anything like that um no i have not seen an increase in students being um homebound um where they're schooled at home or be or students um opting to disenroll and be homebound or to be home schooled i haven't seen any numbers that have made any kind of impact on our outplacement numbers um i i think that um you know i'm hoping we're not going to jinx ourselves now that we're talking about this but you know we are in a good place um right now but you know things can change you get a student that is moves into district that has you know incredible needs or you have a student that is placed in district through uh dcf um in a foster placement in cheshire we you know there's there's all sorts of things that can occur and i do recall several years ago we had a couple dcf placements in cheshire that were students that weren't out or very expensive outplacements and that that impact our um our budget there and um my last question before i get to and i see your hand there ann um is the only position you're asking for this year is that transition coordinator yes yes it is okay thank you and go ahead robin thank you for that um wonderful illuminating uh presentation you're welcome as always um and going back to the number of students with ieps and the fact that you gave that um we've seen an increase in that due to covid yeah correlated to covet uh related so do we expect to see as um kovitz stuff has kind of starting to at least um dissipate a little bit or students are becoming more comfortable with um with their situation in school under covert restrictions are we seeing already those numbers sort of going away due to covid stresses or or not yet or and do we expect to see some num some of those numbers go down um right now i i think we're still on kind of the upswing i'm not i'm not really seeing that the numbers are coming down but i think that as our ppt teams and as our school-based teams begin um to grapple more with is this a result of cobit or is this the sign of a learning disability and begin to tease that out i think that we're going to find that um that where that the growth is not going to happen at the rate that it is happening right now um it will probably return back to more of a normal growth rate my hope is is that if it's truly that these are students that were impacted by cobin and some of the the things that were presented through um over the past year that we're gonna see those kids that were identified as make that they'll make good progress once they have their plan in place and those um those interventions are in place and then they'll they'll um respond to them and then maybe we'll see them actually make progress and maybe close that gap and then be able to exit off of the iep if if it's truly a learning disability then they're going to continue probably on that iep then a little longer but my hope is is that we would see those numbers start to decline and not to grow as rapidly as they have this past year great thank you for that answer and i didn't mean to suggest that you or anyone else has a crystal ball and right so thank you you're welcome faith uh you had your hand up yeah um i did robin and i i too want to say thanks really this was um quite a job that they're you know presentation that you put together and i don't think i thanked you appropriately but um and at the risk of adding one more thing to your already full plate i do agree with sam um i think it would be helpful for everybody including your team to track how many kids exit the the program annually because that's truly the success story uh if you can get these kids off their ieps and into a 504 or something or even off of 504 i mean that's that's a coup and a win and so um it would be a good way to measure the the success of the program sure i'll see what i can do see what i can pull up yeah we definitely track that on an annual basis i mean we don't have year-to-date numbers on that but it is something that we monitor um i've uh two more questions um for now that the transition program has expanded to 22 uh 22 years old um i'm trying to think of the timing was there any at any time a gap where like someone who was 21 had matriculated out but then you did they have to decide to come back or did you find that you they had been sufficiently transitioned that they didn't need that extra year yeah that that did happen that when that came into play of um july of 20 um there at that time the pps director tracy hussey reached out to those families of those students that had aged out at 21 and offered them an additional year so that they would then be with us through until their 22nd birthday so that did occur some some families did take us up on that some families did not they had already had their students placed in programs or had already gotten them settled into um um you know services um and did not opt to come back thanks for that i appreciate that um and my final question is um so you had you said that the the numbers the numbers you used for your report were i think was a 352 right for total special ed students it was something like that 558 552 five bill gee sorry yeah um and then but when you looked at it more recently we're up by like 12 students or something like that do you know what aid yeah do you know what age group of those students were was it across uh all ages or was it like let's say just in the elementary age or anything do you know um i didn't look that deep into it to see if it was one particular age group or not um but i think um based on my conversation with our school counselors and our school psychologists i think at the upper grade levels the students that we're seeing more more likely to be identified are students that are being impacted by anxiety or emotionality there may have been some hospitalizations that have occurred and then so now and and the student is now eligible for special ed um at the lower levels i think at the elementary levels i should say i think that the school psychologists were seeing more of the ld learning disability students coming coming across the table for them and in that case that's where they felt that um the impact of covid and looking at standardized assessments and the impact on standardized assessments it makes it very it convolutes making those decisions as to whether a student is really being impacted but is this student really being impacted by a learning disability or is this a result of remote learning less engagement maybe was um to you know engage in out of school um for a period of time so so these students uh post october one weren't necessarily like newly identified um let's say learning disabled students these were potentially mental health um i think i think it's probably both it's probably both because like i said i think that what what i'm hearing more so at the high school tends to be towards the mental health at that age typically if this child has a learning disability it's been teased out by that it's very rare that we identify students with a learning disability by the time they're in ninth to twelfth grade majority of the time it's it's we can we identify that at the early stages so it's so just so i'm understanding so when if there's a mental health issue issue with the student it's more like um their issue has been identified in this so when they when they're perhaps are entered into your program it's more of on on the recovery phase and not like or a treatment phase and not um uh i'm trying to say like you know there's the initial incident and then when they've kind of come back from that when they're trying to transition back is that kind of how it's used or is it not it may be someone who has been treated in the past or maybe seeking outside out of school private services for to help them deal with any kind of anxiety or emotional issues that they're having but now it's risen to the level where it's blowing over