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[Music] so [Music] good evening everyone i'd like to call the march 7th meeting of the dartmouth school committee to order um please stand for the pledge of allegiance [Music] one nation miss ganther can we have a roll call please shannon jenkins here mary wait here kathleen emerald here john nunes chris oliver here i'd like to remind everyone that this meeting is being streamed on the dhs tv media youtube channel you can find that at youtube.com slash ghs tv media the meeting will also be rebroadcast on dc tv channels 9 on wednesday and thursday at 5 pm friday at 6 a.m saturday at 8 a.m and sunday at 2 p.m it will also be rebroadcast on channel 18 on monday and saturday at noon and thursday at three and i'd just like to remind our audience members um and committee members i always forget to silence your cell phones if you have them um okay so the first item on our agenda is public comment we've set aside 10 minutes for public comment on any of the items that are on our agenda for the evening if you would like to make a comment i welcome you to step up to the microphone state your name and share your thoughts please all right so if we have no takers going once going twice all right so the next item on our agenda um is the approval of the regular session minutes for february 14 2021 i'll entertain a a motion to approve those minutes second all right so i have a motion by mr news the second by miss amaral is there any further discussion on that issue hearing none all in favor opposed extensions so that motion carries unanimously next on our agenda is our student representative report um and evan garcia is joining us again and evan i understand this is going to be your last meeting with us yeah it is all right well we'll let you go and then we'll say nice things about you after you're done talking so we'll we'll let you go first okay thank you dr jenkins since coming back from february vacation students and staff have successfully adjusted to our school's new optional masking policy additionally our extremely successful winter sports season is wrapping up several of our track athletes competed at state level meets while three school records were broken james martin broke the 55 meter record not once but twice and mia carter kate smith madison stott and srell lawton all beat the 4x200 relay record our girls basketball team qualified for the miaa tournament and had an outstanding victory last week against burlington high their season ended with a fierce match against top-seeded norwood high school our boys basketball team season is also over after many competitive and action-packed games our hockey team ended their regular season by winning the spartan the spartin cup and qualifying for the miaa tournament they defeated westwood high school on saturday in an extremely intense game they will be facing duxbury high school at 7 20 on wednesday at the bog in kingston massachusetts in what will be a must-watch game great job to all of our winter student athletes for what was a phenomenal season last week was both busy and exciting for our tv media program which hosted wpri 12's kate walsh on friday to talk to our students about what it's like to work in the media on saturday the students then visited harvard university to watch the production of the harvard versus dartmouth basketball game our deca team has been very successful recently as well and they are currently hard at work in preparation for their state conference which will be held this thursday good luck to all of those competing our illumineers robotics team placed 7th out of 20th in their qualifying competition while they're consistently inconsistent there were not mine robotics team placed third in that competition as well that robotics team then had a great performance at their state level competition last week in which they finished 7th out of 32 teams tedx dhs is returning to dartmouth high school later this month it's scheduled for friday march 21st right now excuse me friday march 25th right now but the official date will be released later this week community members can watch our students present their talks on dhs tv media's youtube page students can now sign up for spring athletics with offerings in unified track spring track tennis softball baseball lacrosse and sailing informational meetings will be held during pace and after school this week and next week tomorrow dartmouth high school will host dartmouth middle school's 8th graders the future class of 2026 so that they can go on student-led tours and hear directly from students about courses and activities here at dhs this is just one aspect of dartmouth high school's efforts to support the transition from middle school to high school dartmouth's finest will be held on march 18th at 6 30 p.m in the dhs auditorium we have 14 contestants this year and a variety of talents and i promise you that this will be a great show that you won't want to miss you also don't want to miss the national honor societies volleyball tournament it will be held on tuesday march 15th in the gym last but not least the dartmouth education association is hosting their spelling bee on march 24th at 7pm i can promise that it will be amazing this is my final school committee meeting as dartmouth high's student representative and i want to thank all of you for your kindness and support over the last two years i have really enjoyed serving as a voice for dartmouth high school during such a consequential period thank you again and that concludes my final update thank you evans anybody have any comments or questions [Applause] go ahead kathleen you want to start yeah you've been it's always wonderful to hear the way in which you describe what's going on in high school uh and i was just sitting here of listening to every little word that you were saying um you know and my oldest is already she's 20 now and i just dawned on me not that not not literally but we're in we're in the sprint where you know we're coming on to the spring and into the spring and um after the last couple years we've had uh you know my life used to revolve around what sports she played or what activities she was in what club she was in from you know the fall the winter and the spring and you know i have a sixth grader and so i look forward to that coming up however she chooses to participate but um yeah it's just great to hear you talk about all the wonderful you know accomplishments and the activities that that students are are participating in and i um your service has been wonderful for our committee the way in which you describe like i said uh and i really look forward to seeing how you move into the world and and the future service that you will you know the contribution you'll make to our community and the greater community whatever that looks like um you know the future looks pretty bright for you so thank you so much you're welcome um yes so i was able to chat with you a little bit before the meeting was going so um evan has committed to holy cross which i think is really exciting um and i was curious do you have a major picked out i want to double major in political science and history yeah yes so as a former history teacher yay and i know you've already started clearly you started showing a a talent for that work and again i know your work over the summer as an intern at mr mcginnis's office so i i think yeah you're off to a great start we really can't wait to see you know what happens we hope you get back to uh to dartmouth and um maybe some days sit in one of these seats you know as as part of that process but we're we're really proud of you and thankful for all you've done and contributed over the last two years so thank you mr news yeah thank you madam chair evan congratulations and all the best to you it's been a pleasure you know watching over the past couple of years as you've given the report you've brought us a lot of information which is very much you know appreciated as to what's going on at the high school and i just want to take an opportunity to wish you good luck at the holy cross next year you know just remember you're a thousand feet in a year so it's a lot colder there than it is here yeah i know and you get more snow than we do here so i know i look at the the weather app sometimes and i get concerned [Laughter] too late now yeah is it too late now that that's it but uh seriously you know wish you nothing but the best and you know make us proud which i know you will do and come back and see us mr oliver thank you well congratulations as my colleagues have said i wish you the best evan it's been a pleasure having you with us um certainly i learned a lot about what's happening uh throughout the months uh at dartmouth high school i just i have a question for you i hope that's okay i'm putting you on this that's definitely okay um with your experience here being sitting up here um what's your biggest takeaway do you have any takeaways from this experience of serving to to represent dartmouth high school to the committee yeah well i mean this is a political body and i think when you think of politics today it's so divisive i mean when you look at cnn and fox news or whatever you watch there's so much you know just division and i think it's really nice to see that even when you all disagree you can always respect each other and really you know work hard to make the school system a better place for all of the students so i just really appreciate all of the work you guys put in as well so thank you that was very complimentary i didn't i didn't set him up for that [Laughter] well thank you very much i i certainly appreciate those uh those words and best of luck in your future in the efforts thank you so much thank you thanks i have to laugh i was doing reading today about student success and one of the things that recommended that um when you are when students are engaged in co-curricular activities you ask them to do like a one-minute writing or speaking exercise and one of the things you are supposed to ask them as a best practice is what's the biggest takeaway how does this tie mr oliver is engaging in best educational practices without even knowing it um but you know i'm i'm very glad that you've been part of this committee i appreciate your updates and your input on important issues um and you know as we've had conversations about a student representative you're just the kind of student that i thought would be great to have at the table someone who is interested in history and politics and is looking to do that for their career i think it is a great opportunity or something to be able to put on your resume i hope you have put this on your resume that you've served in this role because it is a good taste of sort of what local politics is all about so um we appreciate you being here i hope it was somewhat useful for you and thank you very much for your service yeah as i said thank you so much for having me thanks have a good day [Applause] all right so the next item on our agenda is the spotlight on kids at the dartmouth middle school i'll allow uh dr gifford's sure introduced i think mr ross is here yes exactly so tonight we have um assistant principal mr pete rossi uh with adam desjardins and jamie geil so they'll be presenting the good stuff that is going on at dartmouth middle school we'll let the crew get assembled here thank you very much for the opportunity we we appreciate this chance to put the spotlight on our engineering and technology program this evening we've got about a 10-minute uh presentation for you i'm going to make some introductions and then i'm going to get out of the way and let the talent take over to steal a phrase from mr nunes this this program is living the dream presently and we want to share with you uh all of the things that are going on within the classroom and uh the after school programs as well so with the eighth grade tonight if you could just raise your hand when i call it we have uh kelsey riley we have seth vasconceles we've got brian we we've got lily scarapony and we've got ahmad rami i'm going to hand this over now to mr desjardins and mr jamie geil as they are the teachers here for this program pleasure thank you very much school committee for hosting us and thank you to our building admin as well um before i let these students talk because that's who we really want to hear from um before i begin though i just want to talk about our partnership with the navy the naval undersea warfare center education division we work out of the branch out of newport rhode island that branch has been absolutely fantastic for us we have so far brought in a total of about over 40 thousand dollars in terms of educational materials technology tools all sorts of wonderful things they've also brought with us a well probably about five or six different engineers that have come in um have taught the students a lot of various things in some of the after school programs they've also helped with our partnership with first robotics the same first robotics that operates here at the high school we run the lower division into there we operate a really nice feeding program to help feed the high school and the program's been absolutely wonderful it teaches kids a lot of great wonderful skills a lot of awesome leadership skills but even then just life skills on using tools you know teaching kids how to use power tools is always a very interesting endeavor as you can imagine um and i i love every second of it as does mr gile so we can't talk enough about how great that program is i'm just going to pass it off to mr gile who'll see speak a few things and then we're going to have some of our students come up and talk about the great things that they do thank you yeah so before before we have the kids come up i'm going to leave this up here for you guys so you can just use this one i just want to say it's been nice to have everybody support our admin the navy uh the dartmouth education foundation when we have new ideas we want to change what we're doing with our curricula you know we want to get new stuff uh there always seems to be some place to get it and it's not a matter of if we can do it it's when so that's been it's been really nice and now we'll have the kids tell you about some of the things that we've been doing okay so in seventh grade we learned about forces the forces that act on bridges that that are basically everywhere so like we learned about torsion torsion tension sheer and compression uh our project was to build a bridge like this that could hold upwards of like 60 pounds which is insane once you consider that this bridge is entirely made of balsa wood which is the flimsiest thing on planet earth so we had so we had to do that it was really fun to learn about the different types of bridges we built a truss bridge which has this pattern on it yeah and it was insane to see how much these bridges could hold like when we put them under the press they started collapsing after 40 50 60 pounds and it was really fun overall fun process to do um so in eighth grade we were tasked with designing a multi-tool we acted like designers that were hired by idea which is the ripoff version of ikea and the whole point of the project was to come up with a tool that would be shipped with the furniture that idea sold there were certain requirements that we had to follow and it had to be like a certain size and it had to have the logo on it it also had to kind of be small and practical so that it could come with the parts tinkercad was used to design the tools and then we later tested them in class to make sure that they were functional which is what this is um so in seventh grade we were also learning about the different forms of communication and one of those forms is smartphones i'm sure most people have them and it's a very good form of communication and um so we are designing them on tinkercat which um it's like a 3d printing sort of and it's so fun to design them because like you can like experiment with it and like play with it play around with it it's also fun to like design stuff with different things for example if you're designing it for a photographer you need to include more like storage if you're designing it for a teenager also more storage so this is one of the example phones i'm not really sure so they haven't uh they're just doing the project the first time and that was not quite complete but if you could see it up close it has all the ports and they've decided where the plugins go and eventually and at the end of the project we're also going to make a short commercial trying to sell the phone to our specific group so this is going to be a model house and this is kind of like an unfinished model for it um so right now we just have the back wall and two of the sidewalls we're not completely finished this is gonna be the top part of it with the roof uh there's gonna be like trusses that run across the roof to support it make sure it doesn't collapse uh there's also subflooring and this i forget the name of it the joists of the of the floor the flooring so it doesn't collapse as well um the walls don't really have anything else except the skinning for it that's pretty much else that's going to be added to it there's going to be no other it's like ceiling it's going to be an open ceiling on the house and what is it there's only going to be a few windows in a door there's four roles to the designing of this house there are the contractor lead carpenter designer and structural engineer i'm the designer of the project out of the four people that i'm working with and my job is to design the furniture of the house and the furniture will be used to test if the base of the house is going to keep them up and i'm going to be using a website called thinkercad to 3d model them and print a lamp a side table and a little couch and we'll be using like a quaker kind of to put the house on with the furniture inside and it'll shake the stuff around see if it'll work so that was the main objective of it thank you thank you um so sea perch is one of the few after-school programs that are offered in the middle school and currently we're building underwater robots with naval engineers and it's a really fun experience and you really get to appreciate how much effort engineers put into the stuff that they're making um you get to use power tools and you learn about uh electro electricity electrical engineering it's extremely hands-on and i believe you learn a lot as you advance through the building steps everyone in the after school program always looks like they're enjoying themselves uh we all met in the fall in to compete in fll which is called the first lego league competition that happens yearly because of the limited number of teams due to pandemic fll was canceled this year so we hosted a competition with regional teams at the middle school and we placed in second this fall the tasks were based on transporting cargo we split we all split up into three groups and built different parts for different tasks on the table here's an example of one of the tasks we did go ahead so hold on first so the table is usually much bigger than this we just brought it closer to the microphone don't do this every night um so the table is much bigger there's usually not a lot more tasks so rather than bring the whole thing and take the time to set it up we just brought the engine part of the tasks where the robot needs to turn the engine over so he's got to run that yeah i'll turn it around i think if you put it maybe right up could you put it right up here so we can see it right we can put it right here yeah right over here if you want you might be able to capture it up close view probably but that's okay [Laughter] that's great wow this is second so one of the team members that couldn't be here tonight uh rio falk built this real quick because that you know we're not meeting right now and we wanted something to bring so so this is this is rio that uh concludes the presentation if you have any questions for the kids of the teachers uh feel free mr news thank you madam chair just curious the the bridge did it hold 60 pounds yes it is can i ask anyone who answers the question to step up to the microphone so our people in the audience can hear us at the home audience yes it did hold up 60 pounds in fact i think the record was 88 pounds for the bridge just that size yeah just this size fantastic thank you good job other questions comments mr oliver thank you dr jenkins so i love to hear anytime there's collab collaboration happening i think that's an awesome thing and to to have this kind of relationship that you do it sounds like with the naval undersea uh program and have those engineers come in and speak to you in addition to bringing in funds or or materials for the projects is is wonderful i guess my question is is so there i i heard an after-school program and then i also heard this is part of the the class as well so can we just speak to the differences like what what is done in the classroom versus specifically the after school programs what's offering um sure absolutely so currently uh the navy since the hardware that they provide us a lot of 3d printers later laser cutters tools uh things like that um that's primarily used mostly in the classroom um in terms of engineers coming in we come in we have a couple of different after-school programs we do have the robotics lego league that we talked about we have the underwater robots we also run a marble course which is a little different but a lot of physics and engineering that we use for that and then also the navy this year has added in a metal jewelry working class um where kids are actually firing their own metal um and making their own jewelry pieces well very cool cool thank you very much any time and great presentation to all of you this way yeah i just wanted to extend on that so how did this um program in this relationship um with the the navy how did that how was that established i think i mean i think it's clearly amazing and i have to imagine it came from your initiative so i'd love to hear a little bit more uh yeah so uh thankfully for uh myself i you know the man with connections i supposedly um when i was in college i was actually doing a lot of underwater robotics things and i was able to partner up with them um it also helped too that i have a parent that worked at the navy base at the time um so i was able to get involved with that and then over time especially you know with our classroom i just was thrilled with the stuff they were doing in new bedford fall river newport public schools and i decided i kind of wanted to bring it over here and they were more than willing to help us out well i'm very glad you have those connections so thank you for it sounds like a great program it looks like everyone's enjoying it like tremendously i mean it's to me it's you know again it speaks to that hands-on you know really i mean you're combining so many different elements the physics and the math and then you know again using hand tools i mean just that for uh i mean i'm not sure anybody would trust me around us all so i'm just really impressed by everything that these you know these kiddos are doing i'm you know it's uh it's really exciting to hear and the skills that they're going to come into the high school with um so thank you for all your hard work and uh kids keep having fun thank you yeah i really not much to add to what my colleagues have shared but what i was most impressed with um being uncomfortable public speaking the ability for you to sure you had some notes but most of you didn't even look at your notes and even if you did good for you because that's what they're there for but you clearly were are so engaged and interested and and just you know living and breathing this these activities and this learning that you're doing i was quite impressed with your ability to articulate your project um and and kind of coming back to maybe you forget a word and then it's it's there and you know it because you're doing it and that was quite impressive for middle school students and very good that's all great yeah thank you very much it was really fun to hear from you all it sounds like some really exciting projects and i'm glad to see you all working on these things and engaging the students with this this kind of work is super important so thank you thank you perfect thank you for having me everyone thank you thank you have a great night guys [Applause] all right and then our students you don't have to stay if you'd like to leave you're welcome to leave if your ride is here or whatnot um you're welcome to go at any at any point in time you don't have to stay you're welcome to go we know you have a busy night they're nervous right it's really okay all right so the next item on our agenda is old business with a fiscal year 23 budget um i will turn it over to mr kiley thank you dr jenkins so during the budget discussion at the last school committee meeting on february 14th committee asked for some additional information i provided the committee with information regarding enrollment trends going back 20 years i provided you with the breakdown of the esser funding um there was also a question regarding health insurance and we have some i guess fairly positive news that we've received since uh since that last meeting that the increase for next year will be 2.2 percent so it is an increase but it could be worse could be worse yeah a little bit worse yeah um you would also ask for job descriptions uh regarding the directors of uh teaching and learning and dr gifford provided those to you so i guess first i mean we'd be happy to discuss any budget information questions you might have um but certainly you know we could address any of those particular documents as well that we provided mr nunes thank you madam chair uh thank you mr kylie for the information and uh dr gifford for the two job descriptions uh i don't have a problem with either one of the job descriptions so i thought they were very thorough it was great to see that there's cross-referencing between both of them you know working in uh tandem and overseeing each other uh you know the esser grants i think you know is you know that funding is where it's going is kind of basically i think what we talked about back in the fall uh and i think at that time we talked about the fact that it was going to be a fluid document depending where it ended up and what we had to do so you know i'm i'm good with that question i have is have you heard anything from cip committee yet nothing nothing interesting i have um i actually the director of budget and finance for the town did reach out to me regarding meeting with the finance committee on the budget not on capital um and at this point i said well we you know the school committee has yet to really have any significant amount of uh discussion or deliberation regarding the budget we wouldn't be ready yet and that i'd let them know when we might be um but i certainly don't want to jump in uh you know a finance committee meeting without you folks having had the opportunity to um you know to weigh in and make sure that we answer any questions that you might have so um so that's where we are with that i the mr barnes did promise me a um a town financial projection um which i expect any time now but i i was hoping i'd have it for tonight but i don't have it um you know it's an important item yeah you know for context okay okay i'm good thank you other questions i haven't mr oliver thank you dr jenkins so um thank you for providing all the information uh dr gifford as well as uh mr kiley for all the requests that we had my questions overseeing looking at the two new positions that we're breaking up well the one position that we're bringing up to two just a couple of just a couple of thoughts on this is i see in the line item budget that one's uh budgeted at 120 and the other one's at 116 i believe is that is that what we're thinking for uh the salary range is that the max salary range where where are we at at that no we're actually thinking more than that and as i said to you in an email um we put an estimate an estimate in the budgets for various positions but depending on obviously who applies the credentials they have the experience it could certainly increase by that and um mr kylie's making adjustments and room for that so where would the additional funding be coming from are they grant for grants or because it's budgeted in the um in the operating budget the lines at 116 and 120.
