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so all right racers arrow light round two in lane x car 602 lane b is car 605 lane c's car 604 three [Applause] okay in lane d car 604. um c is car 606 and in lane d is car 605. so [Music] 606. [Applause] second last seat of regular competition for the aol then in lane hayes car 606 lane b is car 603 blade seized car 602 and led car 607. all right final race of the regular day competition going into the last heat looks like natalie's house in first place with the score of 80. jake quinnetta has scored 12 in second place and third place is charlie hey my give us a moment to calculate the results moving back momentarily all right for our arrow of light den first place 604 knee patel and second place 605 jacob planeta congratulations scouts take a select break so we can set up our championship competition and put the winners with all the separate players and we'll be back you all right well the votes for best and show have been calculated and in second place with the hess truck evan malia and bringing in first place and the mario kart damian garcia nice work scots welcome back researchers we have the winners from all december dennis now going head-to-head for the pack championship and he won round one we have car 101 connor out of albany in lane b car 306 michael saraceni lane c car 506 john gabowski and elaine d car 206 connor good luck to officers hughes with a pac championship [Applause] all right plane c car 604 annetta patel and lane d car 306 michael cyrus so lane c car 101 and lane d car 403 after three rounds of time for first place in a tight quarter let's see how racers do oh tell bird is still targets from john boski and congratulations keith ford is going to have a name today in car 403 lane b car 604 blaze cd car 206 and lane six four is a job playing a is car 604 playing b is car lane c is car 403 and lane deeds car 101.

so [Music] is 101 lane b r403 lane c is car 306 and lane d's car 206. [Music] scott don't forget after the completion of the state bridge hey car 206 lane b car 506 lane c car 503 2403 and indeed car 306. so 506. and especially mike celebi coming out hopefully next year we'll all be back in person so currently we have a tie between connor is 506. so lane c r 101 and lady d car 604. eleven house connor marin second place is michael 17 with 16 points clerk is tied between conan and alfred and nevin patel our racers are car 306 206 conor marin and car 101 connor had it all feet awesome job racers all right solid scores across the board we're going to take a moment to put together our final stores all right welcome back everybody we've reviewed the results and for the pack wide race coming in third place car number 506 john lebowski coming in in second place car 306.

michael saracini and coming in first place over the whole pack car number 206 connor maron congratulations guys [Applause] as first second and third place finishers in the pac-wide race you guys are all eligible to participate in the town-wide race which is two weeks from now on saturday the 26th we will be sending out additional information so you have the details of the time location and everything else you'll need to know for that that concludes our 2020 2022 pinewood derby race uh for this year and uh after the race feel free to stop by any via your cars will be out on the table outside the cafeteria here pick up your your cards and awards and i hope you enjoyed it see you soon

here tonight tonight is definitely not the meeting we want to start late so let's get started we got a lot of stuff to get covered tonight i don't get anybody in trouble tonight so let's jump right into it so we're calling me at 5 31 and we're going to make up that minute somewhere in we will have our blue ribbon update mr smith mr president members board dr smith renovations are going well lc we're actually putting flooring down on the third floor and we did pass inspection for above ceiling so that'll start going in mechanical work and boiler room continues on lc1b phase the one on the right is actually lc's new dance floor or dance studio as it will be ready to go later this spring ln third floor continues drywall continues on the third floor as you see there the panels the architectural panels for the pool we're hoping to start raising those panels march 7th ln new walls those are at the company where we are basically passed the okay to pour and proceed transportation we are winding down transportation this week and moving that facility uh through the course of this weekend and we continue on with the middle school with the design process and the hva aac continues question for mr smith for our blue ribbon facilities update roger can you give the board mr smith update on the move for transportation since you alluded to that you can go ahead and share that the transportation uh yes we are uh going to be moving the facility starting actually friday we're going to have the buses drivers take the buses over there and technology is working hard we're finalizing some things this week and actually the movers even started this week moving some of the shop equipment so we'll finish that up with the two days next week where we don't have students that'll give us plenty of time to make sure everything's operable for wednesday with kids thank you questions thank you sir request for proposal for lawrence north asphalt mr smith mr president members of war dr smith we did pull a couple things out of lawrence north affalt to get ahead on some things for this summer number one is a north west or northeast corner you'll see up there in the upper right hand corner and then also the lower south east corner and also in front of the new [Music] pool area and also we are adding a walking path from mckin or lawrence north to mackenzie and it'll actually be on the south side and the east side of the uh drive as we move closer allowing kids to drive and to walk to mackenzie and back and forth that'll give them a safe way to maneuver between the two sites we will bring this back to the board if approved tonight later uh next month and uh have that approved so we can uh do some summer work question on our lawrence north asphalt thank you sir calendar updates assistant suits good evening mr president dr smith members of the board tonight we bring to you some recommendations for the new federal holiday juneteenth a little background in june of last year u.s congress passed the june teens national independence day act establishing juneteenth as the newest federal holiday in order to bring your recommendation this evening we sought input and feedback both from our district counter committee as well as our association tonight we're bringing you the following recommendations we recommend that juneteenth be recognized each year as a paid holiday with 12 month employees receiving the paid day off normally that would not be an issue because school is all for the summer but obviously we have jump start during the month of june so for summer 2022 june teens falls on sunday june 19th and should be recognized on monday june 20th this falls in line with uh recently updated federal guidance this will shorten jumpstart from a total of 16 days to 15 days as a reminder jumpstart runs monday through thursday and then for summer 2023 juneteenth is and should be recognized on monday june 19th and then the calendar committee will con will include this in future recommendations to the board i'd be happy to answer any questions questions for any board members well i have a question and i'm gonna act like i don't know this what exactly is juneteenth good question the math teacher me would do a gr hopefully do a good job giving you a history lesson on that um president lincoln uh back in on january 1st 1863 signed the emancipation proclamation however it took nearly two and a half years for both word and the ability to enforce that proclamation to this as far as the state of texas uh so two and a half years later is when juneteenth was first celebrated and is recognized as knowing when the proclamation reached all of the states any other questions on our calendar updates regarding juneteenth thank you student chromebook it's michael good evening uh dr smith mr president members of the board uh this evening i bring to you the results of our most recent bid process for new student chromebooks as you know we do a refresh cycle every year uh replacing fifth grade and ninth grade devices on a four year life cycle uh and then in future years we'll also be adding second third and fourth depending on when those fall in but this year we're looking at fifth and ninth grade and in front of you you see the results of the bid process this year hpi international presented the best possible price for the device the warranty the battery coverage uh so we have a we combine those into a single unit price for the bid process so later this meeting i'll ask for the board's approval to to proceed with the purchase of the new chromebook so that we can ensure that we receive the devices in time to deploy them at the end of the school year and for the start of jumpstart any questions on our chromebook bits thank you technology surplus bit results mr president dr smith uh members of the boards i present to you another set of bid results this time for uh some surplus equipment uh that will be retiring from the the district uh the board has already approved declaring this equipment surplus and this is an opportunity for us to recoup some of the value uh this is somewhat of a smaller uh surplus sale than we usually do uh but with the last two summers of the pandemic and moving lots and lots of equipment around we needed to do a surplus sale just wasn't as large as our normal one so that's why the numbers are a little bit reduced but we feel like we got a good competitive bid and and we got the best that we could out of the equipment in this in the current environment any questions on our surplus bid results thank you just one question real quick so i i assume because we approved the bidding out of this there's no further action we need to take as a board on this we'll uh we'll be bringing it to for final approval uh to sell the equipment to these particular vendors at this price so the board has declared the equipment surplus but uh approved the bid results that that yeah that's going to be deferred until next meeting yes that's correct okay gotcha any other questions on the surplus or comment request for rfp for extending the wide area network viral connectivity mr michael mr president dr smith members of the board uh today i present to you um initial information about publishing a request for proposals to lay a fiber connection connected to our current district network to the new transportation facility and then also to the city of lawrence water tower to support the district-wide radio system currently we've established a business class internet connection with a third party provider comcast to get the sites up and running but as a long-term strategic measure it is in the best interest of the districts to own our own fiber and so this would be permission to advertise a request for proposals to get bids to lay the fiber questions pertaining to our viral connectivity thank you sir thank you award goals well outstanding agenda items student achievement update partner mr president members of the board and dr smith i'm bringing to you this evening an update on your board goal that's related to our district benchmark assessments and you may recall at the last board meeting i presented how our students were growing from the beginning of the year to the middle of the year just our students in lawrence township tonight we're going to talk about how they compare to the rest of the country so this is our fast bridge reading and math assessment so on the next slide you can just see some reminder information about our fastbridge assessment we assess both reading and math we administered the first assessment in august for the beginning of your baseline this is a nationally normed assessment meaning there are millions of data points across the country as many school districts use this assessment we then administered in december or january depending on the school for mid-year growth data so just a real quick refresher in percentiles a percentile growth measures the growth of similar scoring students across the country so this really tells us where we are relative to the rest of the country in terms of our students growth and a reminder that 50th percentile or above indicates positive growth so this is our data for of the district grades two through eight in reading and so as we do we disaggregate by each of our subgroups to see how each of our subgroups is growing so as a district we're in the 54th percentile which 50 is that magic number you want to be above but then when you look at our subgroups you can see we have several subgroups that are higher than 54 and that indicates that we're getting more growth for instance from our special education subgroup which is important because those students have traditionally not performed at the same level and so this is good data for us the math data is a little bit different we still hit that above 50 however we do have some subgroups that are right at that 50 and so math needs to continue to to be our focus for growth particularly because our white subgroup is the highest so just a couple of analysis points you can see clearly the district focus on reading instruction over the last several years both core instruction as well as intervention that's that same focus we're giving to math now we are achieving equitable growth outcomes in reading all students are growing at an accelerated rate however our students of color special education students el students are growing at a faster rate all subgroups are achieving growth in math however we are concerned because we don't have that same equitable outcome in math so we will continue focusing our efforts around core instruction in mathematics i'd be happy to entertain any questions you might have what questions i'm a little bit confused but did we measure where we stood percentile wise in august in september so a percentile you have to have two tests in order to have a percentile so you only have one percentile that measures the growth between the two tests we'll have another percentile score at the end of the year when we take the third test so usually when i think of percentiles i think that if you have a hundred kids in the room um we would be in the top of performers if it's if our percentile is 54.

sure is that correct so it is however this is percentile growth so in order to have growth you've got to have two tests you've got to have two data points so we wouldn't have growth data with only one test administration in august right right i i guess i'm just confused i guess i'm just confused with that that math um with i would be below 50 percentile this week because that math confuses me but um well i think probably where the confusion is this is growth yeah so you can have percentile score on one test administration but this is growth we're wanting to achieve so the growth data that i showed you last time about and we had lots of green with lots of growth across the district in various subgroups i wanted to show you how that compared to the rest of the country so if our kiddos for instance i don't remember what it was but for instance if they grew eight percent um they achieved eight percent higher in the springtime then um that would put them in the for let's say 52nd percentile right or whatever exactly okay and then the flip side is if they grew 8 percent but they were only in the 40th percentile that's not something we should really be celebrating even though it looks good in our data we need to look at it compared to the national norm thank you for clarifying that absolutely any other questions on our student achievement part two i just had a quick question i know last year it was mentioned that math was the area that suffered a lot due to the pandemic are these numbers um what you might see like reading was higher would was that a number you would see even before the pandemic where the scores were typically higher in reading than math not percentile growth oh okay i wouldn't okay the percentile growth in reading really is attributed to the focus that we've had in the district typically you'd see it the other way where you're getting faster growth in math than you are in reading um historically and so we're pleased with where we are with reading we've got to apply that same process to math to get our students caught up there okay thank you for the context i have a question it would be concerning um just the ebbs and flows of our subgroups um i know that we just did the uh the equity audit would that be highlighted in the audit as to why there's certain certain groups of students that do better or not than other students or is there a why that we can go to as to why like white white students are growing at a higher percentile rate so that isn't necessarily in the equity audit per se what the equity audit would call for is a systematic approach to interventions for students to make sure that you're meeting kids where they are and growing them to the next level which we've put in place in great detail for reading we now need to do the same for math so if that isn't specifically mentioned in the equity audit but we know it's work that we need to do it's a tool that would assist in absolutely okay but there so as of right now we don't know the why why different groups are not right now because we don't have a systematic support of interventions quite as detailed in math as what we do in reading okay thank you for working with my processing got it no problem christopher do you understand that no no i do i got it yeah we put a lot of energy into reading i got it thank you absolutely just quick troy chuck and i so the data set that we imagine because you know unlike nate we just take a certain but this is all our students second through eighth grade is every student correct every student compared to every student and all the other yes every student who had both a beginning of the year test and a middle of the year test so a student who moved in in october wouldn't be included in this data set but all students who tested both times are compared to every student across the country and these norms were set pre-pandemic which i think is also important information um because we're seeing accelerated growth particularly particularly in reading based on pre-pandemic measures which is what we want to get back to thank you questions on our student achievement update part two thank you mr notre budget tax rate update mr mr president dr smith members of the board as you know last summer we or every summer we prepare the budget and you approve it this is bringing back to you the results that we get once the state gets done with their analysis and adjustments on the overall budget it came in [Music] about 16 million more than we anticipated but that's primarily due to the growth we had in the fall with the students on the education side and the operations fund was increased a little bit there as well you can see 10 million on that and that has to do with the assessed valuation and the maximum growth that we can have now that may sound like cause for celebration however we have tax caps that will impact that number and reduce that so we will probably end up close to the 39 million when all the tax caps are taken into effect the next slide is the one that i really want to point out and we can celebrate on if you look at the overall tax rate last year we were at a dollar 19 this year wrote a dollar 14.

the and the other one to point out is the capital referendum we did remember we advertised that at just under 25 cents the current rate is 22.28 cents you may say how did that happen because we're raising the same amount of money well our assessed valuations gone up from that time so the lower rate may not translate into a lower tax payment for every taxpayer they'll probably if their ss valuation went up proportionally they'll have the same but some may pay more and some may pay less based on that rate but the nice thing is it's lower than the 25 that we started with and then the last slide you can see our overall tax levy actually went down slightly but that has to do there again with the um the let's see yeah the ss value went up a little bit and with the rate and then the re you see the retirement severance bond debt service fund dropped a little bit because those are slowly coming off of our books here in a couple years that one won't be on there anymore but overall we did well we came in on pretty much where we expected on all of them the rate came in lower than we anticipated which is always a good thing for our taxpayers for questions pertaining to our tax rates i just had one question mr shreves um i know on the lt website we have a calculator for the taxpayer to see what their tax bill would be it's right now it's about the 0.25 percent will we adjust that or do we just leave it kind of as is we can adjust that okay just need to work with the ones who developed it to change that right that was there primarily when we were doing the referendum so people knew but we can see what we can do to get that adjusted it just sounded like good news to me so thank you any other questions from mr freeze on the budget tax rate oh i thought somebody said something thank you mr freeze neola policy updates dr harshbacher mr president members of the board dr smith you know as staff story language has changed or laws are updated both at the state and federal level that requires us to do the same and revise our policy tonight i bring to you 27 revised policies and one new policy for your review and first reading questions on the first reading of the neola policies thank you doc hartford anything for you dick anything nope nope i've taken a look at them and worked with dr harshberger on them but obviously welcome any all of your reviews you have a chance over the next couple weeks if you didn't have a chance to review them over the weekend and if you see anything uh you know let me or dr harshberger know about it thank you we'll talk a little bit about the public participation of board meetings just for the public so people don't get confused what's taking place in the policies okay ward on to our action items approval requests for proposal or our launch north asphalt mr president members of board dr smith who recommend the board approve the request to bid ln asphalt as presented so moved second move amy norman whitney mustang questions or comments all those in favor signify by saying aye aye and impose the same motion carries thank you approval of calendar updates good evening president mcgregor board members dr smith earlier this evening mr kuznick presented to you calendar updates regarding the federal holiday juneteenth we recommend that you approve those as submitted some moved second mood crystal puckett second uh dick freeze questions all those in favor signify by saying hi and they oppose the same motion carries thank you approval of our student chromebook beard results mr president dr smith members of the board um i recommend that the board approve the chromebook bid results as presented so that we can proceed with the purchase so moved second moon crystal move when the mustang second by crystal puckett questions all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye and impose the same motion carries thank you approval of the personnel report mr president dr smith and members of the board i'd like to recommend that we approve the personnel report as submitted so moved second move amy norman dick frijee questions all those in favor signify by saying aye aye aye aye aye opposed the same motion carries thank you for our action completing our action items tonight comments miss norman happy valentine's day to everybody in addition to the hearts it's heart month with the american heart association so just make sure you get out and find an activity you love and hopefully accessibility increases for everybody to have good health care and then i just wanted to say a thank you to our staff i know that we've had a lot of illnesses over the winter and everything and our district has been fortunate to stay stay in session as a parent as a board member i just appreciate all the hard work that everyone's put in to make sure that our kids can stay in school so thank you well sid thank you miss norman dick nothing here windy nothing here crystal you know i will say in celebration of black history month there is a performance at the theater um on the fort for arts of lawrence it will be from the ipeka kids and so i urge you to go check it out it will be february 24th at 6 30 p.m that's it come here what was that i pica forest glen thank you orange glen thank you mr president uh i want to thank publicly our elementary team and dr brown for an outstanding academic championship this past weekend uh the stars will be coming soon to be recognized in front of you but our champion this year or the amy beverly star so i just wanted to put that on the record thank you mr mcgregor for helping me give out the certificates and uh medals and as well as the trophy to the runner-up a runner-up we need to put that on the record was crestview elementary but the champs are at amy beverly and we'll see them here in a couple months as we'll recognize them in front of the board thank you that's all i have tonight thank you board our next meeting will be on monday february 28th we'll be again at seven o'clock p.m we do have a full agenda a very full agenda for that meeting so let's be prepared for that if there's no other items to cover i'll take a motion to adjourn so moved second moving probably second by consent we are concerned all have a happy

good afternoon we're convening the joint committees on transportation and education and senate here in conference room 229 as well as uh online for the purpose of hearing one measure sb2544 let's just note that in case we lose the feed uh we'll find another uh date for this agenda item otherwise uh we do have testimony we'll note in writing from a number of our testifiers today so for those who are testifying in person we just ask you to summarize your comments so we can get to everybody and with that on sb 2544 this is relating to safe routes to schools it establishes the safe routes to schools advisory committee and testifying first is the department of transportation hello chair ed sniffen from the toronto transportation stand our testimony in opposition thank you up next is department of budget and finance comments uh department of health oh excuse me state council on developmental disabilities in support department of health with comments uh hawaii bicycling league and support bike share hawaiian support uh aloha care in support apologize oh important fans yeah with our testimony thank you so much chairs have a happy valentine's day oh thank you american heart association support get fit kawaii with us in support ulupono initiative good afternoon chair lee kidani members of the committees michael munich on behalf of the ulupono initiative we'll stand on our testimony and support thank you thank you path hawaii and support uh maui bicycling league in support hawaii public health institute a lot of chairs amanda fernandez on behalf of hawaii public health institute i'm also here on behalf of the statewide obesity prevention task force we strongly support this measure it was one of three priorities chosen by the task force over the summer to push this year that we feel will have one of the greatest impacts on health especially with our keiki we really appreciate the committee's hearing this important bill and we do hope it will move forward we believe that it is the all community's responsibility to take care of kids if kids are being hit by cars struck by cars on their way to school um and we know that a lot of the pedestrian um the pedestrian incidents um and car crashes that are happening um uh with k that involve kids happen during the hours you know when they're going to or from school we know that a lot of our infrastructure is not made for kids to safely walk bike roll or bus to school and we're hoping that safe routes to school fully implemented in hawaii will go a long way in changing that and make sure that we can move away from an auto-centric society and really enhance the health and well-being of all children in the state we're available for any questions thank you so much for hearing the measure thank you up next is blue zones project hawaii in support american diabetes association support and office of foreign affairs with comments we have additional support from 16 individuals with one in opposition is there anyone who's with us today uh wishing to testify who's who's been missed get everybody okay with that that's all our testifiers are there any questions no questions sure thank you chair uh for department of transportation it's sniffing that's true um how much funding or funds are we talking about for for the federal program justice school program um the funding stopped in 2012.