into school and so when that happens and now and you might see students that are maybe their uh their rate of um absence is rising they might be pulling themselves out of some of the social activities that they used to be involved in you might see them their grades dropping and so those might be some of the red flags or the indicators anytime we have a child that is hospitalized um because they're struggling with something we or we always go to ppt to at least review the information to see if we sh if we should go forward and do some evaluations and see if this that child is actually impacted by a disability thank you i appreciate that um are there any additional questions can i just add a real point a real quick point for clarity around special education identification and in that process um you know the team evaluates a student and identifies a particular learning disability perhaps or sometimes as robin said there are other emotionality issues that are connected and special education doesn't cure those things right special education teaches compensatory practices the skills for kids to be able to work through them work around them learn different strategies to tackle problems um so i want to be careful with the idea that you know exiting is very much a goal um to and what that you know would mean is that the child has developed the skills necessary to compensate for whatever the original identification was and that's really the goal it's not a cure and we identify goals for students to meet um along that process and and that's really what the emphasis is in that ppt meeting that you know andrew was talking about earlier we once you're identified we come back and we take a look at what compensatory strategies are we focused on teaching this child to to what end what goals are we trying to you know get them to accomplish um and the team agrees on those things and then we move forward and so over time it's tricky because you know the things become more challenging academically and more sophisticated and we teach new skills and the goal is that like you know we've said before to exit special education but um our the child's success and failure is not grounded in whether or not they are exited from special education and you be continuing special education for an extended period of years and be very successful in that process to the point where you know i as a high school principal and i know that you know robin's seen this plenty of times where students okay we've we've met these goals and then parents and students may say well you know to tim's point earlier i don't know i don't want to get out like no this has been it's been great for me um so you know i don't want to caught in a trap where success and failure means whether or not you got in or out but it's about how you're meeting those goals so just want to throw those two cents in and rob certainly you know if i i missed anything there no no you said you said it well because we know that our many of our students with disabilities go on to college and there's no iep at college you know they they can get accommodations they can disclose their disability they can get accommodations but they're they won't be getting a a plan such as an iep when they go there and and you're absolutely right that they learn how to compensate for those areas that they that are deficits for them or that they struggle with um so they find the strategies of the tools um in order to um you know build that bridge so that they can be successful so yeah you said it well jeff who knows uh sam you got a question yeah actually now that dr zoe mentioned compensatory did we have um are we playing catch up to compensatory i know there was a huge issue obviously over when we went into covid and it's across the state that you know we owed our kids instruction um so where are we as far as cheshire is concerned where are we with that and are we continuing to make that up as we go along this year uh well we um we are applying the same um strategies that er that general ed is applying as far as acceleration goes um i mean that's been what special ed has done all along and as you know we were very fortunate in cheshire that um when the stage when we shut down it was just a couple days before our teachers were on um on the computers and were providing that remote instruction and um i have to you know hand it to them how they really uh really thought had were thinking out of the box on how to present specialized instruction through a remote venue um i i actually had seen many screencastifys and and wilson instruction programs for students with dyslexia that they um that they were utilizing and how they were presenting it through the remote avenue and then fortunately for our elementary students which are most impacted by um by um their disabilities um they were in person all last year so for them they were they were present in getting that direct instruction for our students that were at the high school level that um were in participating in a hybrid model if we came across students that were struggling in that hybrid model then they went back to ppt or they pulled those students in and some students were able to come in for four days a week versus the two days a week um and so you know we tried to accommodate um our students that um just weren't having a difficult time with that remote so as far as compensatory services that's a decision that's made um in with individuals and through individual ppts um and so as they look at the students progress and they look at if there was some regression or some loss of skills and the rate of that recovery that that student is experiencing then they are making those decisions as to how they're going to address that that loss no great i definitely you know obviously cheshire was at the forefront in providing that and having kids are all in especially in the elementary side i just didn't know where we where we fell on that spectrum as to um ensuring that you know students were receiving the hours of services that we were supposed to be receiving to a certain quality obviously um yeah i mean we when we were um on remote um you know we had to develop our remote learning plans and we had to take a look at our students ieps and look at the amount of hours of services they were supposed to be provided when in person and we had to determine what were we still able to do from the remote remote classroom and what could we still apply in really you know the state wasn't looking for us not to reduce services during that time they were really looking for us to implement the iep to the best extent possible as it was designed so thank you robin thank you okay there any further questions all right well uh robin ann uh thank you so much for another excellent presentation we thank you for your time this evening thank you and uh we have a lot to think about thank you thank you i guess uh we hand it back to vin i think okay well thank you so i'm going to um wrap up instructional expense which you know this is the section we were just covering with some noteworthy information related to curriculum writing and professional development you should be able to see that on the screen so for curriculum writing just a few bullet points here um you know the summer curriculum writing uh workshops went extremely well last year so you know it's certainly being planned for already for this summer uh some of the work that needs to be done has to include new standards and incorporating district focus areas the curriculum council focus the curriculum is is reviewed on a five-year rotation for 22-23 the sections that are being reviewed by the curriculum by the cheshire curriculum council excuse me are language arts in english and special education on the next generation science standards front there is training that's needed to support the alignment to those standards