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so resolved at the boundary board of education approves the minutes for the following meeting regular and executive minutes from february 21 2022. i have a motion also thank you mr bell a second second thank you miss cuzino any discussion i need to understand thank you hearing no discussion may i have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazios and the sustain ms casino yes mr januzzi yes mr minhas here um thank you item number 6.1 approval district and high school personnel resolutions resolve that the superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions is outlined in personnel resolutions under district and high school this is 6.2 through 6.9 we have a motion motion thank you mr powell second second thank you mr zipcode discussion so i'd like to recognize him and she's been here quite some time so uh congratulations to her on her retirement i uh i wish her nothing but the best in her next stage of life any other comments or questions hearing none can we have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazio yes ms casino thank you we are up to item number 7.1 resolved that the superintendent recommends for approval the resolutions as outlined in personnel resolutions under middle and elementary schools this is 7.2 through 7.6 have a motion motion thank you mr bowel a second thank you mr sabano discussion yeah not not about the uh people that are filling the position but uh the after school remediation for ell learners uh is there a set program that we're going with an hour is how are we determining who qualifies for that after school depends on their level um so as determined by state testing by their language acquisition abilities and then any student who falls into our levels three one two and three um are attending the after school program um and basically it's just working on language acquisition um all right and is there a particular is a specific program that's going to tell you it's an extension of our curriculum in the regular classroom and that's okay to eight or six um that is well it goes into the high school any other questions okay can we have a wall call please mr bell yes mr fazio yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes mr minhaus yes mr osama yes and mrs yes ocean thank you we are up to item 8.1 resolve that the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in education resolutions under district and high school this is 8.2 8.3 have a motion thank you mr bell a second second thank you mr zeno any discussion good luck to the spring athletes always okay maybe we have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazio yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes mr minhaus yes mrs rosamano yes mr zipko yes ocean characters we are up to section nine resolve that the bound broke board of education approves the resolutions is outlined in education resolutions under middle and elementary schools this is 9.2 through 9.5 may have a motion motion you're on a roll mr fowle may have a second [Music] second thank you miss kucina any discussion okay hearing none can we have a roll call please mr bail yes mr fazio yes mrs casino yes yes we are up to item 10.1 resolve that the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in financial resolutions this is eight point i'm sorry 10.2 through 10.13.
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okay 78. so but we did hear that from students last year in the hybrid five minutes makes a difference no no but it does it does it does you know that for being in a classroom 12 minutes and we also heard that from students last year even though this isn't the same as last like this is not last year right but we did hear from students like don't go more than 80 minutes like we don't want to be with the teacher the same teacher for more than 80 minutes so we're at 78 we're less than 80 minutes right so that was a bit of feedback that we did hear from students like don't go any longer than that um and then uh within the the students so students that are truly ed will probably be in their own kind of programming okay so they may not necessarily they may not necessarily or for the whole day be included for that that whole schedule right same with our multiple needs students our mn students those kids will follow kind of their own schedule yeah i know there's so much yeah you know with ed kids putting them into the regular curriculum but then many of our classrooms where you're going to find more students you're going to find more support in those classrooms as well yeah with paraprofessionals and those kinds of things no child left behind thanks mike you're welcome yeah yeah why did you say that yeah why'd you say that but i'll have words later too soon all it's been about a right right so where do we leave off here so i'll give you a few more chuckles a couple of things on here that we perhaps didn't mention is we do digital citizenship lessons now we plan to put those into the access period so less pushing into classrooms and taking time from instruction in that sense some of the tech tools some study skills there's some new legislation in terms of needs in terms of like media literacy this will provide that opportunity in that time for those lessons as well i mentioned avid and then certainly and some of this will evolve by grade level beyond the first year and that's why i kind of put beyond there but certainly we've talked about test prep being grade level specific and what does that look like and it might look like online programs it could look like a lot of different things all right so overall there's a lot of benefits we've covered most of these tonight i won't read this all to you a couple of things we haven't touched on tonight that we need to pull out of here one of the things we're also working on is with the later start making sure that we shorten all of our bus routes as much as possible so we are planning on adding five additional routes in the morning that we're trying to make it not only is the day start a little bit later but the time that students have to leave their house to get to school is also a little bit later so we're trying to make it you know so even if you even if a student doesn't have to walk out for 10 or 15 or 20 minutes later to hop on a bus it's 10 or 15 or 20 more minutes that they get to sleep in the morning right so it's looking at both of those factors in the morning to allow students to arrive later as i mentioned one of our college and career indicator standards is students a lot active in clubs and activities and sports right uh so we're talking with uh our activities directors and we will be trying to promote that a lot of our clubs meet in the morning because now there is like you used to arrive at eight now you could still arrive at eight and go to a club for 15 or 20 minutes before you go to class right so a way for students to get more involved in those things without extending the school day or cutting into athletics right that tend to happen after the school day um and then we talked about avid college and career readiness and then the last one i think is the most essential part of all of this is you're going to see me start to use this word a lot i've been talking about a lot with jill in strategic planning that we move from a school district that creates opportunities that students can take advantage of to ensuring that every kid is taking advantage of those opportunities right there's a difference right now historically we're a very good school district we build a lot of opportunities and if kids choose to tap into those things they get them but there are a certain set of skills that we call tier one skills that every kid should have that we administratively uh want to be as intentional as possible of ensuring that every student has those skills not just they could have if they got the right set of teachers and coaches that they would get it we want to make sure that every single student has this basic skill set and this schedule allows us to do that and then this schedule also is final exams are going to be at the discretion of the departments or teachers or right but they'll have these different times in which they could fit so we're still working on revisiting that for this year and then based on that we'll have recommendations for next year as to how that that falls so we're looking right now and evaluating what'll happen in the last week of this school year based on what happened first semester so that we can improve that experience for our kids and we're we'll know that in the next few weeks i would think and then we'll use that to model out what we do for final exams next year i just wonder okay it just sounds like with this hybrid block that um this all becomes potentially in theory less stressful on students and teachers and all that but what about the implementation of it how stressful is that because we're coming off a covet and we're thinking of starting it this year is that going to be kind of stressful for you well i think i mean i i i think that this is i've been asked this a lot of times like is next year the right year this year would have been the right year if we had right because all of these supports that we're building in would have been perfect coming off of kovid right to have all of these supports if this is what's better for kids then now is the right time you know next year will be a change for students no matter what yeah it's going to be different than the last three years hopefully we won't end it two-thirds of the way through and leave for a pandemic hopefully we won't have a year of hybrid and mixed up stuff hopefully we won't have a year of covid restrictions right hopefully no matter what for our students next year our seniors next year we'll be different no matter what we do next year even if we went back to the eighth period day it's going to be different it's going to be a change next year it will be a different school year than what they've experienced in their prior three years and thank god for that um so i this is the right thing to do for kids then it's the right thing to do for kids now all right so uh that was the biggest set of solve fors between the last two board meetings that we've brought you right gina is still working on resource and probably will be for the rest of the year to get all of that work done in place november we we did seek board of education approval to work on this technically the board doesn't have to vote on it again a bell schedule is you know within the administrative purview to put that into place how the boards voted on it twice with the contract and with um and authorizing the work for it however nancy and i talked about it we would like to bring it back at the next board meeting to just take formal action on it even though it's not required by the board we just think that it would be a good indication to everybody that we're moving forward with this for next year so at this point between now and march 21st if any board member feels like we have not answered your questions so that you can make an informed vote at that time this is your time to ask those questions over the next two weeks to get them to me we'll make sure we have them for you in advance of the march board meeting remember as a superintendent my job isn't to convince you to vote yes my job is to convince you that you know all the information you need to make an informed vote of course we've done a lot of work on this and we think it's the best thing for kids we hope that you will vote yes son but we never want you to reach a point where you feel like you don't know enough to make a decision so if there's something and you feel like i got to get this answered before i take a vote yes or no the next two weeks is your two weeks to to let gina and i know like at the next board meeting please bring this to to us um so that you can be informed uh enough to to take action and then we do hope that you uh that we vote and we move forward and we're ready to go at that point so any concerns or questions that i can answer right now this is kind of a one-off but when you look at like those standardized testing days that we have coming up how do you envision i thinking of placing those on a regular eight period day or you know because it just depends on what the state gives us okay yeah that's determined they pretty much become their own days okay they don't become like this year it'll be it's an announcement on this one or did it go i think everybody was simple we sense it yeah okay well there'll be more announcements yeah rooms and all that information of course but it pretty much they become their own testing days unlike sat that's a set date by the state we don't have any choice okay and they don't always pick the same day no because that would make sense they want to surprise you so that like you're saying what the ninth and tenth graders it's the testing day being on a different day there's actually a testing window okay same with isa so illinois science assessment excuse me so those tests have a testing window we've often obviously paired psat 8 9 and psat 10 with sat this year coming up the doing a little bit differently in terms of scheduling we have and then illinois science assessment we typically do during the school day as we will this year in like two shifts of students dividing the junior class in half all right another question all right thank you excellent work all right uh this one's short this is the first meeting of staffing recommendations this is the shorter one of the two meetings the longer one comes at our next meeting that's why we part of the reason we want to make sure we got all of the schedule questions out of the way tonight you know because we'll have a larger staffing presentation at the next board meeting this is the first meeting where we bring you recommendations for new positions that were added i have gina talk about the first two which are kind of tweeners they're not really new but they are so as you may recall from our last meeting i talked about the arp sr3 use the funds plan and you may recall that i had the student success coordinators in those plans they're in the plan so this year salaries are being paid out of sr3 or s or arp as it's called however moving forward we do not anticipate having enough funding within the grant to be able to fund these positions and we have been very pleased with these positions we have seen that having the student success coordinator as a as an academic liaison between counseling student support services and academic classes and teachers as a great benefit to our students they are working with not just students that are obviously in person in school but students are hospitalized students that may be on homebound and we're hoping that the board will continue to fund these positions but moving to funding out of local district funds this is a position we actually talked about met we've been talking about for years this position as well for as long as i've been here yeah definitely um but when we saw the opportunity to be able to do that we put it in place and as we had hoped it's been very successful so we're hoping that the board will continue with these positions i have a question when it says potential cost estimate is that all in cost is why are we calling it that way yeah because it depends on the teacher that you hire for it so salary and benefits it's going to be a teacher this is a teaching position so currently the two individuals that are serving in this capacity are certified teachers okay sorry i missed that some kind of way but yeah all of these positions are teaching positions yeah they're not called teacher anymore they'd be a student success court this this position would be a student's success a certified teacher it's a certified teacher okay you and i are around the same we're finishing each other's system in terms of absorbing the cost you had mentioned something in the uh about how you really didn't see this as in terms of overall so these positions jeri and mark anticipated that they would work out that they would be the thing that our kids needed and when they built the budget for this year anticipated those costs in the projected budget for this next year so the budget for next year already contained these two positions so um but just transparent in what we're doing that is for those following at home yeah since yeah there's hardly anybody here principles joe um how are we going to pay for this that's how it pays it's already it's already in the projected budget yeah we're wondering what kind of things will the student coordinator do i mean is it taking care of like kids who are hospitalized for emotional reasons is it taking care of the social emotional getting back into school it's all of that yeah all of that but somebody's functioning in this today correct we already have people serving in this role today you'll have a job description for what may need to change about it or whatever based on well the only thing that really changes is that it's students out for other things most likely more than kovid right where this year it's been a lot of covet absences but historically our hospitalization numbers for all kinds of reasons have continued to climb over the last decade we don't see that going in another direction so um and we're never at a lack of students that need extra help so okay and before we were using these s or funds and arp and now we gotta absorb it you know local funds yeah and when you say local funds we're talking about just our our budget okay yeah and as i said uh mark and jury built that into our budget for next year they anticipated that these positions would be successful and that uh the district would need to pick up the tabs for them moving forward and that anticipation was based on you know past experience knowing that this was something that we really wanted to have and then we have a situation like this pandemic and and the government at large she goes hey this is something we really need because we have so many students in need and in dealing with remote and what have you and and just because the pandemic ends doesn't mean that the need is going away we we still have students that have to miss school for any number of reasons and have other issues that this this coordinator is going to help with and another preview of our next board meeting we will talk about our as i mentioned earlier our strategic response to students that are failing this position helps cover that gap and make sure that students that are not on track to graduating are in their purview of helping them get back on track so and then i'll let scott talk about t99 social work yeah so we're uh we're asking the board about an increase of of a social worker so just to give you a little perspective we've increased in in the last four years about 20 some students but we haven't increased social work support in that time we've always had kind of a part-time allocation for the for the social work so with the increase in numbers we're looking to move that up to a 1.0 uh so it'd be a full-time social worker at the transition program at the program absolutely as opposed to yeah right now we have someone splitting some time that's working with our our social emotional side of it but with the increase in students we just feel and typically our our ratio when we look at special ed social work support we're our ratio is usually one in 50 students and we're going to have 70 students at transition next year so but we do feel the 1.0 is justifies the support we need so that will be in in the group of recommendations that we bring you at the next board meeting overall our enrollment is down and our fte will trend down slightly as well we're putting the final touches on that in advance of march of our of our next board meeting in march but overall we forecast that our enrollment will be down so our number of teachers will be down but we also as we always try to do make that coincide with attrition so that it's either people that are retiring that absorb those positions or part-time teachers that are released every year make up that fte and we don't cut into our established kind of staffing that are here so we always try to absorb those things through that direction first however you will still see uh at on the agenda for the next board meeting a hearing for reduction in force because any time we're reducing any number of staff through a combination of re reasons that sits on there but when you see that don't get concerned that we're releasing a bunch of of teachers as a result of that so that all will come together at the next meeting the enrollment uh piece uh just how so curiosity how does um how does the effects of the last couple years line up with the casarda model that we've been following forever yeah it's not following right now the casarta model but that is true for all of dupage county enrollment is down everywhere uh in public schools we we have intentionally built some space in some of our we're down about three but that we could have been down even some more you'll see but we had to build in some space because we anticipate students coming back we had students that went to private schools because of covid because of different restrictions we had students that went out of state because of covid restrictions and not wanting to be in the illinois set of covenant mitigations we are leaving space because we anticipate that some of those students will be coming back this summer so we've tried even though we have declining enrollment leave some key spaces open because we anticipate a move back in uh to the dupage county area and especially especially our attendance area over the summer so a little preview for you do okay have a deadline or can they just tell you they live in the attendance area they can show up anytime we take them all the last day of school they can show yep we're a public school uh we have no forms right so no reception of visitors all we need to do is adjourn that's remarkable oh what was the last time that happened so moved terry doesn't care a second sorel oh shirelle baby favor hi hi all this opposed we are a journey i'm sorry i like this meeting yeah thank you everybody have a good evening you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um every week of the academic year you've got a new tool yes and i'm assuming that everything from week 13 or week 25 would also be available online yes so what studies weekly says that you will the teachers will receive all 32 or all 21 depending on the grade level you will receive all of them toward at the start of the year so teachers could also arrange the order in which they're maybe having a large unit that they're tying also maybe with their reading instruction or their or another instruction so they can move them but of course they are in historical order that that the magazines go one through 32. so yes the way i was pulling one it was the northwest territory so it was all in how indiana became a state how did we have formerly northwest territory how how indiana became a state and how many people had to be in that area to be considered a state so it's a really engaging newspaper it's a different feel for the students than having a textbook um i think this is easier also to go home for their parents to see and just they can go home and talk about what they had that they learned in school because it's a newspaper form it's an easy format to take home as well at the end of the year i take your your social facebooks home so this is uh also easier take home you can have some conversations of history at home as well seems to be an impressive company and i appreciate your recommendation thank you so i um i appreciate that the fact that it can integrate so well with reading and language arts is is really impressive and particularly for the diversity and language and reading skills among our learners so i appreciate what bernie you were describing are the options that learners have that's most impressive so i'm glad you told me you read more than two or two mr stenners that's like two because we've usually had more than that we saw the finalists i well clearly but um it's interesting that the finalists like were wildly different yes so in your check marks so they're wildly different in that um if we go back to that we go back to this one so when the the group evaluated the two resources it was very clear very early on which our group found the ease of use the most and what would be best for students when we looked at discovery education we had a hard time noticing where all the state standards are specifically and we fact we fact checked we looked okay it says that this is a kindergarten standard and and then we looked at the resource and there was no way that if i were teaching kindergarten that we would i would show that so we found that it it really represented our state standards very seamlessly and age-appropriate discovery education was almost 100 video based and having a print in front of students in elementary to me is very important as well and was important to the group to have some print as well in front of them and not just a video based sure and it was also um the group found it hard to navigate and the ease of use comes in so are students going to be able well they might actually be able to use it much better than us but the the ease of use for teachers and students to be able to get to the resources and the lessons that we want them to it was far easier in studies weekly and just a more seamless directly going back to our state standards and that's very important to us is directly linking back to our state standards well i have to love the print option and i'm not going to date myself as to what i used to get we called it the weekly reader oh no i used to get one of those all the time all right other questions yes mr grimes has um has studies weekly is it is it a program that's been around for a while is it pretty well established yes it is um it's a very established company there they have several school districts in indiana that are using it they have many dis school districts around the united states that are using it so yes it is i don't know i would have to find the date that they actually started business but yes they are a well-established and um older teachers like myself have heard of studies weekly uh quite quite often and that was going to be my other question is if you had a chance to to reach out to any other school corporations that are currently using it i asked six different districts that i'm going to have colleagues in that are in the technology world and four out of six of those said that they use studies weekly all right thank you all very much so we have the opportunity to review the links and all that stuff and we'll officially vote on it at our next meeting yes thank you and um you can keep the newspapers or you can leave them and cherie said she would pick them up but feel free to take the newspapers if you would like thank you very much for your presentation and all the work and those of you who are on the committee you had a lot of energy facilitating your work but thank you for all the time you put into the project as well thank you for that clarification dr shed so this is like the first reading of policy so information was provided to you to go back review the information that's been provided in the next school meeting which definitely was april 4th we would have the recommendation to you as a board for approval and on that evening the secondary presentation will be given as well as a first reading for social studies adoption all right it is time for a board commentation so i'll turn to my colleagues i've got some doctor i know you did mister well yeah i didn't start reflections no yeah settle in i've got about two dozen here no i don't have that man i do have several however and i'll try to go uh fairly quickly some of them are probably teetering on the verge of being semi-old news and some are hot off the press i'll start with some news from the college scholarship coordinator at columbus north high school sarah dismore shared the names of eight students that have been named as national merit scholarship finalists fifteen think it well ms dismore shared with me that out of the 50 000 top scorers in the nation approximately 15 000 are selected as finalists and eight of them at north and just to go ahead and mention their names uh congratulations to evan carr tiffany linfu sanjana jane shaywan lee matthew luke osborne rishi real and jack swan wang eight finalists for that that will be competing um for merit scholarship awards and that's based on not only their psat scores but also areas such as their gpa the coursework they've taken extracurriculars it looks at the whole package so congratulations and good luck to those eight um c4 again i seems like i mentioned c4 a lot but uh eight to ninth graders uh this is maybe uh in january now 12 over 1200 8th and 9th graders attended career fairs with c4 where students and teachers put together all kinds of cool looking interactive displays and activities for prospective students to experience and as stated in i believe it was probably the latest c4 newsletter the future of c4 looks bright so great job to c4 once again uh national uh according to a press release from national history day on february 14th central social studies teacher alan burkmeyer is named as one of 30 teachers from across