so brad is attending the meeting via zoom so disgusting he had asked me if i would go ahead and run the meetings so first order business are there any changes uh yes i need to change uh one of them under superintendent's report i'd like to change c to legislative update and then i need to add another executive session on staffing and why don't we do that um can we do it right after the negotiations executive session that's what i would like to do it yeah john will be here so like 10a yes thank you josh 10 a executive session tamara you've got the motion allison you got passed to you so staffing yes whatever john sent us yeah i took that one out they're going to talk about it in the steering committee update so okay then i would entertain a motion to approve the agenda with the changes in the second by chad all in favor say okay then there are meetings for the january 10th regular meeting the minutes or part of you are there any discussions changes okay seeing none hearing none i would entertain a motion to approve those minutes summer motion by allison second by josh all in favor say aye same time okay and recognition of any visitors or their answer anybody signed up to speak all right moving on to the invoices yes i have a few some of them from my board members that have been on for a bit uh i'm they'll be repetitive for you but i just wanted to highlight some of them for the newer members um on check journal uh the about three quarters of the way down you'll see one that says compliance one that's our drug testing for our bus drivers that we are required to do not many anymore in that one but the second check journal you'll see on there and it'll be scattered throughout one of them sabrina bourbon michelle brokish that's first semester parent mileage that we pay here at wilson since we don't run a bus you'll see that throughout several of those you'll see on the second page central mechanical boiler repairs that was something that i'd presented to you before the first of the year we have uh about three quarters a little bit almost all the way to the bottom claflin claflin golf club a thousand dollars that is so our students can golf out there uh for the golf team top of page three you'll see uh daily os living llc nine hundred 19990 one dollars that is for the air purifiers that we received uh grant money to purchase uh through the state so that's like a net not costing us anything we got the money through a grant we placed those in the buildings there might be one in here is there one in here mr dawson over there by that chair okay um one of the things that we've done if you look on the top of page five we were able to train some of our custodians to be bus drivers and when we do that we pay for their physical and for their cdl license we had gunner brent and leslie i believe am i missing anybody i think those were the three that had gone uh and done that and uh that way they will be available for maybe a trip here there or sickness or just subbing routes but we were able to do that um you'll see on page seven uh mike's plumbing and heating new fan motor that was up for up on the rtu uh and that was probably done back in october but we just got the bill you'll see on the bottom of page eight you'll see our assessments local assessments that we pay to salina for special education services and i mentioned earlier about physicals we paid 225 dollars for physicals at sour chiropractic for our new bus drivers i think that was it is there any that anybody has any questions about um for the newer members as we go through this through the year a lot of things will you'll see them again and again and again i just wanted to highlight that compliance so that's tyler's chiropractic that's mark 1 i you know john or chad i don't know that i would assume it is but i don't know that i can find out uh some honestly on those physicals some physicals and i don't understand this but some physicals are more expensive than other physicals i'm sorry i don't say that's what i face okay 75 bucks okay all right so then that would be all probably okay that's all three that'd be all three i do know we have some i shouldn't say that they're more expensive we have some drivers due to some medical issues have to have physicals more often than other drivers [Music] any other question but that was a good one i would entertain emotions [Music] motion passes beginning bank balance first kansas 92 cents deposits 452 702.80 checks cashed 299 811.70 ending bank balance five 176 fifteen dollars and two cents checks outstanding one hundred sixty two thousand three hundred seventy six dollars and seventy seven cents ending balance on hand fourteen thousand one hundred thirty eight dollars and 25 cents bank of hollywood beginning balance 383.78 deposits 1 million forty three thousand one hundred seventy three dollars and forty seven cents checks cashed one million fifty nine thousand five hundred sixty two dollars and forty nine cents bank balance one million three hundred ten thousand nine hundred ninety nine nine hundred ninety four dollars and seventy six ticks outstanding checks five thousand three hundred 390 and 35 cents ending balance on hand 1 million 300 5 604 and 41 cents wilson cd we have one 100 three hundred sixty four dollars and fifty cents total cash available one million four hundred twenty thousand one hundred seven dollars and sixteen cents reconciliation i believe i'll lay down at your place i think i don't think it was ready that the cash summary report is what you'll look at uh the ending cash balance matches the bank balance which matches the treasury support so everything is balanced as you can see the cash went up quite a bit from last month because we got the tax distribution from all five counties the last one that came in i think was january 25th so and then we'll get another distribution probably in march and then we'll get another larger one in june and then that should be it then for the tax deductions yeah i have a little um a general fund right now we have uh 51 of our general fund remaining but we have spent uh like 366 000 more in general fund and that's mainly salaries last year at this time we had 57 left lob uh we are about 25 remaining there last year we were at 46 remaining capital outlay we're about the same as we were last year last year we had 37 this year 33 food service with everybody eating we've spent about 27 thousand dollars more uh for about 47 percent of our budget last year we had about 54 of our budget left remaining so uh gonna kind of need to tighten the purse strings here as we move throughout the spring um make sure that we're that where we no that's just drinking that's right mr clark what uh on the food services government's paying for all that now yeah so how does that party flow through or how does that work well it just increases the federal revenue in food service so we don't have the revenue of parents writing a check for food now it all comes from the feds we still have to keep track of who's free and who's reduced for the at-risk funding part of it but our revenue is actually a little bit higher because the federal reimbursement is higher than what a parent pays for a full paid lunch but the cost of food has gone up and we're serving more food because everybody's eating so that's why the cost is a little bit higher so is everybody eating we have our numbers are a lot higher than they usually are i'll say that and i think i put something in friday nights that i've had a food service meeting and we're still struggling getting items some items we have to get are more expensive than what we would normally get you know having to get an alternate whatever it might be just like when you go to the grocery store for your family it's costing you more we're going to for a whole school district and it's costing us a lot more this is where i'm really glad that we have one food service or one food provider which is ebco uh kevin who works with our district knows our cooks and works he is out in our district well probably once a month if not maybe every three weeks going to the kitchens and helping the clerks our cooks order new or different things to to make the meals that we're trying to make so it's a little scary on that front because it's so does it fit do they take in consideration inflation or is that just the form that's already been said that was the number that was said it was said they they review that every year and every year it goes up right their reimbursement is that they review that when we do the budget they tell us exactly what the federal reimbursement is going to be for each meal breakfast and lunch and so we just budget for that for the whole entire year and they'll review that again this summer and we'll get a new one and that's one of the reasons where we have to be very cautious when we serve meals is they have to be a reimbursable meal we can't you know we can't have a kid to go in there and say i just want a pizza and a milk no we can't do that because that's not a reimbursable meal it's got to have everything to make it a reimbursable meal so if that line item comes up short then where do we just have to we have to eat it's we were when i started we were about 150 000 in the hole and and honestly when this all comes to the end i'm hoping we'll be a break even because that's i don't want to make money on food service and i don't want to lose money on food service i would prefer it just breaks even we had dropped and helped we were about more than we were taking in uh eight years ago we got it down to basically just about paying for itself last year it was almost a wash because they were paying a little bit more and now though with food service going up our food prices going up it's it's circling back around where we're going to be in the hole a little bit again so what he says we're in the hole just to clarify that means that we have to supplement the food service fund with the general fund or the local option budget so we transfer over so last year i didn't have to make a transfer clear till june when it was time to start the new year off with carry over cash so that's when i made my transfer and in the past i'd almost have to transfer four or five times a year to get it in the cash balance so yeah we've been it's been doing pretty good i think that helps with the federal pay for that so uh how long do you expect the feds to continue this equity know i haven't come once nobody said that i've if there is been i haven't heard anything um you know we we had uh leaned our kitchen staff down a little bit on employees uh we've raised the prices of meals not a lot uh over the years adult meals we've raised one of the things that we did and this is something that evco this is backtracking to year two or so of my superintendency here we we had issues with just everybody ordering whatever they wanted and there was no commonality between buildings uh so you know we had people ordering from fna we had people ordering from cisco or ordering from them all whoever had what they thought they wanted cheryl who works for evco had come in and helped us really define and we started following the state menus and then kevin comes in uh cheryl's with evco kevin's with ebco and we had a lot of and let me tell you this was not easy because school cooks don't really want to change what they've been doing they do a great job but they did not really want to change what they were doing but we got to where the same and i always say chicken nugget was being ordered at wilson and at hollywood and so we developed a set of what we called our top 25 order items and those were what we ordered and by doing that we controlled our costs better does that make sense i'm instead of somebody saying well i'm buying this brand or this brand no we're all buying this one unfortunately that's what i thought but we eventually got there um so we also worked with our cooks and most of our cooks were really really good about this but on proper serving amounts in the sense of say you're going to make something that serves 40 kids whatever you're making but you only have 20 kids eating that day that's a that's not true but how do you take that 40 recipe and make it a 20 recipe before we just made a 40 and then well we have leftovers well and we also worked on how much stock they keep because anything i have sitting back there is just money that's not necessarily wasted but it's just sitting there order it when you need it and and they've done a great job uh both ends of the district eat the same thing every day yes they do yes they do what's that and i'm i am a hammer on that uh a because if i'm a parent of a kid and my kid they look at the menu and it says it's a hamburger today and that kid says i don't eat a hamburger and i'm taking a hot lunch or i want to eat a hamburger and i'm not taking a sack lunch and they get to school and it's a corn dog and they don't like corn dogs that's not cool it's just like you don't go to mcdonald's and ask for a whopper you know where you're going and we've gotten i'm not saying that sometimes you have some supply issues that we might have to change but i'm going to say 99 days out of 100 if not better than that everybody's serving the exact same thing sorry that was a long roundabout answer to where we got to where we're at thank you okay okay statement equals what we have in our activity accounts we took uh kiddos to the spelling bee over here at ellsberg county last week uh jackson shards lucy beck henry simpson caitlin bunch adlen habiger scott marcel kami sink and aisley martin they all participated did very well but didn't place in the top five but it's a good experience for them to get up and be in front of quite a few people and but they did a very nice job parent teacher conferences were held last thursday we had 90 in attendance or via phone calls and some of the teachers are still trying to make contact via phone calls and the pto was awesome and provided our new and evening meal for us pam styles have the third graders perform a dental skit to various grades in our building and they're planning to come up here to wilson on thursday and perform their skit again calendar committee working uh to get a 22-23 calendar spring pictures coming up we're going to have a drop everything and read day march 2nd at the elementary kids can wear their pjs and a lot of our activities are going to tie around reading you know even the teachers are going to get up and do a skit so we'll see how that goes and um march 4.

is exploratory egg and you're watching cat tv news [Music] we're back with another installment of your favorite school news and we're starting off with the fact that this weekend is president's weekend so we have the 18th and the 21st off there's quite a bit to get into first up there will be a peer leadership meeting the 15th freshman will go to peer leadership and all other grades will be told where to go over announcements kate made tech's official golf team is meeting this wednesday the 16th at 2 30 after school if you're interested in playing golf just meet them down in room 204. yesterday both boys basketball teams went against pilgrim high and tonight girls jv and varsity basketball teams both have games against vineland after school one is at four and the other is at 5 30. so let's wish them all luck against such formidable by his mother foes hutchinson father james huffinson and grandmother lorraine [Applause] losers [Music] [Applause] accompanied by her father jerry fox and mother denise capcom lexi is a one-year member of the hall basketball family and one-year varsity letter winner she's a member of our early childhood year lizzie hunter is accompanied by her mother patty [Applause] accompanied by her mother christina lexi fathered [Applause] coach pickett and coach dorians val is a three-year member of our hawks cheerleading family and a three-year varsity letter winner she's a member of our agri-science and horticulture career technical program and plans on furthering from education at a four-year college [Applause] oh [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] get up on him [Applause] short [Applause] in other news there will be a job fair thursday april 7th at 3 30 here at the courtyard there's already decided rain date of the 13th but not much else is known in case you weren't here last week on the 9th national honors society went around and gave the newest members a diploma and made them know and let them know if they made the cut good job to everyone accepted valentine's day was yesterday but we're still celebrating the love here this week for cat tv news we went around and asked people to shout out their favorite people let's see who got a shout out hello i'd like to give a valentine's shout out to my favorite water drinker of all time ryan coffey now please demonstrate to us how you drink water so well fantastic i would like to give a holiday shout out to mr patterson miss nelson lisa my mom my dad my grandma my brother my grandpa my other grandma my other grandpa my aunt my uncle my other aunt my other uncle and then like anyone that has the last name coffee anything relating to coffee not even e y it could be e e it could be g h e y g h e g h any of those anything that's pronounced coffee is considered within my boundaries of valentine's shout out so shout out to you all of you and anyone watching this video shout out to you for being awesome because you're so cool good job also shout out mr halsey uh he's awesome shout out to laura shout out to emma shout out to yellow and ahala me and carly want to shout out our one and only jamie you happy valentine's day to all the beautiful moms shout out to my girl miss giles love you miss kyles to the person that can save my life other than the school nurse happy valentine's day mr scott shout out to gap happy valentine's day lee shea and lisa did shadow all of my like communication arts friends malia sage brianna and also my uh non-communication arts friends ali oh wait also ryan is in communications i'll give him a shout out too and uh shea and also kiki uh shout out to ali shea and lisa i love you guys valentine's shout out to me also valentine shout out to me because i deserve it and i'm awesome yeah all right guys just one last valentine's day shout out to everybody in communications i love you guys you're my besties hi we'd like to wish a happy valentine's day to our favorite english teacher mr godfrey let's go hey there happy valentine's day to my lonely friend wiley sorry hi i'd like to wish a happy valentine's day to my taken friend evelina you're still my wife don't forget me please i'd like to shout out um my one true love well past tense the green eminem we could have been everything you could have been my ride or die number one then you got those ugly shoes on disgusting revolting if i ever see you again my fists i'll hurt you also my love my love of my life right here yeah thank you my shout out is daniel and teddy right here you know my valentine i love him so much i love danny i love you i love you i shout out to charlie he's my baby boo bear i shout out to david he's my boyfriend we've been married for like 10 years so uh for valentine's i want to shout out uh black history month my boy scott my mom teddy you know he's my boyfriend i always got to thank him um yeah i would like to shout out to danny and charlie i love them like to shout out my two boyfriends pretty cute um i'm gonna shout out holly here love my life i'm also gonna shout out the love of my life taylor i'm gonna shout out my dog luna shout out to scott and my mom my uncle uh my dad my cousins all right shout out to my boy matt over there you know he's looking extra good today and my uh grandmother shout out to matthew and michael over there shout out shout out to my three boyfriends right here looking pretty uh this valentine's day i would like to give a shout out to gary this valentine's day i want to shout out to danny he's my boy shout out to um gary my guy my valencia shout out is my mom so i want to give a shout out to my to my friends at school and my mom and dad and sierra logan for my family and my family loves me for valentine's day and friends let me at school for valentine's day and remember i love you hi valentine's day shout out goes to mr tarr my valentine's shout out this year it's got to go to mr dunning because well he's mr dunning happy valentine's day mr dunning uh happy valentine's day to sean marsden shout out to my boy shelton uh shout out to my boy jeffrey wharf we've been through thick and thin together i'm hoping to last a lot longer with them through these tough years shout out nate archbold happy valentine's day shout out to nick bame uh happy valentine's day i'd like to shout out uh shelley belly or sheldon marsden i love your shelly buddy got some great lovey-dovey responses i hope everyone had a great valentine's day this year especially mr godfrey hmm marlo who always has a date on valentine's day let me guess a calendar maybe but it sure isn't you you're mean no i'm wiley and i'm marlo and we've been cat tv news [Music]

into order welcome everyone thank you for being here tonight and joining us for this meeting if you would i would ask you to stand and let's have a pledge of the please states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice thank you very much item number four is the adoption of tonight's agenda i would appreciate a motion to adopt tonight's agenda okay thank you seconded all in favor [Music] thank you um item number five is our call to the public and we do have two pieces of paper for call of the public any of our other audience that is interested in speaking to the board this evening we do ask that you fill out a request to address the board and they are right out where you signed in for this evening so without seeing anyone jumping up to go get a piece of paper we're gonna move on with these um the first one to address the board this evening is going to be cheryl may you come up here yes yeah well i haven't been in this room since december of 2004 it's lovely decorated it represents the district very well and so the first thing i want to do is say thank you i also appreciate you volunteering for this very important board work been there done that so i know the time and energy commitment that you're making it's fairly important and then um i just have a really kind of easy statement more or less to make um i was at the community mat force meeting last month and i got the pleasure of meeting um china valley resource officer jeff peasy dizzy just trying to remember how he told me he's but anyway um the thing about that was he gave us a report about his interaction with our student body especially this year in comparison to last year just kind of the things that you know he's called in on and the things he does for the students and so i see that he's made it really important have a relationship with them one that's no nonsense but also professional and very approachable that's the feeling i got and um uh what i really want to say is that i thank you and watching what i appreciate and fully approving the support that you're giving him i understand that he knows our principles well and especially our superintendent john schull and that relationship is one that's building a strong foundation for the children as they're moving through the younger grades to high school and um you've taken a strong stand as far as having marijuana on our campuses and i think that's a really good thing so that's the reason for my visit my statement thank you thank you cheryl it's a it's a it's refreshing hearing things like that so thank you well that was what i was feeling i i have you know no no idea can hardly imagine what you've been through the last two years but it hasn't been easy and i and i live in this district and i have since 1984.