again all this is being incorporated and planned for within our budget and then the next to last bullet there talks about the social studies curriculum revisions are needed to align with new state standards on the instructional materials and resources we do need new textbooks and or resources for the earth science programming and also for the manufacturing fundamentals which is part of the cte program and then on the professional development front similar to what we've done in the past you know the pd will focus on complex thinking and social emotional learning which are key district goals also a big focus will be on english learners this is in line with the state's emphasis and also we've seen growth of english learners in cheshire and so they'll be coaching you know sessions to implement strategies for english learners um and then that last bullet talks about instructional shifts necessary to deliver the next generation science standards so those are all factors that will be incorporated into professional development as far as instructional expense overall as a percentage of our budget this is similar to what we saw with all the other areas we presented instructional expense has been relatively flat as a percentage of our budget it's not been funded over the years just as a percentage of the budget it's it's held in that 5.6 to 6 range is what you see on the chart here so with that i'm just going to go back and ask if there are any specific questions on the line items related to instructional expense and then we move into support services uh vin just a quick question on instruc instructional supply firstly um you had budgeted uh 440 for this year but we're way above that um but so for next year was there so what what caught what's causing that bump right now and so is that funding level uh still appropriate as do all of our classrooms have the supplies that they need for excellent education i think the answer to that adam is that we'll prioritize to make sure that that education isn't compromised and when you say the bump are you looking at the 482 that we expended in 2021 um yeah am i looking at the wrong year yeah no well the 480 000 that's what we expended in 2021 yeah i'm i'm sorry that's okay about so as long as you think that we have enough uh our that 440 numbers is a good number for uh to keep our levels steady that's all i guess that's what i was asking i i think we're good there thank you stay i'm glad ben what we can't really see this as well but um what's this 60 000 it seems pretty consistent to maintain the library periodicals is that what i'm seeing right now yes the 60 000.

it's going up 2.3 percent important to note that the vast majority 57 of the support services line is for student transportation which i'll show you some more detail on that in one second and then the smaller percentage is the the next largest category is other professional services which you know that budget accounts for technology services including apex who's our network service provider board of ed legal services audit services that we pay um sos our auditors for uh the next largest slice that energy performance contract of 630 0490 that is for the um mresco energy performance infrastructure improvements we made about eight years ago now and we pay those back over a 15-year period that's what that represents and and the rest are smaller amounts that i will go through in the next slide and i won't mention that i will come back to the point about allocating some funds because i do have some good news to share with the uh with the board members tonight so this is just the same look from the budget book of our support services line i will highlight just a couple of these quickly um rentals leases that's going i mean it's not a large dollar amount it's 22 000 increase but what we do this particular account supports rentals of the multifunction printers that we use as well as rentals of pool and um hockey rinks so it's a pretty broad category the reason this is going up is because what we've been doing for about the last it's getting close to 10 years now when we rent these multi-function printers so it's copiers they also serve as printers and they also serve as scanners what we've been entering into is municipal lease agreements where we could buy the machine at the end of five years for a dollar so we had quite a few machines that we had purchased for a dollar that we've been running the last three or four years so we're not making any payments only for the use of the machine so those machines finally reach the point where they're no longer viable so we had to enter into new five-year minutes for leases on some machines you know to the tune of about 20 000 or so so that's why that line item went up an important line to look at here is the pupil transportation line that oops didn't mean to do that 3627 790 if you could see where my cursor is you'll see that we budgeted that flat we were able to do so despite a two percent contractual increase and i'll talk about that in a minute but you know we are finding you know savings with root consolidation you know which we've been doing for several years now so that's some good news um you know even though our contract cost is going up by somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 000.

that's this year's budget we've and that's what we're budgeting for next year so what's happened um you know with library over the years is these line items have decreased because we're relying so much less on printed materials and we're using more online resources so that that budget seems like a reasonable number you could see in in 2021 we expended 43 000 does that answer the question sam yeah i just i mean because we're going so digital what would be the need for the 60 i just don't yeah the expenditure is not zero for you know the items that we need for library so there are still expenditures that go against you know library periodicals and the two lines below that for library media supplies if i could jump in i would also add that that 43 000 in 2021 was also the school year where we shut down in march right so that's important to remember i want to stress that while we have certain textbooks and i hate to even call them textbooks because they're not their platforms which have material in them that are videos um that are more manipulatives those things certainly are electronic but i want to stress the importance of getting hard copy regular books in the hands of students and how we don't want to shortchange that in our libraries for our schools or in our individual classroom libraries you know you we've recently done a lot on our ela progressions across elementary and middle school we'll have one at the high school soon and the focus that we still have on reading hard copy text hope that helps and for anybody that i mean this might be difficult to read in the budget book itself um you know under the instructional tab this is on page 11 the you know and basically ben's just walking through you know the line items here and it kind of outlines what the library books periodicals is and library media supplies and i'll just keep we'll just keep subsequently walking through it make it easier if it's easier to follow that way hey you had your hand up i did thank you um i i probably should have written out this but i'm i'm looking at this um budget i have to say i am incredibly distressed by it um and and then the reason i asked for the per pupil expenditure on um you know the the non-special ed student the the general ed student is that and i don't want to take away from the special ed um but i we're taking away from the general ed students and as a if i were a parent i would be mightily concerned i mean i look at replacement equipment we spent 326 000 in replacement and 236 000 plus um you know in 2021 and now we're saying that we're gonna be able to