the u.s two from indiana that have been selected to participate in a program called revolutionary ideals and mr burkmeyer will spend a week in july in providence rhode island and those 30 selected teachers will spend the next several months learning about researching the ideals behind the american revolution and their experience will culminate later this summer as they work in pairs to write and create lesson plans for an upcoming national history day publication and then mr burkmeyer also asked that i mentioned um mr lewis the social studies department chair columbus easton central and the central prison principal mr payne for for helping him to achieve this uh to achieve this honor um i would like to just give commendations to science teacher and adventure club sponsor at csa new tech mr larson um mr larson this is the i believe he told me this is the 24th year he has sponsored the adventure club started at columbus north years ago and it caught my eye because i saw it in the republic what their fundraiser was so i i talked to mr larson a little bit about it but it's a group that he said has impacted uh hundreds of students these last 24 or yeah these last 24 years they go backpacking camping rock climbing skiing canoeing cave exploring biking ziplining much more and the fundraiser that they had last month the polar blair polar bear plunge at mr larson's house in the lagoons and mr larson said they have raised nearly 4 000 to date to help pay for transportation you know equipment fund bigger trips and and so forth and they hope to go to red river gorge in i think michigan for their for their next trip so accommodations to mr larson megan schaff director of mcdowell the educators that mcdowell adult educators that were recognized at the state house as part of adult education day for the role that they played in helping teach english to afghan refugees at camp vaderbury and miss schaff asked for me to mention in particular nikki nolting debbie pogue arlene parsons mayra rodriguez and lindsay swann for the vital role that they played in that and then she also shared that another interesting thing that they did at mcdowell was they had their alternative high school students have the option to write notes of encouragement and to the afghans and they delivered them to atterberry and in return many afghans were eager to write notes back to the students and then ms schaff also shared that to the afghan families have settled here in columbus and are attending english at mcdowell one last thing about mcdowell miss schaff says the high school equivalency certification classes are in full swing again this year and today 38 individuals have earned their high school equivalency diploma so far uh this year at ed mcdown um three more uh from from sarah fraser the thing that kind of caught my eye this is the first year bcsc will be hosting an elementary spark night for fifth and sixth graders april 8th at columbus north high school and this mrs frazier shared that the events already at capacity 125 students 30 currently and on the wait list and that wait list is growing but the purpose is to help students celebrate their sparks or find a potential spark and um mrs frazier went on to say you know sparks it's very important for uh elementary age kids to find something that interests them and that they can get engaged in and so you know some of the programs that they're going to be taking part in coding unplugged vr and instrument zoo improv theater alternative sports so their hope is that you know the goal is to have each student come away from the evening to be able to identify and spark and then they plan to follow up with that the attendees those those kids that attended in april may to see if you know just what they've done in terms of pursuing their spark um commendations to mrs jennifer richevy uh reshave excuse me for winning the 2002 edna folger award for any full-time educator in bartholomew county a huge honor for that so congratulations to her and then the last one that i just got today hot off the press the bcsc winter color guard just won first place at their competition this past weekend at hamilton southeastern so congrats to the vcsc collar guard nice nice thank you thank you very much others commend the i think we'll find out at our board meeting tomorrow that it was the best the best attended one that we've had and probably the most profitable one that we've had i think people were anxious to get outside or to get somewhere and do something and they were they were there yesterday so nice nice great all right we have not had anyone sign up for public comments so we will go down to our school board member reports yes mr grimes so just a dovetail off the school foundation yesterday's harlem wizards i i saw another board bcs bcsf board member on the way out yesterday and he commented that he thought there were over 1500 people there so yeah it was very well attended very entertaining very loud very all kinds of things but yeah it was great to see so many kids and families out and about and enjoying themselves that was that was great and then the next event from the school foundation april 30th hopefully it won't be snowing a 5k at south side and i will have the online link out for that soon and then hopefully i'm not stepping on your toes here dr shedd but february 15th dr shed and i were able to attend uh the school board association day at the at the state house for this short legislative session that looks to probably wrap up in the next day or two yes and dr shed and i were able to have a good lunch and conversation with representative lauer and then uh mosey over to the the state house following lunch where we had a a good conversation with senator walker we did we did thank you others that seemed so long ago oh my gosh um all right cabinet reports yes yeah moving to my policy on here so we have just one item under cabinet reports today is to give a first greeting from policy uh we provided the policy to you in your packet uh policy 8310 so it already exists uh but with the request for records uh sometimes are are interesting but uh most interesting when they come from a commercial vendor who's trying to use that information for commercial purposes um so we are able to put in policy a disclosure of public records that just indicates that any person who requests information pursuant to the indiana access to public records act may not use such information for commercial purposes including but not limited to sell advertise or solicit the purchase of merchandise goods or services or sell loan give away or otherwise deliver the information obtained by such requests to any other parties for those purposes so that is the simple edition is a paragraph in there when it's closure of public records to focus on those trying to use that information for commercial purposes again this is just information as a first reading and i'll ask for your recommendation for approval of the next board meeting all right thank you were there questions individuals have about that edition to your knowledge already i don't think so mr stinner i just we will get these from time to time and then we will reply you know similar to what this statement is but we didn't have that exactly his policy and so this allows us to give them the policy numbers based upon the reason they're requesting that information we will not provide that information all right now to our list of requests for approval thank you dr i have quite the list here um so quickly go through those we do have uh under my request for approval of the minutes of the regular school board meeting we met a month ago february 7th and then we also had an executive session uh recently as well two weeks ago february the 21st you have a list of supplemental contracts in your packet field trips and professional leaves school fundraisers as well as claims and payroll we have two sets for you this time made claims for today which is about a little over 1.8 million dollars and then the pre-run that went from february first to february 28th coming in the month of february a little over 2.1 million dollars in claims we also have two sets of payrolls for you both of those are normal ones covering the dates of the 17th of january through the 30th as well as the 31 31st of january through february 13th and that total of payroll was a little over 6.3 million dollars also we're asking uh for approval from you to get permission to receive bids for the roofing project at taylorsville elementary this is completing that project about three years ago or so we had part of that roof completed we also have a strategic plan uh in front of you again this evening we gave you a presentation at the last meeting we also have an adoption of findings of fact conclusions in order from a recent meeting that you had we all have we're asking for permission to declare some items from c4 those items obsolete we also have an appointment of mr michael macgyver of the local law firm sharpneck bigly stroll in washburn as school attorney mike is here mike we raise your hand so welcome mike and chris monroe has been our um attorney a school attorney for now several years since 2016 fall 2016 and uh was gracious enough as he was trying to step out to serve as an interim attorney for us for this first couple months so thank you chris for your willingness to do that i'm asking you to appoint mike michael macgyver to that position and uh i'm just we're going to run through the slides this is our bcsc strategic plan uh this was the presentation given during our pd day a reminder that we did have a full day pd day for staff back on february the 21st and during that day we opened it with this presentation and so got into the fact that we have a professional development day website that's available for all to see and to access information get through the day we got our schedule for that day and then jumped into information you've seen here and i've provided against this again to you it has our mission of shooting our vision mission and core police now the three focus areas of excellence and high expectations healthy safe and welcoming environments and pathways to success and then we got into what that means in terms of our specific strategic objectives and programs and methods that we are implementing putting into place to accomplish those strategic objectives and just roll through that quickly and again because this is the second time of seeing it it was again in your packet and i want to get to this piece in that we introduced for the first time after uh a number of iterations of trying to get to a new tagline as well as um icon for the school corporation as we're just trying to move forward with some of our efforts together we learn is the tagline we have here we believe that that is an indicator of inclusion openness unity and partnership and the fact that the success of our learners does come from the importance of collaboration both internally and externally as well as then these symbols of the school corporation with our bcsc together we learned as a tag line and this check mark slash pathway or road that we have as an icon and that particular icon is a stylized check mark that would signify its voice of togetherness as a school corporation there are four striped segments there that would represent families or students our staff members and the community so four different pieces and then the road like quality is is signifying the different pathways that we offer our students so three different things coming together that one icon one a check mark that people have chosen us to be the school corporation to send their students and or to work with us and then the four segments being the four different groups that we try to collaborate and partner with and then those that road um being the the pathways that are so um such an important part of our school corporation and i think a demonstrative of the success that we have as an organization so that um one of the pieces that we've we've arrived at and ask you for your approval for all this information and this is just an example of strategic planning questions that we follow the presentation with we did ask for people to get together then and to review um the plans you'll resonate with them what maybe were some opportunities that we missed as you uh know this is a document that will continue to evolve it should be an active document and one that will continue to try to move forward and improve all the time but that was a conversation so here is an opportunity for any input and review as well for you as we i guess that's actually the next part of our agenda so i'll stop right there so you have the items in front of you now that i am requesting your approval and i would ask ask for a question for that doctor so if i might have a motion from one of my colleagues for items three a through j as they've been presented to us so man thank you mr grimes is there a second sure thank you miss dave dwyer do individuals have questions about any of these items mr spencer it's just a tangent but i think it's the first time we've been together since the professional development day yes and as you talked about the strategic plan i wonder were there any big takeaways for you for your cabinet uh learnings things we might things that go really well or things that we might do differently next time yes all of that i as i introduced the the morning i introduced it as an experiment this was the first time we had the opportunity as a school corporation to gather our staff all two thousand of them together and try to meet their needs both individually and collectively and then organization as we try to explain what we're trying to do as an organization and then align and move forward and so the schedule that we put forth we try to provide some individual time not a lot it was about 45 minutes then with a 15-minute break to move to the next thing uh and then the the morning was full of corporation-led activities uh first focusing on the strategic plan then professional development with udl and pbis two very foundational pieces of our school corporation uh lunch and then followed up with building and department specific things in the afternoon so north side evan and amy would have in their cic would have organized an activity or activities events in the afternoon that would need to be meet the needs of that building specifically and then even more specifically to this strategic plan so as we move toward the next time um we are reviewing currently over 1300 responses we get to our exit ticket so 1300 people did take the time to respond to that our teachers association also put out a survey just asking some questions about things so we're trying to understand all that information and and take that and understand how we can be better the next time uh with all that said um the the responses were very favorable certainly there were people that that had good constructive feedback for us in terms of how we could improve but in terms of the purpose of the day how the day was structured and utilized um and the feelings of of coming together and be able to collaborate both as a school corporation as a whole and then with their buildings and departments were very favorable and then our support staff i think felt very valued we just don't get enough time period with our staff and and even more so with our support staff they come in and work their hourly positions get straight to work and and then they work their hours and and we where it's hard for us to pull them out for professional development so bringing them into play and having them understand all the things that we try to regularly talk about i believe was helpful and our feedback does indicate that that was the case very positive they look forward to the next one thanks for asking that any other comments all right all of those i don't know if you julie if you're still with us we have to see you for your vote there we go yay there she is i hope you feel better soon so um with that i'll do a roll call so mr grimes all right mr brian all right mr hawk dwyer hi miss wilney hi mr stenner hi dr bills hi i as well so items a through j pass unanimously dr roberts thank you very much so lastly an opportunity for board input and review mr spenner thank you dr tonight it was just amazing coach cooper and his wrestler mr young mr law families that were able to come thinking about the parents that have participated in the curriculum the new committee for us the administrators and teachers and students that we have as part of our presentations tonight great meeting great great days i read a lot from cases so that was really helpful tonight since i've been on um i also i i was as the rock creek teachers and principal were talking through their numbers talks i was thinking back to mr grimes reflections and intellectual humility and i thought how great to have this group of kids present their ideas and be a little vulnerable in that and be willing to take input and it all kind of came full circle if you want people you know we're teaching our our kids how to live in a world with social media and polarizing topics and views and we're going to have to teach them differently than we did in the past to overcome that so you know that kind of came full circle um a couple more congratulations to mr burton um on being appointed the next principal at northside um yeah and thanks again to uh mrs dedler and the staff of rock creek for sharing number talks and also thanks to to all those people who worked and spent time on the elementary social studies resource adoption materials yes for sure for sure yes you made me nervous by calling on my first i forgot that i wanted to thank judge monroe for serving as attorney for so many years and to welcome mr mackay absolutely and you can see that we take all of this very seriously as we should i appreciated all the enthusiasm that we heard today oh my goodness so i think so i don't think i've heard mr hughes speak that much at one of these before so that was very impressive and he was thoroughly excited as was um i appreciated the enthusiasm that he shared about chris cooper and what he does for the athletes with whom he works that it is more than just wrestling but it is about they're growing as individuals and mr burton could merely contain himself and that was just so fun to experience and we didn't take and i hope everyone appreciates how much we value amy dixon and the fabulous leadership that she did for us at northside middle school and then the the children at rock creek and there's actually one of your quotes on the that made me think about the kids they talked about their collaboration and working and it's there the success is the importance of collaboration which they talked about as they were discussing their whys in their number talks so that was my full circle it was we got to appreciate so many components of our corporation and what makes it the great place that it is so i thank everyone for fabulous work so far it is very cool to see everybody without a mask so i hope school went well this past week without them yes everyone truly truly deserves this coming spring break be safe and enjoy yourselves please i my last line that i have to do is our next meetings we will have a strategic planning session on march 25th 9 a.m in the lovely terrace room and our next school board meeting will be on april 4th at 6 30.
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so they thank you all for your support because that 750 dollars comes from various fundraisers fundraisers that we do and or donations that you make so they asked me to extend our thanks to you dire parks i attended their first meeting and they've got some really cool things going on at dyer and i'll tell you more about it at a different time when we don't have such a huge crowd thank you we'll move on to our official school board business topics consent agenda dr veraco thank you again mrs seek board approval for the minutes from our meeting on february 22nd also seek board approval for the claims payroll and extracurricular expenditures that were included in your packets move to proof we have a motion by mr marshall second second by ms kelly any discussion hearing none all in favor motion passes i'm sorry i need to abstain i was not at the meeting we have four yeses and one abstained by dr malcolm are there any public comments or action items there are none so we'll move right into our official school board business topics regular agenda dr varaka thank you one more time and to begin our recognition section i'd like to invite mr graber from clark middle school forward to begin those festivities uh tonight i'd like to recognize first of all our seventh grade girls basketball team on saturday they won the conference championship so congratulations [Applause] anna is the uh actually she wrote an essay for the patriots and essay contest was chosen as the gary of winner by the same time vfw uh her with a certificate and a 500 scholarship on february 16th in addition anna also placed second in the district receiving another monetary award so congratulations [Applause] yes [Applause] all right my second recognition tonight is for a gentleman one of my clark students ben kaminski if you could come forward and his coach jen gleason come on forward please ben just an incredible young man congratulations to ben kaminsky he won first place in the future problem solving bull scenario writing competition middle school division in indiana ben will be competing in the international finals at the university of massachusetts on june 9th through the 12th 2022 with students from over 23 countries ben will represent indiana and the united states in the finals [Applause] ben can i ask you a question do you attribute all your success to mom and dad [Laughter] i'm just kidding okay moving on to my second agenda item this evening i do want to give the board and the community an update on some legislative happenings since our last meeting the first piece is part of hb 1001 which is now house and roll act 1001 the piece i want to talk about relates to remote participation in school board meetings and this information came to us late last week from isba that with the passage of that act our practice where periodically during the pandemic we had board members participate from whom no longer applies and so for us to choose to do that moving forward we would need to implement a brief board policy to do such so you don't have to answer me this evening but if you sent me something between now and our next meeting we're going to be going back to our work sessions to review board policies and when we do that we can include this with that group if the board is so inclined the technology while it exists has not been great for us um in terms of the connectivity um for a variety of reasons but in the past we've always been able to have a quorum by mostly following the schedule barring inclement weather that we agreed to in december for the following year so i just wanted to put that out there for the board the other piece that we were happy to see not pass through the senate was house bill 1107 after some significant amendments by senator rogers it did not survive the the rework um and in fact even the individuals who sponsored the bill on the senate side voted against it so it it went down 50 to zero of course if you remember there were parts of it that concerned us with parents and or people in certain cases being influenced by attorneys to not meaningfully participate in a reconvened case conference or in a mediation because um it may be more beneficial to get right to a hearing and so while we agree there are things that need to be looked at in the area of reconvened case conferences mediations and hearings this particular language we didn't think was going to be very helpful and so we are appreciative of those people who decided to think about it some more because in the past we've had some legislation get rushed through that then caused us some major heartburn and needed to be reworked in the future so um 1107 is out for now and then of course the big e is the hb 1134 the curriculum piece is what everyone referred to the most controversial piece of legislation in the current session this was the legislation that was going to require teachers to post all of their activities for the future year by the end of june in the summer really hampering flexibility also limiting certain topics in fact the original bill said anything that makes anyone feel uncomfortable and unfortunately for you know the way the world is now there's a lot of stuff we're talking about that make us feel uncomfortable whether we're four in preschool or the superintendent at 58 watching the news thinking my word what is going on so not talking about it doesn't make it go away or make it better having said that i do think there's you know room for certain guidance or guidelines for what how how hard of aligned staff would take um but to be honest we have not had very many instances in my 12 years where we had to talk to teachers or rein them in for going off the rails so i do think that you know if if maybe the objective was to get people to think about how political they get if they're a u.s history teacher or even a language arts teacher but we're thankful that for now that stuff did not go through do i expect some of it to come back sure and i think um there are no matter which side of the of any aisle you're on discussing things is fine um but putting in rules that are unmanageable need to be considered more thoroughly before it goes through the other piece that i wanted to share with the board and i put on the bottom of your talking points notes was it was interesting that the college board weighed in late last week on this and said if certain parts of courses the college board is the organization that is responsible for psat and sat the college entrance stuff they also manage the advanced placement program in america and we get a lot of students i think we had at our recent board meeting uh presentation that included some data on how many advanced placement credits were earned so students in high school go on to college they already have some credits in the bank and they get it by taking a rigorous course and then taking a test at the end and scoring high enough on it to demonstrate proficiency but the college board did say if certain topics are banned we're not going to certify those credits in those states that aren't allowing certain parts of courses to be taught and so that was interesting because that was coming from a different corner now a different group weighing in and saying hey let's be careful about this um thing that we're going to start limiting what can be discussed so i just wanted to give the board an update on those three pieces of course the session isn't over uh it will end sometime this week by all indications uh probably wednesday or thursday so we'll have one final legislative update in april and then um my last item is that on april 20th they've scheduled our regional school board indiana school boards association meeting in the evening at tables and as you know we always get a a legislative update from uh executive director spratlin at that so i think i've heard now from four board members so i'll talk to the fifth and see if she's gonna attend because it is an informative evening but um that's where we'll also get uh some of some of the details because while we are following the legislation closely sometimes uh late or sometimes even early in in passing a bill there are little clauses that we don't catch that do impact schools and so we do need to follow it closely because usually the legislation is effective july 1st after it's passed and so we have to be ready to implement those changes for the next school year so with that are there any questions about legislation before we move on president i just wanted to make the comment that i uh so many people did move forward and reach forward to help with that 1134 house bill including our ability to meet with the legislator only one of the two but i think the thing that i found so interesting about this process is that there were so many entities with from the state of indiana that joined together to say hey this is not good decision making so you not only have the school board association but yet a teachers association the principals association superintendents association so it was clearly clearly a um a bill that would serve no purpose other than creating more diversity and challenges among us which we don't need more challenges among us we need to embrace the diversity that would be the only thing thank you director morocco so now we'll move on to our director of human resources personnel mrs mocha thank you very much we are recommending that the following personnel items be approved but i do want to bring to your attention a retirement of adrian belfeld with 25 years of service to lake central [Applause] do we have a motion oh motion to approve i have a motion by miss kelly second second by dr medlin any discussion um the retiree where is she where does she teach celebration i didn't think i had to answer it language arts very good thank you thank you all in favor all right motion passes and i am pleased to present to you the new grimmer school principal and his beautiful family we have mr ryan bounce with us this evening i would i want to thank all of you and i want to thank all of you for this wonderful opportunity