is up to an oversight but i expect it to be rectified and i expect a comprehensive list of curriculum for the zen dead class to be made readily available for all parents who wish to review thank you thank you all right thank you paul unfinished business um is erica there yes good evening yes so i'd like to provide an update uh we were at the board meeting on december 14th i want to wish everyone a happy statewide day two months later i want to provide an update we have provided the term sheet out that to more than 40 banks and that was at the end of january um i think we received a few questions from a few of the banks and those responses are all due tomorrow afternoon from a market standpoint interest rates had increased uh in the last 60 days um so in looking at our results um our estimates in december versus now um i i mean i think we're still going to be in the range that we discussed before in the presentation we had used an all in true interest cost so that would be the cost of financing including all the estimated expenses we were using 1.60 um the bids may end up going a little higher just looking at the markets whether you're looking at the u.s treasury market or the municipal market but they both gone up over a half a percent but as i said before uh the banks have their own cost of capital that they're estimating so even if um i estimate in all true interest costs of 1.85 that would be a quarter percent higher um it's going to reduce the savings each year by around nine thousand dollars so um the overall aggregate savings is would still be over a million um like i said before tomorrow afternoon we were going to get all those bids in i don't expect all 30 banks to participate they're all going to look at their portfolios and see if it makes sense a bit but i expect at least three to five if more to set this response some other information i wanted to share the district assessed value so we had estimated an estimated growth doing half of the five-year average so the five-year average is 4.8 percent and looking at the information from the county that was sent out in the last few days the district assessed value for tax purposes has increased over 4.5 so what that will mean is when we are estimating the savings we were estimating three cents a year and so we're still looking right around three cents a year it's just uh like 0.297 or zero point you know three zero one versus it was you know over point zero three rounded uh so it's very similar um but that's great for um for the district and um so i mean that's an update i feel very very positive about where we are um looking at the um the public market there is a lot of volatility so the districts or issuers that are in the market right now are experiencing um some of the investors are sitting on the sideline um so i mean i getting a quote from our desk and running numbers cost to all in cost of capital would be over 2.1 so even if we end up being you know between 1.6 and 1.85 um or maybe you know wherever we end up being um if we're gonna be below um then if we went out to the market and put together an official statement and got a rating so i feel like this private placement is um we're still on track and that's still going to provide the district the lowest cost accountable so i will be sharing those results in a spreadsheet to share with with the district and um and then we'll be looking to lock the rate with one of the banks that um have the best rates and the terms for the district and then we'll look to close that the in early early april and that would be as soon as we can close it to have a current refunding so any questions erica this is steve australia um our current rate is roughly between four and a half and five and a half percent right um the coupon rate yeah for yeah for those for the um for the boss that we're looking to are i mean they've got a um those rates are between 3.15 and a little over you know 5.35 percent so so yeah so um so it ranges um but obviously a lot higher than you know we're gonna be below two so yeah here we go eric is richard when can we lock so so what we'll do is um in the response term sheet that we sent out we ask the banks the soonest they can walk and there's a number of banks that will walk in the road rates 30 to 45 days before the closing so our goal will be to lock it as soon as possible and i also will say if they're you know if there's any fluctuation with the banks we will be i mean if we need to move if a if a bank you know one bank is really close then they can lock the rate and now in the other blank it's you know just a little lower just a little higher but they can't block it um we'll be negotiating that to make sure that that when we know we can lock it in that we're blocking it as soon as we can um for that or april closing so some of that i'm not gonna know until we get those responses but um most of the banks would be 30 to 45 days um so that would be at the latest i think in early march you know two weeks from now ish um but maybe sooner and i really don't i mean we will keep you know like i don't see a bank submitting a bid and knowing if they thought it was going to be drastically different in two weeks and and if it is we'll go to a bank that's more competitive um so but yes i will be we will be negotiating all of that and making sure the district has the lowest um the lowest cost of capital does this require another vote of the board as far as a decision to lock um no so the resolution provides the district administration to move forward um and you know we will will send the information recapping all of those big terms and if there are if there is you know some gray area on that we will bring that to the district's attention um and i mean i can send out a recap to be shared with the board um but um the action took place on december 14th i'm good okay thanks erica of course yes and i look forward to sharing results and um i appreciate everyone's time thank you so much thank you thank you have a good night thank you erica yeah all right take care bye [Music] drum roll please good evening so we'll start with the continental cults and what we've been doing they've been very busy we had our continental spelling bee and we had our champions we had many of our students who participated and um we had our it was lewis harvey from eighth grade and runner of james ricketts so they'll be going to well louis will be going on so we'll keep you posted on on the results and what ends up happening with that our 8th graders are still very passionate and working hard to fundraise for their washington dc trip so they had a mcdonald's fundraiser night it was a very successful night and they worked really hard they made their signs they were they were working inside the mcdonald's outside the mcdonald's they were getting donations at the drive-thru we had many parents families come out to support them and cheer them on so very happy out of them we had our jenny lichtsteiner and her team got together and they put on a boat the cult point 5k little race and it was really fun and it's to raise money for shade structures and i still have a little ways to go but it was a great event to bring the community together and the students and their families and it was a really fun successful event our eighth graders have been preparing for high school they went last week to walden grove they had it kind of set up like centers outside on people's off fields with all the different classes the teachers and students were presenting so they after so many minutes they would just keep rotating but they put on the student council was there and they they answered questions they put on a big assembly outside for them and they got to ask a lot of questions in regards to their classes and then we had saudi the high school come out and meet with the students who are going to be going to saurita high school and they went over electives classes registering and so forth and then we have our fourth and eighth graders participating in n8ep we call it nate testing which is the national assessment of educational progress and it's a way for um this organization government organization to they randomly choose schools each year and we were chosen not just our school but for them to test fourth and eighth grade and those those results helped them with determining data in regards to state testing across our country so they said that they would give us those results it might take months for us to get results and it won't necessarily have students by name but it'll it'll give us information it'd be very interesting to find out since we were one of the schools who were open most of last year five days a week they said it'd be very interesting to see what the results will be for us to look over and and study great news is our girls basketball team the a team which is comprised of mostly our eighth grade girls are undefeated right now so and their families came out last week and we did a little celebration for them one of the parents had posters made for them and we got to recognize and celebrate them with their parents and thank them for all their hard work and efforts state testing dates state testing's just around the corner currently we have a zelda testing going on and azela testing is for english language learners so miss lina zabo is doing that testing right now we have a writing field test that will be taking place monday february 28th and tuesday march 1st our new state test is no longer called azmerit or ezm2 it's called arizona's academic standards assessment so these are tentative testing dates you might you might see the dates change just a little but they for the most part this is how they're going to remain the writing field test is a test that is not going to count towards us but it's for them to decide what kind of changes they need to make and modify for next for next year's state testing then we have arizona science testing that will be taking place with our fifth and eighth graders so monday march 28th our middle school will be testing tuesday march 29th they'll be taking part two and then we have the 31st elementary's fifth grade they'll be taking part 1 a.m and part 2 pm we're not doing that for middle school because of their periods and the changes that they have to do throughout their schedule for the week and then writing state testing writing has to always go first when we give the state test because they give us two week a two week window to get writing completed so we will be doing that tuesday april 5th middle school on thursday april 7th elementary and then on to ela which is english language arts it tests their reading and writing skills so monday april 11th middle school they'll take part one and then third through fifth we'll do part one mid morning tuesday april 12th middle school part two and then mid morning third through fifth wednesday april 13 and thursday april 14th there's an oral reading fluency test that is new this school year for our third graders we will have to take them out in groups of no more than six students and test them on this portion of the test in a separate testing area where they will have headsets and many mites will be asked to answer questions and they'll be testing their oral reading fluency it may also be them reading passages and they'll be testing their fluency and comprehension state testing for math will be april 19 for middle school and as well as fifth grade and then april 21st for middle school in fifth grade and we have to have all of our makeup tests done by april 29th because the window closes at the end of that day so we're working on all of that right now we the month of january well all year we've been talking about data but we really went over our benchmark data from fall to winter so they've been studying global progression from our benchmark testing students standing at proficiently level proficiency levels have been identified so we are clear on the students in each class who are highly proficient proficient partially proficient and mentally proficient data transfer grade level cohorts are being studied and discussed so identified subject area needs can be addressed when we say the cohorts that means our sixth graders we've been going back the past years to see where how they progressed or what the trends are and so on state subject area blueprints for ela and math have been studied and looked over those blueprints tell us exactly what state standards are going to be on our state tests but those blueprints help us to that's our map on how to prepare our spoken sequence calendar for academic standards for math reading writing science social studies but specifically ela and math as they are tested subject areas those blueprints were modified and re-released so we are going over those blueprints and already starting to plan our scope and sequence calendar for next school year and our teachers are also looking at those blueprints right now to assess students where they're at before state testing also starts going back to we teach based on those standards all right questions thank you [Music] members of our board our staff and our community members thank you for being here um lots to report like ms dana said we've been super busy this month so i'd like to just um wish you all a happy valentine's day today first off hope it was a good day um we had a very successful sweetheart gala another huge success thank you to all of our foundation members staff students governing board members and community members for their continued support total raised was 28 000 so we had 19 000 in sponsorships 3 000 was raised on our online auction and 9 000 was raised at the auction at our live event and we have a few items in the community room um here in the conference room that items that were in the auction that nobody bid on so if you'd like to check them out and see if you would like to um purchase them they are there for us so there's a few pictures of mr ferguson are just then i want to say that our kids have been coming for zero hour at seven in the morning to practice jazz band we have um chamber orchestra and also our drama kids have been coming at seven in the morning so we have dedicated students and staff meeting these clubs and choir again we appreciate our continental supporters and there's the three deities that helped with the auction items and getting things out and collecting funds validation of our many community continental supporters it was a very nice evening two years ago when we had it it was very windy we couldn't be outside so it was really nice evening our continental foundation grant support phase three of our outdoor musical playground was made possible by our foundation and mr nathan and mr ferguson worked on the install and mr joe bertram last wednesday so you'll see it there in our playground 20 mini grants have been given to teachers this year and there's just samples of some of the things that teachers have asked for that the foundation has covered and they're still taking applications by the way for mini grants so it doesn't there isn't a deadline just as teachers need it throughout the year our enrollment update you'll see we're down by two students from where we were at the end of year last year um and we are still less 36 students pre-covered here from 1920 but we are doing well we received two new students just this week who are coming from one from honor state i believe and another one from in tucson so they're still enrolling attendance update just wanted to share we are improving as we've been sharing attendance and through coven we knew that we were hit pretty hard after october and the holidays so today we um only had 28 students absent on friday there were 29 and you can see that the quarantine numbers have decreased severity and our mass to stay students are still coming and we decided to start to look at tardies since we've been talking about our tardy issue for a while also and developing a goal to get kids here on time but it's improving so i think everybody's work and our messaging is helping 100 day celebrations so we had a lot of traditional 100 day activities that took place you can see some of our kids they love dressing up like they were like they're 100 years old a lot of math games a lot of building of number sets and concepts counting to 100 so kids really look forward to the 100th day of school read better be better is a program we started this year through it's a partnership with sawarita and a company out of phoenix but the idea is that the middle school students are reading with younger students they all have consent forms we've done an interest inventory where we talk to the kids about how they feel as readers and how they feel about reading we worked with our middle school kids this is the second phase of second graders that we have and we added more middle school students because we only had five last nine weeks and we have 11 now so i'm pretty excited the kids love it they get books at the end of the program and also the middle school kids like i mentioned before we have some true teachers in the making who just get the books and take off reading with kids saturday school and summer schools a little bit of information um i know that at our study session we talked a lot about kids who need interventions and if they're coming and what we're offering so we just decided to show you there in november 13 42 students were referred and 18 attended december 4th 46 students were referred and 15 attended january 29 42 students referred and 13 attended march 2nd 33 students referred and only 13 attended so we do have saturday school coming this saturday we have and then we have two in march and when in april so we had mentioned that our study session about the fact that maybe we need to have a town hall with these parents that were and the students that we are referring and recommending and maybe talk to them as to what what do they need and what do we need to do differently in order to get kids here to close the achievement back summer school we are currently teachers have signed up these are our dates january 6th through january through june sorry june 26th through june 24th 15 days monday through friday from 8 to noon so we really are hoping um we have title funds title 1 title 2 and esser funds for summer school so we are able to invite more teachers and more students to attend but we really have to get them to commit to come a learning walk so we completed three or four learning walks for the year our next learning walk is scheduled for april 26th and we will have two groups from eight to eleven thirty and another from twelve to three our goal is to build consistency in identifying effective instructional practices and building capacity and knowledge amongst all teachers pre-k through eighth grade so you can see here we go in as a large team we observe the classrooms for anywhere from 10 to 15 minutes and we have a walkthrough form where we're looking at classroom structure we're looking at how the lessons being taught what are the students doing what are the standards how is the teacher engaging the students are teachers doing less talking students doing more talking and overall environment so we asses we assess we come out and we uh talk about the feedback we're going to give specifically to the students and to the teacher and we return and give the feedback and and then we go to the next class so we observe three classrooms um in the morning and three in the afternoon and um drew um came in for the morning session with us mr mckibben so thank you for coming and hopefully we can get the other four board members to come and be part of the process of april because even if you can visit one class one process and see it it's it's pretty effective and we're getting good feedback from teachers by the end of the year we will have almost all of our staff have gone through the process of being observed and being on the observing end as well announcements and updates for our ela adoption we are in the process of final cost admissions and entering committee scores for curriculum presentations we'll be meeting with the committee members this week to present the final scores and to discuss the cost for both curriculum we've narrowed it down to two benchmark events and wonders and both are there on the side table committee um after the committee selects the curriculum it'll be on for public display for 60 days february 21st through april 21st we will recommend for governing board approval at the may 14th foreign meeting and just one more thing both of those curriculum have a spanish parallel for our dual language class where the the students will receive the same topic and curriculum but in spanish where now teachers are using different curriculum that doesn't necessarily align with the english content that they are receiving so we're very excited about that annual financial audit preliminary information so based this is based on our 2020-2021 school year conducted by heinfeld meech who are our selected auditors so the state gives the school district 25 000 annually for us to in turn pay our auditors which is required by law so there's 430 questions in the following areas that are listed there account accounting records budgeting cash and revenues expenditures financial reporting procurement student attendance governing board and management procedures so there were approximately 31 findings or questions in which mr schubert and i addressed with the auditors mr osterly was also present for the exit interview the findings that we received were expected however there's one major finding relating to the balancing of cash with the pima county treasurer which um you know we had been discussing and are trying to rectify according to our auditors an audit receiving 25 to 30 findings is a good audit so i know you know we talk about a clean audit and what that entails and that is what the auditor told us but obviously we would like to get to the point where we have less than five audit findings if possible our next steps final audit findings are currently being drafted heinfeld image will attend a special governing board meeting prior to the march governing board meeting in order to review and discuss the findings so we thought we would have a study session to better understand what the findings are and they can go through them and explain the process governing board must publicly accept the audit by we'll call both on or before march 31st um and there's the statute so we did want to have the study session so that we can address this at our launch governing board career fair and vacancies for 2022-23 so mr marianas attended the u of a career fair so this year we have two teachers that are not returning next year one is working on an administrative internship and the other was an after july 1st hire which you know we have the policy that states if teachers are hired after july 1st um they have to reapply a re-interview for their position the following year and this teacher is electing not to interview for the position for next year last year we had seven employees who did not return two retired one left the teaching field one left to people with her baby one moved and two left to go work for another district so just wanted to give a little recap of last year versus this year's vacancies conferences and trainings as we mentioned everybody's been busy um mr malayanis attended the asbo bi-monthly meeting he is on the asphalt board so again the spring conference is april 6th through the 8th in laughlin and as a member of the asphalt board for information technology mr malayanis is the chair for he's the chair for the technology pre-conference and general session so mr mayanis has been out there and really has been doing a good job of leading our technology efforts in our state and so they're replicating a lot of what we're doing here at continental school safety security and trauma summit was attended by mr nathan and mr curtis and they will plan to share specific information at our march board meeting as well as the asba bolts training i attended along with miss lavina and mr osterley and there's some of the topics that we discussed and we we talked about developing board agendas which was mentioned in being able to put the meetings in consent and additional information that will be shared along the way as well miss collay attended a creative mathematics workshop got the basic fact blues in gilbert arizona on saturday so she came back very excited with some ideas that she's going to be sharing with our staff as well the double asa national association of superintendents national conference is this week i will be in nashville for that on wednesday through sunday and now it's going to be super confusing because double asa is the national association of superintendents and now it is the uh the test the state assessment so we're going to be really confused when we say double a state of what we mean um the ixl conference mrs colley misloco and mrs tesla are going to be attending that later on this month so we're looking forward to them bringing back effective strategies to enhance the current diet sound use that is taking place at school via their rotary events they have mini grants and we're submitting two one for field trip for avid to go to college campuses and a peaceful project and our continued campus beautification and rain garden projects jazz in the desert is saturday march 5th the matinee will feature our jazz band students at one o'clock continental has purchased a table we have 10 tickets so if any of our board members would like to attend these email monitors so that we can save your spot and they are also looking for silent auction items if you have anything at home that you think would be beneficial for the rotary jets in the desert love of reading week we have many fun activities planned this week that were in mrs cuevas weekly update please make sure to read and keep updated and also let us know if you're interested in reading in the classroom this week we have um mr olerie i believe you're already scheduled to come in this week to read the preschool so you'll have fun that's the preschool group that i was reading to this week as well last week okay so again thank you very much um and that concludes my report well thank you on to the consent agenda there's 10 or so items taken there you don't discuss each one do we have a motion to approve a motion um two questions uh a couple of the doctors mr schubert we've got another forty eight thousand dollars of payments to reveal math um i just wanna understand i mean it just seems like we continue to pay more and more and more for reveal math in addition to the original uh payment for the curriculum you had mentioned before that one of them was based on the estimate of students we ended up having more students and so we had to buy more kits but now we've got another 48 000 that was just uh just paid on the two vouchers this month so we've already paid them just over 58 thousand that's 48 000 it so is a partial payment on the hard copy and digital curriculum this is the balance that's due on the rest of it so i remember correctly the the reveal map was 98 in check for the impact and i want to reiterate that that's why we are taking our time and making sure with these bids that are coming in for ela that it's everything right now and that we're not piece milling or that we don't find out afterwards well we could do this but we need this kit which is what happened with reveal math because a lot of the kids and supplemental items that were required that we had to purchase is that the tool the hands-on kit yes yes the manipulatives for the students so after this we should be we should be done with reveal math and um we shouldn't need to keep paying out that amount every year uh second question is on certified staff for the school year we're putting on um cars for the 22-23 school year for 32 teachers and six support will we be able to honor these contracts if the african expenditure limit is not waived so the aggregate expenditure limit only affects current year so these are contracts for the upcoming year now granted next year we are in the same situation as we are this year um that's why these contracts are for the exact same amount this year um there are currently i think five or six bills within the legislature dealing with the aggregate limit and one of them is actually resetting the baseline from the 79-80 school year to believe it's last year so there the legislature is actively pursuing trying to fix the aggregate limit understand so your answer is that we will be able to honor these regardless yes thank you you know all right mr gray so within your packets are our district financial report as well as our budget versus actual that you had asked for to show line item what each category looks like i bring this to you for your approval tonight but if you have any questions before that please feel free to ask i'll move will we approve the consolidating the board report and the legend versus action second president one question on the board consolidated board report unrestricted capital outlay shows a negative 16 000 left is that is our unrestricted capital outlay fund exhausted for the balance of the year so we currently have about 2100 left in our budgeting we're within our capital outlet we just haven't received every payment those payments come in monthly so with us having a negative cash balance there it's not unexpected so to give you an example at the beginning of the year if we were to purchase a bus in july that account's going to show a negative 150 000 because we haven't received those funds but as far as a negative balance a native balance is perfectly fine so how much in capital outlooks funds are still available to us to spend for the balance of the year two thousand one hundred and eleven dollars thank you okay in business um every year we have to review the conflict of interest and i actually have the forms if you guys want to sign up after [Music] which is basically you got a family member okay and let's see the revised calendar board here so i can change a couple dates i'm going to do at one from spring break march 14th since we do have our 11 month employer on spring break at that time so we're asking to move it to march 21st it looks like that's an action item so we need a motion to uh move the governor board meeting agenda discussions yes this is kai yeah mr mckibben yeah mr allering yeah yes all right open enrollment that's rico um this is just um authorization to approve our own enrollment dates to start accepting open enrollment applications for next year dates are as follows okay thank you this is an action adam as well so you need a motion to approve the open enrollment do we have a motion i knew to prove the overall information outside the district that we accepted this year yes that's what i was opening the list right now so that we could see we have um we have we have approximately 100 kids a hundred plus students on opening one so and that includes that steps open and that's what i i can send that to you on the on a report just with staff kids and then other open enrollment students but there's students on the spreadsheet so with returning and new and staff students how many of them are on an iep and require transportation currently on ieps um my roundabout guesstimate would be that approximately 20 to 25 of those children are on ieps and requiring transportation but i don't have mine i would but all of our open enrollment students at this point um are transferred transported by parents so for open enrollment as far as special education i'm just throwing a number out there we would have to i would say no more than seven that are on open enrollment that i can think of roxanna off the top of my head that are open enrollment students and a lot of times what happens is they've been on open enrollment with us since let's say kinder or first grade and we've identified them by second or third grade as needing additional support and obviously we're not going to say just because you have an iep that we're not going to accept your open enrollment status when we have the last three years and all the siblings are here so that's typically the case but as we look at new students coming in we obviously look at the needs level of service that is needed and whether we can provide what they need so we have that option for new students we ask for reference and information do we have any estimate of students within the district that have opted for open enrollment to other districts we can pull that information um it's very it's slim but we can verify with ms eva from thank you mrs allen yes mrs kais yes mr mcgivern yes mr allen yesterday yes the american intercontinental university system intergovernmental agreements so this is just another school that will provide opportunity for our teachers to pursue higher education which also at a discounted rate which is also available to family members whereas we have an iga with gcu and our teachers get a discount but their family members don't necessarily get a discount and this university is an online university offering that so we are bringing it to the board for approval so our employees and family members can take advantage of the savings and the continued education motion fee i'll make a motion to approve the american intercontinental university system intergovernmental agreement i did a lot of work any discussion who are they accredited by i don't know off the top of my head but we can find out is there a cause no yeah yes appoint a student treasury student activity treasurer i learned a lot during the audit how this works so it's kind of interesting so during our audit one of the findings one of those 31 findings is that we did not appoint the board had not appointed a treasurer um after ms matthews is left for this [Music] so it is now to the board to appoint someone as the treasurer for the student activities account and the district's recommendation is that that person be me discussion what's your rationale if i made are the student activities funds under the auspices of the district so student activity funds are technically student funds it is all student organizations students vote on how this gets spent in in the such um i am just the overseer of those funds as their treasurer do we have a separate bank account for those monies we have a separate fund for those monies that would be the 850 fund when you look on your district spending reporting right just uh okay but they have to do a true accounting of let's say they buy 50 pizza kits at two dollars a piece they got to know how many mary and johnny and billy sold and what it is and you know some of the teachers a lot of them are more laps than others because that's not their fortune to keep track of that so they really have to keep decent books when there is a fundraising activity i i mean i agree i would have just thought that this was a normal activity of accounting that's what we that's what we thought we do i have never and who was it before miss matthews miss stacy matthews so we need a motion to approve uh how we have ready mrs allen yes mrs kais yes mr mckibben yes mr hollery yes and mrs so in our study session we talked about just district goals and strategic plan so after meeting after our meeting and meeting with our leadership team to figure out where and how we were going to incorporate our timelines our measurable outcomes and our project updates and status so on an on a district strategic plan this document i am requesting that you approve this district strategic plan as presented at our study session that has the goals and it does have the annual measures without the specific metrics on it because when we do the specific metrics for example one thing that we talked about with our team in terms of certificated teachers and the number of certificated teachers that are not appropriately certified if we had seven and one in our goal to be five one year and narrowing it down to three we didn't want that to be those specifics to be on our district plan on our website so we are asking that this district strategic plan be approved to go on our website and what we are doing as a team if you remember our priority goals and objectives this one that has the timelines we realize that because these goals were initially and these um action steps were started in 2017 they have changed and evolved as we have done our needs assessment and have our lay up and our saya so we are taking this document and we are aligning the specific district goals that are here will be action steps on this document with implementation and completion dates with measurable outcomes and current status okay so this will be our working document that our teachers and our board refer to on a regular basis as means to accomplishing what's on our website as our overarching district goals and i know that as we taught that it was the district goals there wasn't a question in how they were stated what's in question and we've discussed is how we get there how are we meeting the goals and what are we measuring as we meet these goals so we will have this document finalized and updated and a draft format for you at the march board meeting but i want you to keep in mind that we are we'll be doing our needs assessment so by april may the layup and messiah will have to be updated and action steps may be eliminated or added to this document as well because this is a live document that will be ever changing sometimes quarterly sometimes by the semester or annually as we work on our needs assessment so therefore we are recommending that we improve the district goals and the strategic plan as presented and discussed at our study session so this is a motion item i'll move to approve the district goals and strategic plans 21-25 and second discussion yeah i guess i'm one that truly believes that we spent a lot of time talking about target dates and the metrics that we're going to use to measure progress on these in in my opinion they are critical to work in tandem with this document and i have a struggle in improving this document if we don't know what the metrics and and the specific timetable the specific metrics and the timetables are to achieve these so i would like to move that we postpone approval of these until we get to also to our march meeting that we can look at both intent second so we have two things on it and two motions so we vote on each so the first vote will be on the original approval and then the second will be on postponing and doing both together like this girl already suggested i just you have to vote on the most recent motion is that [Music] which overrides the original is that an understanding all right okay well it's not too bad is there any more discussion on them moving into march i don't um i would like to say that i i think we spent an hour and 45 minutes on this document and we did not have any initial input and yet if you look at 15 341 this ars 15 341 is one of the items that we're responsible for it doesn't directly say strategic plan but board members are responsible for setting the vision so if i may interject when we worked over my evaluation and we had discussed it in july you saw this document i shared with the work that we had done with our team based on our fishbone with our layup and our staff and our discussions in our board meetings and in my evaluation is where these goals came from based on your feedback so you did see it in july and we should have brought it for board approval in august which we didn't but this is a document it doesn't stifle or work or change the work that we do on a regular basis because everything that's in here is what we do on a regular basis on a daily basis thank you i think it's a strategic plan and and i do think it's important for the board to have more input into it um as i indicated in a review of the ten top elementary school districts in the country one of the number one across all schools is teacher-student ratio and that's not addressed in a strategic plan and i think it's for it to be such a critical element of success in schools i think it's important for it to be in there so it goes back to and we can have another discussion on this but it goes back to realistically is that like when we look at a strategic plan and our budget if we wait till we can afford to have 14 students per classroom we have student achievement goals and gaps that we need to close immediately so this is a five-year plan on increasing student achievement and operating our school based on these goals so if if the board would like to have a plan of a vision of eventually getting there but i don't know as the superintendent and with our leadership team when you talk about what what we can and cannot do to close the achievement gap right now i don't see how having 14 students in one classroom is doable feasible or something that that we are willing to say okay that's going to make a difference in our school when we have teachers and programs and curriculum and assessments well you know you used you used a great uh term you said it's an operational plan but this is a strategic plan so those are are vastly different so operationally i understand the importance to reduce the gaps the learning gaps etc but strategically we need you know anybody who drives here from over where i live knows that we need to look at this whole district in five to ten years when you look at the number of homes that are going up we need to be a little bit more strategic a little bit more visionary and i understand the operational piece of it but i think there's there's more to this and granted we may have seen it in july but we didn't participate it so we have been asking the board to develop board goals and vision on your own so that has not happened so when have you looked at other strategic plans national in our state of arizona if you go to other districts and look at their strategic plans the goals are all fairly similar because everybody is trying to ensure increasing student achievement safe and orderly looking at retention of teachers looking at social emotional learning looking at extraordinary opportunities so is there any board discussion yes there there always is more discussion but i but i feel that when i presented in july where this strategic plan came from and asked for feedback at that time i would have expected some more dialogue and more interest in the plan but like i said this is what these are the themes that we operate on and how we operate our school and there's nothing wrong with the goals that are in this i mean but the timetables and the metrics that we're going to use to determine progress on these goals are a critical part of it they're they're not something that we just look at separately from this document to me they're part and parcel that's why i think we should look at them in tandem together at the same time we would have an opportunity then if we wanted to to make amendments to recommend the change to vote on changes that we feel need to be incorporated in this and i'm not disagreeing with this document i'm just saying it's only half of the puzzle this the way it is is for what i would say as the superintendent my recommendation that this is on our website with our goals now how we get there is not going to be part of public information on our website this is our daily it's like this is our nitty gritty detailed numbers we are not going to put on our website that we have a certain number of special ed students who are not meeting standards therefore our goal is for the 10 kids to close the achievement gap that is not going to be on our public website so i agree and i since our last meeting keep referring to this in my mind um like a lot of the documents at my work there's i mean just gobs and gobs of manuals that i have to read all the time and there's all these appendixes and it's all electronic now so in the manual there are all of these hyperlinks here and there and if you need more detail about a specific thing you click it and it takes you to another thing then they have mandatory letters but it is all part of the the manual it's all or our bible because we say something um but that's kind of a common in my mind in my world that's a common format for these kind of documents um to have predictions and links to take you here and there that break down certain things in more detail um i i don't have a problem approving the strategic plan as it is and the nitty-gritty the timelines and the metrics which the metrics are going to change every year because our standardized tests are going to change every year and our needs for those of improvements are going to change so i think that's something that should i i don't have a problem with putting that separately because i know that these goals aren't gonna change whether we want a three percent improvement each year or five percent or ten percent we're still going to want the improvement our goals aren't going to change um as far as mrs kai's gotta i would love to see smaller classroom sizes that's i feel like it's a pipe dream honestly but i think that that's a great then when we look at schools because i did also bring the report of the top 20 schools in arizona that we looked at and when we looked at the trends none of those schools had 14 students in a classroom they their trends that we looked at were based on the we looked at their curriculum we looked at again the parental involvement we again looked at clubs and tutorials and all that stuff visitors that were not allowed to be on campus and teacher and teachers teaching a grade level up to students is what made the most difference but we also have to look at you know comparing light schools and demographics because you had some of the schools that were listed as top schools are schools with 200 kids private schools with the demographics not light bars you know they don't have the freedom regions rates that we have they're not title one schools for a reason and so we have to make sure that we're looking at schools that are comparable to our school if this document were to be approved with the data on our website that would have to be updated basically weekly would it not yes i mean to be accurate right right right for it to be real-time data that's that's basically my issue with it it's just a logistical issue i don't think that data i think it's obviously public information but i don't think that um it needs to be on a document that needs to be updated every week or so it's just to me it seems like busy work well maybe we need a district like roxanna said a district plan if it is to have class sizes below x to have x number of days in school to have you know it's a if they're all pipe dreams then whatever that's what the board agrees to that our long-term goal is to have this utopia of the school whether it's realistic or not you know that's that's a whole different conversation i guess i don't see it i mean when i read develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management process to provide system-wide direction for design delivery monitoring and evaluation of the curriculum my question is by when i don't expect to see it next week so it won't be changed frequently but i would expect to see something like that maybe in 18 to 36 months which and we do have the dates because we did it for math so we're doing it for la now so why can't that just say by uh school year 24 25 well it says annual measures so annually these are the things that we address that we look at so it's just but that doesn't tell me when you're going to implement this and the goals or the strategy is to develop and implement and so the question is by when will you develop and implement not how will you measure well and curriculum is implemented in an annual basis at the beginning of the school year so we implemented renewal math in august to start the school year but we worked on the process the year before to go through the adoption process but it's not curriculum it's the curriculum management process so the curriculum management process when when would that be finished and women's day like all right i'll bet we've got no more on that i would bet we haven't now no we don't because we're working we have that in place we're working on reading but don't isn't that a process aren't we going through a process so then this is done but then no it can't be done because after this we'll look at science after that we'll look at you're talking about the core courses not the process of curriculum management we have a curriculum management process whether you're looking at ela whether you're looking at math so if we've already done this then we need to take it off we have a process i i know you do because you just said that in may you're good may 6th or may 16th or something we're going to prove that so we must already have this process that's why it would be in our so our priorities are it would be here where we had math as our priority last year ela was our priority what she's saying is that right there like um going out and seeing what our holes are our weak curriculums and updating them that is the management process you already have that laid out you know what you're going to do next year so you already have the curriculum management process worked out right so i would just but i would just propose wording it differently like instead of develop and implement a comprehensive curriculum management process i feel like um i don't know constantly seeking out better curriculum and implementing them within our sportsmanship i do have a couple of comments that um i had mentioned that i felt it was really important do we have a board goal for this district to achieve an a school we're currently at b i think that's a great board goal for this district and it's not in here and then to move to an a-plus of that's not in here as far as measuring academic achievement there is no mention in this document of azmerit or aksa it's all based on map growth it is not it is something that it says it says nwa map on comprehensive system of assessments there's nothing in here that refers to aasa or azmerit ac merit it's not a thing anymore well it's aasa that replaced it's just terminology aasa replaced azimura so the harm is pushing this i'm sorry let's say the harmon pushing this further to another month is what nothing there's no harm [Music] clarification of the motion moving into march uh yes mr mcgivern yes mr allen yes um modification of rating scale of the superintendent evaluation process this is an action item yes if you recall we needed um to change the blue grip from a high point rubric to a four point rubric because on the on the scale score four and five in needs improvement was really the same move to accept the modification of the rating scale of the superintendent as shown in the board documents discussion listen mrs allen yes mrs kite yes mr mcgivern yes mr johnny yes okay events february is a busy month i guess our thing we got rodeo breaking nothing a couple basketball games wrestling match um we had our sweetheart gala and um our next meeting is going to be march 21.