get by or we said that we would get by with a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty and a hundred and eighteen thousand seven fifty for both categories last year and we're going to do the same there we're working against high inflation this equipment has to be has to be suffering from wear and tear [Music] every category is not what it is even though the dollar value is the same as last year it is not what it was last year because it has just been reduced by an inflation factor of six percent or whatever we're looking at and you know i'll say more at the final meeting but to have to cut we're beyond cutting to the bone we are in the bone and we're at a real rock and a hard place here because i don't know how much this town can carry um so i just am expressing my dismay over this it's it's i there's nothing i can do but i don't know if anyone else is seeing the same thing i am if i could just add one one point before um the next question so if you look at the line replacement and new equipment in particular um expend it for 2021 keep in mind as you know as we manage through the budget year as we get into april may june if we have accounts that are below their budget and we can allocate funds to replace or buy new equipment that's what we do and that's what's reflected in the 2021 expended and so my point is yes the budget for 22 23 is below that level but if we wind up at the end of 2223 where we have availability and we have a need and replacement or new equipment or any other of these accounts we would allocate it but from a budget point of view you know we're certainly trying to strike this balance i think that's what you're getting at faith between you know what we can afford to budget and what we would budget if we didn't have right this year's limitation you know being driven by the enrollment and medical benefits so we'll do it what we always do is we'll prioritize as the year goes goes through and then um you know make expenditures accordingly spam i i have to say i'm with your face because as i look at the binder it just stresses me out a little more so um and and i guess to help with the decision making i'm hoping that we can if doctor sullivan or vin can can prioritize the that wish list and the needs you know obviously the medical expenses you already have a plan to work on it to collaborate with the town to try to find a solution for that but it's right now it's just hard pressed to find solutions for the other items and still maintain and accelerate our students you know so i guess what will be easier going back to my comment is what are the top priorities if we had to do without certain things what would what can we not do without medical obviously being already on the table well i don't wanna i don't wanna throw gas on the fire salmon and faith but when you look at the um the binder you'll see that you know pretty much as you flip through line by line there's a graph for each item that shows the historical you know allocation for those various lines in a lot of cases you'll see that you know there's a downward trend in spending in those lines because over time you know the budget's just been squeezed over the course of you know my experience here you know dating back to when i worked at it dot but um we've also worked very hard as a board and is a leadership team to identify core priorities that yield high return on investment and in doing so we've able to be that much more pinpointed as i think you're suggesting sam you know what what are the high leverage areas here and our achievement has dramatically improved and our services have you know diversified in and improved so um yeah i think we've just been leaner and more effective in terms of the items that were moved forward on day one in our budget presentation in terms of like these are new positions that we're adding those were all designed as i think i mentioned that day to sustain services so to not you know really make leaps and bounds if we're talking about making which i think is pretty good by the way sustained services what we provide is is you know pretty darn good for our community to build upon what we're providing is definitely important um and that i sent that document to the board uh i don't know a week and a half ago and feels like a week and a half ago and covet time that could have been like tuesday i don't know but um tomorrow why don't we or excuse me thursday during when the time lapse again why don't we go through that um because you would ask that question in one of our i think the first night i presented the budget and we can go through that together i can kind of pinpoint you know like for you and the community what we're looking at and why is priorities yeah that would be actually very helpful dr solon um you know just speaking as an individual you know i personally would not want to take away the direct impact on students anything that would have a direct impact on students and the growth and progress of students moving forward because we do need to accelerate our students to be competitive right or to maintain our our competitive status so um i think that you know we have all these numbers thrown at us i i am looking at the binder every single night and i just go back to what is truly doable here what is what is reality at this moment in time and i also think that you know we need to be paid back what was given last cycle and that's going to be a bigger argument but that would be helpful thank you sure um ben continue on please okay so this wraps up instructional expenses i will jump into support services which is 8.7 percent of our budget you see up at the top the support services accounts uh the 22-23 budget request totals 7 million 85 879.

we'll we'll save that with some other reductions property insurance and liability insurance you can see those are going up by significant percentages doesn't really have that much to do with claims that were filed here in cheshire it just has to do with the general cost of property and liability insurance hd seeger is our broker they are shopping these were early estimates um but those increases unfortunately are in line with the industry trend um and you know hopefully htc will be able to find some coverage that isn't quite um that high in terms of an increase but i'm doubtful that they'll be able to do that the rest of the line items um transportation supply we are increasing that budget anticipating that you know fuel prices uh and this is primarily fuel for the buses whether it's diesel or gasoline so we increase that because we don't know fuel prices will be higher next year we'll be able to lock those uh those prices so that's just a high level review of the of all the lines so transportation which again represents about 57 percent of this line item um i and i see mr martelly's raise his hands i'll just explain this and then we'll pause um of our public um about student transportation about 54 2.1 million is for our general public school roots special education is about 23 or 945 000 uh the next slice there is is for fuel equipment and repairs that's 353 000 just to be specific the repairs are for the board of ed vehicles that are owned that goes repair services are covered under their contract but the board owns about a dozen vehicles and we maintain and repair those student activity what that refers to are the sports and extracurricular runs that we do um private school roots that is the transportation that we provide for st bridget students which we are required to do it's it's mandated um the 162 000 so students that attend boaag schools uh wilcox and other that's transportation we're obligated to provide and finally that last slice is uh transportation insurance so that just gives you kind of a high level picture of you know where the transportation dollars are going again that's that's 3.6 million plus the 353 000.