it is it is a privilege to be here at lake central and uh we are we are humbled and honored to be here uh my better half rebecca bounds my wife uh and i'll go oldest to you i'm a girl dad we got isabella bound she's gonna join me at grimmer in sixth grade next year without the bounds sorry we have elena bounds who is currently in second grade will be in third grade next year and then we have emmy who's still in preschool so once again thank you grimmer folks i can't wait to partner with you thank you this is a wonderful school district thank you family you want to get your family sure sure can i get one first of this one and then you all of you guys absolutely one two three perfect thank you anybody else that would like to get in the picture oh you're gonna go back there outside grades thank you thank you my second item is to approve the professional leave form that was in your packet move to approve we have a motion by mr marshall second second by dr meddling any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you i do have kevin gardner here a high school teacher who is in charge of our vaping program and he would like to give a short presentation on how that program has been going mr gardner thank you terry uh board how are you hi central how are you uh this is our third year for hopefully they have the printout they do all right hopefully you have the print out in front of you and we want to thank dr veraco first of all and terry mucha for heading this out and we started this three years ago and in those three years we've seen 88 different students this year with the first year we've had to present a second class and the second class is now helping them quit so the first one is all about information getting them to understand the the addiction part of vaping the second class that we started this year is actually getting them to quit the nice part about the 88 students is the least amount of students that we've seen on second time most of the ada is the first time we've only seen this year only two of the second class so that's that tells us it's working and it's also not only working with our students it's also working with their parents and so we've had some parents call in and they actually wanted copies of the presentation and so we want to continue with working with our students we've worked with other schools we work with the state of indiana their health department we work also with the heart association and the lung association so lake central central's getting out there i want to thank dr veraco and terry mucha because the actual heart association said you guys are doing the best job that we've seen yet so that's a hands-off to like central school corporation and just to let you know that program is in the high school and middle schools thank you good thank you we'll move on to our director of primary education dr bracey good evening i'm coming before you tonight seeking approval for the professional leave request in your packets motion to approve we have motion by ms kelly second second by dr medlin any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you but the real reason i'm here tonight is because i have some amazing fourth graders from bibbich elementary who are here to present to you i think it was last month i was able to visit their classroom and michelle snow and julie moore were co-teaching a lesson and it is going to blow your mind so please get ready for this awesome presentation come on up guys [Applause] they're very enthusiastic all right thanks so much for being here with us tonight um miss moore and i want to share with you what the class worked on for we were trying to decide if it was three weeks or four weeks that we were working on the project so what we did was how many of you have ever attended an escape room all right fantastic we've got a digital escape room and it's called a breakout it's from breakout edu so the kids built everything so we're here to talk to you about that tonight so the site breakout edu is what we used and you can see this google and what it does is it creates games and these games help you with critical thinking higher level skills collaboration process standards for math problem solving the higher level thinking skills that's what it's all about so it brings a lot of those components and as you can see there's an example of one on the site they have a lap of the day and so you have to use the clues in the picture to try to solve the different blocks are directional color words with all different types of lies so one of the challenges on the site during valentine's time was to create a challenge where the kids would submit different parts would break up like there's introduction there's different clues that you can have and each component so we kind of took our own spin on that and we worked together and we decided that the kids would team up and they would make their own breakout collaborative so let them tell more about that absolutely at first ms snow picked sticks for groups to work in then we use the picker wheel to pick our areas to work on [Music] computer lab after that we also use the picker wheel to pick the locks we get after we decided what luck we had we planned how we were going to do it on a piece of paper next we typed the plan onto google's next we type the plan on google slides which is a database that allows you to make a presentation some also used canva which is a site that gives you the power to make posters and things like that then you have to create a nice background that helps capture the idea of what you are doing and create a video of what you need to do after you finish your slide you revise review and edit after your slide looks good you submit it to the teacher the teacher then uploads it to a breakout then you finish and you got a breakout uh while we're waiting for that the one thing that i think you guys all need to understand so that you guys google slides breakout.edu screencastify and jigsawplanet jigsawplanet is where we would make a puzzle make puzzles so we used all this for puzzles editing making pictures and editing the main slides some people also used canva google drawings and pixel art to make or draw covers for extra or to make or draw covers or extra photos to add on for decoration or hints to find the answer to the lock we also use google earth remove.bg google images and google sites we use google earth to see the life things outside things that we know what it looks like we use remove.ibg to get rid of the background of pictures we use google images to add pictures finally we use google sites to get to the sets we need to make the breakout for the intro we all um we all use google maps google maps google earth to help us to find and see how the roof of bibbidge looked and how the water tower looked for bibbidge for the inside part we used google maps for the indoor part we use google drawings and other stuff that would allow us to take images and imported it into google slides and we use that for background images so like you would see it like on the breakout and you try and have to figure it out and then insert the answer in and we would also we would also like link like for example another place to go in where it would be like their own slides and they would have to remove stuff to figure out what the answer is if you get stuck on a slide you can use the hint slides to help you to try and crap what lock you're on or solve it um for the ending uh we had we had um uh answer and we have a question would you want to know the answer and i can't tell the answer [Applause] all right so for those of you who want to know why we took the time to do all this during our class time here there's some academic benefits for completing the project there's a lot of problem solving their collaboration was outstanding um the creativity unbelievable they worked on communication skills critical thinking is the biggest part there tearing apart that problem and being able to put it back together they knew what the lock was going to look like at the end but we didn't know what it was going to look like at the end so they had to actually dissect it to be able to put those elements together so that they could give you clues so that you can actually solve it there's a lot of math processing skills and those are the really hardest ones to get to um cots to the max that's higher overthinking skills um and then the change in their confidence level from when we started working on this project until when we were done and just to see them up here right now who would have thought that we would be standing up here in front of all these people at this time talking about this project right can we also give an extra round of applause for miss moore too where'd you go to julie oh she's like she's talking right there with the slides [Music] [Applause] yes yo great job boys and girls let's give them one more round of applause and also thank you to all of our parents for coming out boys and girls give your parents a round of applause and one more time boys and girls for miss snow and miss moore thank you guys great job and just just think that one day in the future one of you boys and girls may be on the radio answering that problem-solving skill like miss snow i know that's what you're training them for aren't you you're all certainly welcome to stay with us for the rest of our meeting but if you need to get home for something your part's done so thank you for coming out thank you i have to look up that qr code qr code scan it yeah can i just mention that i should have said karen bowman also is retiring and she has 29 years of service so i did forget to say her she was a late edition so congratulations congratulations mrs bowman dr bracey that was a qr code that we could scan and do those activities from our home so that'll be on the beverage website okay we'll look out for that thank you yeah right all right i think it's safe to say we'll move on to our director of secondary education mrs castaneda thank you for my first item i am seeking your approval for the professional leave requests we have a motion by ms kelly second second by mr marshall any discussion all in favor aye motion passes thank you for my second item i am seeking your approval for the field trip requests move to approve the field trip requests we have a motion by dr medlin and i will second that any discussion all in favor motion passes thank you thank you and then for my last item i'm going to go ahead and bring up kerry regan and todd smilinski two of our assistant principals from the high school who are going to discuss some new course proposals at the high school in facts and business good evening to the board as well as to central office staff we have a couple new courses that we would like to present you should have them in your packet i'm going to talk about the business courses there's only three that are new proposals actually two of them are or one of them i'm sorry is a rename so the first one is the principles of entrepreneurship and the next one is new ventures development so basically the entire reason for these changes and the proposals is because the state has switched over to next level programs of study as their pathways so in order to try to offer as many different pathways as we can to our students to get them to check that you know graduation box these this is the reason why we are going with these courses um we do have a teacher who um went to some training for us so that the students could actually earn dual credit for those courses as well and even though she's actually on a sabbatical she went ahead and and did that training for us which we're very appreciative of so those are the two um the principles of entrepreneurship and the new ventures development the other one for business is actually just a renamed course under principles of computing that might be on your last page so basically that one is going to be combining what we currently have as our computer science one course and our ap computer science principles courses so our computer science teacher danielle carr went to iu she's actually getting credentialed through iu to offer those as dual credit courses students who take that new course well new titled course will end up receiving seven dual credits and they can still take the ap course so or the ap exam i should say so it's all being combined in one but we think it'll be very beneficial for our students good evening thank you for having us on the family consumer science the facts side of things most of what you'll see in here is is more or less a rename because we're offering these courses i think just the biggest change is that they go to a year long to fit their next level course of study i put another kind of new course would be the nutrition course on the very top there in the first page we are offering a nutrition wellness as a semester course this is going to be a year-long nutrition food theory course it fits into the the culinary arts pathway which we offer we'll actually offer two two courses that will fit that pathway so that's at the top their nutrition and then again most are are going to be in the renamed because we are offering culinary arts and hospitality but they change over to a year-long course so we're not going to offer the principles of culinary and hospitality we have child development currently in advanced child development to fit our into our education careers pathway child and adolescent development will be the new course title with the new number and so on so all these kind of fit into uh into these different pathways we're offering here in our facts department going through yeah and the last one on there is our relationships and emotions if you have any questions about them that's all i have so okay so i know we have these career pathways and i understand that but if i'm going down a career pathway and say i'm in um throw me an idea what am i in what career pathway am i in marketing marketing okay if i'm in marketing does that mean that my schedule is pretty much dictated into that area or do i have any flexibility to take electives or explore other arenas or there's certainly still some flexibility and the one nice thing within the next level programs of study is students can take these classes concurrently as well to help them get to that pathway a little bit sooner um but they're still especially their their junior and senior year they do have more flexibility to to take some more elective courses um and the nice thing is these principles courses uh especially like the principles of business management and that could actually give them a couple different pathways so you know if they want to take the entrepreneurship one well that's an entrepreneurship one but there's um the business management and it just just depends on what pathways we will be able to offer we want to offer more um over the next few years but right now we're just we just have to start with a few that we have and the teachers that can teach the courses we have but yes there is still flexibility for students schedules so when you talk to your colleagues about this in the career pathways is lakes are you feeling comfortable with where lake central is compared to your colleagues or do we have gaps that need to be filled or what's your self-analysis of of the program the program is still pretty new to us and quite honestly in talking with people from other schools um this has been a very complex pathway to try to figure out they have changed from the perkins 4 to perkins 5 and now the next level pathway so it keeps continually changing however fingers crossed we have been told that this is going to be it and they're not going to change this pathway for a while but i feel like we're all kind of in the same boat where a lot of people have been just trying to figure out they just finished the computer science pathway probably within the last few months i see yes so it's just they weren't even the state wasn't even really prepared i don't think to roll it out as soon as we did in my personal opinion well that that tends to happen a lot you know change change change at that level and then they'd forget how dramatic it is for us to try to implement that also if i remember correctly and correct me if i'm wrong but um don't the career pathways isn't there supposed to be something happening at the middle schools also with career pathways that i don't care or am i wrong on that no um okay so that's something that the state has changed also there's two things at play here there's the pathways that are tied which is what we're discussing and then there's graduation pathways which is how they earn their diploma oh i'll say that all again would you step to the mic and say that again so i can comprehend this so this was indiana's attempt to try to be more consistent with their cte courses across the state that's the pathways that they were describing i've been here before speaking about graduation pathways which if you recall is the way that students graduate high school so even though we're both using the word pathways they're two different things graduation pathways those requirements for the diploma are something that we discuss at the middle school level because we want them to be thinking about that as they're starting planning for their high school career okay okay thank you you're welcome any other questions all right thank you thank you and we'll move on to our director of student services miss gramala i have asked mrs devries here tonight to talk to you all about our ell program um this is typically something we do early in the school year but we were a little busy at the beginning of the year this year so she is going to show you some data on our weda scores which is our testing for english language learners from the 2021 school year we actually just completed our 2022 testing so the information she's sharing will be from last year and then once we get those new scores we'll have more info for you this was all in your packets but liz will share this is going to be hard to follow the beverage kids because they were great so bear with me so this is just an overview of who is involved in our program and like she said you did have this in your packet but we have a director or coordinator we now have five teachers and including myself would be six we have liaisons in the building that help us and of course the teachers do the daily instruction and then we also have paraprofessionals the way that the students get identified is by their home language survey once we have that that's how the process starts for the program weda we adopted indiana adopted wida in and the state of indiana became part of that and it's a large consortium and these are some of the states that are involved but this is a better picture so it's nice to know when a kid comes from a state that is a weed estate we don't have to re-screen them or do anything they come right into our program this is just the way to access as becky said we give that once a year we just finished our testing it just goes through the different clusters and the different features which we go over a language arts section a math a science and a social studies so these are the different levels that the students will achieve starting with a level one which we consider entering a level five which is bridging and the students in indiana once they reach a level five are considered fluent and out of the program and we monitor them for two years so this is currently 2021 2022 we have 467 students in a program just a little bit of information i started this 17 years ago and we had 81 students across all the schools so we've grown quite a bit we have 404 students that are receiving direct services meaning they're active in our program 29 students are in our first year of monitoring and 34 are in our second year and the state still has us make sure that we check on those students we meet with the teachers and we make sure that they are being successful if for some reason they're not then we meet with the committee to decide whether we bring them back in or what the plan of action would be these are this is just a breakdown of the elementary a breakdown of the middle school breakdown of the high school and then this is um our testing from 2021 and students improving from 2020 to 2021 and overall the corporation improved at 65 percent now that is the same number as 2020 but with the pandemic with some kids being at home some kids coming in back and forth back and forth i was really actually very happy to see that number because i was afraid we were going to go down quite a bit and we didn't so currently we service students with 30 languages and 29 countries the top languages are spanish at 46 percent of our population arabic is 16 serbian and polish are tied and then vietnamese comes in each year we do hold a parent night for our parents to come in we did both virtual and in person it was kind of back and forth this year depending on when they did it but um we actually with the virtual we've had a much bigger attendance i don't know if it's because the parents are maybe don't want to come in but they don't mind getting on virtually so we actually our attendance went up for that so this is just an overview of our lake central families and where they come from um and this is including their parents too we have quite a few students that are born in other countries but this is also their parents included in this and then the essa just follows along to make sure that our students are their needs are being met and um the indiana department of education ties that into our program and then just talks about what the way that our students are successful or not is that we measure their growth from year to year and it's not even necessarily their overall growth there's four sub categories and so if they even grow in one of those categories that is considered growth and then the state looks at that and that's how lake central is given um i guess points whether or not the students are successful and that just kind of goes through the essa um i know i went through that really quickly but like i said i couldn't hold up to bibbich but any questions so what are your thoughts about leader now that you've been into it for several years you know i do like it it it does hit a different the old test used to just hit language perfect proficiency weed of branches out to the language arts and math not necessarily measuring the math and measuring the vocabulary a little bit more time consuming yeah the test overall probably takes an average of um in every building and some buildings have two thank you liz thank you now we'll move on to our director of facilities mr ledger ah thank you mr seuss um tonight i have one item to seek your approval on um and that's to ask to award and execute the core construction contract for the cma position at the beverage elementary school project um i've sent you guys a bunch of information last week last week we spent two mornings interviewing four very highly qualified candidates uh mrs seuss sat on that committee with most of the rest of central office and we had some we had four really fantastic presentations and in the end we ended up picking core construction out of cheryl indiana uh just a little bit of history with core construction i'm there they're a national company and they do they do projects all over the nation and in fact they are the third largest k-12 builder in the nation uh behind turner and gilbane so they have a lot of experience in this on their sheriff office for those you don't know is right there at us 30 and in the five-story building at the crossings there across from tables so it's literally the project's in their backyard as well so with that unless um any other questions i'll seek your approval on that motion to approve we have a motion famous kelly second second by mr marshall any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye aye thank you i would like to introduce uh guys van buren he's he's the director of operations and it looks like tim snuck in here since i since the meeting started as well he's going to be the project manager site so um i just want to introduce these guys they've been great to work with through the through the bidding process and i look forward to a long partnership so uh guys and tim congratulations can you tell us a little bit about you but you have to come to the microphone we so my name is guys van buren i've been in construction for 22 years believe it or not working for core construction just down the street like bill said so handle the operations out of that office um and yes this is definitely our bread and butter uh doing k through 12 work and uh and higher education works so really appreciate that uh the opportunity again thank you so much are you from the area here i am yeah i live just uh i live in crown point indiana so just uh by whitehawk there so graduated from crown point no nope i actually graduated from uh iliana christian is where i graduated from when they were still in lansing so yeah yeah and you did your degree work at purdue no i did my degree working actually at prairie state i grew up in chicago heights you did your degree work where at uh prairie state oh yeah yep so i grew up in chicago heights that's where i was born and raised so very good well thank you thank you you're welcome thank you [Laughter] this is always so important to me i don't know why but it just helps me get a broad perspective no no no worries um tim stevenson uh former piper pirate former grimmer gladiator and uh former lake central grad of 2000.
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right so actually so the the budget lines historically for the director of teaching and learning salary are net of um our net of grant funding so i mean it might be helpful for me to provide a breakdown for you so you can understand where it was in um in the fy 22 budget because what we budgeted in fy 22 was for an assistant superintendent that was at the time the the you know thought in our request less grant funding so um we actually only budgeted a hundred thousand dollars in the fy 22 operating budget for that position we then in fy 23 have budgeted for mrs oliveira's salary up until when she leaves in mid-september the two position new positions and then less less grant funding so reduced by grant funding so i can provide you with a little breakdown of that just so you can visualize it it's actually pretty easy if you put it on paper but not as easy if you don't know you know you have to talk it through but um so i'd be happy to provide that for you okay um so just a couple more things um so so with that being said uh because these are i'm first of all i'm all for these positions i i think they're needed i love the idea of breaking them up i think that makes a lot of sense um have we done because these are new positions and you know we oversee the policy in the budget has there been any kind of salary surveys done for curriculum directors um i'm trying to remember we have access to that through the mass association usually uh okay i can't remember if i looked at that recently like last year or okay really haven't to tell you the honest truth okay no not in preparation for this science preparation i i'd kind of i'd kind of like to see that because i i just i have some serious concerns with with salaries and it seems as and this is nothing against anyone it just seems to be that there's starting to become as as two percent on say a step five or six teacher versus two percent on a a high-level administrator is a big difference and it seems to be that there's a growing disparity disparity between our administrators and our teachers um and i wouldn't i honestly um you know with some of the research that i've done i wouldn't be comfortable going over you know 125.
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i have a motion thank you mr powell a second second thank you mr zamano discussion dr gallagher can i just ask that you may go through 10.6 which is the proposed bidding timeline for hvac projects so that everybody understands i'm sorry would you could you just walk us through 10.6 to make sure that everybody has a firm understanding thank you so we advertised for the hvac uh work that we're going to do at le mans lamont mx lafayette and small us to replace unit ventilators or angina ventilators to eliminate window units for air conditioning as well as to upgrade our heat so that went out on february 17th drawings were available february 22nd the pretty pre-bid meeting was march 1st last day for questions was today march 7th followed by a bid opening which will happen thursday march 17th followed by uh on march 21st we'll be hopefully awarding a contract as long as you know everything lines up the way it should so i think the important takeaway that i want everybody to understand is if we stick to this timeline then at our next regular business meeting we would be voting to award the contract so uh stay tuned for that and also you know if it's uh something you're feel strongly about or passionate about just try your best to be here and and very quickly all those funds are coming from all those funds are going to come from our extra three months just making sure yep awesome so it's all non-budgeted phones awesome [Music] the only other comment that i would add is i think it's actually kind of exciting to see that the baseball program is going to be using snap raise which is i guess 10 12.