information that's being taught to our child it is a requirement and yet we're told that no specific list of materials exist per se if my child is attending a class at this school then i expect that the list of materials taught in that class be readily

yes okay guys it's six o'clock without order let's have our pledge of allegiance please ms allen i pledge allegiance to the lag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands for nation god indivisible with liberty and justice well welcome everybody mrs allen here mrs kite here mr mcgivern here mr olivery here and mrs all right can we get a motion to approve the agenda please [Music] yes christ yes mr mcgivern yes miss valerie yes and his pastor yes all right thank you now we have uh two meetings uh two approval meeting a group of minutes to approve january 11th these are separate motions right yes our last uh regular meeting on january 11 we need a motion to approve i moved to approve the january minutes so comments actually have a comment we have learned that from the bolts training now correct me because you were there um is number one is we don't have to approve them number two is our official minutes are really the recording is and then the other thing they mentioned is that we could put this in consent if we would like to so that we don't have to do all these steps so we can put that in consent all the the minute approvals does anybody have a comment about that i would like to see the minutes in the consent agenda okay please mrs allen yes mrs keith yes mr mcgivern yes mr hollery yesterday yes and if we had a study session uh we could go on february 7th if we could approve those methods move to approve the study session match february 7th second your discussion mrs allen yes mrs pike yes mr then we move on to item six called the public looks like we have uh paul um i'll have to i'll do my egg you right that's right paul you've got um two minutes to ensure each individual is have an opportunity please do not repeat what other speakers have said you're the only one but please don't call out specific teachers coaches or person all right uh my name is paul lagu my son who is a kindergartner at continental attends a class once per week called zed which is taught by the school counselor zen as defined in webster's dictionary is a japanese sect of buddhism i wonder if the class was called the christian corner of the muslim minute if this board would take exception with it i'll have to leave that for another time because i only have two minutes to speak since we were unsure why our children why the children are required to attend a class with the school counselor my wife and i recently requested in writing a list of the kindergarten materials for this class so that we can review it we have yet to receive a comprehensive list of materials and have been told that there is no specific list this is unacceptable i have the right to know you