it's going up 2.3 percent important to note that the vast majority 57 of the support services line is for student transportation which i'll show you some more detail on that in one second and then the smaller percentage is the the next largest category is other professional services which you know that budget accounts for technology services including apex who's our network service provider board of ed legal services audit services that we pay um sos our auditors for uh the next largest slice that energy performance contract of 630 0490 that is for the um mresco energy performance infrastructure improvements we made about eight years ago now and we pay those back over a 15-year period that's what that represents and and the rest are smaller amounts that i will go through in the next slide and i won't mention that i will come back to the point about allocating some funds because i do have some good news to share with the uh with the board members tonight so this is just the same look from the budget book of our support services line i will highlight just a couple of these quickly um rentals leases that's going i mean it's not a large dollar amount it's 22 000 increase but what we do this particular account supports rentals of the multifunction printers that we use as well as rentals of pool and um hockey rinks so it's a pretty broad category the reason this is going up is because what we've been doing for about the last it's getting close to 10 years now when we rent these multi-function printers so it's copiers they also serve as printers and they also serve as scanners what we've been entering into is municipal lease agreements where we could buy the machine at the end of five years for a dollar so we had quite a few machines that we had purchased for a dollar that we've been running the last three or four years so we're not making any payments only for the use of the machine so those machines finally reach the point where they're no longer viable so we had to enter into new five-year minutes for leases on some machines you know to the tune of about 20 000 or so so that's why that line item went up an important line to look at here is the pupil transportation line that oops didn't mean to do that 3627 790 if you could see where my cursor is you'll see that we budgeted that flat we were able to do so despite a two percent contractual increase and i'll talk about that in a minute but you know we are finding you know savings with root consolidation you know which we've been doing for several years now so that's some good news um you know even though our contract cost is going up by somewhere in the neighborhood of 75 000.

so this is our you know outside of salaries transportation is our largest line item and um i'll pause there mr gripper for questions andrew you had your hand raised sure van can you just go back to the last slide with the insurance number yes so is that am i so it's a 40 000 liability insurance increase so we use hd seeker so do we shop that to multiple parties i mean that's a 40 increase yeah that's that's what hd seeger does they shop um different carriers for us as our broker so between property insurance and liability you're looking at a 60 increase well no it's whatever 35 of those two lines combined right the average of 23 plus 39 percent right yeah it's it's a huge increase um higher than we've seen in many years is it because of like claims or is that just the industries dictating that yeah it's the industry it's it's the it's the broad claims that are happening you know with all the um hurricanes and and other events that have driven up insurance costs this is how the insurance company make it up it's really not uh because we've had extraordinarily high claims at all it's the industry and they're seeing this on the town side as well unfortunately maybe it's time to look at htc here i mean i i know that they're you know they do a lot of municipal um coverage but yeah i mean in fairness you know hd seeger um i know we had talked about it in the benefits section but you know they did shop at workman's comp insurance and so we saved about a hundred thousand dollars this year moving from kerma to travelers and for the next year we're expecting savings of about 72 000 against that line so it really is market forces that are driving this um and again hopefully we'll get some better news when the shopping process is finished but that's where it is currently thanks man okay timmy you had your hand raised sorry man i'm not sure if i missed this but i'm just looking at that transportation line going from 3 million to 3.6 million from extended to 2021 yeah to this year's budget what's so i mean okay we didn't do a lot of transportation runs in 2021 because of the pandemic so we were well below our budget at the 2.9 million if we look back at the history you know the three we've been in the three and a half million dollar range so that was a covet pickup it's really sort of um it's not the regular daily school bus routes morning afternoon it's the sports and the activities and stuff like that ended up getting reduced i know sports were reduced last year so because you were still doing the bus routes well it was a combination right so yes we were doing the bus routes but you know for example the high school was um you know there was no uh no bus routes for the high school on fridays okay yep all right gotcha yep yep yep okay so it was a combination of things yeah so the 2.9 million that was the actual expenditure let's call it a covert anomaly sure no no no okay that that makes sense and the um the one other thing that i'll just point out as unfortunate as as it is with these uh i've seen it recently the catalytic converter that's including with our own vehicles electric vehicles don't have catalytic converters so electric school buses hopefully in the not so distant future so another benefit pros are pros and cons to everything but that's one pro for electric thank you vin you're welcome thanks evan uh faith have your hand raised so uh this i i know we we purchased this the property and the liability insurance with the town and this may be a verboten question but have we ever considered or explored regional risk pools like ex cooperating with other towns and expanding our purchasing power well on these these two lines of insurance no we've i mean we've been uh with htc girl although we've shopped you know for different brokers we've been with htc girl who's been placing our insurance for several years um on the there's two places where we are taking advantage of risk pools you know one was when we were with kerma for our workers comp insurance which as i said just a few minutes ago we did exit kerma because we got a better rate from travelers and the other place where part of a multi-town municipal arrangement is our stop-loss insurance for medical with ct prime you know that's ten different um municipalities and or boards of ed that that cooperate with that but um that's a good question faith i mean we're we'll look at we're looking at this a little bit closer as to you know what are we going to do with those two particular insurance lines so we really had insurance from karma like bad karma oh not karma kerma c-i-r-m-a but that's a good one all right nevermind thanks okay okay then go ahead yep all right so um just to wrap up on on transportation the um you know that go is our provider that contract runs through june of 2024.