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so with that i'll call this meeting adjourn and everyone have a very safe relaxing spring you
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oh how about that awesome i am a purdue graduate i've been in construction so you you're you're nailing that you know hitting the nail around the head so uh been in construction for 17 years majority of my career has been to chicago but i've been with core for almost five years now so just humbled for the opportunity and it's gonna be pretty cool to work for the old schools what would you think of that purdue iu game yeah it was a nail biter oh it sure was but i mean i was i'm not i don't even care about taking out the wisconsin game oh oh she's not important no uh wife's actually a kindergarten teacher at holmen oh really yeah and i have two boys that go to culling one's in kindergarten and once in second grade oh very good well welcome back home and welcome to you too thank you yes and welcome and congratulations thank you and we'll move on to our director of business services mr james thank you my first items to seek your approval for the donations that were in your board packet so move we have a motion by mr marshall second second by dr medlin any discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye motion passes thank you um three years ago our school district joined the foo to school purchasing cooperative for our food service for our grocery items for our milk and our bread in your board packet i get there's a sheet in there that shows all the different school districts across the state are part of this co-op it helps for buying power and through that co-op then we do the the bidding process and so part of the current agreement we have through the the cooperative allows us to keep and maintain the same vendors that we've had last year for an additional year so i seek the boards approval to remain with the cooperative um they've been really good with supplies especially in this past year being able to get food for our kids to be served every day for lunch where we've heard some vendors have not been able to in fact some vendors have notified school districts that they're not going to be able to supply in the following school year none of these three vendors which are hpc for groceries pleasantview dairy for milk and alpha bakery for our bread there's no issues coming along so we seek your approval to remain the co-op and roll those contracts for the 2022-23 school year motion to approve emotion by ms kelly second second by dr madeline any discussion hearing none all in favor motion passes great thank you very much um in your packet i just want to give you an update on our adm count so the we have an accountant that's done in september that's the fall count and then we do another count here in february and so i have two pages in there one showing the difference by each school location and then a second one showing the differences by grade overall we are down 81 kids total district wide um now the february count is always less than the mark or excuse me the fall count because of december graduates and they don't count and so of we had 76 graduates here at the high school this year so really if you take those out we're down five which we know we've had some loss of kids at companion it's such a transient program transient program over there but if you look at each school except for the high school pretty much every school has more kids now than they had in the fall and just the decrease by grade is mainly the juniors and the seniors at the high school for the reasons i mentioned above so that's where we are we're happy with that their last we our funding for january through june is based on this february count um we've historically we don't get that funding for those december graduates unfortunately which is sad because we're not cutting our expenditures we just don't get the money for the kids because the kids aren't here we haven't gotten money for that in the past we just districts across the state just had to live with that but that being said as of last week there was some verbage in one of the bills to count the february of the december graduates in the february count whether or not that makes it through this week we'll see it was in as bad as in the end of last week but as dr bronko mentioned earlier these last three or four days things will begin and out all the time so um if it if it does get allowed to be counted in the future that will be great for school districts across the state so um any questions on the adm count rob i have a question what what date not february was that taken in february one or it wasn't the first maybe the third or the fourth okay but earlier in the month yeah okay so are we seeing more students coming back since the masking issue has gone away are we seeing people come back from say homeschooling or k-12 and not yet okay i was curious thank you i think the fact that except for those two grades at the high school that all of our grades have pretty much more kids now than they did in the fall i think is might be just a gradual reflection of that you never know we have so many people are moving in from illinois and here in the first place that is still attractive place for people to come so what the reasoning is you know we'll see how um what happens in the fall with our with our count i'm not sure if people are going to come and bring their kids here in the middle of the year in february or march um but that doesn't mean okay they're done homeschooling them and they're going to send them back here um in the fall you know we'll just have to wait and see so thank you okay uh my next item is just to go a little bit over on the funding for per adm that we get for kids so we just talked about how many kids we got and now for our state tuition support is all how much dollars we get per kid and so this is something i prepare for the board i get some of the information from the doe and i make some charts and graphs to share with you so this is about nine pages so and this what this does it shows every school district that is in the state including charter schools because charter schools are public schools and shows the dollar amount that is given per student for the school funding formula there's the basic part which is called the foundation which everybody gets the same and then based on your free reduced population determines where you get more in essence what they call complexity dollars so in this handout that you have in front of you all of the schools that are in gray those are charter schools all the ones that are kind of in the orangey pinkish hue those are region schools and i've also noted which school districts have tried and either passed or failed an operating referendum so you can look at that at your plea leisure um i i guess the good thing is that lake central used to be on page nine and over the last years we've kind of graduated and moved ourselves up that we're moved up to page eight now and so out of 372 public schools we are funded at the 336th level so i don't want to take too much of your time after that detail there's a chart that kind of shows the schools in our region when i say our region it's lake porter and laporte county and the funding level for each of those as you know there was a big increase in the budget last year four funding for k-12 about four and a half percent this year we're expecting another four and a half percent next year that was more the amount of money put into the formula itself how that shakes out for each district is a little different so on this page you can see how much each school district changed you will see that we had a 5.8 percent increase in our funding per student again the average statewide was around 5 for the schools here in in the region the next page is a graph that shows how we compare to the other schools corporations in lake county the 16 districts and we are you know toward the bottom but we're not at the bottom anymore and uh and then finally the last graph kind of just goes it shows an indication of how things have changed in the funding since 2009 and 2009 is the important date because prior to 2009 a lot of our funding came from property taxes from the taxpayer then the state took over the funding with the promise that all those levels were going to be maintained and then some so this craft kind of shows the highest in the state the lowest in the state we are in blue and where we were and if you look on that last raft back in 2009 we did equal the lowest funded in the state but i'm glad to say that not only us but the general assembly has made a conscious effort to increase that lower amount here in recent years so we're glad that it's trending upwards you know inflation is kind of big right now seven ten percent um you know will we ever see that no um but you know we're happy that again thankful for the legislators for what they did this past session which since it was a budget year is automatic for the next one as well um this analysis page i gave kind of has a bunch of stats and the difference between the high and the low and where the state is going but for many years the state tried to close the gap to kind of bring the top down and bring the bottom up and they got to that point maybe around the 2016-2017 part where there was the smallest gap and now both the top and the bottom are gradually going back up which is fine so um that's just kind of a summary um it's always good to see you know where we compare you will see on that first page as i mentioned so many of the charter schools i know that 41 of the 47 top funded school districts are charters the reason i bring that up is if you recall earlier in the session and even when we met with mr slager there was a push to make school districts at operating referendums like us to share some of that money with charter schools regardless if it's even the charter schools located in your district or not um and the reasoning was that they didn't have the ability to raise money from the taxpayers and so forth but as you can see from this chart they're getting the bulk of the money in the first place so i'm glad that died um i didn't really agree with it conceptually and i'm glad many of the senators on this uh on that side felt the same way so again there's 372 public schools 290 traditional 78 charters and four virtual charter schools and it's sad but all four of the virtual charter schools so they're not even really no bricks and mortar no no buildings all four of the virtual charter schools got more money per kid than we got per kid so so it is what it is but um any questions on this you can approve it at your own you know rob i do have a question about the private schools they don't receive any funding from the state private schools do not get tuition support no not from the school funding formula not tuition support but don't they get money from other sources well a family can get a voucher which then they can use to pay for that tuition but it's still the same tuition that they instead of in essence the state is paying the parents giving them parents the money in order to pay for that same set tuition okay i i i don't know it just kind of seems that that's an important issue not to forget about yep so indianapolis if i remember correctly did decide to share referendum money with charter schools but that bill did not pass for the rest of the state correct that's correct now i think indianapolis is one of those districts that actually operates at least two charter schools of their own within their umbrella under the ips umbrella um those aren't list those two specific skills aren't listed on here because their funding comes through ips they don't get their own separate funding but they chose then to share their funding with these charter schools because they were on they were in essence their schools anyway but not just the two but all the charter schools in the area um maybe i don't know i really don't follow what ips is doing so okay thank you thank you all right thank you thank you do we have any public we have no public comments so with that we'll move on to our board comments and considerations of future agenda items mr marshall nothing i have none thank you this is kelly um just wanted to say congrats to mrs biafalt and mrs bowman on their retirement right okay dr malcolm lots of exciting things going on i know we wish the science olympiad students i think at clark in the high school also and perhaps the other middle schools i'm not sure good luck they go to purdue on saturday for that competition it was great to watch the boys basketball game and and also the girls i know that we are heading into track season which is a very exciting time um can't forget those central that's i don't know if you've i think i texted that information to everyone that the central let's won grand national champion which puts them in the very top position of over 4 300 schools by the time they group them all together so um another stellar performance and i believe that i heard that our cheerleading team did well too so that was awesome not to mention our handbell choir and it just goes on and on and on i could keep talking but mrs seuss i noticed your comment in the in the minutes from last week and i thought that is very true and i also want to thank mrs nokovic mrs milwaukee for transcribing the words in the minutes word for word so that we all know exactly what we say and we don't get accused of things that we don't say um and i think that's it do we have graduation date set is it may be 25 all right thank you thank you dr madeline um i'd like to congratulate mr bannon for his uh 14 to 16 years service with the district um very potent ones thanks and i know that uh spring break is coming up so wherever your travels are going be safe and with that i'll turn it over to dr veraco for board calendar future activities yeah this is an unusual year that uh our meeting falls on the seventh so the second meeting of the month is during spring break so that's why back in december we didn't have a second meeting for march so our next gathering will be april 4th and we are going to move back to the k-trap room unless we have recognition it just is a cozier room for conducting our normal business so we'll be back in k-trap except for when we have a large group recognition thank you thank you all right do we have a motion to adjourn still moved motioned by dr malcolm second second by miss kelly all in favor aye
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um that's just me i'm only one one member um but i i've you know at some point we've got to really really carefully look at these salaries and the other thing was that i had said i mentioned to you dr gifford was once again just me just my thoughts for what it's worth is i i'd love to see these positions you know that be based out of whether it's the high school middle school as well as one of the in one of the elementary schools and maybe have a day which they report to bush street but i you know in my experience i see curriculum directors working really diligently and hard with building administrators as well as teaching staff so i would like to see them out in the field as much as possible i i i'm glad you explained it because as i said to you i'm like i really don't get what you're talking about because um the person is the people now are housed at central office because they do so much more work with central office as well like especially even professional development planning um meeting with our leadership team like it's in and out of offices all day long you know i'm part of that as well especially since michelle left the residency reporting uh supervision just there's so many different tasks that happen but as far as being in the buildings um currently of course we just have tracy you know she does attend staff meeting she'll go to the cpt meetings she'll attend the teacher leader meetings at the high school etc so she is involved in that kind of work already without being physically in a building at all times so i just think as a um you know if they weren't in our building then i'm down way down in people i wouldn't have michelle's gone so if you take the two that we're trying to build out they're gone it's just then i'd be running back and forth to buildings and working so okay yeah but but the work itself does happen in the buildings as well so okay thank you yep you're welcome are we do we need to vote on these on these job descriptions because you put together the draft you sent us the information and i did post them today to tell you this yeah but i'm not sure um we're creating positions creating new positions it's kind of a split position so i guess you could to make it official that'd be great yeah would you like to make that motion now do we want to do that now for those for those job descriptions i'll make them i'll make the motion that we approve the um the two um new job positions for uh the uh element of the primary and then the secondary um directors of curriculum instruction and assessment all right so we have a motion by mr oliver a second by mr noon is there any discussion on that item i would just ask at what point um is this committee going to set parameters for salaries on these two new positions i just have to say i do have fear on that because again if i speak about my hope is that people in house are going to apply and i know what you're saying but with the contracts that have have been negotiated even with the daa for example with the assistant principal role the disparity that happens between a principal position and that so if one of those people applies they may already be making a certain salary that they're going to increase their days right their time well i guess they know what i mean i understand dr gifford but on the flip side then maybe they don't apply for it right but then we're not growing leaders i mean my position is trying to grow good leaders and keep them in the district and if it takes you know that that's my position no i i certainly respect it and i appreciate it um i'm just not comfortable in a salary range of 130 to 140 for these positions i'm not okay other comments yeah i mean unfortunately i'm going to disagree with my colleague here because big surprise i've agreed on a few things that's true i can't remember when but we have yeah but in all services i i think uh in no disrespect you know the old adage you pay peanuts you get monkeys and i don't mean that in a disrespectful way but i think we have to leave that salary scale scout salary range to you know dr gifford and mr kiley to to see who we've got yeah if if we're getting a teacher per se then you know the 116 may 120 may work but if we're getting an administrator who's trying to build into a leadership role the 116 may not work so i think we have to we have to leave that open-ended and let just let the chips fall where they may i have this way i agree with uh john on this one i just um you know i think we're we we want great people into these roles we want to you know and again i just i i think would be helpful to see what comparative districts are offering i know you've said you've done a little bit of research there chris by the same token it's a unique position i'm not sure that how many other districts are offering this kind of position as well but i i think you know we get a lot for what we spend in this district and i think at some point we we have to pay for quality folks like i i you know i don't want to say across the board i mean we have excellent teachers we have so many people who are working for in my mind not enough but i'm worried that if we will lose folks you know to your point to other administrative roles so um that would be you know i'm i'm hesitant to to limit to an unless i have a little bit more research around what those numbers would be and if it's really you know if i think i want to hear a little bit more and make sure that we have that openness so you can negotiate that's well i think we can just approve i'm fine with the proven job description as is and then we can come back with some some research with it yeah okay much more to add but i was i was thinking i did but you came circle with that like and i was just listening chris and i appreciate what you're saying um you know you pay peanuts but we do have excellent you know bang for our buck here and you know it could be a great opportunity for a teacher to kind of step into this role as a stepping stone as well and so i don't want to limit us on that in that end as well but um you know when we start looking at we should be across the board in terms of what can we afford and what what do we what how do we show our value with what we pay for a position but then therein lies the disparity i think that my colleague is referring to in terms of historically we we underpay our our teachers in this district comparatively so i would just want to kind of balance that out i would you know personally i was involved in a situation where an external hiring authority tried to clamp down on um on salaries for people coming into a certain role and then what happened when you do the math sometimes you're asking maybe someone to give more time that they're when you add the extra time that they're working and their salary it doesn't add up to a raise right you're actually working more that's my secret less money so i don't i don't want to want to hamstring dr gifford on that and um you know i do think developing internal leadership and internal talent is really important we want to reward people who do good work in this district that having been said i do understand mr oliver's concerns and so i think i think i would say is that i think what the committee is saying is to do sort of we hope that you do your fiduciary duty right that if the person comes in and their salary does warrant that level that is where we would prefer to be right if we have an exceptional candidate who's already making that money and we need to go a little higher i would be okay with it but i think our default has to be the lower end of the salary range we don't start from there we start we don't start from high we start from low that would be my personal preference yes i was just adding it you know i think the other acknowledgement is that you know we're really expanding a role here just you know certainly we're we're filling up this gas line i always talk about vertical articulation and that's something that's a gap but also there's a big pr component and that you know if you look at new bedford they're hiring their own pr people and these folks are actually you know and setting up a separate role for them and these folks are actually like taking on that role as part of this job description which is significant here because i think we've all acknowledged that this is a a space that we want to you know improve upon so um again just you know when we think about this it's not just about the curriculum piece it is this other you know significantly like pr you know reaching out to the community piece and so there is that other kind of new job that you know i don't know if that was part of um the existing with miss tracy's as much pretty much do it yeah yeah so yeah okay as for the pr piece have we ever considered going with an outside pr firm it's more money it's actually not that bad i've done my research it's actually not that bad um and it takes a lot off people's place it's true other questions so we have our our motion on the floor is there any other discussion about the job descriptions about the job descriptions the motion on the floor right now we'll come back to the budget after we take care of that motion all right hearing no further discussion all in favor aye opposed abstentions so that motion carries unanimously so we have approval for those job descriptions now we're back on to the budget um are there other questions about the budget well i'm waiting to see if anyone else does i'm going to ask a question mr colley so i just want to make sure i'm correct we have about it looks like in fiscal year 22 a little around a million a little over a million um in salaries on our esr grant right and that's that's about what we're saying same 16 fte a little bit of salary increases i just want to highlight that because it is two percent of our budget right that you know come around fiscal year 25 right that's our money's not there um yes that's 16 people that's a lot of people and none of these people i'm because our you know our viewers might not see this but they're special education teachers facilitators classroom teachers social workers guidance counselor instructional specialists teachers assistants nurse i mean these are not like fluff right these are providing core educational services they're necessary they're all necessary positions yeah absolutely that are being funded by grant money that was going to run out in a couple more fiscal years so i think we need to continue to highlight that i don't that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be doing this but i'm i tend to be fiscally conservative and this this makes me a little bit nervous i know we have to do it there's that's the only way you can spend this money it's not the only way but realistically there's only so much like after school programs and this and that you can do you really need people to do this work um but it puts us in somewhat of a precarious position right um and i just want to want to highlight that because it does make me a little nervous i'm sure it's mister yeah we're nervous we keep talking about it right absolutely it'll be exhausted in fiscal 24.
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uh is that something that maybe trialling and potentially using for other programs or is it more one-off um in terms of fundraisers it again i'm not familiar with exactly which one that is um but usually programs um you know they we try not to inundate um you know the small town that we have with the same sundries over and over again so usually what happens is that uh you know certain certain programs run certain fundraisers throughout the year great any other comments or questions okay hearing none can we have a roll call please mr bell yes mr defazio yes miss casino yes mr januzzi yes mr minhas mr uh mrs rasmanov and mrs zipko yes motion capture okay we are up to items number 11 and 12 other matters to come before the board or new business i did not receive any from the members in advance of the meeting but i'll open the floor and ask if there's anything anybody wants to bring up now [Music] just one logistical thing um now that we i hate to even say it out loud but our seemingly getting back to some kind of normal will we be continuing to conduct all meetings online and allow comments from from home is it going to be forever now well that said that will be up to you i think we need to carry it out through at least the rest of this year and then as a board as a whole as a group you guys would have to decide whether or not you want to continue that okay um right now i don't i don't see it to be all that much of an issue um but that's definitely in your purview to decide whether or not you want to do that okay i think it's i mean right okay anybody else feel strongly about that one way or the other i think it's a good idea to keep it going to michelle's point there's families with multiple kids at home and if they have easier ways to watch the meeting online they'd say keep it going not to say we don't like seeing you here so please yeah clearly come on now um the only thing that i would bring up then is i believe that we've been requested in the past to be careful about the ability for people to view different aspects of the meeting whether it's a presentation uh or you know something that we're displaying on a screen so if we are going to do it then let's just maybe take some of that feedback into account and see what we can do differently or better across the other types of things beyond just our discussions anything else in terms of new business all right we are up to item number 13 which is open to the public uh again this is public participation in board meetings members of the public must sign in using uh well here's a below google link but uh certainly the information that's up at the podium name address uh group affiliation if applicable uh so dr gallery do we have any questions online we do not is there anybody in the room that would like to come forward and ask a question okay and we are up to section 14 which is executive session yes we'll be going in an executive session under 1 2 4 seven and eight thank you so resolve for the boundary board of education enters executive session as allowed by mjsa104-11 under the items that dr gallagher has already mentioned may i have a motion oh sure thank you mr powell a second second okay all right run you to just see you now thank you sir so unless it's about me getting a raise uh you'd probably keep it to ourselves though okay should we vote on it all right we're ready to go tom yeah you're good so we're reconvening now an open session we're up to item number 15.1 dissolved at the boundary board of education approves the resolutions as outlined in approval of hiv cases under high school i have a motion motion thank you mr fowle a second second thank you miss casino can we have a roll call please mr bale yes mr fazio yes mrs yes mr januzzi yes mr mithas yes mr samana yes and mr zipko yes ocean carriers 15.3 resolved oh that's a long resolved in accordance with the provisions of njsa the bound broke um sorry 8 18 a colon 37 15 b e the member board of education affirms the superintendent's report of alleged hiv incidents and investigations this is bb agent 20 22 10 11 12 13 alpha period 221 through 7 37.