what i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all do we have any items to add to the agenda no no accomplishments and recognitions i think we need a motion to approve the agenda oh i'm sorry i have a motion to approve the agenda second gary and doug yes okay accomplishment yep okay all right each month we have our employee and student of the month awards and i'm going to call up first our student of the month emma corbett emmett would you come on up i'm sorry emma i said emmett sorry emma i have no idea why i said emmett all right and i'm going to call it miss colada she's going to share a little bit about why you were nominated for this award so come on up miss colada hi um i'm mrs claude i teach stem here and i chose emma for student of the month because she's just a fabulous human being as a person um academically she's wonderful but she doesn't get involved with middle school drama she takes things under like she just takes ownership solves problems she's just a wonderful human being thank you so much this is uh you know this we all of our staff had an opportunity to nominate someone and there i tell kids there are 1700 kids 750 kids here so each month one student is selected and our staff selects it so you should feel very proud of that so should your parents so congratulations let's get a quick picture here with us [Applause] there i tell kids there are seventeen all right we also have an employee of the month each month and i have uh the honor of introducing andrea woods come on up andrea and i can speak to the fact that andrea is an amazing teacher big hollow i'm going to call it ms dawn smith to share a little bit about why she nominated andrea for this award this month and i love that andrea's mom and husband are here that's awesome um i nominated andrea for a few reasons many many years ago andrea and i did some book grants together and we had gotten for our library some nominee books award books and andrea carried on and was able to get for our libraries even more items some books that were in line with our social and emotional learning program and also some books to increase the diversity of our collection and also she has taken on a leadership role in um organizing our um hispanic heritage month and our black history month and has also put together some programs for veterans day andrea is a national board certified teacher since she was a good study pal when we went through our cohort together and she's up for renewal and i'm hoping that all these great things help her to get her renewal in the next year or two so congratulations andrea i do um to be nominated by your peers and your colleagues is quite an honor considering that there was an amazing list of people this month who were nominated and i'm just so very privileged and blessed to accept this and to work in a district that recognizes and honors not only um employees but staff not just teachers and students because i think that's really important and i just want to say that i wouldn't be where i am without the backing of so many people lenan who first welcomed me here and dawn for nominating michelle for building into me and encouraging me and vinnie for standing by and you for just continuing to give us a place where we can grow and bloom and thrive and um years ago my father had given me a book to read and it was called the one minute manager it's a very old book but one of the quotes in that book was the best minute i spend is the one i invest in people and that is what this school is about as we are about investing in people and i'm very pleased and blessed to do that every day so thank you very well said let's get a picture [Applause] thank you very much [Applause] okay mr lyons you're up no i will avoid any conflict of interest for the appearance of impropriety which could result from my position and will not use my board membership for personal gain or publicity wait a minute consent agenda does anybody have any questions on the consent agenda nope can i please have a motion to prove the consent agenda motion second lauren vivian blusha yes peter yes yes ballinger yes lions yes patterson yes bennett yes public comments we have two tonight um miss abraham you're up first you have five minutes to speak i just know that when you speak we can't respond to you in any way shape or form okay so the microphone is yours please step up it's okay thank you my name is aaron abraham um i actually wrote to you guys last week so thank you for responding um and when you're this pregnant it's very hard to breathe as i'm sure some of you know and with a mask it's also a little bit harder um so and i know you're gonna have a discussion or talk about this or vote on this so i don't know if my comment is helpful but anyway my son is seven years old and a first grader sorry my husband's gonna he's gonna laugh at me she's watching this it's totally okay you're fine one of the things i love most about my son is he's a rule follower i'm a rule follower when the rules are reasonable last week we were leaving a locker room after swim lessons as we got closer to the door a sheer look of terror came over my seven-year-old because i couldn't get his mask out fast enough he literally panicked he yelled at his little brother to put his mask on my heart completely broke [Music] this is not okay i went home told my husband and gave it a day i asked my son if he gets in trouble at school over his mask that look again panic in his eyes he said not me but other kids do this is not okay by continuing to keep our children masked in school despite being told we don't have to wear them anymore after february 28th is crazy in my in my opinion how do i explain to him he doesn't need to wear one at the grocery store he doesn't need to wear one at camp he doesn't need to wear one at his cousin's school in illinois when we go watch her perform but he has to wear it here this fear that has been instilled in our children is not okay parents should have the choice to mask their children or not teachers and staff should have the choice to mask or not we all keep hearing covet isn't going away we need to find a way back to what is reasonable i know we can do this i know you guys can do this give families the choice thank you thank you thank you thank you [Applause] we have one email public comment from michael briggs good afternoon miss morley i am the parent of a fifth grade student at big hollow and i'd like to submit the following public participation statement to the school board for the 214-22 board of education meeting distinguished board members i am writing to express my support for the continuation of current covenant mitigation measures including universal masking throughout the campus while it was encouraging that case counts continue to drop from the extremely high levels of a few weeks ago it is simply too soon to change course community spread remains high and the request for stay on a temporary restraining order is still pending a consistent approach is warranted for the well-beings of students and staff within the zip codes that make up the big house school district the northwestern university covet dashboard puts the seven-day average of new cases per 100 000 residents at 256.8 using the district's own metrics a number above 100 is considered high transmission it is premature to remove masking when local cases are still this high quite simply the mitigations put in place by this board are working and should be maintained until local community spread has come down to lower levels i commend this board for consistent measured approach throughout the pandemic one that has properly balanced the health with the need for in-person instruction for all students i ask you continue with current mitigation strategies thank you for your consideration respectfully michael briggs is there any more public comment superintendent's report mr gold all right uh first action on the agenda is uh says forward action on covet mitigation strategies i have um some thoughts i want to share first as we get into this and matt if we can yeah so i'd like to start by just saying that the big hollow community has been really really strong through all these all this that we've gone through last two years i'm very grateful for the people who uh have been supportive of what we've been trying to do even during times when uh it has been easy and they may not agree i'm grateful that we haven't had uh some of the experiences that some of our local districts are experiencing right now this is a pretty emotional time for everybody feel we've worked hard to put our own personal opinions aside as we serve this entire district as board members as superintendent which consists of people on all sides of this issue for the record there were others that board members know as well that we've been receiving emails pretty consistently this last week from people on both sides of the issue we're here tonight to discuss uh a recent ruling that was handed down in sangamon county and how that impacts us that's what's stirring the discussion tonight the summary of that is that the just the judge issued a temporary restraining order against statewide masking mandate the ruling only covered districts named in lawsuit despite some of the judge's comments in the footnotes of a ruling which caused a lot of confusion we are currently await an appellate court ruling on this case which is due any day and that's kind of where we are at right now we didn't jump into this lawsuit right away because we didn't have to and we didn't want to make our kids and communities shift from one thing to another and then have to maybe go back so that's why we didn't jump in right away as some districts had so in the meantime school districts across the state have been left in limbo school leaders have been asking for an off-ramp uh for several weeks from the state but we really have heard nothing um i don't think anybody could argue that at big hollow we've really tried to stay consistent with the executive orders uh all along throughout this entire pandemic however with no plan for what is next it's really becoming difficult we are now just one of few states who continue to have a mass command day for schools you're all aware that this single issue is a very hot topic with many and all we've asked for is a clear road map for what it will take to eventually take the mass off and ease some of the current mitigations that's really what we've been after over a week ago the governor announced the state mass mandate be lifted in february on february 28th but he also stated that with the exception of schools and this comment alone just did a lot to fire more people up to come after school leaders and boards to end the math requirements so we've still not been given any plan or metrics that would be required for a masked mandate to be lifted in the schools for the past few weeks i along with districts across the state have really been having to develop our own off-ramps which is uh not a good state to be in when we are when we have these districts having to do this on their own because every community handles this so differently so tonight i think i'm gonna share with you three we have three choices to consider and i have two resolutions in front of you um our first choice is to do nothing we could keep following the governor's executive order as we also wait to see the outcome of the appellate court ruling on the case if the current restraining order temporary restraining order is upheld then it's likely we would be shifting to new relaxed requirements at that point if it's overruled then we could just continue under the current guidance from the governor so that's our option is we have it's one option is just to stay put and do nothing our second option um i have a resolution in front of you resolution one and i don't know matt if we can get that up on the screen so if we can get on the screen um section one is what i'm gonna read from so board members it's on page two section one so in this resolution i'll re i'll read it and try to explain where this is coming from so it says unless and until there's an appellate court ruling overturning or dissolving the sangam and temporary restraining order gro that you're giving me the authority to communicate and implement the same mitigation measures that were in place as of friday february 4th except unvaccinated employees will no longer have to submit to weekly screenings close contacts will not be required to be excluded from school and students and staff will not be required to wear a mask in schools except as required by the district's situational masking plan established by the administration face masks will be required on school district transportation so what what this is uh what this um is stating is that if we approve if you vote to approve this resolution we would be shifting to what the tro the temporary restraining order has stated to do but we would also shift back if that tro is overturned so that's what this resolution is stating if we can go to the next resolution option the resolution number two and matt if you could jump to section one there section one of resolution two says the uh the board's intent regarding delegation authority the board delegates to the superintendent the discretion and authority to communicate and implement the district's situational masking plan established by the administration for the remainder of the 2021-22 school year or until further action by the board face mask will be required on school transportation uh pursuant to the own voice authority students who have tested positive or ill may be sent home so this uh this resolution um without reading the whole thing to to everyone this resolution basically would shift our position to what i'm going to share with you in a second on the screen is a situational masking procedure regardless of any of regardless of any court rulings that come out so regardless of if the tro gets upheld or overturned i'm sorry i should restate that if if if the tro gets upheld we would then follow the the the law the way it's written there if the tro gets overturned we're saying that we would continue with our situational masking plan is what this is stating so when you read the entire thing so matt if you could get the situational masking procedure on the screen and i don't know there were copies up front for anybody that wants them but i'm going to show it on the screen as well and board members you do have one in front of you the situational masking the first page um if you just want to go slide one there we go uh there's we're looking at three situations universal masking is where we're at right now and again i guess i need to clarify this is what i would call our road map so this is something we have been looking for from the state we haven't been get we haven't received anything so this is what i would consider our roadmap to determine what mitigation strategy we put in place uh universal masking is where we're at right now that's everybody's masked in inside the schools and on the buses situational maxi masking and blue there i'll just read it mask will be worn the following times while transport on a bus in hallways during band choir and physical ed went indoors during instructional activities which social edition may not be maintained or in a large gathering such as an assembly um there also may be isolated cases when masking would be required so basically this would be like walking into the restaurant you wear your mask till you get seated that's situational masking so that would be a phase we could get in i'll get into that in a minute the green is recommended not required masking so that would be uh where staff and students and visitors choose to wear mask while indoors when masks requirements are lifted there may be situations in which masking be required due to isolate increase in cases but they must be worn on a bus so that would be it's recommended not required so go to the next slide matt the guidelines for universal masking and i'll go through these numbers in a minute but guidelines would be uh if our buildings we're not looking at community transmission rates we'd be looking at building rates right here if building rates were greater than two percent uh we would shift universal masking and we would follow all idph quarantine guidelines at that time so go the next phase map next page situational masking and these percentages will become a little more clear when i show you a couple of charts but situational masking would happen when we're between 1.25 and 2 positivity rates current guidelines for quarantines would also be followed at that time the next page the recommended not required masking is when we're as long as our buildings have less than one point two five percent uh contact tracing will be completed with quarantine recommended for close contacts not required uh students and staff who test positive for cova that will need to do one of the following quarantine for five days return on day six to ten with a mask or they can quarantine ten days so we still wanna make sure we have that so next slide matt is uh primary elementary this is this would be putting actual numbers to those percentages for you so you could see so it would take 21 or more average daily cases that's a five day average for us to be over 2 percent in that building and go to a required mass situation between 13 and 20 cases would be would be a situational masking situation and under 12 cases would be a recommended but not required if you go to the next table this would show you if we had that plan in place all year this would show you where we would have been the entire year as far as recommended situational or you know or universal masking and you can see we had that surge in january with the omicron variant and we would have had to shift to uh some situational masking and then some universal masking but for the remainder of the year we would be in a mask optional recommended not required so that's the primary elementary i would be surprised if we see another search but you just never know what's going to happen so but right now we would be in mask recommended not required so middle school if we shift to the next slide 16 or more cases would be universal 10 to 15 would be situational under 9 9 or under would be would be recommended not required so we go to the table mat on the next slide the table shows you that this is what the year would look like had we been in this the entire year so we would have had to and i would be honest with you these these numbers um when we went through the surge in january it was hard to keep these buildings open so i would i would argue that we would need to put in any mitigation strategy we can during those times to keep the buildings open the remainder of the year it's not been hard that was a hard i mean i shouldn't say that that was that was not a good comment this year has been tough i'm saying that the remainder hasn't been as difficult to keep the buildings opened it was very difficult in january to keep the building open with the number of substitute teachers we needed and number of students out it was tough but we were able to do it so the i think that that the situational masking universal masking is supported during the time if we were experiencing something like that again so that if you were to approve resolution two that would be what we'd be looking at right now but you're really what you're approving is not this situational masking plan you're proving giving me the the authority to implement that plan um that plan could change we may find things that aren't working or things we haven't that we've just not included that we should have included so i'm not gonna say it's it's a finished product but that's where we're at right now with it um but that's where uh so that's what that's what approving resolution two would do now i do wanna say you know there's there are risks and you're gonna be i don't wanna i don't want to pretend like there's not there are risks to doing uh this plan because we're doing this when there's an executive order in place and uh the risks are is the enforcement action a potential loss of tort immunity potential labor dispute and ocean enforcement action possibly so there's there's risk to it i think you're seeing a lot of districts that we've been we've been trying to follow the executive orders all year because we want to limit the risks to the district we're just at a point now where um we need to bring it up for discussion you know how far do we want to go with it can i ask a question yes so so if we move to situational masking you're saying that we still can incur risk yes yeah as long as as long as the governor's order is still in place so i there's we just have not received any indication of when that could be lifted right now that this one is in place till march 5th um but we don't know after that what what he's been doing is renewing this one was renewed for a shorter period so there's kind of thinking that maybe it's going to be done march 5th i don't know but i don't want to bank on that and i do have our attorney here jeff galitz he's back here so if we have any questions for uh that i can't answer i'm gonna point to jeff and what's the difference in risks for not required versus situational masking what's the difference in the risk i don't i don't believe there'd be any difference in the risk because we're just okay because we're not following we're not following executive order yep resolution option two can you go into the mic lauren sorry one more test if we do resolution option two will we be testing uh non-vaccinated staff yes we still will be yes i didn't take that out okay bob on the situational one you said you showed they're using five-day averages why are we using five-day averages where you know on day one we have let's say 50 new cases we know we have a high positivity rate for the next 10 days shouldn't be strictly on number at that day because otherwise i see you're you're you you know the spike is there but you're waiting four more days before you actually do anything about it yeah i get what you're saying there um this this is uh the way this is written too i would have the flexibility like to to make the call when we switched from one to the other this is a guide but if we were to see a surge like that we would probably like we saw that surgery came back from winter break we definitely saw that sir we went from to 70 from the time they left to the time they came back so it was close to 70.

we're gonna have a call to order uh prior to the roll call i'm going to appoint asia johnson as secretary pro town asia thank you for subbing in tonight no problem mike davenport here christopher espinoza here jenny hackstrom here terry pivozic here joanna vasquez drexler present nancy kupka here scarlett o'hara here jay toledano here okay we have a quorum let's stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we're going to mix things up a little bit we're going to start with dr thiele's presentation on the return to in-person instruction plan and then we will have reception visitors thank you dr kupka i as we get started i've prepared a statement for the board in the community we have been following the guidance of our local state and federal agencies since the party start of the pandemic in march of 2020.

[Music] good evening everyone i'd like to call the february 14th meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order will you please rise for the pledge of allegiance thank you i'd like to ask everyone to just please check that their cell phones are turned into silent mode um this meeting will be re-broadcast on dc tv channels nine in the following days wednesday and thursday at five friday at six a.m saturday 8 a.m and sunday at 2 p.m the meeting will be rebroadcast on dc tv channel 18 on monday and saturday at 12 p.m and thursday at 3 p.m ms genther can we have a roll call please shannon jenkins yes mary wait yes kathleen emerald yes john nunes yep chris oliver yeah thank you everyone uh the first item on our agenda for the evening is public comment if anyone would like to make a comment and any of the items that are on our agenda i would ask you to please step up to the podium state your name and briefly share your comments so that everyone has a chance to share their thoughts hello my name is lynn turner and i am speaking to the item on the agenda that is listed under old business and it's called face coverings and it has the word vote next to it i first want to say i'm very grateful to governor baker after consulting public health officials and and considering that kids are very low risk for serious illness from cobia 19 and considering their mental health from being in masks for two years for six plus six or more hours or six hours a day for school school days for two years and the low covid count in massachusetts and uh for the number of our states we have a low covid count we're on a steep decline for covid and even in the hospital beds we're at pre-pandemic levels in many hospitals his decision to lift the mask mandate i think is a sound one i applaud our superintendent for quickly trying to react to the celebratory news for massachusetts and how well we are doing facing this pandemic it's time to give our kids a sense of normalcy they've earned it even jeff reilly the state education commissioner said it will make it easier for the students to learn and our own and let's see i i know that many will still be wearing masks which is great and it should be by choice the mandate should be lifted that is my very strong opinion and i think it is a sound one and i think many think it is sound so i urge our school board to please support this ruling by governor baker i hope that we can instead support uh that we focus on creating a supportive environment that respects everyone's choice of what is best for them thank you anyone else like to provide public comment please step up to the podium and state your name good evening my name is pedro castanera i am a member of the community here in dartmouth i have two school-age children in the school system here and i'm also a product of the dartmouth school system i'd like to strongly uh reinforce what was just said that i also agree that it's long been long enough two years of masking forced masking of our children is uh more than enough if they want to wear them by choice that's fine but if they shouldn't and if their parents and their families choose that that's not appropriate or necessary i don't think anybody else should have the right to tell them to do it i'd appreciate that the school committee today uh take the information that desi provided and move forward with the 28th of february as the date to unmask our children thank you thank you anyone else wishing to provide comment please step to the podium state your name and share your thoughts hi good evening thank you my name is jeannie tripp and i no longer have any children in dartmouth schools i am a product of dartmouth schools i've lived here since i was seven years old i have three children who graduated dartmouth schools i knew the dedication and the love that this community showed my children i only want to reiterate what lynn said and the previous speaker as well that i firmly believe that we as parents should be making those children the choices for our children and if the governor and dusty is going along with it then everybody should be thank you anyone else wishing to make comments please step up to the podium and state their name my name is dan turner and i am a parent of two children here at the dartmouth school systems and i want to thank you for the opportunity to have public opinion on this matter the children have been going on now for two years with the uh the lockdowns the mandates on the masks and uh there's plenty of evidence now that state that we are really getting to the point where we should be returning to normalcy there are countries around the world that are actually lifting all the mandates states in this country as well there's evidence that is uh now out that proves the fact that these mass do a lot more harm than good as far as cloth mass the virus can travel right through it it doesn't really prevent the spread if it does it's a very low percentage so i implore you today to make the right decision an educated decision to lift the mask mandate and return our children back to a state of normalcy within the dartmouth public school system thank you thank you there's other comment please step up to the podium state your name good evening my name is adam herrera i have three children in the dartmouth school system and just to piggyback on what the previous speakers said um i just want to reinforce and say that it is very harmful to kids as a gas detection specialist i detect harmful gases every day and i've measured the levels of co2 under they get under the masks and they reach over 30 000 ppm which is very hazardous and i just also wanted to ask if there's going to be support for kids that are having difficulty after the masks come off as far as mental health suicide rates are up for kids depression anxiety is skyrocketed and i just hope that there is programs and the nurses are looking out for these you know signs of suicide and depression that is all thank you thank you if anyone else would like to make a comment please step up to the podium state your name share your thoughts briefly hi my name is ken raposo i'll try to be beef so much to say so we moved here from brazil a few years ago my daughter is a school choice kid we are from westport she was very happy freshman and sophomore year here on top of her class in junior year with at home and then hybrid learning she crashed she has been rejected from every a-list college she has applied to so far we have all heard about the mental health toll this has taken on kids my daughter had the crisis center called in to help her last month and will now miss a day of school per week for inpatient group therapy why because the eight hours have covered this and covered that and vaccine this and vaccine that has driven her nuts she's not alone last week the governor and deci said schools in the state can go mask optional the school has always followed desi the superintendent has also agreed with that call for two years students like my daughter have done what the school board and the teachers unions have asked of them now it is time for the school board and the teachers turn to do what the students want and by the way have you ever polled to see what they wanted because i don't think you ever have the boston globe in the boston herald told local parents about masking and at least 80 percent in boston said it was time to go boston if tessie's rules were fined before they should be fine now let's just call it a truce follow what bonnie gifford had said the students will be happy and anyone who is still worried can still wear a mask it's a win-win thank you anybody else would like to make comment please step up to the podium state your name share your thoughts briefly hello my name is nicholas pike i have uh two twin boys that are going to be entering the school system next september they follow the eec guidelines through their local daycare in dartmouth that they're attending now which states that when they turn five next month they'll be required to wear a mask eight hours a day i don't think it's right for my children to have spent the past four years unmasked and now be forced to wear a mask i also don't feel it's right that children of that age should be forced to wear a mask at all for eight hours a day this should be our choice as our parents of our children and i think it's time for the mass policy to go thank you we have a few more minutes for public comment if anyone would like to step to the podium and share their thoughts please do so now hi elizabeth neto a school teacher in the dartmouth system i see 398 students and i believe that masks are keeping us safe as a teacher who sees that many children every week please keep us safe thank you all right seeing no other takers on public comments all right please step up to the podium state your name hi good afternoon my name is name is stacy martin i have two boys in the school system i also work in the vocational school nearby greater nebraska volk i work hand in hand with them and the nurses work tirelessly through this the masks in my opinion they don't work we have a positive case maybe rate of one or two kids per week they're not transmitting it in school they're having sleepovers they're doing sporting events how can you prove that this is happening in schools and you're punishing them and letting them sit in masks for hours they don't have a normal life they have it depression anxiety this is wrong it's child abuse please end it thank you [Applause] all right so it's now 6 45 so unless there's anyone who else who wants to make one last brief comment we're going to move on to the next item on our agenda seeing none next we're going to move on to the approval of the minutes i'll entertain a motion to approve the regular uh session minutes from january twenty-two move madam chair second all right so i have a motion by mr oliver a second by ms wade is there any discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor aye aye opposed abstentions so that passes unanimously uh next i'll entertain a motion to approve the executive session minutes of january 24 22.

all right i just got the message that's been a live stream yep okay so i'd like to uh call the special meeting of the uh brookfield board of education for uh february 14th to order um please join me in rising for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of america and to the republicans to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay um so first of all um happy valentine's day to everybody um i am hoping that we don't go a long long time this evening because i am sure that people would like to spend some time with their significant others this evening um but thank you for making the time uh the board has had a very busy calendar uh late last week we did our budget presentation we have we're meeting with the nbc tomorrow night to uh review the furniture for the new school and we have our regular board of education meeting on wednesday so it's one of those moments in the year where there's a lot of meetings for all of us so um the uh and for the people members of the public and there are a number who joined the zoom call and uh and there's a number who i am sure are listening on the youth youtube live stream uh thank you for joining uh uh the the legislature uh the senate passed the extension of the governor's orders to the february 28th this afternoon which we uh eric now you're good at pause it pause it pause zoom but didn't pause youtube so keep going okay there you go yep um so we're in a position where the board needs to make some decisions we chose to do this meeting by zoom this evening because there was another meeting just before this and it was just logistically challenging to get all the board members physically together in one place so so i may i made the command decision to make this a zoom call there is no public comment on this evening's meeting um so those of you who've joined the the zoom call you will note that you are muted and your video is off that's on purpose and and one of the things we have to decide as a board tonight is are we going to go through a process of a formal public comment process or do we have enough information already to uh to make the decisions that we need to make as a board so that's actually one of the decision processes we have to get through this evening i will say though to my fellow board members i've been answering an awful lot of emails i counted them up just before this meeting since uh the the governor first made his announcement i've received 84 emails in the last uh week and uh and uh and uh i spent the super bowl responding to emails last night so um so the uh we've gotten a lot of public input i know you all had a chance to read through those and there's some good and very useful uh input so um eric mike is pinging me saying he's uh he's locked out so if you could just find him and i'll give him this yeah mike i just got your email and i took care of you thanks man appreciate it um so tonight we're working through our process of what what are we going to do to make whatever decisions or uh and we have to ask ourselves very fundamental questions like you know do we have enough information are we clear enough with what's going on in the state uh do we need public com a public comment session uh or do we have enough information to make a decision that we might need to make and move on this evening i mean that's the fundamental question that we're going to be facing so what i thought we would we could do is dr brill's pulled together some very basic information some of the statistics some of what's going on at the state what is he hearing and most importantly what is the advice we're getting from our health advisors and uh and i thought that what i could do is turn it over to dr burrell and let him walk through this presentation uh and at the end of that we i think we as a board have some decisions we need to make on how to move forward so with if everybody is okay with that um then i'll turn it over to dr barrow okay all right a gorilla floor is yours sir thanks bob eric can you share the screen please with the slides we're gonna have eric run this uh tonight for us so obviously we're here to consider uh the mask wearing policy uh based upon everything that bob just said is uh the introduction in terms of the governor's announcement last week for the extension of the uh mask wearing uh until the 28th of february and then leaving it up to the local districts for march first so eric if you could go to the next slide i want to give a little brief uh status update of exactly where we're at so the the legislative actions that have occurred thus far it's really important for everybody to understand this to kind of just level set last week as we said the governor recommended that mask wearing in schools be a local decision and as most people are aware his legislative executive orders end uh i believe it's midnight tomorrow february 15th he asked for an extension of two weeks and after that everything moved forward as a local decision regarding masks and the department of public health actually um endorsed uh his announcement last week and endorsed that position the commissioner of the department of public health was on and spoke at the press conference last week then on thursday which was february 10th the house voted to extend those executive orders uh for the two weeks literally two more weeks to the 28th and we just found out this afternoon probably within the last hour and a half that the senate also agreed to that to extending those executive orders so we now have the legislature the governor and the department of public health um basically saying to us the mask mandate is is essentially ending uh officially on march first that's basically what this means here one thing that's important for everybody to understand that the transportation the public transportation mandate um that deputized the cdc to mandate that transportation still uh consider mask wearing and have mass wearing that also applies to school buses that is still in effect because that is federal that is not actually a state mandate so that's still in effect as far as we know obviously if there's any changes we would let folks know all right next slide eric all right it's important as we consider moving to um local decision making in terms of mask optional if we go in that direction and again that's for the board's consideration i have a few slides just to go through before we discuss is that right now we've been awaiting department of public health guidance uh in regard to if we don't have masks in school as a mandate for all and it's optional what does that mean for mitigation and as as you know in talking with our medical advisor with our public health director some of the key mitigation factors still remain and so those are things like obviously one of the things they all recommend is vaccination as a matter of fact our town has almost an 85 vaccination rate if you're ill stay home if your child is ill keep your child home hygiene and hand washing things we're very familiar with keeping paying attention to ventilation distancing and cohorting where possible and of course quarantine protocols uh applying for when you've been ill and you've isolated and then might be feeling better when you come back and timing all that out so right now in the absence of absence of that direction as we figure things out over the next two weeks we would want to pay attention to update w-1 that was sent out a while back which talks about all those things and we could always resend that to families and so forth um one thing that's a couple of points that i want to make is that superintendents are hearing coming out of the state department of ed in kind of out of the department of public health that the the csde and dph might not be recommending anything for us so that's why it's important to think about what are our uh mitigation protocols that have been effective for us and what has worked and and what do we do on the local level and getting that local advice because we may not get any more state advice going forward we may get some again we don't know um the other piece to that is the department of public health doesn't plan on establishing as far as i know or my colleagues know any metrics where it may mean we have to ramp up mitigation or continue pulling away from mitigation efforts and getting even more back to normal so um those are those are things we need to be aware of the indicators that i understand that the dph will look at and the commissioner has talked about is vaccination rates and hospitalization rate indicators nothing further than that we think that the you've heard a lot about positivity rate we've all heard about that over the last year and a half um we don't believe that that is going to be an indicator any longer and then like i said other protocols uh may terminate as we progress through this we really we're getting into a place where it's positive we should be excited about this and energize that we're even having this conversation right now um one thing as we start to consider mask versus no mask and optional is that through this whole process and to bob's point about the 80 plus emails we received um what i really appreciate about all of them is the points were made but they were respectful and kind and people really sharing their stories um about what their kids are going through and on either side of the issue so again it truly is a positive time and we need to take that take heed to that so please next slider so some of the metrics that that we all hear about and know about are uh case trends um across the state we hear the national ones but i want to focus on the next couple of charts state trends in brookfield our vaccination rate in brookfield broken down by age range and then specifically i think the most important one is what are the infection rates in the schools for our staff and students and similarly what are the quarantine rates it's really important you're going to see some really positive trends across all of those metrics so we're going to put those slides up so we go to the state one eric the next one please all right so you can see um the number of confirmed cases and probable coveted cases uh in the state if you think back to the end of last winter beginning of last april things were getting much better and then you have this large spike as you progress through the years this large spike in january you can see there and this precipitous drop if we go right to the next slide eric it's important to see the match of the state um brookfield mirrors that and you can see the confirmed versus total cases uh here at the end of january and then the first two weeks in february and you can see we've really dropped down quite a bit again we're in a very nice position here so these dynamics are the same as the state next layer this is an important one we've highlighted the the right hand column of the chart this is the actual brookfield vaccination rate we have a weekly report from ed advance our local um resk and they share with us by age each week the vaccination status so it's an interesting chart for people to take a look at it's not one that we publish regularly but we do have that information and it's there for you if you're interested so that's where we were as of the 10th next slide to me i have the next two slides especially this slide is a simple line graph you can see on the yellowish orange line that is our student um actual covid cases at the beginning of january down through last friday i think we're down to 13 across the district and zero for staff that's the dark blue line you see there for infections so again that precipitous drop-off we're a very good place and then the next slide is uh i thought it'd be of interest to folks uh that is our quarantine counts and it's a it's a similar trend you can say and remember quarantine is uh students and families sharing with us that their child um tested positive and then quarantining their child from an out of school trans uh uh infection that is uh in school we are no longer uh doing contact tracing so if you're not doing contact tracing in school then you're not gonna have close contacts and you're not gonna have those quarantine so that's just something this is really out of school quarantines that we're actually tracking at this point are out of school infections and then subsequent quarantines in close context all right next slide all right so so here here it goes so the governor department of public health our metrics all trending positively our health director dr sullivan saying it is time to eliminate the mass requirement and he is in alignment with what the department of public health talked about in the press conference last week with the governor which is through the extension for the next couple of weeks and being ready for march 1.