we'll we'll save that with some other reductions property insurance and liability insurance you can see those are going up by significant percentages doesn't really have that much to do with claims that were filed here in cheshire it just has to do with the general cost of property and liability insurance hd seeger is our broker they are shopping these were early estimates um but those increases unfortunately are in line with the industry trend um and you know hopefully htc will be able to find some coverage that isn't quite um that high in terms of an increase but i'm doubtful that they'll be able to do that the rest of the line items um transportation supply we are increasing that budget anticipating that you know fuel prices uh and this is primarily fuel for the buses whether it's diesel or gasoline so we increase that because we don't know fuel prices will be higher next year we'll be able to lock those uh those prices so that's just a high level review of the of all the lines so transportation which again represents about 57 percent of this line item um i and i see mr martelly's raise his hands i'll just explain this and then we'll pause um of our public um about student transportation about 54 2.1 million is for our general public school roots special education is about 23 or 945 000 uh the next slice there is is for fuel equipment and repairs that's 353 000 just to be specific the repairs are for the board of ed vehicles that are owned that goes repair services are covered under their contract but the board owns about a dozen vehicles and we maintain and repair those student activity what that refers to are the sports and extracurricular runs that we do um private school roots that is the transportation that we provide for st bridget students which we are required to do it's it's mandated um the 162 000 so students that attend boaag schools uh wilcox and other that's transportation we're obligated to provide and finally that last slice is uh transportation insurance so that just gives you kind of a high level picture of you know where the transportation dollars are going again that's that's 3.6 million plus the 353 000.

you know there's two percent escalations per year up until the last year of that contract which is a couple of years out and the way there's just a couple of things i wanted to mention um we are in the process of upgrading the software that we use to for routing and one thing that's unique about cheshire is that we plan the routes for the buses based on where the students live you know we don't let our service provider of that go do that and so you know our transportation manager luther miller you know does a really really good job of looking to you know improve bus routes consolidate stops wherever we can and that's been a significant savings over the years other things that we've done even though we didn't have summer school last year you know by changing the the locations where summer school is held to highland only you know we've reduced the number of buses that we need over the summer and this is we only provide buses for summer school for special education you know we do some route sharing for special ed and and technical school routes with other districts we are a member of aces where we do some route sharing on the special education side we we've been in contract with them i believe this is currently our third year you know we do try and mitigate you know costs wherever we can with fuel prices by locking in and then we've looked at programs such as you know can we have students opt out and we do that if for example a student at the high school is issued a senior or junior parking permit they're opted out of transportation so we can you know reduce the number of students that you know would be assigned to a bus run so we're always looking at ways where we can you know reduce the cost of transportation to the extent we can um on the operations side i'll pause for the question before i give you the breaking news here all right thanks and with the buses vince's you've been here have we reduced the number of buses yeah we have over the years and you know we were over 40 bus runs at one point and you know we're i believe it at 37 or 38 this year i'd have to just double check the number but a a regular ed bus run is roughly 60 000 a year so it's significant savings when you're able to reduce a bus run the special ed runs they're not um they're not quite that high it's about forty thousand dollars per year those are smaller uh buses and we also use vans in some cases which are even less expensive to run you know plus we have as i was saying we have a dozen vehicles you know with board of ed drivers that are significantly less expensive than having that outsourced dad go okay trying to get a lot of bang for our buck all right you ready for a little budget good news yes let's hear it i really do so we've gotten two grants approved in the last um 60 days that are very significant and i'm very pleased to let you know the first one is uh through the emergency connectivity fund which is basically an e-rate program um we received 649 that is used to replace student chromebooks that either are or will be at end of life now this is a grant that michael papa our technology director works with e-rate online which is a service provider that we use so that that award is already in effect it requires zero outlay of funds from the schools now we'll be able to purchase roughly eighteen hundred student chromebooks with that funding we have roughly four thousand two 200 chromebooks either in students hands that they take home or that they leave you know here in school and they use during the school day so our fleet of chromebooks is very very large this 640 000 essentially what it does is it is it frees up money that you know we have you know in our budget for chromebook replacements um that we'll be able to use for other things such as to upgrade the smart boards from smart ports to smart flat panels we funded the smart board project through capital we have not been doing that in recent years we're funding it out of our operating budget and again whenever we free up a budget line like the account that we would use for chromebook purchases which is the capital equipment account we can use it in other places so you know if next year we do have a need on the textbook line or you know on the on the library periodical line you know we can allocate the funding to do that so that's grant number one and then grant number two slightly different grant type but in june we applied for round five of the school security competitive grant and we [Music] were awarded 959 687 dollars now this grant is specifically for physical building security improvements it's a reimbursement grant we get 45 percent reimbursed so to get the 959 we have to spend 2.1 million it's important to note though that we do have funding allocated from our capital budget for some of the security improvements that we applied for this grant for not the least of which is the person traps that we installed at four schools this summer um so again very significant you know grants which you know either relieve our operating budget in the case of the first one or provide reimbursement against capital expenditures in the case of the school security one okay so that's my good news for this budget season and i see mr gripper there are some questions yes uh firstly uh vin congratulations to you and your team