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right so two more years yeah well two more one more budget here right talking 23. so it's really only one more budget year and um you know we'll we'll do our best to mitigate um the impact but it it's going to happen regardless of our best efforts there there will be an impact at the end yeah i mean unless right the dreaded word right you're looking at likely an override because i don't think that the the town can simply absorb that it would be cuts elsewhere in the town budget which it's not like there's a lot of fat in the town budget either so it's it's just an issue that um i think we just have to remind people out that we're going to have to do something about this um i appreciate though the detailed information on on where that money is going yeah that was helpful does anybody have any other questions about the budget that was my point too so all right so we don't have any other um we don't have to take action on the budget tonight correct right let's taco can you remind us of the schedule again i think it's just good for the public to hear that it is so um our next meeting on the 21st will uh be a school committee meeting in which you can deliberate more on the budget but it will also be our our budget hearing okay so be an opportunity for the public to opine and you know and um so we're you know we're looking forward to that of course and um from there uh we originally thought we'd have a joint meeting that's not gonna be happening in april with the select board which is probably good from a budget perspective in that you'll have the opportunity to decide when you're going to vote it could be that next meeting after the public okay budget hearing and that's what it's scheduled for but it doesn't mean it has to be uh but yeah and then we'll move forward from there and um like i said they did reach out to us regarding the finance committee but i want to be sure that you know you folks have your say before okay before we go before them so okay thank you thank you all right next on our agenda is uh new business so the superintendent's update okay um it's funny because evan did such a nice job ross i always ask the principals any little tidbits you want me to share tonight so ross sent me things he he thought evan was not going to share but evan was all over it so he did mention about the eighth grade coming to the high school tomorrow also it's uh let's see i've got a not a d but yes um the counseling department here also goes to the middle school to talk about uh class scheduling etc so and also we talked today that he is going to plan a parent night an eighth grade period which will be good uh probably the first week in april okay great eight kiddos can come but everything else evan talked about for the high school so that was good um and if you notice i did send you today a link for the tedx in case you wanted to watch it but it's postponed so that date that i sent was we found out later as evan said it was postponed um so a couple other things that are happening planning we're already planning for k through 12 summer reading and once again we'll be focusing on voice and choice the last few years it's been going really well the teachers are everyone throughout the district i know even ms ganthner participates as a as a facilitator of a book and you can offer out a book and and the kids get to choose as we always i joke i stopped because two years ago not one kid hit my book that was it i said that's it i'm not doing again um anyway the second session of the sale program began last week and with new offerings we received overwhelming positive feedback through a survey that we did from parents etc said that kids really loved school and and had a great time doing the projects and all of that so we look forward to another wonderful session for that um we are we just began advertising for help for camp invention which will start off again this summer so it's nice to see things begin to be you know be begin again uh that will be the week of june 27th through july 1st oh that's my mother at the high school i did attend the aasa conference last week and uh well this was the week before already and a lot of the sessions as you can imagine with focus on social emotional learning i did come away with some um a great site group cook cook it's a cook organization and it's really about mental health and preventing teen suicide and so i've reached out to them they're free resources free courses for parents but i want to not just throw it out there for folks stay here take a look at this county i've asked if they could do like a virtual presentation for our admin our social workers perhaps and that we can then share those resources uh with our staff as well as again parents and um it was really really a good session so we had that well maybe with a youth advocate too that way yeah you know it's a good idea yeah that's a good idea uh we wrapped up the accelerated math academy in february we had about 100 students that attended that we'll be running that again in april i was very pleased that we had some high school students jump in which is you know not always the case they don't want to deal with that stuff project time recently met again in person so that was nice and again you met the two teachers that are leading helping facilitate those meetings they've done a fabulous job they this session was discussing best practices for teaching after pandemic very relevant quinn shared and i believe the other schools did too they had read across america where the kiddos could come dressed as their favorite character and potter will be running their um fun run next week and they're hoping to match their twenty thousand dollar raise that they did previous year team chair training begins next week i mentioned that last uh last meeting we're providing a new training for new folks that are new to the district as well as a review for some of the uh people that have already run chairs it things like roll of the chair meeting regulations working with advocates etc and then of course um we are you know preparing for tomorrow night's meeting i did have something i wanted to mention um i know you've all received like well over 500 and probably 50 emails and petition and you know supporting keeping the indian um but in in looking at someone asked me about minutes for the diversity meeting which we said some have been approved and some have not but in looking at that i just wanted to bring something up that the committee expired its appointments as of december 2021 so i became concerned with legal procedures of the subcommittee holding a meeting when the their tenure expired according to your minutes in december and i was i became concerned about that so i i wanted to throw it out there and i know i was just like oh i just thought about it and it was a one-year appointment so i that was all i had i leave it at that thank you so i'll come back around to that i just want to for my um update i just want to remind everyone i think mr oliver had asked us several meetings ago about the school committee sponsoring uh teenagers so i will take the lead on getting the money in to the dartmouth education foundation or i've let them know that we are we are committed to sponsoring a team you all want to write the check for them because it is tax deductible so as opposed to me putting the check in so we can't vend them online i think you would all prefer to write the check to them so if you google dartmouth education foundation it will tell you or you can give me the check written to them and i can i can give it to them um but that way you will all enjoy i believe it's six is it still sixty sixty yeah because there's five of us three hundred i'm doing nothing no no that's fine that would be sixty um write it out to def give it to me or you can give it to mary because mary's also on the board um and we can we can make sure that they get it they know we're good for it online two oh you can donate online okay and we know where to find you if if we're not all clear not at all and please just mind all right so the second thing i want to talk about um is about the meeting for tomorrow night i want to um clear i do want to clear up some misinformation that's been circulating at our last meeting or the 24th um we had a conversation about setting up the dates for this um i asked for help um you all agreed to help um and so at that we set the meeting for the eighth for tomorrow night um i sent out an email i think to mr oliver miss guenther and dr gifford were copied i ask you to reach out to the equino wampanoag at the end of january and i took on reaching out to the mash p wampanoag in the past at wampanoag i know ms genther has also reached out to the equino wampanoag we've reached out specifically to to chairwoman um andrews several times right and so there's been some misinformation circulating that they were not invited they were invited we have we have reached out to them we did we did invite them um i reached out to my task where to reach out to the pokas at wampanoag and the mashpeenwampanog and they asked me what the parameters are and i told them the same thing that would would tell the i think i copied ms genther on this right 10 to 15 minutes if you want to do it one person if you want to do it three people however you want that's your time for that so the mash biwampanoag have agreed to come they have a tribal representative the tribe has voted officially on the issue they have a representative who represents the tribe's position on the mascot she will be coming along with the chair of the mash p wampanoag tomorrow evening um megan running dear paige who is a member of the pokhacet wampanoag has asked to come as a representative of the pokaset wampanoag tribal council they have also voted i i told her the same thing 10 to 15 minutes however you want to divide that up that's up to you several members of the equino wampanoag reached out to me including a former chair of the equino wampanoag they noted that the equino wampanoag has not taken an official position the tribe on the issue of mascots so there's no effect can i correct you madam chair it's not a mascot i'm it's not a mascot symbol the symbol it's just it's not no one running down the field that's fine the symbol whatever we would like to call it the symbol the equino wampanoag have not taken official position on this and so that those members of the aquino want benoit wanted me to represent there or to articulate that there is no official tribal position one of the members of the tribe given that the tribe has no official position asked if he would be able to present at this meeting at the meeting tomorrow given there is no official tribal position i said yes because there is no one to represent the tribe because the tribe does not have an official position yet there is some misinformation circulating that this person is a representative of the equino wampanoag he's not he's an individual who asked to speak and i said yes that is the only request i received from a member of the tribe to speak at tomorrow's meeting outside of the invitation that we extended to the chair so i just want to say that i did not invite someone else to speak as a representative of the tribe that person contacted me and asked me to speak after several members of the tribe articulated that the tribe has no official position and no person is empowered to speak for the tribe so right now we have the mash p wampanoag lined up to come tomorrow the pocasset wampanoag lineup to come tomorrow i have told some people who are in support of keeping the symbol they want to have other people speak and i said i have not been empowered by my committee to do that so i have not invited those other people who have articulated a desire to speak at our meeting to come to speak if this committee so directs me to not invite mr lopes that is the prerogative of the committee i am not i am a member of this committee and i will follow the decisions of the committee but i can't have these conversations outside of meetings because it's a violation of open meeting law and so i'm trying to do the best that i can um with the requests that are coming to me within the parameters that we established which were the mash p wampanoag the equino wampanoag and the picasso wampanoag and one representative the national congress of american indians did not respond the north american center the north american indian it says north american indian center of boston correct ask they represent several tribes they asked to speak i said yes because this is an organization representing multiple tribes as we had slotted again if the committee has a problem with that i can make changes but i can't have that conversation outside of a meeting and i'm just trying to do the best i can within the parameters that have been set up for the committee so i think the first issue that we need to tackle is the question about the equality committee the diversity inequality subcommittee and their appointments i would be inclined to extend their appointment so that they can attend tomorrow's session but that is a decision that we all have to collectively make i mean okay so i would say yes we should extend you know especially since they really haven't met you know just given the the limitations of covet i would say you know certainly extend and then we can you know step back and reevaluate that one on that if we're dealing with that topic first i would say yes i would you know think that we would extend them to the remainder of the school year you know and then we can reva re-evaluate so since some of that work you know has been done but mr oliver thank you madam chair i guess my question to that would be do we know that if everyone wants to continue their appointments i have we emailed i will the only thing i can say in response to that is that we emailed everyone the committee miss amaral forwarded the agenda to the committee no one indicated any intention or desire to step down and from what i have heard from people again not everyone communicates with me they plan on attending the meeting tomorrow so from what i've heard they i have not heard anyone say they do not intend to continue i i'm go ahead and say i mean i would uh i would be inclined to at least extend to this next meeting and we you know we haven't met on a regular basis but for no real reason other than life was crazy coveted um and i think we need to be sort of gracious about the fact that there was no uh other reason we didn't meet or weren't consistent or weren't up to par with um attempting to be [Music] right and correct and you know i can't think of the words right now but i would be inclined to say my my opinion is that we should at least extend it throughout through this meeting and perhaps it would have to be on a future meeting agenda so what thinking about our meeting schedule we're meeting tomorrow we could extend it for a week two weeks right then our next individual meeting is the 15th okay so at tomorrow night's meeting if we extended it for a week we could ask the question that you asked because the committee will be there in open session whether or not people would like to attend or we could say notify us by the end of the week if you do not want to continue i'm i'm mixed i'm certainly mixed based on the um the growth that this has taken on in the community and i would just legally speaking are we in the parameters of the law to just extend it just to reappoint at the day but just reappoint the committee i don't think there's any there's any legal principle that prevents us from doing that if we establish the committee and we establish the committee we establish the membership i don't know i mean i did mr knit against no disrespect i am against extending that uh at this point in time that committee's uh appointment whether it be for a day or a year or two years at this point in time number one their actual term per se has expired type of deal number two at the 11th hour we're trying to have a discussion on this to say do we want to extend it number three we have nothing in writing from any of those participants that they wish to have it extended so that we can see who wishes to extend their appointment and number four more importantly to be perfectly honest with you i don't know how many meetings you've had as a committee i i don't know that but i'd like to know who was at the meetings now i know there were a couple as i look at uh looks like you there's a couple of as i'm looking at the agenda for tomorrow night there's a couple of sessions in the summertime and that's tough to get everybody together with vacations and i understand that i don't know if you had any meetings before that type of deal so as to you know what the what the attendance was that those at those meetings to see whether or not and again there are no parameters to say you know you have to make 75 of the meetings to be in good standing and and such so and you know is there anyone else in the community that may want to step in so that's that's my concern at this point in time i will just note that as of an hour ago we're all quite willing to have a meeting with these members of the committee tomorrow right and so i think for at least one day we ought to extend um and have the invitation that we extended to them so that they can attend this meeting if we don't want to continue beyond tomorrow i think that's fine um but we were all okay with with them continuing on miss ambrose yeah and to to john's question uh all of the meetings that we've had the few meetings that we've had were all posted publicly and are available to be seen on youtube one meeting i was unable to make i actually just sort of watched it from afar but um so and they were well attended but it certainly is a great idea to revisit reforming i mean there are other issues that that committee should be tackling in addition to the one that was scheduled to be discussed tomorrow and i i just think it would be unfair to you know it would nobody said hey i'm done with that committee and we've sent the meeting the minute that it was posted um there are there's no shady dealings going on there i've to clear up some other misconceptions that are being discussed in the community but i would i would personally like to at least extend it through tomorrow and certainly revisit so that other folks i have other things to contribute to that committee but i am more than happy to step away and to allow someone else to sit in and represent those same you know where i what i bring to it other folks can can equally bring to it um but i feel that it's sort of in it's it's happening it was scheduled i think it's unfair and i don't know why we wouldn't want to just move forward with it um but i agree that perhaps other folks would want to serve on that committee you know for enough for the next term perhaps sorry no i was just going to make a motion that we extend it until our next school committee meeting that's the second it's then the terms of the existing members of the diversity i second that motion all right so i have a motion by miss wait i have a second by miss amaral further discussion on the motion mr nunes thank you madam chair i have nothing against the members of that committee or anything of that nature i'm just talking procedural wise and such understand no they're we all go 29 7 450 days okay i got that type of deal so it's nothing again it's just a procedural way yeah um i i would also say that i think that we should officially put this on the agenda for the yeah 15th um so 21st sorry my bad my dates are mixed up but that we put we haven't we put on the agenda a discussion of the terms and how we're going to reappoint and what we're going to do for that i i we can ask we can ask tomorrow night if people would like to continue but we can also tell them it doesn't guarantee that they're going to be able to continue because we'll be having that discussion on the 21st okay if this motion passes and if to send a letter that says or an email to ms gunther or someone that says i'd like to they would like to stay on the committee just so that we have something in writing yeah okay all right we can we can say that tomorrow evening so other discussion on the motion miss counter on the 22nd so just to let you know yes but we'll have a discussion again on the 21st about how we want to proceed so we'll figure that out um any further discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor say aye aye opposed no all right so that motion carries three to two all right next moving on to the meeting for tomorrow evening i do need some direction from the committee about how to proceed where to go what to do so so far we have the picasso wampanoag have confirmed the mashpee wampanoag is confirmed we agreed to that at our last meeting the equino wampanoag we have one individual who is asked to speak the tribal chair has not confirmed um we had one organization that we authorized they couldn't make it there's another organization that we could that has asked if they can speak so let me take those in order with respect to the equino i think we should proceed with a meeting tomorrow evening because we have people who have agreed to attend the question i would ask the committee is whether they would like to schedule an additional meeting for the equino wampanoag to come speak if they cannot make it on the 8th that's one option that that we could have on the table miss wait just you know in light of you know uh a letter that we all received today from mr ventura you know again and understanding that there isn't um unanimity within the is it possible to invite him to speak also tomorrow night as par during that time frame that we have set aside those 15 minutes for the begin we have one person that's coming in from one you know perspective we know that he's strongly in favor of the the logo the iteration name so again since we had extended that invitation understanding or hoping that there was going to be uniformity since that's not the case and we're proceeding with representatives of the queen it seems that it would be that are opposed to maintaining the logo it seems fair to also include that's that's just you know my my thinking is that way we could extend the invitation we have this letter that you know it demonstrates that you know again that he feels that that viewpoint is not being reflected it represents a certain segment of um people in dartmouth who are you know aligned themselves with aquinas so again just as i know it's kind of coming out he might say it's too last minute but again reflecting on that reflecting on the fact that we don't have a unified view from the quina it seems a way to proceed understand that we're giving each of these nations 15 minutes to speak within that 15-minute time frame can you have it i will also say i want to be clear that i did tell the chair of the equinox that having someone else from her tribe would not diminish her speaking time that's good that's good right i mean she is afforded 10 to 15 minutes so it's not like they've got to fit pro and con and it's a 10 15 they're no sure so she would if he would like to come he would be afforded the same full 10 to 15 minutes ms amro so um i just want to clarify um miss andrews has not responded to the invitation has not confirmed attendance correct oh so she may be attending we just don't know of course we want her to um i was wondering if she wasn't speaking because of that they haven't like she she could speak a personal opinion but she is it i was wondering if it was a situation that she couldn't speak on behalf of the tribe as you say no one person right if they haven't brought the issue i i hope she does okay i think you know and i i can certainly cannot speak for a sovereign nation um for any sovereign nation but i think there's certainly some concern um with the um aquina tribe when the wampanoags coming during this meeting where there is more than just the two federally recognized tribes um here um that's just my takeaway um i i don't think there's uh and you know i don't want to speak out of turn but i think there's certainly some concern within their sovereign nation about coming to speak speak at a forum where there's going to be other people here besides federally recognized tribes in which i i understand although the ancestry tests and everything and that the time it takes to do that so in respecting um you know the chairwoman andrews i can certainly understand her her hesitation and i have not spoken to her i've just i've heard this through through other members of the tribe i will also say i have heard from the past chair of the aquina wampanoag and she has indicated to me that that is not an issue from her perspective so it is not necessarily the position of the full nation there's i'm not going to disagree with you madam chair however there is certainly um you know controversy within every uh nation sovereign nation the united states absolutely and this is just no this is just another just another politicalization in society right now unfortunately mr news yeah thank you man excuse me uh i personally uh with all due respect i mean you know it's bristol county and cape cod and that we have the mashpee and picasso coming type of deal i'm not exactly sure what uh north american indian center of boston is going to bring to the table type of deal it you know i'm not trying to throw any water or anything on i don't know of them uh and such i'm not a political sign no disrespect political science person or uh somebody that gets into into the weeds on these things but you know bringing someone down from boston and you know they represent a couple of other i think you said they represent a couple of other tribes or such i i'm not quite sure what they would would bring to the table with uh the uh you know the masterpiece you know uh the aquina wampanoags or anyone down this think of the woods that's my that's my take on the matter so if if you know we didn't have them i would not be upset or anything of that picture i'll just follow it the reason why i said that as i received requests from several other tribes that have been recognized by the state some of which we visit when we play athletic competitions to speak and i didn't i don't think we wanted to have i think there was five or six other tribes that that have have sort of inquired about this and so i felt like that that organization representing that group would be more succinct you don't agree with me the committee doesn't have to agree with me that's my reasoning but i i do need direction on how to proceed miss amero nope i was no i think i was you know starting but that's where i was thinking is because we are going into other communities so that is you know is important for us to understand how you know it's being understood outside of dartmouth that was you know where i would see the you know the usefulness so um i need direction from the committee if they we like to change for tomorrow evening do we want to schedule an additional meeting i will also say um with respect to mr ventura i've had some conversations in mr pereira um with miss murphy who's on the equality subcommittee about arranging the meeting for the 22nd and one of the things i think that we would like to do while it is for public comment i think we would like to invite someone from each side to open and represent the position of and have a more extended time to talk at that public comment right i think we do need to put time limits on people because if people talk for 10 minutes we'd we'd be there till two in the morning we're not gonna hear from very many people but i don't think i think two minutes is enough to hear a few things but i do think we may have so another option to think about is to invite mr ventura mr pereira to be the opening speaker right for that side of the debate we can invite them tomorrow but then also on the 22nd to be and to give them the 10 to 15 minutes right that would be the same as as what happened here so i think we should do that regardless of what happens tomorrow um i that was another thing i wanted to sort of ask you about i want to stay focused on the eighth before we get to the 22nd but i just want to throw that out there that that i think is an option for an extended period of time to speak about that position miss emerald do you have your hand up my um i'm withdrawing my hands okay so mr newton okay i don't know about anybody else but we've got the meeting on the 22nd which is which is fine uh i've kind of blocked that date off my calendar we've got the 21st but i don't have with all due respect i have no other time the rest of the month i'm straight out okay it's unfortunate my busiest time of the year right now so yeah i'm retired and you know once i get by april 19th i'll be good but uh so you know we're doing tomorrow night and we're going to do the 20 you know we've got our school committee meeting the 21st we've got that meeting on the 22nd that's good uh i'm i'm personally i'm good with that okay huh and we got the spelling yeah but so but as far as an agenda like on the 22nd type of deal whoever wants to come god bless them they're more than welcome to come it's an open meeting i would give them three to five personally i'd give them three to five minutes i'm talking about the people in the audience i think we're i think two to three i think is sufficient but i do think that having someone who represents either side to sort of start off close off i don't know would be a good thing because i know mr pereira and mr ventura have put a lot of effort into this and so to give them the space and time to talk about and to not say two minutes no no i think it would be appropriate on the 22nd yeah no no i but everyone else two minutes i was going back i was going backwards on that i know you had talked earlier about it you know somebody opening up and getting there right you know 10 or 15 minutes i was i'm i'm good with that but you know the people in the audience two minutes two to three minutes i'm good with that great that's fine all right miss ambrose my hands back up because my comment was similar to the 22nd i i do in terms of like parameters around that i agree that there needs to be a set limit but similar to how you testify for um something at the state house i think it's helpful if we sort of hold their hands a little bit or allow those people who are representing the sides i cannot stand talking that way because i i the division is really just making me sick but um you know 340 words on a paper literally is going to take your time that you know to spell it out for them to say no more than 350 words on your paper and if you and your friends have something similar to say then perhaps you pick one of you to come up because like receiving 500 of these emails we use them phone to action for my work we we have action alerts all the time we allow for some personalization that these didn't so when i see one i see 50 i see 100 i see 500 to me it's all one it's like a generic kind of spewing out of the same commentary so if they're going to come on either end and say the same thing for or against keeping the image um i think that it's it's not a good use of all of our time i think that if there could be a coordinated effort to have a spokesperson i think that's what i would i think it would make sense to have people who are invested to be the spokesperson but also then the then the community where you get that's where you get your two minutes and i think 340 or 340 years i can give you the accurate i think that's three minutes to be honest so we can we can we can perhaps provide some instruction so i just want to clarify on the 22nd are we in the auditorium because i know on the 22nd the after prom has scheduled as planning six o'clock and i would just think would be a huge bottleneck if we tried to do that in here in the 20 seconds i'm assuming that we'd be the auditorium with i mean that seems to be has a huge problem with that that's the only thing we cannot fit in here on the 22nd there's no way you can't do all of virtual [Music] streaming and then then we may have to give some of that up because i think we need i think we need to have the space for people to be able to attend this meeting i think it's gonna be tough otherwise you're gonna have people in the hallway this bottleneck so i think i think for the 22nd i think we need to be in the auditorium i agree it's not going to be everything and that's fine people are just going to have to i mean if they want to voice their opinion they're going to have to show up they can see it online but we have to do the 22nd in the auditorium i think there's no ifs ands or buts about that so let me sort of summarize real quick on the 22nd we've decided auditorium opening speaker on each side and what i think what we would like to do is to have two separate podiums so we make sure that there's some alteration just just a thought yeah and you know um i know they have towel meeting here maybe we should look at um getting dc tv for this event because they can stream they can go live on cable um versus the streaming and then they also they do town meeting with the two different microphones going back and forth you know yeah i think that makes sense yeah i mean no there's no disrespecting yeah we got to be in there and we got some stuff and i think you're right we've got to be able to it's a really good idea if they're available i hope yeah i hope um can miss gentler can you see if if they will be available on the 22nd that's a good idea and then we'll do two to three minutes after that and i think we also need to say this is the time at which the meeting shall end right we're going to say it where we start at 6 30 we're done at 8 30 30.