monday february 14th 2022 um i would you have a roll call first you are dan harrigan here tony parragini here when he rises for the pledge i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with literacy and justice for all okay um i'm going to ask if we have any public comment we have no public okay um next on the agenda is review of the minutes of january uh um i'm going to open for motion for approval of the minute um do we have any discussion look good um okay so the motion is let's uh approval of the minutes of january 10 22 all in favor new business we are we've been discussing uh how to go about reviewing and requesting reconsiderations of library classroom resources so tonight i'm going to turn marley solano to just kind of um go through what cade that connecticut association awards as education has recommended or offered the sample policies so we did reach out to a lot of their materials around selecting instructional materials which we already have policy that is truly in line with that the niche piece that we were looking for was how does someone go about requesting a reconsideration of a particular material and while we have that in practice currently we don't have it formally in policy and so what he said were some things for us to take a look at and i shared with you here what the berlin board of education has which is a request for reconsideration of instructional materials and it gives a little procedure so ideally i think what we would like to see is that if there's a book that's in question that the parent would talk to the teacher about it um and that looks differently at different levels sometimes it's the teacher sometimes you see the department chair sometimes it's the principles but this is basically saying that if they don't feel satisfied with the outcome of that discussion with the teacher that they can submit a request to the assistant superintendent for first limited instruction thereby you will take a deeper look at that so it would require the individual to what i'm referring to is um if you look at this page right here the next two pages indicate recommendations for textbook adoption which works with that one but the request for reconsideration of instructional materials for their name their phone number their address the department or school where they want to reevaluate this material so the title the author the editor and then it asks some follow-up questions about the materials he needs to more course what brought this resource to your attention have you read or used the entire work if not what parts did you view what specifically concerns you about the resource they ask for page numbers or click on images or additional pages and then refers them to um resources that they may suggest that give the thing so i think that really gets to understanding what people are concerned about and then that would that would follow to the other page where some districts have come up with sort of a subcommittee that then looked at them so there might be a school media advisory committee's reconsideration of instructional material and give that advisory committee some guidelines on what to look at focuses on purpose content checklist recommendations so again this is nothing that we need to make a decision on tonight but it's really something for us to take a look at to review and then come back and we could then stay to get our next meeting yeah we like this and this and we want to forward it over to the policy committee for reconsideration for consideration to reconsider the policy for resistance okay so just to make sure um this if we were to say adopt the first document we looked at um [Music] it is the parent or guardian who submits um does the teacher need to do a follow-up report of any time would we require that okay there's that part as part of the conversation that we have you know we can outline what the sort of the chain is to you know have the book looked at right in many cases after talking with the teacher the parent understands the context of human rules etc the students are all often in the rare cases where this happens um students are to be offered another book to read and from my observations and talking with teachers rarely doesn't even get to that point so this offers opportunities for discussion and dialogue but also offers people a way to document their concerns which is also important and this could go as far or as it could be as expensive as an entire textbook i mean i i mean would say you and i know we're we're kind of uh moving from the big huge textbooks um i don't know why someone would object but you never know um would we have alternatives to in the eventuality objective okay you know maybe that section okay or maybe not right right i think it happens last year i think we're talking about a very very very very neat case right like i think i don't have not even heard of it happening except the one the one time so i think that this is not a frequent you know occurrence um so i said but in the chances when it does happen i think it's really focused on literature right and that is where the the issues have come up so it just wanted to make sure um we could go to the extreme and so these um examples these sample forms are from the berlin public schools they send these people from a variety of schools yeah okay but what is the is this our policy as it stands in that no the policy that we have is old from and it's really not written around instructional material it's written about complaints in general okay so it's not even a starting point just curious they didn't give any indication as to what berlin's experiences um i actually spoke with the issues superintendent there um you know for a colleague who's been a member of and they always started um and then so and um again this would be something that we would uh edit and amend to fit our district um so this is an obvious question would we work in conjunction with policy on this or once we make the motion and act upon this to go straight to policy and it's there it could go either either i think i'm sure that your colleagues could appreciate you taking a look at it but they really get down and dirty into the wording and work with an attorney to make sure that our policies are aligned so you wouldn't have to do the whole list on it you could do something as simple as you there are some samples or you can go and go a little deeper and say you like this policy here are some language suggestions okay and i mean it needs to come to the full board for approval right right so if you put them together before it comes down okay um yeah let's maybe consider putting it on for march or at least and then um and it doesn't seem to invite um courts to come and sign us for every book okay good wonderful that takes care of i'm free um so we're moving to information like informational items we're going to start with um a review of two new programs in the elementary physical ed we're pretty excited about these kathy sullivan our pe and health department chair is here tonight to share a little bit about the um some of the background in history around both the bicycle safety unit at the elementary school and to tell us a little bit about um a golf unit that people have reached up to her for so wherever you're comfortable kathy i don't know and kevin has your um first t video when you're ready for it okay that's at the end so okay so um good evening i'm kathy sullivan i'm the department chair for physical education and health in the district and as marlene said i'm here to talk to you about two new initiatives that we are hoping to institute at the elementary level hopefully the spring maybe in the fall depending on how everything falls in the first one is a bicycle safety program biking and bike safety and previously we did teach bicycling at highland school where we had two physical education teachers joe crutz and andrew steinway that started the program they were responsible for getting all the bikes donated for setting up the curriculum for having everything stored in the trailer and for maintaining and repairing the bikes along with a custodian at the highland that would help out and programming for a number of years and was very successful recently joe and the custodian were both transferred up to cheshire high school and that left everything falling on andrew it became very difficult for one person to run the program maintain the bikes try to teach joe and andrew would give up their prep periods to teach and help so there'll be two teachers teaching the classes um and andrew was kind of by himself on it so unfortunately the program kind of fell to the wayside for a little while and in february of 2020 um doug levins and from the cheshire y and jim jenks from cheshire bike and cheshire um bike walk and also one of our town council members came to miley and me and asked about trying to get a bike and bike safety program going together at the elementary schools and all the schools and so doug came and talked to all the elementary teachers to make sure that they were on board and over the next two years doug and jim spent a lot of time soliciting our businesses in the area getting donations and they also got a matching grant through outright foundation and with the money that they received they were able to purchase a classroom fleet of bicycles and a trailer to transport them and it's our hope that they will be able to roll up with the trailer to our elementary schools with all the new bikes helmets and all the biking gear and along with certified instructors from the league of american bicyclists and our pe teachers they will instruct our students on bicycling and bicycle safety it'll be probably three to four lessons at each of the schools and right now it will be just fourth grade so we can see how it works and how everything will uh work with this with the students who knows how to ride who doesn't we do find there a lot all the way up to the high school that have never ridden a bicycle so um that will be part of it and obviously the bike safety piece as well our teachers are going to be trained on april 21st in the teach the teachers workshop about bike safety and take what it's called safe kids safe biking and once they're trained then we'll have the opportunity to present it to our students so it's kind of an exciting endeavor we've only as i said done it at highland so it's nice of the other schools to be able to get involved um and to have the extra instructors when we get that much easier for us and we don't have to maintain those flights which is probably one of the hardest pieces so that's our first the second initiative is called the first t school program and it started in 2004 and i actually was introduced to it then at a state conference for physical education but it was prohibitive the cost of running it and applying was very expensive and every elementary school had had their own equipment and be part of the membership so we just didn't go for it this fall susan wage maker who's a business teacher at cheshire high school approached me again about first tee she's a big supporter of it and said she would advocate for us and that she did she spoke to the people at first tee and got approval for us to share the equipment across our elementary schools which made the cost a lot more manageable um at the same time we um susan along with myself wrote up a proposal to the cheshire education foundation and i think we're close to hopefully getting something there so that would give us the opportunity to start the program and we would share the equipment between all all of the schools so what exactly is the first tee it's a program that introduces golf to elementary school-aged children the curriculum is set up so that it is geared towards the elementary child it's based on the national standards for physical education and it also encompasses um information on character traits so along with teaching about golf and about the knowledge and skills involved it also talks about being courteous it talks about good sportsmanship it talks about fair play and empathy for others so it institutes a lot of different things into the instruction as well as part of the tea program we'll get the curriculum we'll get equipment that's geared for the elementary student and we will also have everyone in district physical education will be trained in their program both as a um in person as well as a virtual training that they'll go so i do have the promotional video it's actually pretty quick it's i've got some good information it actually shows you what the equipment and everything looks like so i think it was probably easier to show you that than to keep on talking within the walls of gymnasiums and on school fields across the country students are learning the game of golf one with the first t nine core values and nine healthy habits and best of all they love [Music] the gym their it lit up and they just couldn't wait to get their hands on me i like golf because like it's really fun probably getting it farther than my friends it's a fun and active family sport i see myself getting better and better each time [Music] the kids are enjoying it because we've never done anything like this so for most of them it's their first exposure to the game of golf [Music] the first t national school program provides everything schools need including curriculum training for elementary school physical educators and equipment to easily deliver the program in a variety of school settings having the ability to practice golf indoors is terrific we're able to do it year-round no matter what the weather conditions are anyone can be creative this program can work inside outside i even had half the space we still could make this program work the national school program also promotes a healthy active lifestyle through the nine healthy habits which focused on physical emotional and social aspects of wellness and were developed in partnership with hall of fame member annika sorenstam's foundation those of us who play the game know that there is this intrinsic relationship between the challenges of the game and life itself in the process of teaching young people about a fun activity that requires hard work dedication some skill you were teaching them that the attributes that make them a better golfer are the same attributes that are used to make a good soldier a good doctor a good teacher a good parent a good citizen a good person the national school program has really allowed the first team to have a broader and deeper impact on our society we're having influence throughout the entire elementary school because they're moving our character education platform beyond pe into the entire school the first he introduces children to really what can be a lifelong really fun exciting game and it does it in a very motivating way but the real benefit the real payoff is the way in which the program delivers and teaches a series of core values over time we've seen that have an impact on our campuses literally by reducing disciplinary incidents because those learned core values transferred from the pe class to all of the other classes in the campus they transferred to the cafeteria it transferred campus wide and it very literally for many children transformed lives it's about discipline it's about leadership it's about courage it's about strength and along with this program all of that comes into play the teachers so what are you doing down here in the gym because i'm noticing a difference i'm not having to stay on them about their behavior they're more on task they want to get their work done and i want to know what it is you're doing and what you're teaching that's making a change in their behavior they're long lasting effects it's not just for the 30 minutes that they're in the class nor for that one day or for one week it's a lifelong experience that they have an independent third party case study reported positive experiences and improved socializational skills for students and that teachers used the core values in lessons beyond golf and find great value in the program once the student's interest is piqued the golf community can expect schools in their area to encourage students to pursue the game at golf activities supported by the pga tour and its tournaments local junior golf programs or chapters of the first team the key is to get them excited about the sport and then try and develop transitions so they can come back to our chapters green grass locations and or other junior golf programs within their communities it's all about that positive engagement when you think about it that's what life is all about we have 26 elementary campuses and they serve thirteen thousand children every one of those thirteen thousand children now are being exposed to and are receiving the first e program and i tell you really unequivocally it has made a significant difference in the climate of our elementary campuses because children's behaviors have changed and teachers confidence in delivering the program and their motivation because of the differences they see and what it is done for children really allows me to believe strongly that every single one of our 13 000 elementary children are being touched in a very positive way and their schooling is being changed for the better [Music] some of our students have participated in the first tee through summer camps or junior golf and things like that and probably the most notable is jacob ecky who was a class of 2014 cheshire high school grad i was part of the first team when he was younger and he was lucky enough to be one of about 75 students in the country i think only two from connecticut to be chosen to participate in the first key golf tournament at pebble beach in california and his partner was a senior pga tour um pro so kind of a neat thing that can come out of this and we're looking forward to instituting it and you never know maybe we'll get off the program so thank you for listening please any questions i'll do my best to answer um what what grades would be involved in this it's it's k26 so the entire elementary school and the equipment is geared so that we can do all of that and the curriculum is written that way just do it well so that's going to be part of the figure out because that's the elementary teachers are like okay when do i get the equipment and what if someone else wants it and so this year and next fall will be kind of a pilot for it and if it's great and we need more equipment then we will start writing grants to get most of the elementary schools each have it so we'll probably do the same thing like we're doing with the bicycle they're going in the fourth grade for biking so maybe we'll go with kindergarten in first grade initially and then work our way so that people will get it um but yes what their thought was is they would keep it at their school for like three weeks of lessons and then it would go to another for three weeks and if we have time then we'll circle back it is indoors and outdoors which is kind of nice so it doesn't always say at first we thought oh my gosh it's gonna be may june and sometimes october we can't do it in the other but it's nice that it can be indoor activity so sometimes that indoor time would be gets very long come march so it might be nice to have it as a change at this time too thank you so you you hit you've got the funding for grants do this yeah everything's been granted yes okay yep for the first tee as well as for the bicycle and then um and just how this equipment has to take a beating doesn't it i mean well that's what we're concerned but um it is very uh solid equipment so they do tell us it lasts i don't know what the warranty on replacement and everything else is so that's all gonna be part of it we're hoping that it it does last and they do replays and things go i do know uh we do a golf program at the high school and a lot of the things are warranted so we can just get it replaced all the time so i'm hoping because it is a high price that it does because they just replace for us yeah the ball is really but it's more than well closed yeah and then um so um so if you're doing rotations um you will you'll be able to mix it up so that it's you know like highland doesn't get all indoors and yes oh believe me they'll make sure they'll make sure they get that outside time too so we'll work it out and they'll have a schedule going and we do have a couple of thoughts on talking to some of the golf courses in the area if it does work out to see if they'll help us out with money to buy a second set so then it's only shared between two schools which i think will probably be a much better deal but we want to get started so this is our way to get started i don't know if they want me teaching them but we'll see i do know one of our elementary teachers prior to coming to um cheshire taught at another school and used it and said it was fabulous yeah i loved the program he loved the curriculum he was a big proponent to convincing us that it was definitely a positive so i think it should work out well i was looking forward to trying it thank you thanks thank you very much thank you so much welcome to two really great programs and it's nice to see the connection between the yeah yeah it is foundation thanks so much um okay next item is the high school courses for career yeah so um last week i guess you know you and i talked a little bit and then mary and i talked at that last board meeting there were a lot of questions around sort of this idea of past days and we wanted to make sure that we were sharing information that we share with all of our parents around the sort of um the houses that we have the exposure that we have at uh as well start with the younger grades but tonight we're going to hear about catholic starting god and exposure that starts at dad through the unified arts department and then the team here is here to talk about um those questions representatives of courses so mary i'm going to show you so the department of chairs who are here are going to talk about the way students can connect courses to career but also the way students can be exposed to careers and also learns and skills that are associated with cooler so you're going to hear from sean mcqueen that our career technical education department um leslie cameron the chair of our business department and michelle batusi the chair of our school counseling department and they'll take you through really first the ways in which students explore so through an ambiance then the courses that they can take and then how do we kind of pull it all together how we help them see the connections between particular courses in the direction that those courses can take a student uh and they begin to think about what they might want to major in college and what they ultimately might want to be able to do uh when they once they leave our wall our four walls but also their next post-secondary experience so um i know that we have a document i think we're going to start with the questions for the the middle school portion and then we'll head into the high school perfect thank you hi everybody i'm kristen castellano um i am the division leader for the unified arts department at dodd and i want to talk to you today about some early opportunities that we offer at dodd for careers career exploration um the first one i want to talk to you about is multimedia and we have multimedia opportunities in grades seven and eight and through our multimedia classes students are learning how to communicate in a message effectively and that's through using audio and visual um editing software um as you can see in these pictures there's just some downloads of pictures of kids using that actual software to edit and to insert transitions and to create these products that are both visual and audio and they put these together to form these products that are really quite amazing um so they learn effective use of voice they learn how to conduct interviews they upload and download content that's both audio and video they record and they edit and they produce those products and one of the things that we're most excited about at dog is one of the extensions that's offered there and one of the extensions is uh the spartans live morning broadcast so one of the best parts about morning zad is that spartans live broadcast because kids really produce it they create it they're the on-air talent and my two colleagues matt fanetta and john cusary work really hard to expose the kids to all of the aspects of that process and they deliver the news in the morning um as many as many times during the week as they can and they're involved at every level from on-air talent to behind-the-scenes work so it's a really cool part of our morning at god and kids get the opportunity to be part of that and to see if that's something that they're really interested in um i'm gonna share with you uh there are quite a few outcomes here um that are created in multimedia from digital storybooks which last year they uh they got an award from cape for the digital one of the digital storybooks that the kids created to podcast interviews to how-to videos so i'm just going to show you just the example of the how-to video here um and i think that you can see that the kids use all of this technology to get certain transitions inside of music [Music] had to do a lot to design that and to think about ahead of time to plan and to think about the transitions and the editing and what music was going to be so a lot of choices and a lot of exposure to many different aspects of editing and creating those products sorry that one gets a little hairy trying to yeah right um next is engineering and production and in engineering and production students are really given a lot of opportunity to learn about the design process and it's both through computer aided design and then more through more traditional methods so if you look at the picture on the left the students used a 3d printer that they programmed they designed and then they created this output using this cad program this computer-aided design program to create these 3d printed objects which is really a sight to say when it happens um and then the more traditional manufacturing types of building methods are illustrated in these wooden puzzles that they create those are just two examples and some more examples from engineering and production they design digitally paper airplanes and to see how far they can fly and they also create these wooden towers with hand tools that will be tested for strength so it's using a lot of physical properties but using those hands-on tools in the industrial and technology lab another really cool thing we have at dodd is robotics and in in grade 8 kids are exposed to robotics um and they are in charge of designing programming planning building and then testing these robots from beginning to end so if you want to take a look at this video it's a really cool demonstration of what they do [Music] fictitious mission to shut down a nuclear reactor before it blew up the world so they have these um these missions that they set these robotic those robots too you also have digital design and digital design is a um a class where kids are exposed to all kinds of um photo photography and photo altering retouching making artwork photos so they're exposed to all of the elements of the design process to create these original products um and they use products like adobe photoshop and pixel re to learn the features of each program so that's a really nice exposure to that world of photography and to the new technology that surrounds that that type of career and lastly we have consumer economics and consumer economics involves a whole lot of different um pieces and parts but the most i think one of the standouts is the entrepreneurship program and the program is one where kids build a portfolio of a business that they create from the ground up so they decide where the location is going to be just they decide what the product's going to be they decide the hiring process the profit margins they create this portfolio online on an online platform and then they put that portfolio into into a fictitious type of use and the culmination of this is that they invite someone from the community a local entrepreneur to visit class and to talk to kids about the process of becoming an entrepreneur and what that business is like and the cool thing about this and this was a virtual visit that the kids really handled the inviting the booking of the person coming in and then handled all the thank you the business thank you um notes that went out to the entrepreneur who visited so there are lots of different pathways to explore a lot of different types of careers and a lot of different types of thank you and i'll try to answer any questions if you have any are these so these are in in school time are they so they're scheduled um during of students day so every student has time in their schedule in addition to their academic courses they also have ua unified arts almost like elective classes so they're allowed to choose which ones they're most interested in and typically by the time they leave done they had a tasting of all of these in one shape in one way or another so all these different courses are the electives but there's the block called unified artists yes and um is there so they're very much digitally oriented is there um the english measures coming up um i guess if you you know in the traditional courses you're going to be exploring magazine design or um i i think they will survive newspaper design uh you know just a physical physical product do you do that or is that part of it or is it is it intentionally focused so on the digital there are opportunities for kids to explore things like that in after-school clubs like we have our newspaper and we have things that are um the the yearbook and things like that that they participate in but these are the ones that are offered right now i think you're returning to faith and maybe when they're working with primary source documents and social studies where they're going to bring in newspaper articles or things for english language arts or in those other happy more academic minded courses well i was actually thinking of um magazine production newspaper production and they they you know maybe i am just such a dinosaur that they won't be around anymore but at the same time you know these there's a digital component but you produce the hard product um and i that's and so that's it that's it does but it's also a participant for sure and then um do you see adding to the electives other courses that other skills that you want to incorporate into these courses yeah i'm sure you've got it as a pretty broad menu there but yeah um is it have you gotten requests for other other skills you know um i would say dad offers more in the area of unified arts than any other middle school that i have seen especially when you have looked at others schools that their offerings are you have your traditional you know art music fair chorus very few offers of breath and depth of what is offered at that okay thank you thank you [Music] so it actually is a perfect segue in with the question of just um you know being asked and what can be offered the high school to expand on what that is so um i think in 2018 i put together a document more so out of my own curiosity just to like very quickly bird walk i come from a family of five siblings none of us are alike we all had very different paths but we were very close in age so um i got to kind of see in action how all of us still became very successful adults even though me and my sister and one of my brothers were very academic oriented and the other two were much more hands-on um and i always felt very bad for my brothers who were much more hands-on because people didn't seem to understand like how they would learn and how to direct them because i went to a high school very similar to a cheshire high school so the course's career document went through kind of those guiding things that we looked at the career pathways the 16 career clusters are in here um very teeny tiny font but um did this in preparation for course elections so that hopefully students would open their program of studies um take a look at it see all the different courses that we offer and get some ideas about how that could align to the career they might want to pursue in the future and hopefully even like trying different things so they can maybe read some things out in different career areas so it's a live document where if you click on the links it'll take you to each section so you go down to it gives a very quick blurb it's actually the career cluster language that's out of naviance so naviance is the tool that we are using um district wide to do career exploration it also helps us in the college application process with sending documents but we have targeted different career assessments um at every grade it really starts at eight is when you dive into it um that look at different ways to look at careers you might be interested in so looking at personality assessment multiple intelligences um skills and interests all different ways so that we can give lots of different ways to look at career and then link that to the courses that we have at chs um so we'll blur what the cluster is sample jobs for each cluster and then if we go to any one of the subject areas and you can click on one of those links so then it spotlights a few career courses at cheshire high school that are very geared towards that cluster lists um electives in all the other areas um that would also align with that cluster and there's obviously repeat that one class isn't just going to show up in one cluster it probably shows up in several and then also linking it to clubs and activities that align um so then again you can get that hands-on social interaction with it as well um so it's updated it's a live document can be updated as we add courses to our program and then i do try to switch out the spotlight courses to be some of our newer courses so that that's getting a little bit more of a highlight i think it's really useful uh the thing that i don't know if i found the key to yet is really getting it out to parents and students to make sure that i send it out six million times but i don't know how many of them are actually diving in and looking at it but i think once someone does they actually do see the value in it and hopefully it's guiding them in their first election so it was sent out again to parents grades 9 10 and 11 in students this morning this course election started today any questions about that document or the naughty answers business i drew that in there really comprehensive michelle thank you like i said it's a personal goal to have kids thinking in a different way of how they're approaching taking classes in cheshire so i hope it helps somebody else i don't want to see the interconnectedness among our courses so um so how many students do you have currently taking your that family example i send it out to all of them so um i mean they do reference it i feel like parents reference it a little bit more especially in the last few years um i did a course selection presentation for parents a few weeks ago and highlighted this as well um and then really trying to move into getting more exposure to people real time in careers so we did not have our traditional career fair this year um but finding other ways to expose students and parents to jobs that are out there so sean and i partnered with the connecticut center for advanced technology to do a panel on stem careers i would love to see us be able to do that for more careers as well i actually got feedback from parents about what ideas like they would like to see fashion and industry came up so i think some of the those holes that we may not have towards working could also be an opportunity to bring in people from industry to talk about those things and links all of the courses available at cheshire high school for organizing them according to the kinds of careers you might be interested in so you know that oh this kind of course could lead me to to understand more what the skills and um knowledges are for each of these different course areas so that it just organizes what we offer in a slightly different way and also shows the clubs so if you think you might want to become an architect here are the courses that will help you to learn about that field and then hear a class that could help you to explore it a little more deeply but it says that all students must register for a minimum of 6.5 credits yes i send this out with course elections so that first week is just the sheet about four to collection the rest of it they address about eight credits every year but they haven't that's not i thought it was six point five credits in this in one program no no no no so it goes on our website from the main headset or on the general website michelle uses this as a tool when she speaks to parents and talks about course selection she recently sent it out to all the parents for um and so it's been pushed are definitely much more manageable but they have about 200 kids on their caseload 200 kids running up to ask these questions this is something that they could hopefully preview before they come in to have that conversation so that they can guide it a little bit more instead of the counselor guiding that conversation we are seeing that with kids especially with the new graduation requirements they're much more reflective about meeting the different buckets that they have to meet and how they can achieve that um so the conversations we've been having with students the last couple weeks and then when this registration started today have actually been very like rich in that respect but it's been talking more about what they want to do rather than what do i need to take i mean we're trying to do that at the college level right and the students just want to tell me these questions they're being encouraged to think about what they want to do and not about you know you have to check out fights yeah but within those boxes there is a variety of choices um have the purpose of the capstone is what i mean it is i'm gonna bring this around you're talking about you don't i should think if i were a freshman going to school knowing i had to do a capstone project i would be petrified and i'm just wondering you know could this be a tool for the kids and are you using it as a tool to get the kids thinking in freshman year that you know to look through here see because it doesn't have to necessarily reflect you know the various all of the disciplines incorporated into one project so that could certainly give them ideas of how they're going to get into diving into that work a little more deeply well and as a parent you know i would be panicked as well and you talk about you know introducing to this to the parents and getting them interested and getting them into this i don't know i just think we'd be um you can kind of put the fear of god in them but also say hey look this could be your solution and i know i don't know if i'm kind of missing something here or if that's another way just to to know that you're done because this is an amazing piece of work once you pull together here and um the parents should be looking at this this is kind of electrical i would love to believe that they are um and then you know another big thing is is setting up internships and everything is as you go along can you i know i know other people in the room incorporate those in here because i know they're fluid they they is with everything that you guys are doing there come over [Music] um so just everything that you're starting and what they're doing up in school counseling um the mastery-based performance assessment these are all pieces that are coming together and are part of the business department too and in cte so what we're doing is we have the internship program that's one way for students to showcase um something a career that they're interested in or not to showcase but to learn about a career that they're interested in get out there try it out ask questions um help help people out and that could cover them or you know that could be their mastery-based performance assessment they could take their learning i was talking with a student the other day and he just wasn't sure what to do and he would he was you know worried but he takes a lot of business classes it's really it's really wonderful so i said well what are you thinking about what do you do well i have a car but i i'd like to i'm working on it so tell me more about this said well i'm painting it's an old car i'm painting it and i'm re helping out revamping redesign redoing the engine whatever whatever sean help me here whatever he is doing he's putting new parts in the car to improve the engine and that's your mastery-based performance assessment you're and he's that hands-on kid i was so excited for him and he was so excited that he you know we just needed a little a little bit you know somebody to help walk in through so there's that's one component of what we're doing to bring students together um with skills and knowledge and and advancing from you know dodd to the high school to college or vocational school and then to a career other things that were involved we have other courses we have a cadet teaching course at the high school that kids can explore those opportunities we have a career development class did you speak a little bit more about the cadet teaching oh of course i love this class so any student that has an interest in education this is a wonderful opportunity for them it's a semester course we are it's open for 11th graders and 12th graders and they are going to work in an elementary school classroom before they get to an elementary school classroom they're going to learn a little bit about the common core of teaching they're going to learn about special education they're going to learn how to plan a lesson right from soup to nuts and then they're going to teach that lesson to their class so we can kind of learn you know what worked what didn't work and then they're bringing that to their elementary school classroom and they're going to teach that lesson with that class so really hands-on um while they're while