as uh mrs rosenberg also said um that i know that writing grants can be a tv tedious process so uh that's uh those are some big wins there um let's see i guess since faith's name shows up first faith you are on your hand go ahead kudos on that one on those two those are great hey um are you restricted in your ability your ability to shift accounts um do they have to stay or funds do they have to stay within the specific account or can you shift funds between accounts the way that process works is that we will offset during the school year generally we stay within the account line so support services stays within support services okay so we don't transfer funds we'll overexpend one where one is below budget and then the board formally approves at the year end the transfers between those account groupings so certified non-certified support instructional services maintenance and operations and medical benefits so that's how it works we don't do intra year fun transfers um so when we look at the monthly finance reports you know we we do spend some time and more so as we get to the end of the year showing here's where we're over here's where we're offending it and that's how we manage the budget and um you know stay you know of course we always have to stay within our budget the technically the board members are responsible if we ever go over our full budget right which will not happen on my watch i value my job so we'll always be within budget so just to make sure we can't say take 649 000 from um our equipment instructional equipment and put it in oh i don't know health benefits or um we could do that if if if that was illegal to desire no i'm not saying it is but it just could you could as long as you're within the total appropriation of the you know that's provided by the council you could do those kinds of shifts okay and there's as i say there's really two ways to do it over expend you know in one account where you and offset it with accounts where you're below budget or you could do formal transfers we've not done that you know here in cheshire previously but it could be done thank you you're welcome tim thanks adam hi vin thank you for doing this with her with regard to the first grant i is it i'm assuming it's safe to say that any of these new chromebooks would be in compliance with data privacy laws yeah none of them everything that we're doing none of that would change in terms of you know how the devices are managed um the protections that we offer through those devices i know there was a data privacy presentation i guess a month ago you know by our technology team and mike papa technology director so we would buy devices that is you know certainly compliant and you know while we're on the topic so what happens with the chromebooks is the chromebooks rely on the google platform um and there's a you know essentially an expiration date where google stops updating a particular device with the latest version of google software so that's when they're determined to be end of life it's really it's not so much our decision if the device is working and it's compliant and it can continue to get its operating system off the updates from google will keep them running but we do have a large number of devices that are reaching end of life you know this year and next year that need to be replaced and so that's what this allocation is for and again it's only student chromebooks we cannot use these funds for any staff chromebooks thank you for that yeah uh um i guess i'll just say as a as a parent i the date of privacy i i personally wonder if the the laws go far enough i mean google's gonna be light years ahead of any laws as far as i'm concerned and they do make money off of data as far as i know so it's just a general concern for me i don't know what the answer is i couldn't begin to tackle it but it is um it is concerning i mean it's not just google it's facebook all these social media that i assume they're making money off of data um so it's concerning um anyway thank you for going out and getting the grant i do appreciate it uh just a couple of other things um this isn't i mentioned this because we did some infrastructure upgrades to the network um 295 000 that was a capital project appropriation that was our net cost we had a 492 thousand dollar capital appropriation but we received 197 000 any rate funding for that equipment so again this goes and speaks to the fact that we do try and find every available um funding reimbursement grant or in the case of e-rate funding we do take advantage of those programs when they're available as we've seen our smart boards start to fail we are not replacing the old smart boards with the projector mounted smart boards technology is dated so we are moving to the smart interactive flat panels we waited a long time to make this purchase decision working with marlene and the curriculum staff as well as technology we shopped a bunch of different boards and uh it's kind of fortunate that we waited because smart came out with an interactive flat panel that's um at a very attractive price so we've replaced 83 boards over the last year or so and there are 28 boards that are on order that are being installed you know march 22nd so this means that we've replaced roughly a third of the of the boards over the years and we'll continue to make progress on that as i said that grant that we receive will help us accomplish the goal of replacing that the smart board equipment we just moved to a cloud-based fax server that saves us the funds from having to buy server equipment in the future and we've eliminated the telephone line cost so this is you know web-based fax server we no longer have fax machines in in the district faxes basically come through email now and then the last thing i wanted to mention is employee compliance training and professional development again this has been a focus in school district operations so we were able to take the alice um violent intruder training and incorporate it into the vector online learning platform which we've been using and then we also launched a pd program for our classified staff this past year these are just updates they're really not budget requests but i thought it was important to share just because we're on this particular topic so what i'm going to show you you know on the next screen is this is a report that comes out of the vector online training program and if if you look real quickly so one of the required online training programs is bloodborne pathogen exposure prevention for our certified staff 400 employees completed it so 99 of our employees completed it we have a very deliberate um follow-up process to make sure that our employees are keeping on top of the required annual training and that's what you know all these items represent bullying recognition cyber security email and messaging safety first aid if you look at the total as of this report which was run last week 97.7 percent of the required training has been completed that two point you know three percent that hasn't completed a lot of that has to do with employees who are on leaves it's not employees that have ignored us um because we don't let um employees ignore us so we are really in great shape since introducing this platform and then as i mentioned a minute ago we rolled out alice training we used to do in person we are able to now do it on this vector platform and so we just launched that a couple of months ago 91.3 of