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have a motion motion thank you mr paul a second second thank you mr simano i apologize dr gallagher did we just approve 15 in total and i should be moving to 16th yeah so we've approved 15 in total and that we're on to 16. correct so resolved that the board boundary board of education uh approves the resolutions as outlined an approval of hiv cases under middle and elementary schools this is 16.2 it's 16.3 i have a motion motion thank you mr paul a second thank you mr zamano may we have a roll call please mr mayor yes mrs fazio yes mrs casino yes mr januzzi yes mr minhas yes mr rasmanov yes and mr up to yes number 17 we have exhausted the agenda and i will entertain a motion to adjourn motion thank you mr pop a second second thank you mr zepco all in favor thank you have a great evening
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8 30 9 o'clock maybe 8 30 right and we we say sorry if you want to get up and talk get up and talk first because we're not going to stay till midnight and you have every everybody speaks once before somebody comes back and speaks again great good call agreed um i would say you only get one shot right at the apple but we can we can allow two if if there is time yes miss amara i don't know if we have the infrastructure to facilitate this but i think it would be useful if we do the math we figure out a minute up and down the do the math figure out how many folks we can have speak on either side and that first come first serve if you're here uh you know the first 60 people on either side speak kind of thing where i i just feel like there's going to be a bottlenecking and and already the emotional kind of i don't want it i want it i i'm i'm worried about what this is setting up for i'm a little bit confused but that's okay so you we're talking about having two microphones or two podiums correct at that type of deal but is one gonna be four and one going to be against or is everybody i think we do whomever i could be four and i'm on this podium here but i could also be four and be on that podium depending where i'm sitting i think we should do for and against and if we run out of say four or against then the other podium keeps going or we can see the balance so i think i think that allows for some some balance do we take a look at and we can also see if there's 50 people on one line and 10 people in another line then maybe we do two in one yeah can i can i just wait sorry um so at the end of this i guess at the end of that meeting what is the expectation are we then coming back at the next meeting and voting are we kind of hopefully crafting some sort of compromise are we i guess i'm trying to see like where where what is our next is it april 4th and then we're making a decision is are the diversity and equity folks who now may not be with us after the 22nd for that next meeting will they or whoever's you know part of that meeting will they then be helping sharing their opinions i guess i'm kind of you know i think just to have a sense of like where are we are we are we coming on the fourth when there's now we have this vote that's happening on the fifth are we voting on the fourth you know just just so we kind of understand as a group like what we're um i think we should have a conversation about that on the 21st okay as part of the structure the i mean this is not a this hasn't been on the agenda so i don't want to get too far into that okay well either either either that or we have it this is we have a discussion af amongst we have as part of our meeting on the 22nd we have a discussion okay yeah we could we could yeah okay we can do that but i don't think we need to decide that okay that's good um all right so tom so i think we're sounds like we're pretty good on the 22nd yup tomorrow night um mr nunes has articulated i just want to be clear you you want mash p wampanoag picass at wampanoag and that's you're good with that right um i would like to hear from the rest of the committee about who else to speak this way you know i think we've i mean my my sense is you know i think it's um it's unfortunate that there's division within quina i think that you know clearly um dr gifford has reached out numerous times and i think we've reached out to that community it's it's difficult i don't think it's fair for us to say that given the circumstances and everything else to say that well you don't want to be in the same room as you know these other folks i i think we've given them the opportunity i think tomorrow is it like and i'd like to say we can you know consider you know including mr ventura but again like i you know or you know maybe expand that invitation i know it's last minute but i don't think we should have a separate date i think we've got a kind of you know again we've we've done what we can and i don't think there's a lot of appetite for you know anyone to kind of push this out like much more so i just just being thoughtful i think we've we've tried you you know a lot of people put a lot of heart into this you know and there's a lot of emotion and i think we've got to kind of move forward so miss emerald did you have your hand up or no i i don't have strong feelings um either way i can i can um i can see where you're coming from i see where john's coming from um i i don't i don't really have any uh strong feelings about the other gentleman you know um i just wish it wasn't so divisive um and [Music] you know as a community especially after what we've gone through these last couple years it would be refreshing to see uh just a different kind of scenario that's playing out in our community it's uh it's discouraging uh disheartening um but uh i'm i what the committee's pleasure is is where i'll kind of go with this one in terms of planning for tomorrow so i need to i need to email mr lopes and the north american center for what this evening what do i email them they have both indicated that they would like to speak i would like to hear them speak i would also like if mr ventura or any one of the other members of the tribe or all of them that sent us a letter are able to come tomorrow they're welcome to come i don't know if anybody is in contact with any of them mr oliver would you be able to reach out to mr ventura and certainly uh try to reach out to some one of some of them so what i would say is that i would extend the same invitation as many of them that would like to speak in 10 to 15 minutes to articulate their position as members of that tribe okay i will certainly do that okay thank you very much for that okay so that i think we've worked through the issues around that and so now i have no other items over the chair to speak about do others have items they wish to speak about miss wait okay so one of my questions again i know that i'd reach out to dr gifford who was going to reach out to ms oliveira about getting that list of curriculum pieces so if that i mean i think i have a fairly solid handle but it would be helpful to know for example you know do all fresh so this is regarding like what we actually cover when it comes to native american history beyond third grade which is excellent i know that we do part-time indian and i think you know um i don't know if there are projects that are done like and if that's done across the ninth grade or just within um and of course within the american history courses you know there's quite a bit that's done around the trail of tears i don't know if that's tied back into um you know specifically russell's garrison and everything that's involved you know with king phillips warren how much we cover that in the high school just looking at the ap curriculum because i've been you know we go over the dolls act and indian reorganization act and certainly you know jackson's policies but we don't like really so again i'm just curious to see like if we you know if we can kind of look at that and you know think because that's a big question that keeps coming up is if we're truly honoring what are we doing in the curriculum and i also think in all fairness those new social studies standards came out 2019 we're dealing with covid so we have to give everybody a lot of grace on this but if you know i think it's important that we can answer this is what we're doing it'd be great you know maybe we can add this we have some amazing like rich um local history too you know all throughout this town like related to that so um again just just you know just kind of thinking that through um well she did as i said to you we follow the math standards yes so many of them talk all through the grade levels about grade grade three is the one specific specific to the um local history etc etc but all of the others i just you know a couple of samples culture religion education um civics but they all have something in them about and what the teachers can bring into it um there was something else you had just met self-selected civics projects in eighth grade yeah and then some people some of those kids are actually like have been right you know invested in but those are self-selected so i just just again i think it's important that we talk about this you know you know if you know as a community we make the decision to keep this image and keep this name then you know what does this partnership look like what does this look like in terms of education and then and if we don't what does that look like in terms of education so that's an important component yeah she did have a conversation with the teacher leader at the high school as well as sarah digas who's overseeing all the curriculum at the middle school okay and they basically said the same things you know yeah okay well good yeah i think that's helpful to know have some sort of but again you had a good sense of it okay thanks uh other mr news thank you madam chair uh a few good things uh mr peratti was kind enough those of us that were here early to uh as i say to people give us the nickel tour of his uh rebuilt media center yeah computer lab in there control room whatever you know me and computers uh and boy it's nice that you know as as i said to them it's kind of like you watch on television and they'll show a picture of a can right control room of a program and you know there's 20 monitors and 50 people were absolutely great for our students to uh to be able to do that and i know uh i haven't talked about the uh students going up to harvard to uh for training there and he was mr parotti was talking about going down to uri in the next couple of weeks to to take a look at theirs so that that is nice that uh i know i went to sports teams and again was talked about but good luck to our hockey team thursday night and uh deca kids uh spring sports are gonna be starting which is good it is nice to see everybody's face mm-hmm that is wonderful type of deal and uh last but certainly not least just uh a reminder about uh the uh music association the music department's uh nesba show on saturday the 19th sure yes yeah that's that's the only place it can be you know that type of deal starts at 12 noon with our jv color guard our winterguard uh they're gonna conclude somewhere around four o'clock the uh color guard portion of it uh the awards right after that then the percussion takes over uh our winds are on uh i believe around seven and percussion at 7 30 or vice versa i'm not quite sure and then awards right after that so you know great opportunity to come and see students from all over new england you know from you know new hampshire connecticut you know down the cape rhode island type of deal to uh and have a wonderful day so that's what i have mr news you had asked if we could if someone could come i am unavailable that day okay i'm just you mentioning that yeah i have another appointment so i just remember that and if i went home i would have forgotten it so i'm going to tell you that now so i apologize but i have another another commitment all right other issues all right so hearing none so technically our next meeting is tomorrow night at 6 30 here in uh the library media center and and just so i think you know this one other before i let let you go is one of the things we were thinking about is depending on crowd we're likely going to have to set up a live stream in the auditorium if there's many people here i mean we you know so we what we might try to do is reserve the seats for the people who are coming to speak yeah um and there'll be a live stream for sort of overflow in the auditorium if that is necessary but just i want to sort of get that out there if anyone's watching tonight because if they can't come till late they may as well just be at home and watch live stream there because so right that we have limited capacity here we will have extended capacity on the 22nd but tomorrow night it will be um if you if you can't fit in there you're going to have to go into the auditorium for a live stream i um i believe that's how the agenda read yes okay i just okay good i just want to make sure that people are aware of that because not everyone reads the agenda right so i just want to say that so our next meeting is tomorrow and then our next regular meeting of the school committee is on the 21st um but that will entertain a motion to adjourn second all right emotion by mr nunes a second by everyone now we'll pick mr oliver any further discussion hearing none all in favor aye aye oppose that motion carries unanimously thank you everyone have a good evening [Music] the diversity and equity committee will be here
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commission and as chair i'm calling this meeting to order as i mentioned and i am calling in from my home here in ann arbor welcome to the march 8 2022 electronic meeting of the energy commission this virtual meeting is to affect social distancing and to mitigate the spread of the covet-19 virus we will conduct this meeting similar to in-person meetings commissioners during roll call please indicate your current location and during the meeting please remain on camera just as you would be visible during an in-person meeting also mute your microphone when not speaking public comment will be held via telephone only to speak during any of this public meeting uh opportunities and there will be two please call one of the following toll-free numbers eight seven seven eight five three five two four seven four eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine and enter then the meeting id number which is nine three seven six seven five one six eight one nine on your phone these this information along with is available on the public uh published agenda in the public notices section of the city's website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 and att channel 99 as well as online at a2gov.org backslash watch ctn missy would you please read the land acknowledgement absolutely i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinaabe including the ottawa ojibway and buddhawatomie and wyandotte peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous people the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807.
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okay i hereby call this meeting to order roll call please brown is here dr hall mrs galbert here mrs walters here mr swallow here vice president ruth here president at auburn here please stand and join me in 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 right ms roop would you please recite the mission statement our mission is to empower each student to positively impact the world for a bright new future okay and let me get the right can i now can i get a motion to go into closed session for the purpose of self-evaluation practices and procedures or professional ethics when meeting with a representative of a statewide association of which the public body is a member roll call brown isn't i mrs galbraith hi mr swallows aye mrs walters aye vice president rue aye president albert aye and for public anyone watching will be in closed session for approximately one hour and we'll come back and pick up the meeting again with public comment okay we're back in open session um terry do we have any public comment yes sir okay next up uh any board updates yes well we had an insurance committee meeting and um i don't i think we can mention last time that we have a new what do you call them i was going to say provider but that's broker okay and so we're just we're just starting that process and so we're waiting for some quotes from blue cross blue shield and um we're hoping to get everything together early april so that we will have something to present and to come to the board for a vote for the new insurance you know just the way we're planning to go but we really don't have the information yet so there's not a whole lot that we could say at this point and i'm sorry i didn't i didn't prepare anything right thank you the only other thing i had um so last tuesday dr hall and i went to a iasb uh meeting for the three rivers division and they had a gentleman there talk for about an hour about the state about the taxes and how it affects everybody in the state and i will say that about a year ago ken you had mentioned that we have about 8.5 million to spend and we had a year window well that window is closing so apparently the way it works is i think this year it's somewhere around 3.7 billion and then next year 530 million will be available and then in 2024 four more billion just about 3.8 to 4 billion and then in 2025 there's no money allocated from the state at this point so i guess the reason i bring it up is that whatever we're making today we have to be prepared for as ken had mentioned a year ago that at the end of the three years how are we going to sustain what we're doing right i mean essentially that's what we want to make sure because we're not sure if the funding from the state is going to be there in 2025 right well and and i think and mr wallace are you talking about the art money that that is going on yeah right so um so the way that works is that we have been allocated in rp3 or sr3 which is the american mastery plan um i believe it's around 9.5 million and we could use that over three years up through 24.
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is um [Music] we're gonna begin with the pledge of allegiance of america one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice um so i do hope to gather kobit is over just like everyone else in this room and everyone feels unfortunately we have to keep a really close eye on it still if you check the state's site data is from 217 the thursday before vacation to march 3rd this past thursday and reported two staff and two students being positive within our district when checking the school district's dashboard is unclear that the week um the late state appointment two is from another mom emailed christy and got a clarification that two pieces in toronto and that confirmed none in the elementary schools although no date is next to this bar on the ground in the survey 56.5 of the parents surveyed wanted an email alerting them if a positive case was identified did this email go after honcho parents if so so they could be high alert to test their own children i'm in the elementary school a lot of people have siblings in toronto and vice versa in elementary schools so this is really important for us to know and to be aware of we no longer have the mass or distancing that 57.3 percent of the survey parents believe contributed to keeping our schools open and in person we need to monitor any cases as the spread will go unchecked by masks and an outbreak could spread like wildfire within our schools and our community 69.3 of the surveyed parents believe the school district should define parameters once removed but also reinstate masking and code regulations something that was overlooked by most of the committee worcester county and most of massachusetts is green for the new cdc color coding system this system includes percent hospitalization other coping rates and also hospital debt availability which is really important but it's also important to note that one can no longer just compare rates between worcester boylston and berlin without this percent hospitalizing vet availability cdc raised the cases for a hundred thousand from fifty per hundred thousand as a benchmark for indoor masking to per hundred thousand and this increase is very dramatic if you don't take into consideration the two other factors that then put you into the yellow green and orange categories that they now have decided upon i hope the school committee can educate themselves on the current guidelines stay up to date on the rates within our towns and surrounding districts and also keep the dashboard up to date so parents can make themselves aware of current rates within the district and how much they need to be aware of symptoms from their own children so we're moving on to communications um we still have an open seat in berlin uh with no absolutes um the physician is opening a seventh month seven month commitment and all of our seats are up for re-election thank you um in november all the seats will be up for re-election so it's a great opportunity for someone to come in to try to save you to see if they would like to be on the school committee to you know give a small amount of their time to being on the committee it when i was appointed i looked at it as dipping my foot in the pool if anyone is interested in applying for this we are going to have an april 5th meeting where we will um interview any and all applicants at that time and we are really like some people to step forward from berlin specifically because it is item number five is there a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented yes second second discussion all in favor aye and i as well the motion to approve the consent agenda as presented passes [Music] so just in general the way this stuff usually works the school committee should write policy that's what we're going to do is the job of the school committee to write a procedure how that policy is going to be implemented so there's really when it comes to this masking in in all of the culverts there's really three possible stages you can be in it can be a recommendation it could be just a guidance it's a suggestion or it could be a mandate if it's a mandate from the state or the federal government that's something we would just have to do there's no arguing something on the wall under the wall um if it's a recommendation or guidance then there's the law options and that's where we would write some protocols and so that's what i wanted to talk about tonight not so again this is not the case of a mandate mandates are totally different we have to abide by state endings that are backed up by mass general law and last quarter regulation so um that's the background on this and so the carol and i worked with the superintendent's advisory which just jessica is a member so in glory we have a few other members two and uh sally sally and also and um we decided that we were going to use the latest covet 19 community level guidance this document this is february 25th clearly lays out three different categories [Music] or school level data but it does use three different parameters that are laid out in another document yes so this new guidance relies on three things relies on the covet hospitalization admissions over the past the previous week the percentage of hospitals that's occupied by co-vacations in a new case of pearl 1000 either above 200 or below 200 again just for reference so it's this guide is here and then what we got to do is we had an faq to go along so that would sort of be the guided document and guiding two documents and so um this will be a running this will be a running uh faq that we will keep on our website we will send this out as soon as the school committee approves their faith covering guidance we try we had a draft of the policy that's going to be voted out tonight and we try to make the protocols um work in line with the policy which is what we're supposed to do so i'm going to quickly go over these faqs i think does any questions about just one answer that too first question was and so we just generated five questions we basically asked if you're a parent what kind of what would you be interested in knowing after you look at this how long does our community have to be in each category before we change our masking guidance and recommendations so we will make that decision after 10 days from the time identified as having moved to the new chattahoochee so you move to the category 10 days from there the reason we did that is because there's a seven day lag so the category is based on what started to happen seven days before that so it's not seven days and then another ten days seven of those will be one full cycle so we essentially will be in a category for two full cycles and then three extra days that we usually need to make the decision get the communication out to the community so um question number two what other thing will you consider we're going to consider town and school vaccination rates as well as covert positivity rates um we look at cdc data as really one point although they considered three and again that's one of the things that as uh as an advisor we were still working on some details that have to be worked out with that but this is uh you know this is a living doctrine so we're continuing to work on number three will the masculine guidance be applicable to extracurricular activities um this will this guidance will be applied to indoor activities there's no masking guidelines for outdoors we will file the miaa guidelines also so if the miaa says they have to do a mask outside and then we obviously have to follow them but this guidance when we decide to put mask on if we do if we recommend that scrutiny and then they go to do it then it will apply just into us outdoors will still remain unmasked unless we're told to do differently the social distancing and other land layers of mitigation lay the mitigation strategy be considered in addition to masking we're always considering additional mitigation strategies we can continue to provide cleaning and disinfection as well as participation in symptomatic testing and the at-home testing we've removed all the social distancing guidelines that's been since the beginning of the year i know some of the buildings have a little extra space so they move students apart but you know we have to consider that what we're trying to do is we're trying to get back to normal for our students normal pre-covert um other considerations would be turning on impact on hand dryers uh in the restrooms and the drinking water access which would shut all those off we have um building stations still on and the um the cool of the five gallon bottles so if available those are those are in place also so again uh i know speakers of theory had asked me i said well we'll keep everything as is for until eighth one and we'll visit that um one will general assemblies regular watch baby again our overarching goal is to normalize the school day as much as possible we've returned to regular lunch periods and assemblies um so those are the those are the five those are the five so far um uh i guess is once we put these out parents will ask additional questions and believe again we will just keep adding to this as we go along again i want to stress that if it's a mandate for federal government estate to put mass.com we need to do it if it's a guidance recommendation along those lines we'll make a recommendation based on the data we collect we'll make a recommendation to the school committee and they will have a role so that's new asking these are the protocols go along with the policy that this committee is going to be voting on tonight and so this is incorporated in that policy that's inside it's not a quote it's not incorporated into the two separate things yeah that's why so it's gonna be two votes no you don't vote on protocols i'm just telling you what they are so no we're not going to vote on the protocols but so i guess you're proposing here that the school committee votes if we move if the school or the town moves into the color from cdc whatever the color is green orange is it i don't know so if we move into that we wait 17 days right well it would be 10 days right and then does the school committee vote yeah most likely so is that in policy if we voted in then we followed this procedure that's what i'm asking yeah yes that's what i'm asking i had the only reason i wanted first class because i had the same questions yeah so you'll vote on the policy and then yeah these protocols go along once you do this that gives the schools that's what i was trying to understand all right i got it now thank you so one vote on your house yeah that makes sense just ask the question everybody says steve see you sitting both first steven asked that was being turned and it's not until you go there yeah that's just a waterfall and hand dries most likely we've turned those off uh earlier [Music] you know again when we i just didn't want to do everything at one time but i feel pretty confident about that one because when those were turned on it was the idea that you would have the virus on your hands and then you know very little evidence anymore that that's that's any kind of an issue so what do they have now paper towels paper towels are there any other questions asking protocol for jeff before you move on to the mlu [Music] that the community didn't consider anything from the survey or any making policy i just want to say we did consider everything we were presented with everything that was presented was considered and then a decision yeah and just to follow up on that i will say that when this policy subcommittee met we had already been thinking about these protocols so it was considered the cdc was considered when the policy was written so i mean the public wouldn't have known that the doctor was considered you guys just wrote this policy yeah after we voted yeah we've had police presence in our school were part-time regarding police officers and science law school schools for a while there are two policy exhibits that are currently in the on the books they were from 2008 i believe and they were just signed by the school today so they really weren't even hammer used um they were procedural documents and seizure documents again they're usually written by the school so we didn't want to take them out we didn't want any place until we had something else substantial so um tonight we're going to talk about the mou that was developed by the district attorney's office at the temple everybody uses the same name their attorney's vetted i've sent it out to our attorneys who vetted it didn't have a problem basically that everybody uses when you look at it you can see that it slices all of the laws um so this is the one we'll be following two things we want to tell you this is again this is what this is this will replace those policy exhibits but the other thing is typically emilu is assigned by the police chief and superintendent about fifty percent of the time or so the school committee also signs off on we don't care i mean either way actually i'd probably like to have the school committee number to sign off on the mou um we don't have any plans to make any amendments or changes to this they're just places we have to kind of flesh it out put out school names in the end with some personnel names but typically what happens is it's a police officer so that a police officer that end is covered by the police department one of the things we've never had is the evaluation of the sro which the superintendent takes place in is provided for here and also training their training courses the sros now didn't exist before so that's all covered in here and so what we would do so we just had it in tonight for a discussion and i suppose if you name the time you'll have to have a vote on it next next meeting but um again it would just be a matter of you know putting your stamp on something that already exists and formalized that the relationship cal i know you had some stuff you wanted to kind of talk about yeah we've been working as a crisis team with the two police departments and fire departments for a long time now and when they brought this forward this just really formalizes the parameters for both parties and it gives us some kind of like it gives us flexibility with them to be able to utilize them in ways we may not have wanted to do before i mean i think it also speaks to our partnership with them and honors their presence in the schools unlike other districts they're not in our schools some of them have places they stay all day in the schools that's not the case here our resource officers go in and out of the schools but they're very active in terms of speaking in classrooms doing their program they've helped us with outdoor dollars drills doing trainings and as i said we meet with them at least twice a year and other times