they're um experiencing that opportunity so and i always say to kids and this goes for any career effort or any opportunity that they had to get outside and explore different careers you know if you love what you just experienced i'm so happy for you you know that's something that you can pursue but if it wasn't what you thought it was going to be that gives you the opportunity to just rethink things look at the um the program that michelle you know that the school counseling department put together and see what else might fit into you know the direction that you want to edit so um and then i i love when juniors take the teaching class because then they could take the um there's a yukon course human growth that developed development child development and there's a high school level courses and um right what's that it's in the educational training so they can they can further explore take courses that will help lead them to the next step uh and then they could also take maybe it's a psychology class so there's so many different um so many different you know directions that they can go in after they after they have had such an experience like that i think i met i might have mentioned some other opportunities the job shadow opportunity uh but before coven we also had great opportunities for our accounting classes they would go to different accounting conferences they need professionals or we have guest speakers come in so they're learning a little bit more you know if that career is you know the direction that they want to head in and i will share with you also we have three clubs in the business department we have the deca club we have fbla which is future business leaders of america and we have a mock trial mock trial club they are all highly highly attended each club well the mock trial club is right in the middle of their statewide competition where they compete against other high schools and again pre-covered they would get together they'd practice you know the trial situation uh here they tried to do it virtually but they're they're still going they're still moving on towards with that they work with a lawyer um every week that they meet either virtually or in person when they can um to see you know to get advice from from him uh and then and i mentioned the other oh the other two clubs fbla and deca they're there's a fall leadership conference they're learning leadership skills they're running meetings they're planning to have guest speakers come they're doing community service and that's all part of the club and then there is a statewide for each of those two clubs competition i right now i think they're both virtual but they really you can compete in any category you could do impromptu speaking you could create a business plan you could there's an accounting competition a marketing competition there's an interviewing competition so lots of different options and opportunities for our students to explore many many different directions to take and to make those connections with the mastery based performance assessment there's lots of opportunities for our students to to extend their learning in many ways [Music] any questions for me and you know if you do happen you're just spending a year but i i just want to say this is an amazing job um and so comprehensive and i i would think that this would be something that parents would like to have a look at when they're not that parents kind of advise their teenagers on their courses today because they don't listen to you um but it gives even parents an idea of of how course work fits into and and the overlap of courses to uh various career bubbles so this is great i mean all the way down to the clubs and activities then so if a club or activity is a interest to a student then you can make the backward connection you can go back and say well it sounds like you're talking about you know one day going into education or going into [Music] mean and i wonder what is the best way for parents to read this do we bind it instead of home like like we do with the uh program of studies we're sending it out electronically and we don't know if people are using it but everyone's looking at this saying holy moly and this thing's been printed for four years now so this isn't just like something that's brand new and i think it's it's i think the toughest part is people reference it a freshman in high school how do you tailor your high school course selections based upon the career that you're going to go into at fourth now at 14 years old you have to make that decision you don't have to make that decision but if you knew you would want to become an architect holy moly it's mapped out for you almost like the college program of studies is right so everything from your science classes your math classes your electives they're all mapped out for you to tailor your education to what you want to do as a career so i think the larger conversation over this whole thing is how do we make how do we have these students understand where the careers are in our area what they want to do we've mapped out how to get there academically or even to have the conversations with them about you know they're talking about what they what their interests are they like to study and or what activities they like to do and say oh it sounds like you're talking about public administration well what the heck is public school which i believe is one of the tools it sure is sure and i also forgot to mention to virtual job shadow which i know lovely department is using a lot as well in the career development course gives nice like short snippets for that visual kid who wants to kind of see it in action but can't get on an actual job shadow that um they can view those snippets as well which is nice it is across all of the clusters extremely that you probably know better than i do at this point that you guys need to get your classes um and we can tailor it with our curriculum too so we can actually fit in with it um like you can develop your own lessons which is nice for the teachers um so i'll just just kind of highlight some of the work we've done recently um the partnership in nonstop valley community college and it started with our digital media foundations course which honestly starts at our middle school program so works through our middle school and by the time you're a junior and senior in high school you can take a three credit college class in partnership with multiple valley it's called digital media foundations it's a full year course covers everything from capturing audio capturing images and video editing through all different types of projects for all these things so it's great in line with two different courses that they offer at nbcc um and as we've heard me speak before our manufacturing pathway that we're working incredibly hard on right now so pathways need to be paved right they don't just show up from start to end so we are now about two-thirds way through paving this this pathway some of the help that i will need are some relationships and better relationships with manufacturers in town and local areas to to to then funnel them through our internship program to then have our kids work in the industry without their senior year in high school so right now we're finishing our first cohort our first pack of students in the first year doing it we have a full boat of 16 kids in the program not everyone's moving on as i mentioned the last time i spoke to us because some are seniors and they're going to be graduating but they get to take those credits that they earn this year and bring them either to finish that program at nbcc or to take those credits into a into a four-year college and possibly into a stem career pathway or something like that so next year i'm very excited because we get to actually start running all of our machines next year this year it's all simulation measurements mathematics 2d and 3d modeling reading blueprints so our students earning five credits this year and six credits next year um we also have relationships with uconn right so our consumer science program we have mentioned before but our early childhood education program and not just the ecu from their early childhood and we have our child development classes and our human growth classes and we're starting that new program with the health and education urban communities it's a one credit college course one semester class i see chs next year so if you are interested in becoming a teacher not only you can take classes in a family consumer science department you can move those over to our cadet teaching class and you can get a pretty good experience of what this looks like in the real world because that that one credit class i just mentioned is also requiring us 12 hours of field work working with youth populations in urban communities so we have tons of hands-on real world experiences outside of our classrooms and that's just that's just the ends of our pathways we have so many other we have you know 10 classes for freshmen i almost got 30 classes at the high school for you to take everything from architecture and construction pathways information technology and our web and digital media production pathway we have a cluster of our stem classes we have that manufacturing production pathway um there's less magnesium over here and then they don't necessarily have to have one of those no so the best way i've always described how students can become full in our department we are probably one of the best tapas restaurants in town okay and at the top is restaurant you can also get the plateaus at the end right so you can get very full on ordering a bunch of different things you think you might like right or you can say i like this flavor profile and i want to stick with this flavor profile that's in our hospitality and tourism pathway as well [Laughter] i didn't think you can see that dr gad and her team just had an incredibly comprehensive array of courses that gives it so many options and that through the school counseling department they're sort of the people who are helping kids make quality connections and i can't say this the internship program is only going to explode over the next two years and i'm i'm not trying to have a you know a technology or stem-minded internship program a funnel funnel at all through this thing that's already already paid and already already established so these these kind of programs like that have been developed into high is why kids are coming to kind of university and taking three questions they're graduating undergrad and for years because they've already got so much basis behind them when they get there so i can tell you of my seniors that are in that manufacturing pathway right now half of them are going into four-year colleges to study engineering and half of them into the other half half of them are already signed up for apprenticeships in the trade and the other ones are going to one of our two-year community technical values so they're they're all they're all jumping out of this with something valuable for credits skills knowledge yeah i think we've asked this in the past are you seeing um especially at the freshman level more interest in this are you seeing expansion in i would say today is the beginning like metric of that we started course launching today so i we don't know um the actual numbers really until the end of this week of who is who's interested in this this program this pathway um it's you know i at the curriculum night i did have a lot of interest in it and it wasn't the only thing i was selling we had our full menu out that night but it was one of those ones that you know if i i ask people you know what on this table interests you the most right when people see certain tools and things outside of talking about this is this is what this is and this is how you can learn these over the next three to four years of high school but we don't i don't know that data yet faith and i would love to share that once once we know because i'm super excited about it too and you know i'm selfishly wanting it to be huge but also realistically understand that probably only run so many sections of it with what we have for space and funds and equipment and all that stuff so and also what do we have for current offerings that would we would we lean down with in order to make this something that's more and you need to share with the other clients yes absolutely and we're and it's not and here here's my whole thing right i get really motivated on trying to improve one thing and if i focus on like six things they're not going to get done right so if you just get this one thing and i'm home we're two-thirds way through this pathway once this once this is done we're moving on we're doing we're doing the next one so you know we have we have five-year plans of either either a culinary track a different stem track right so there's there's other things that are out there it's really getting the back end of the community colleges to recognize what we're doing and then say okay we're your partners now in this pathway and then we can reformulate it backwards down that's how this whole thing is and please do you ever want to come in and see what we're doing have my email right give my cell phone number come in please it's something come talk to our students and see what they're actually doing day in day out standing here even just with you i'm not even showing pictures but come it's it's smell what we're doing here what we're doing seriously smell from the wood shop all the way to their culinary dog okay absolutely once we have them we will share them good and trend if you build it they will come in is that where you're going well i mean um but anyway um no i mean i would love to um okay i know um thanks you guys this was great i appreciate it you know you're all set you've got everything covered in yeah well done um all right item c what are students reading that's the level yes so this is the culmination of our three-part series meeting at the elementary level the middle school level and tonight we have department chair ian wilderman here with amy feliciano to talk about what are students reading at the high school level and what skills are they learning all right well thank you for having us um all right movement on the department chair of the high school um and i think kevin you have control of the all right um which is probably good because i love explaining the why behind things and my students will tell you that a lot of times they'll ask you know why are we doing something and five minutes later they regret asking that question so hopefully if i go into the y kevin so we thought we'd start or just sort of our overall ideas that kind of drives a lot of these these things that we do in some of the decision making so our our overall philosophy and approach to developing readers right our visions to develop its lifelong readers who have the skills to understand and appreciate our array of literature and non-fiction texts that we're not just hoping that they're successful uh with any unit within the year but also preparing them for for the future as well and that being a piece of wanting to develop effective communicators where the skills both comprehend the ideas of others through reading and listening and express their own ideas through writing and speaking which really hits all of the skills we're teaching right kind of decoding of reading and listening the encoding of writing and speaking because whether someone you know reads their favorite thing whether their english is a favorite class whether they're going to go on to to major in english they're all going to do something in their lives and in their careers where they need to be an effective communicator so that's really the goal for that uh in terms of what are they reading and how are they related um there's whole class texts uh canonical texts and uh to sort of build off of the shawn's uh food analogy maybe not quite as you know fancy as the toughest but uh the whole class texts are really sort of the the main course um the focus of the of the units of the course and then supplemented by independent reading and nonfiction which are sort of the side dishes that that complement that that main course to make a full meal and with all of those right we're focused on those those skills of both building the chs performance standards but also our specific common core state standards all right so for the different types of those different types of the pyramids in terms of those whole class canonical texts um our purposes with those are really to you know to get to the roots of of literature literary themes of character development conflict uh developing their core reading skills and helping them learn to express ideas on what they've read through writing and speaking so while the focus is reading obviously all of our skills are interconnected and the idea that we want them to learn how to have discussions about what they've read and how to express their ideas and our whole class text is kind of a new idea for them when they get to us from the middle school and i think we find that they when they come to us they they do they are readers they love reading um and now we're introducing some other texts to them that will help structure and scaffold so that we can bring them to a different kind of instruction oh uh in terms of so with this we thought we you know we looked at and uh kristen shanley obviously gave a lot of the expert research on why reading independent reading other types of reading are so effective and important for um for student development so we thought we would provide another expert for you instead of those kind of typical experts we went to the students to see some of what they're getting out of these these various types of readings and we even tried to shorten them a little bit they said such great things yeah we really wanted you to see that we didn't write that right we wanted to pair it down and see what they're what they're actually that they are achieving the purposes we hope they are with with each text and you can see with that first one the person says you know as a thinker therefore this novel helped me great it geared him out of focus when reading in the past i would resort to speed reading um skipping over important important stylistic and more complex elements of the book so the idea that reading that whole class novel help the students see more in a book that they might read on their own more beyond the plot more beyond the characters to see some of those more nuanced skills within the second one discussing the novel with the class of different personalities that's offered new and unique perspectives on the book i wouldn't have thought of myself uh capture the right my peers pointing out different aspects such as lack of self-confidence and hypocrisy which allowed me to understand the purpose more so again those ideas that since they're reading the whole book together hearing other ideas ideas from their classmates they're able to pick up and appreciate things that they might not have if they were reading it on their own um the second last one if i was reading my independent book i would solely read for the understanding in entertainment whereas the whole class novel forces me to read for complex and deeper meaning looking for foreshadowing literary devices and overall themes and again this isn't like you know things we told them to say they're they're noticing that they're developing those those literary skills recognizing foreshadowing recognizing literary devices and themes through those whole class activities um and the last one nope sorry i've been trying to make the pause that that last last line we pulled out especially the best way to learn to write is to read good writing and that really is a strong focus that we have especially junior year in that you know the two go in hand at hand actively reading and learning how to read carefully and becoming a good reader really does result in being that and the fact that they recognize that reading gatsby we we're really excited because some you know we want them to love literature but also appreciate it and that's why we introduce them to some of these texts that they might never have read all right that was worth that was worst thing okay that was our favorite show this one for the non-fiction texts the purpose is to investigate the relationship between fiction and non-fiction between the author's world and the world the author creates that the idea that we're able to see a little bit into the author's purpose the author's background some things that are shaping the fiction that we're reading so oftentimes these the non-fiction texts will be directly related to the fiction that they're reading so the skills are going to be the same um but those are obviously just in terms of the comic corgo it's reading informational text as opposed to reading the letter all right so what the students say about reading non-fiction um the first one right i think getting some background information on the author of the book is written helps understand why they made some of the choices they did and again the fact that these students are thinking not just about what's happening in the story but thinking about the author's choices and what shapes the office choices is really a sophisticated level of of thinking enough reading that they're not just coming in to have a discussion about you know just oh what happened to the book what happened why did it happen why did the author have this happen instead of something else so i think bringing in that non-fiction so that they can think more about the author's purpose helps them get to that level of sophistication um the second one in discussing historical background behind the text right sometimes we'll start with some background non-fictional background information first i'm able to better understand the actions that take place in the novel and that they may be the product of social norms that were prevalent during that time but not today that was pretty impressive that they recognized that you know what we read takes place in different time periods and that while we may interpret something one way that reading it now certainly the person writing it was thinking about some different social norms in terms of when the book was written and the last one um this is for a dvd there's a documentary where oprah interviews ellie wiesel and they are auschwitz it's pretty powerful um and this person pointed out that they were able to see a little bit of what the author had gone through and as they astutely point out it doesn't recreate the experience but it gives us a sense of what he was feeling and why he's inspired to write the book so again that nonfiction giving them that ability to think about the author's mindset and the author's purpose and how the author's background can shape their there um for independent reading um again this really has two purposes independent reading the idea is that they're able to apply those skills that they've learned that that first student talked about those things about recognizing uh foreshadowing literary themes and things like that that they're able to apply those that they've developed as a whole class then to their own independent reading and obviously that's through what they do in the class but the hope is that they're then doing that on their own as they read outside of school as they read over the summer um the second purpose for uh independent reading is to foster interest and passion all right we try to select things that we you know are you know curriculum and canonical texts that kids are going to enjoy but the independent reading gives them the choice to really pick a genre they're interested to pick a time period they're interested in because we found and some of the testimonials show that having that that interest having finding that like one independent reading book that can really spark their interest can impact their reading for years going forward um for that first one right this was someone recognizing exactly that first goal right that their independent reading has helped me improve because they're making those in-class discussions in their head and they're analyzing the novel thoroughly and creating a deeper understanding so this is pretty impressive of that student pointing out that they actually are pulling those things from those whole class novels and and applying it to their independent reading of it even if they're just reading it on their own um the next one one of the goals certainly in the independent reading is that they're reading something at an appropriate level something that's not too challenging because if they're reading it with a little bit less support they don't want it to be over their head but also not wanting them to choose something that's below their reading level that's not going to challenge them so this was just someone that was obviously very carefully paying attention to his or her reading level when choosing his or her independent reading book the last one hits to that second goal of inspiring students to have that that passion for reading the person said they hated reading never read until they found that that one author who kicked things off if you're a girl who loves love you won't be able to put it down [Music] all right for this one i'm looking at kind of how we teach some of these skills and also how we move from some more scaffolded more carefully guided things into more complex tasks so the first example we'll see is within a single text then over the course of the unit and then over the course of the entire year all right so this one's an example of how you can increase that complexity within just a single text and this is within just a single act of macbeth so students would start are reviewing rhetorical devices which are introduced sophomore year reinforced junior year and now this is actually something they're doing senior year so they're building on those skills they've they've learned through throughout their their years at the high school then they're learning something new when we look at specifically theatrical devices as they're about to read um shakespeare and then what they do is we pull one line out of act one and students analyze the bower the balance of power between characters in a single line it's a line for macbeth that says screw your courage to the sticking point and will not fail and so students in groups get a sign okay and this this your group the speaker has the power and your group it's the listener who has the power and in your group there's an evil uh equal balance and so they have to try to use those theatrical devices and show they all have the same line but they have to deliver it in a way act in a way that shows who's in control in the scene obviously at that point they don't have it intentionally they don't have the context of the play it's really thinking more about those theatrical devices then we read act one starting with the teacher thinking aloud especially with shakespeare and the teacher really just sort of reading as if they were reading on their own and stopping and explaining here's what i'd be thinking about here's what i'd be wondering this seems kind of odd what do you guys think of this um then we'll do that in whole class and then students will finish it individually then we come back to that line and there's an exchange between lady macbeth and macbeth where she uh essentially convinces him to go through the murder of the king that he really doesn't want anything to do with um and what a line she uses is from that third piece but what they're doing here is really analyzing how she's able to convince them and so in order to do that they need to call upon the theatrical devices that we learned at the beginning of the unit they need to go back to the rhetorical devices that we focused on from sophomore year and junior year um and really come up with that pretty complex analysis of how was she able to convince him to do this thing that he did not want to do so that's one way we go so that takes about two weeks um but that step that they would done that they would do of looking at how she's able to to really convince him to do that wouldn't be able to take place without those little pieces this is senior year macbeth um they start their freshman year with shakespeare as well romeo and juliet or midsummer night's dream and do a lighter version of this but still getting some of the um the terminology and the history of shakespeare um even as freshmen um so an example of how we move from that um more sort of guided scaffolding to more independence and complex path this is within a single unit this is a sophomore year sci-fi fantasy unit so the students start by analyzing sci-fi movie posters they're doing this in groups it's very informal just looking at some posters what do they notice about the posters and how do those posters depict some characteristics of science fiction then they discuss popular science fiction films that are in the posters and start to identify those characteristics okay so what makes up sci-fi fantasy genre what do all these movies have in common then moving to some literature the students read short stories again as a class and continue to identify those characteristics now in literature next step students reading a whole class novel to be able to analyze and apply those science fiction characteristics right what's the social commentary being made here on a larger scale uh then and this kind of blends the independent reading students choose the science fiction or fantasy independent reading book and then they're applying those things on their own so they practice in small pieces practice stick just looking at movie posters talking about movies short stories full class novel and now they're doing it on their own and then the last part kind of puts it all together they watch the science fiction fantasy film and write an essay that synthesizes the film the whole class novel and their imb with the what they're looking at is kind of what's the commonality in terms of social criticism that's being made through the that's specific to the genre of science fiction and fantasy and then for over the course of a year um just a sort of possible uh four quarter menu that uh could appear right you might starting with the whole class novel uh highly structured all right providing vocab before specific content specific vocab guided reading questions note taking sheets graphic organizers so that students really guiding students for what they want to look for as they read at the beginning of the year next whole class novel also structured but less prescriptive um so instead of um page by page note-taking sheets whereas you know what's important in the first half of page three what's the most important sentence here some questions for them to think about for the chapter but they have to have a little more independence on being able to find those things on their own uh quarter three literature circles students reading in groups so the teacher has support in terms of they're all getting the same assignments all right for this section you're looking for metaphors similes for this section you're talking about the author's tone um but the content is going to be different and then the last one students finally having their chance to choose their own book and applying all those skills that they've developed along the way to the independent task certainly rather than starting with that independent reading where you're cutting them loose more on their own they get a little less and less structure so that they can do that final final project on their own i think that might be it there's nothing for me so the main uh slaughterhouse five is what they read is the whole class novel um they're independent reading it kind of depends on the students have a whole bunch of choices the teachers who um are teaching it often to go through our librarian and have them put a number of things on their sci-fi series that they need like diversion is still really popular um a lot of them even still go to the hunger games the hunger games still yep so a lot of that so what they'll read the short stories of the very like classic you know uh stories in terms of that and then also the the bonus of the slaughterhouse five so they have the classic in terms of that whole class novel um but then a lot of them will choose more contemporary stuff as their independent reading which is actually creates an interesting dynamic when they're looking at the social criticism because they have something older in terms of the whole class novel and their current veronica and then sometimes contemporary and trying to see it's sort of the commonality between that but also the differences based on those different time periods forces them to do some pretty complex things yeah sounds like i was going to ask you about the authors intent because i'm glad you're going into the social commentary which is pretty much the driver for so much especially classic science fiction um and what are they reading typically independently you know is with your a lot of still uh jody the colt is still really popular um john green is probably still the most i would say fault in our stars everybody still loves which i'm glad good one um but some new ones nicola you well i guess everything everything is not that new anymore but that's another really popular one um i think um it also depends on a lot of them will pull from those kind of more contemporary young adult authors um because especially for that idea of fostering that interest in reading there's all kinds of studies show that kids are most interested in reading when they're young and all the way up through high school uh when there's protagonists who are just older than them and so a lot of times those young adult authors they know what they're doing when they cast their characters um but different students we have a lesson to pull from bestseller lists um uh i had one teacher i was talking today and she has a whole bunch of students reading with just uh broadheads thing that's uh recent and uh geared towards adults some students even all ask us you know if they're really engaged and like the classics some students will go to our book rooms and pull because they know you know there's no way in a year in the four years that they can read everything that's in our book rooms and so they'll go and see oh i didn't get a chance to read this software i didn't get a chance to read this in american lit and so some of them actually choose to actually fill in their independent reading with some of those other classical texts and then how about the non-fiction is it mostly biography or is that uh you mentioned um i guess um oh the great gatsby yeah so like what was the supporting non-fiction material so for that a lot of times we'll um look at some sort of essays by uh fitzgerald essays by some of his contemporaries by hemingway um just to kind of compare their to do two things to compare their non-fiction writing with their fiction writing but also to see how their non-fiction writing can like reveal things about the choices they make in their fiction writing like when we read uh huxfin we'll read some of his um short stories some of his little articles to see not just how he has this like different approach but how different his writing is in some of those compared to where he's creating this this fictional world and help them and then they'll bring in sometimes if there's um even modern day current event articles that connect the themes that are in the books people will bring that in as well to bring in that um so while some of it is memoirs biographies longer works a lot of the non-fiction a shorter step that's connected to the picture oh um especially shakespeare we'll show a couple minutes available and there's different build versions of films like great gatsby and like that like being able to see a couple different versions and then the students have to analyze okay how are these different versions what choices are these you know to talk about the codes that the authors are making now what choices do these directors make for different purposes why is this version different than versions so those film versions really offer a whole number another level of analysis um the bbc version of hamlet and then i don't know the later bbc version okay and patrick stewart played claudius in both of them so one in 1980 and one in 2014 or so and he played totally different and he was violent each one he's just such an amazing actor anything he's either acting or talking about acting shakespeare's yeah we were even talking about the choice of um the the actors as uh frank smith and washington as being older in these roles versus the you know the wonder that it's all like young youthful musical stars yeah and that that makes a difference especially when we talk about him not having offspring right and probably past the time right they will have options yeah there's a lot yeah anyways no i was just i mean there are a couple of things that um so and i love the that that student picked out um the ability of fitzgerald to create the perfect sentence there's something in there's one in tenderness tenders and he captures the entire essence of world war one in one sentence like they you know they never got anyone and they just killed each other over 18 inches but um i don't um i just that's this is cool i i wish i could win but you know i just oh i do do you ever take a book and just even especially a classic and ask the kids why it's a classic absolutely they can see the difference between we do that what makes a classic and what makes just pop fiction they do we we sometimes ask them to argue why it's in the curriculum and so and by the time we're done we're hoping they understand that and and they do they just uh at first you know they're a little bit slow to get into it and then once they really see just so many avenues to look at a book and just so many different things to look at they really start to appreciate them we have them in ap junior year sometimes what we do is a culminating project is they have to actually sort of make a picture of a recommendation for a book to be added to our curriculum to our canon and so part of what they have to do is you know to pick a book that they like but then they have to establish does this fit the criteria of being a classic which means first they have to define what it means to be a classic and so they'll look over books they've read and see these commonalities um so that's probably the best step of it is them coming up with their definition of what is a classic and then okay would this book possibly be able to be a classic and a lot of them it's actually pretty impressive because you would think are they going to argue that yes this good book could be added so many of them will say we love this book but it actually falls a little short of the definition that we established for the classic so it's pretty pretty yeah um you didn't i just i i hope jeff was just watching because i think [Music] took us a few months but then it covered and that gave us time okay oh that's sorry my turn yes last item and i think we've all read about these um changes to the 2024 yes if you want to take a look at the last page in your packet just you know making sure everyone's familiar with the fact that the college board announced a new format for the sat that will be implemented in 2024 they're reducing the hours of testing time down to two hours and the reason for that is that they have condensed the reading passages so there will be shorter reading passages with only one question tied to each rather than longer reading passages with multiple questions another change is that calculators will be allowed in the entire math session students who've explored that they're telling us within days instead of weeks days and um the major things um as you know the sap is going to be digital business this will be the first time so we've been working closely with technology and high school to make sure that all of our districts issue devices are up and ready to go for that administration which is not until march 23rd our format has been in place for a few years now we have the math department administer the sat they act as the proctors so it's at the high school the math section of the high school is on the second floor so we can isolate the students up there and the rest of the students in school can have a normal school day so the 11th graders are all upstairs taking a test in a room with no more than 20 students each with their own proctor who's a math teacher and then grades 9 10 and 12 go through their regular school day and you know and it doesn't doesn't interfere with the teaching and learning that's going on here so you're not doing that saturday morning well there are saturday morning tests all the time and cheshire does post them yes but this is for the sat school yeah 15 minutes currently and these changes that that marlene has are implemented a couple of years from now so probably not next year yeah yeah i swear this was the testing equivalent of walking to school to miles up illinois they've changed it a lot yes five to 10 years do you think you're making changes due to the fact that colleges aren't requiring it yeah sure that that is why so they're starting trying to stay relevant okay yeah i don't know to think about a condensed test i don't think any of us do until we actually see it but i think the good things that they've done over the last few years are really transformed the test into a skills-based assessment rather than just rope memorization and things that like the analogies that you probably all remember when we were in school those are gone you know so it's all it's all reading in context and analyzing and just real world skills and connected directly to what they're learning in the classrooms that we just heard from i'll tell you those analogies stimulate that creative thinking skill what connector they want wow thank you and so they're going to change the psat too as well eventually yeah eventually all of the tests are going to be electronic and in the same format as the s18 okay great well um i don't think okay um well thank you everyone thank you