our staff has completed that training so we are following up with the you know roughly 70 employees that are listed here is not completed again some of those employees may be out but this has really been helpful to ensure compliance with you know mandated as well as optional training and then this is just a quick snapshot here if you look on the right side this is professional development that we rolled out for non-certified staff communication skills conflict resolution customer service that we use especially for our maintenance and our technology staff interpersonal skills teamwork this is something that our you know non-certified staff has been asking for for years to give them more professional development opportunities that are specific to their jobs and so i'm really happy with the success of these programs um and a lot of this training we are doing as you can see on the left we're using google webinar google oh sorry google webinars scott's quick bites that's scott conway um you know one of our you know technology educators we're using deer oaks which is our employee assistance program provider and then we're using hybrid video instructor led interactive workshops so these are not high cost training modules but they've they've proven to be very very um successful and our employees you know appreciate it and so that wraps up support services which you know you could see just looking at if you drew a trend line it has has been increasing it's been kind of up and down but the general trend line has been increasing a lot of that increase has to do with the cost of student transportation and i will pause there to see if there are any questions on support services ben i don't see any questions okay last um section here is maintenance and operations and so i'm gonna jump in um and unless you tell me to not go mr grippo uh well let me uh how long is uh how many slides you got ben um it's about 20 slides but some of them are going to be really quick there's not a lot of detail that you haven't seen in these um all right we don't need this one yeah we've seen this one plenty so um yeah go ahead go ahead oh you when you want me to stop i'll stop people everybody knows this average age of our building is a 71 years our schools are used not only as schools but schools and community facilities so you could see on the right hand side this is pre-covered but our buildings get a lot of views and i i know that the board members all know that and ms rosenberg is new to the board and i'm confident that she's aware of that um this is what this slide would look like in three years if we go forward and get approval for the new north elementary school and the new norton elementary school so we would have two buildings at a year old so our average age would would come down quite a bit obviously we'll still need to maintain those older buildings until they come offline but that would be the impact of school modernization phase one and i apologize that's the next generation phase one plan to us uh maintenance and operations five percent of our budget it's about a four million dollar total line item important thing though that i'd like to point out is of our maintenance budget of it goes to electricity heating garbage and recycling water gas propane and sewer use so you know even though it's a significant line item at four million dollars a significant portion of that does go to utilities and heating not to repairing buildings so the converse is what are we using for maintenance lines outside of utilities and heat and it's about 2.5 million however 31 of that is cleaning services um so the the amount that we allocate for building improvement is a few lines it's 596 000 for repairs and improvements to the buildings another 251 000 for grounds maintenance plus this um 297 000 for maintenance services those are outside providers that we use other than the cleaning service you know the rest are relatively small dollar amounts this is uh this hundred thirty thousand is our snow plow budget um so far this year we're looking pretty good however i know that there's a large star storm predicted for saturday hopefully we don't get um anywhere near the amount predicted but you know the snow plowing if we have a good season some of that 130 000 is freed up so that we can uh use those funds for other things within the building repair lines these are the lines the increases as you can see in the budget book they're relatively modest we did up heat and energy for next year simply because we don't know where fuel prices are gonna go hopefully they do subside um as we enter the new budget year we also budgeted you know i'll call them modest increases for our maintenance repair and maintenance supply line but there's really not a lot of increase requested in this uh this year's budget for maintenance and operations um the next section really would take me would take us through a high level review of the capital budget um so i'm going to keep moving on the um [Music] capital budget just to be clear capital budget is used to fund building improvements that are of a non-recurring nature and there are 110 000 or more um council approves a five-year capital expenditure plan but they only fund the first year in that plan and then any expenditure that's capital expenditure over 500 000 requires voter referendum this is proposed it hasn't been reviewed or opined on by the planning committee of the board of ed so this at this point is a proposal you know from uh you know dr solon and i and you could see that for the next five years the request is 32 million um i will note that it excludes chapman norton darcy and hummingston because those are the schools that would be affected if we go forward with the and get approval for the next generation plan and you could see roughly the categories there's no change here over prior years window replacements 9 million paving roofing sidewalk masonry 6.8 million improvements to the district cafeteria 5 million hvac improvements 3 million these are all items that are just necessary to keep our buildings in in good repair and operating efficiently if we look at of that 32 million instead of looking at it by category look at it by school you could see that not surprisingly high school is 11.8 million of the request followed by dot at 7.2 million followed by doolittle doolittle is a little bit of a surprise at 6.6 million but they need a roof system that's three million dollars that's included in the in the capital budget and then if i just highlight what's the request that we're asking for funding and money for 2223 it's in these categories window replacements million three roofing uh sidewalk and paving 975 000 district cafeteria improvements of 845 that's primarily for highland school um and then you could see the rest of the categories and again i'm not going to spend a lot of time on this because it will go before the planning committee for additional review soon we are supposed to approve the capital budget at the same time as the operating budget over the last decade the boards requested an average of 24 million the council has approved about 19.6 million so the council has is approved the five-year plan at about an 81 rate however if we look at just a one-year funding approval the council's approval rate has been about 66 so we're really not investing enough in the buildings based on the requests some years like you could see here in 20 20 21 the request was 585 000.