so the funds that are left over in this federal state foster school program is like 1.3 million 800 000 for infrastructure and about 500 000 for non-infrastructure at this time there's an ii in safe routes to school is recognized again map 21 took it out um iija recognizes it again but there is no funding that's dedicated to it so we don't anticipate any more funds being added to this safe routes to school program not in the existing legislation so the way the way that the congress had pushed for it is identifying it as a program again but not identifying any funding towards it so there's a potential that there could be funding in the future that gets directed towards it but there's no funding at this time so what would it cost to hire a full-time safe routes to school coordinator i think all loaded i mean loaded rate i'm assuming this would be like an sr26 sr28 kind of person loaded rate would be about 120 000.

is that going to be recorded i don't know if it'll be recorded or not but look it's going to be kind of funny i'm assuming the kids i hope we'll get a kick out of it uh march 4th our kisa we'll have a kisa meeting in the district and that's just working on planning towards our accreditation visit that's coming up in april into the third nine weeks crazy march 11th spring break and then that state assessments come up the window has gotten a lot shorter this year not sure why but you see that we have quite a few assessments that we will be giving in the month of april mainly and so and i try and stress to people it's one test it doesn't tell us a whole picture of a child so you know take it ask the kids to do their best and that's all we can do so any questions thank you thank you our reconciliation before the bank statement statements all matched uh the high school girls or the champions of the saint john tournament cassidy nixon maddie mcguire and brenda hammackey were named the old tournament team the boys tournament our lake scholars bowl where was held on january 31st in ellenwood where kids placed second in league regional scholars bowl was held on february 3rd in the city we competed well but didn't place junior high scholars bull starts today they're in chase junior high ended their basketball season on february the 5th with their league tournament at victoria the girls placed fourth and the boys lost their friend ellsberg county spelling bee as jade was talking about was on the fifth carissa benavidez placed third ben threw off place fifth central plains as a whole to three out of the top five places so they may represent the district very well student-led conferences were on the 10th we've been 92 and a half percent attendance which was awesome um and probably half those didn't fill their stuff out but i scheduled them and sent it in and they showed up anyways that was great um senior parent night will be tomorrow night before the varsity girls game if you don't have any senior boys uh kspa this kansas scholastic press association regional contest is virtual again this year we have three students that are going to represent cphs they'll have eight entries if they qualify for state it also will be virtual what they do is write stories or do articles and things that they send in to get judged so basketball season is coming to an end this week is the end of the regular season sub-state quarterfinals will be on the 24th and 25th they're held at the higher seeds home gym and then claflin will host the sub state semifinals and finals on march 3rd 4th and 5th we'll administer the act test for free on march 1st for those juniors who registered cpl all league music earl league basketball selection is on march 2nd middle school lacrosse music festival on march 4th high school cpl music in bartlett county on the 8th and end of the 19th march 11.