informally they're just around so i think this was brought forward from the two police officers chiefs um and they're really asking us to create that partnership but in a stronger way with them they feel that now is the time the last one is jeff mentioned and we haven't revisited um having this in place also gives us an opportunity to look at this annually with the police chiefs and say you know what kind of job in the sro was doing what else could we want them to be able to do so i think that's going to be um really important also as you read through the document you'll notice there's no financial commitment from the district it all comes from the town for the police department so it's already funded through their overtime pretty much um or anywhere they choose to fund this but um we're asking for your enlistment really and your opportunity to sign along with us um when we signed this initiative with the police chiefs as jeff mentioned we were falling back once we talked to you about this tonight and you have a chance to read it we're going to be meeting with them in the month ahead with the two police chiefs sitting down and going over this document more thoroughly making changes to it we felt we're most appropriate to us as a district and with the police department and then we'll move on to the next month's um divorce i don't know if anybody's had a chance to look at it again if you've had any questions there's a lot of flags or questions you have one thing i wanted to point out one of the the questions well first of all the school committees superintendents shouldn't be writing down these should come from it should be a state level document that covers all the bases one of the things that's covered in here and i think parents worry about a lot of competitive police presence in school is whether or not they will take on discipline so wonderful funded mass general laws they're not allowed to take part in general do that we have we have good relationships with our police departments and so and we know those thoughts and i know the principles work closely with them so we don't have those issues so i'm admittedly not well informed on this topic however i do know that there are other districts especially some of the larger urban school districts in the state where they've looked at different models for the amount but can you just help us understand your perspective on the role they play within schools and um well the the original intent of the sro this goes back to the midnight to build a wall between the police departments and the school district so that when children saw police at least out in the community they didn't look at them as the adversaries and enemies that they saw them differently than that so you know we continue to do that so they still we want them to think they're friendly and we want them when they're out on a you know on a saturday or friday we so you know that was the original goal and it still remains that but it's grown so they do as cow said they do a lot of professional development in the buildings um they they do uh what's the program with uh no not the odds yeah different variations of that i know we should have their office so you know it's basically that that that co-op um [Music] focus is really still in my mind what it's about it's having police in the building with safety aspect you know that hasn't changed plus they bring a lot to the table in terms of just stuff we can do in the buildings just you know they walk through the buildings and as you know we put you know safety film on all of these windows that was as a result of uh police liaison saying you know this that's a lot of glass on there those kids can go through it someone can try to come in there's a there's a very very cost effective way to deal with this um so as far as the why other districts have gone in a different direction i don't i don't know well the bigger ones are because they have bigger issues and they have you know maybe more criminal activities but i don't i don't i don't i don't know i can't speak to that i would just add to that we're very fortunate to have two wonderful officers who are dedicated to the schools i mean they all are really um but these two in particular dave holding berlin goody uh he's now managed i mean he's just there with the kids from when they're little and he knows them all and um brought barbados in doyle's and these these two men have gone out for trainings above and beyond to understand the laws and how to work with young people i think it speaks to something we talked about the last meeting that jake mulatto was here to talk about they want to build the relationships with the children while things are good so that they trust them and that they may think twice before something happens and they know that they can go to them in a safe safe and respectful way so i think that's that's what these gentlemen model um with them and it's i've seen it through the years we stepped up involved over in berlin and they used to keep their dare raised until they usually keep their dare essays and when you used to see them as teenagers sometimes you get in trouble you would that's exactly what you get out of it pull out your essay and read it to them i mean that was the kind of experience that it was and that's who they are we just feel very fortunate just that they support us and we support them i think that makes the difference from other districts nations and natural i don't think they're presences seen in the same way that we create and it's a relationship and they think a lot of them they think differently than we do we don't think about they might obviously think about school safety but in a different way they see these little things and they they call you attention to it it's just little tweaks here and there and um those are invaluable as it does between someone walking in the building and somebody not so they really are valuable do the principals want to add anything i mean you you see them all the time if goody was here you'd give you college so yeah i think you know i think with our relationship but really as carol and jeff stated it really is about um building relationships and not um so much about the discipline because they'll be the first ones you know to say that we as administrators have more power than police do um with the changes you know with the changes in the laws and they want to you know be partners with us they come in and they speak to students in the health classes work with the with the counseling office whenever we have a you know a crisis or a need you know we just make a quick phone call and they you know they're here um not just to offer guidance and and support some of the larger you know the larger districts they have you know very intense security systems um you know the students and staff have to go through daily there are schools that have um actual courts in there you know in their schools um and so it looks very very different than it it looks here and um it really i think it just the way that we are doing it really just adds to the relationship that we um have to over 14 years ago i need to say it one more thing we've talked a lot about the officers in school but i can share at least with goodies in berlin there's also an outside presence there are you know from time to time unfortunately things that happen in the community and cody's been so good with kids about kind of just taking them aside and reassuring them because he knows what's happening out there whether it's a medical emergency or or something less well-known um that relationship because it's been established for so long kids looked at him for that and really part what makes that relationship between him and my kids for that now i remember as a building industry i would meet with rsro every monday morning in high school and he would go through all the things that happened to me in all the possible issues that i might see that morning so you could you could attend to that stuff before it became a problem [Music] i think yeah it sounds like it's working out well here uh a couple you mentioned discipline that didn't even cross my mind a question about them involved with discipline but you mentioned specifically this new written document helping um build the relationship even what specifically will change in the schools with this will anything i don't feel like we're seeing anything changing i would yeah i really don't see anything that's actually happening kind of on the ground what's happening in the schools right now as far as that but we did if you go back if you compare this all of this to the previous one which it just shows how much they can do and how much they can help the fact that they go for training now if it's written down so just formalizing what you're doing exactly there's some pieces in there that you know even gave us some ideas as we went through it about other things we can do together and then we're building that i think that's something we've been building two years with the crisis [Music] well there's an educational component here that was never formalized for them so you know they'll bring that stuff to us you know go to the training program and that's our training program that we really never had and they'll bring those ideas back to us so we'll have a lot of that the superintendent really was there but in the schools would not be building on a formal way to evaluate at least i can bring something back to the table so that's what will be [Music] we are going to um uh mr henry is not here so we're going to um give his presentation he will give it at our next meeting and we're going to watch him thank you i'm just going to step up here for a moment so this is our annual mid-year benchmark discussion currently in the in the elementary schools and historically only in sixth grade we have used aims web which is an online program and it's a universal screening program that allows us to progress monitor students in the areas of reading and math and um it really helps us guide instruction but also provides us with on interventions and targeting those students who are in um in need of some sort of intervention where whether it be in math or english language arts so honda students in grades six through eight have completed their mid-year benchmark assessments due to the transition um previous years we had done math testing in grades seven and eight this year however um there was a decision that was made um really i believe it was over the summer and really in the early fall to change from map testing to aims web testing in the seventh and eighth grade as well to offer some continuity on between the elementary schools up all the way through the middle school so what you're going to see or what you do see in your report is that we only have mid-year benchmark um data for our seventh and eighth grade because the fall was a time in which we uploaded all of the secondary graders into into ames web as well as our sixth grade teachers trained our seventh and eighth grade teachers as well on the platform and the use and the data analysis so um this report is for sixth grade from fall to winter uh the light blue is our winter scores and the darker blue are our fall scores so in math um and reading up above is is the reading um you know as you can see a significant amount of our students are at um average above average or well above average i'm very pleased with um with the growth that we saw on in our average students um because i think that really shows you know obviously with kobe last year i think it really shows the difference sort of that that in-person instruction and the consistency of that in person instruction um can make even if it's just over a short period of time sally do you remember um when the sixth grade team did the fall testing was it in right away yeah september okay um so you know you're talking only you know approximately three months um and we're in we're seeing some um some nice growth in reading in math again um very similar i think one of the you know again one of the standouts is here um you know the number of students that you know were well below fewer students in the winter same thing with below average that then it obviously increased the number of students in in the average category in the sixth grade we um the sixth grade team has done an amazing job of developing a program um that's called the quest program um and it is really an intervention block that is fluid and it is really designed you know to make sure that you know whether it be after our aims testing and they're able to sort of target students who need extra support or assistance in certain areas or certain parts of the curriculum that they can actually tailor that intervention to those particular students but then they also do it throughout the year in areas of history and science as well um and so it really is and amazing it is a lot of work for them to be able to do this but it has shown amazing um amazing results in the sixth grade so we're very pleased um with these and as i said the result 91 of our students are falling on within the oh it's cut off within the um above average or well above average category this looks so different again because it is just that one it is just that winter um assessment and so this lighter block is a national average just so that we have something to compare it to this solid line right here again depending upon the student's um grade level it determined basically for us what our target score median target score would be up for that upper that arrow is um is where we actually score um and you know obviously as you you know as you can see on our seventh grade um in reading um obviously outperformed the the national average but also outperformed our target for the age group so we are very pleased with obviously with the students results seventh grade on math again here is our target which is where the national average is and this is where our our students have scored um they really so the seventh grade um is beginning to adopt some of the same type of program and transition for interventions as the sixth grade are as well they're not doing it every day um they are doing it i believe sally how many days is it once every six six days in their cycle the class yeah uh yeah for the summer well yeah yes yes once every six days um and you know again i think that they are seeing the results from that in the seventh grade we also have um math and ela labs in the seventh grade and we were using this aims web data um you know to determine entrance into those labs but also exits out of out of those labs as well in the eighth grade um i mean they they killed the the reading adam's web reading again this is our target this is the national average this is this is where the national average was was here um and the eighth grade really did an incredible job um you know with the with the aims web in the reading um again we obviously want to take they take a look at the individual scores and we also want to take a look at you know any of those students that fell um you know in this two students fell within this percentile taking a look at those students um as well and developing interventions and supports for them and in math again this is the this was our target and this is where the eighth grade students performed again in math and just like in seventh grade they have um we have math labs and ela labs um to be able to support the students in the areas that this type of data shows that those students need support so what do we use it really what do we use the data for besides these fabulous presentations um really it is to inform next steps in the instructional process for individualized and whole class instruction if the teachers are seeing that there are you know certain parts of the curriculum that students are really having difficulty with um this is going to pull it out much easier for them and really target be able to then give them targeted instruction for on either whole class instruction or to be able to take a small group and really focus on those areas and those skills to inform decisions for future curriculum mapping um so our curriculum database teachers are able to sort of do a curriculum map to determine exactly how much time is spent on certain parts of the curriculum and you know using um these results it will allow them you know the next year they'll take a look at you know this year and say you know what i only really plan for two weeks you know for these standards but what we're seeing is that these kids really need um you know to be able to focus on the standard a little bit longer so they're able to you to you know adjust the curriculum mapping so they know for next year we're probably gonna we're probably probably gonna need to spend you know an extra two or three days on this um on this standard also used to determine student eligibility for ela and math labs as well as quest as i just spoke about it's also used to help determine iep and 504 eligibility and progress monitoring and so you know when special education teachers are you know looking for you know if students are making effective progress this is just you know one point one data point that they're able to to pull from and one source to pull from um to help in making decisions for students iep and 504 plans and then um it's also one data point to help determine placement for following year whether it be in well in the middle school it would be for math only but um also from eighth grade to ninth grade for ela and leveling whether it be college prep or honors so overall i think you know sally and i are very pleased with um with the students and really the the teachers in you know the beginning of the school year seventh and eighth grade team learning a new a new system but also the sixth grade team willing to help obviously their colleagues in the training with this as well any questions yes diane you've shared the national data is this the statewide testing program yeah so can we get comparable in the future that shows that so it really is um district so it's it's you know whatever school district buys aims web they they take all of that information and that's how they get the national averages yeah and the second question you can go back to the sixth grade slide for a second just just to clarify the data so the testing in the fall and the winter are we testing to the same standard or are they testing to a standard that assumes they've had three more months of construction they it assumes that they have more three more amounts of instruction yeah staying on the sixth grade reading you mentioned you're happy with the growth of the average scores but and this one looks like you came at the expense of the above average it looks like there's more kids below average now than in the fall because the other graphs look like those scores improved yeah math and everything else but what's going on here you know again it's you know as we just said it is it's dependent upon uh you know they have three additional you know months of instruction so it could be you know again i don't know those students in particular that fell within that range but it could have been the content um area specifically um that some of those students did struggle with um it could also um you know some of these things also whether it's in sixth grade seventh grade or eighth grade you know like this incredible growth you know we had students move in from the time from the fall to the winter and you know we could have we could have had students that moved in that were you know very good math students and that pulled you know that whole skewed the graph a little bit you know the opposite could be for um specifically for reading but again they take you know the sixth grade takes a look at you know the individual um scores and again determines through quest what specific skill areas they need assistance yeah because you can see in the math i mean you're below average and blood blood yeah definitely right but in reading worse yeah so i mean i think the other thing you have to consider is how few kids will have to take these you know we have a small district so even on things like 10 you know one or two kids that's always the issue with the small small district yes that are potentially around 100 students in sixth grade so every percentage point involves the student right so you can see for instance that's probably one additional student in the winter than the fall that double after training do the parents get an individualized report on this that shows how their child is that part of this sally can can go ahead and answer yeah um yeah there are reports that can grow on you okay do they go thank you okay yeah in one i'd have to check with the seventh and eighth grade since they're new doing it nearly but okay if they don't they will so the um there's one more question that i have yes so i know you you said you went to aims over the other what's the difference in the testing um you know to be honest with you one of the biggest differences on is the amount of time that math testing takes on in comparison to um to ames one you know matt took you know approximately three you know two or three days away from instruction to be able to do um you know the assessment where ames web might happen yeah yeah if even half a day so a significant significant um difference in that and that's really one of you know one of the reasons why we have done it but also that you know um you know to be able to track students from the elementary school up through up to the middle school what does that difference in time relate to your accuracy and your ability to identify different gaps assessment time from three days down to half a day what are you missing from what are you not being able to identify or what's the change in what you can identify with that drastic reduction i know it gives you more time for instruction but yeah i think one of the uh we we actually when we started doing this it was matt from fourth grade through eighth grade so we got experience in the elementaries as well now the depth of the information that gave you was overwhelming it told you like everything and it was counterproductive because you couldn't productively use the information with aimscrap because it is it's literally a way for our kids it's a 45 minute session for man but a 45 minute session for reading and what it warns you about is hey this kid is below where we expect them to be go look further so like when you see that graph where jesus what happened to those kids just split down from above average to just average which is crazy easy because that average range is 25 times a 74 and then above average is like teeny tiny so if you miss like a questionnaire too you slide down but it lets us go geez those kids let's dig deeper into that because the other thing with angel is that it will not let me progress monitoring so identifying poor mr thompson here has some struggles with number of sense fluids he's not sure which numbers are which numbers and i'm going to practice with him every day because he's a little slow and every two weeks we're going to check we're going to do a one minute quick test and that goes right into asia so that teachers can build that over time and the other nice thing about youtube now 8 is that these middle school teachers now are going to be able to see how ace did when he was in second right and they'll be able to see what he was trying to straight through so in the long run it gives us more actionable information so you're connecting those schools and historically okay that's a good thing that answers it so we started preparing for this report we do we almost do we call each other this is what my first grade did what is your first grade we were pleasantly surprised with some small demon variations a pretty similar place so you know rule of small numbers large numbers it made a lot more sense for us to combine our school's data and they do with medications partly because we are working partially we're working on the same things we've changed for us this year in my building as we go through foreign [Music] uh so you know when you look at our report we're not going [Music] because while our students are doing doing fairly um before we get too far into it before i pass the passive it's on i always want to point out that aims with norman this was done that they haven't updated so while we're consistently above the norm we're not necessarily where we typically think you remember these are this is compared to this four years ago so we don't really have a comparison for how we're doing compared to everybody else that talk through this so that's just my little camera then i will let you pick up from with more caveats yeah all right so um the report that we gave you is way too in-depth and way too much information because i was off for a couple of weeks i was bored so please feel free to add us to any questions you have about other stuff you saw in there that's fine i'm going to do kindergarten through grade 2 race is going to talk about grades three through five in literacy um because that's i think where our focus has been all here year math is ruthlessly cumulative they'll catch up but there are some things in reading that if you don't get it by second grade there are problems and so we're hyper focused on phonics and forgiving that's what we're going to talk about um in these next few slides this is kindergarten kindergarten this is the what the report looks like that we got it's a skills report you can see we assess it in kindergarten in a lot of different things it's just way better on my screen than it does up here we look at a lot of subsets of information to see where kids are do they know how to hold the book do they recognize letters do they recognize do they understand letter sounds and then we get a breakdown kind of like what diane and sally were showing you in terms of above average etc etc um but in kindergarten the two things that we focus on what is letter naming fluency which is here and then let our word sound fluency so do they know what sound s makes can they say the word sat these are quick one minute tests that we give to every child three times a year and you can see that the bottom line here this is the well above average average our percentile scores are in the 40s mr thompson and i have a problem with that because what we like is to always be above the norm we want to be the label will be gone in education always above average and we're not there um and you can see on this side they give you an early literacy composite score and our district composite score is 39.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
good evening everybody i'd like to call the march 8 meeting of the equality and diversity subcommittee and the school committee to order i'd like to ask everyone to please stand for the pledge of allegiance and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all all right so we're going to start with we're going to roll call the quality and diversity subcommittee into order first because we have some minutes to approve and then we'll call the school committee into order so i'll start with a roll call kelly bloom elizabeth murphy lily chamberlain uh diane massari yeah uh mark hayes here shelly scott here juliana pamphiel here and jada walker here and shannon jenkins i'm here mr tebow could not make it he's coaching his daughter's basketball team and they made the playoffs so that is an excused absence for mr tebow first the first item on our agenda or there's there's two items and then one notification first we need to approve some minutes um we haven't approved our regular session minutes from july 13 2021 on august 18 2021.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals i have to unmute thank you very much missy um would you now take the roll call and before you do so i'd like to acknowledge um that councilmember rodina informed us before the meeting that he's not able to be present tonight he is on an airplane on his way to washington dc um he indicated that depending on when he arrives he may be able to join in at the end of the meeting go ahead great i'm gonna sort of stick on that train uh commissioner cleavy has also shared that he'll be absent tonight uh uh commissioner hook um uh chuck hook i'm here from my home office in ann arbor commissioner mccomber let me just make sure everyone's in the waiting room okay uh commissioner here in ann arbor hey chairmaski you're in ann arbor great well they're so fast uh vice chair colin garcia here in ann arbor thank you councilmember briggs here in ann arbor thank you commissioner mccoy here in ann arbor thank you commissioner george here in ann arbor and i'll be on camera in just a second we miss you commissioner kerber here and in ann arbor commissioner peck you're in ann arbor commissioner juno ann arbor thank you commissioner stevenson all right chair uh let me just check the room you have a corn very good very good thank you so um could i have um a motion to approve the agenda and then a second a motion from councilmember briggs in a second by commissioner juno all in favor please say aye and raise your hand i um i don't see anybody that or didn't any anybody oppose or any concerns unregistered so the agenda is approved um next is approval of the minutes those were posted a little bit late but they are up hopefully people have had a chance to read them um do i have a motion and a second to approve the minutes of last month's meeting uh motion by commissioner hook um and seconded by commissioner levin all in favor please say aye and raise your hand bye anyone opposed or any concerns none registered the motion passes so we now are on to public input for the first set of input at least again this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes if you're watching on ctn please call 888-788-0099 or 877-853-5200 and enter meeting id 937-6751-6819 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and the video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone and you will hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak and speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sounds so that we may hear you clearly and then finally please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments all right uh caller ending in one three four thank you doctor stealth chair mursky ken garber 28 hammer mill court um i'm glad to see city solar installation and the green rental housing program on the agenda rental housing is especially key from an emissions standpoint so i really commend osi for taking on this intractable problem i read the slide deck and i have one question about that i apologize to staff for posing the question in advance of the presentation the question is about slide 11 occupant weatherization i have some personal history here back in 1985 i helped organize a petition drive for what we call the basic weatherization and rental housing act we got the signatures to put it on the ballot voters overwhelmingly approved it and it became section 8 528 of city code chapter 105 which is still on the books this mandates weather stripping crack sealing and caulking it all inside outside interfaces and attic insulation to at least our thirty landlords must meet these standards in order to obtain a certificate of compliance the lack of which entitles tenants to withhold rent 37 years later i'm still a renter and two years ago i was forced back onto the depressing local rental market in midwinter i toured a couple dozen rental units several of which were complete dumps that did not come close to meeting these weatherization standards misaligned doors without weather stripping cracks and unsealed window frames uninsulated utility connections incredibly drafty rooms you name it energy sieves if you're a long time ann arbor renter you've seen this too i noticed that occupant weatherization slide 11 is one element of the green rental housing program you'll be hearing about today i read the slide as saying that we will now allow tenants to install basic weatherization measures without penalty my question is can we better enforce section 8528 so that landlords themselves do the work as we intended back in 1985 and as code dictates rather than putting the burden on tenants to do it i suppose we were naive back then to assume that land to assume that landlords would comply but given the new urgency of climate change and our 820 goals maybe we can step up enforcement now thanks for any insight staff can provide on this question i'm really looking forward to the presentation uh great caller ending in six six 661 hello yes we hear you great thank you for the opportunity to speak my name is gus teschke i live at 313 montgomery i have a question for dr stealth um i'm part of ann arbor indivisible and we are very happy when the energy commission and city council uh managed to pass a resolution to do a feasibility study for a municipal electric utility and uh some of us in ann arbor indivisible participated in ann arbor for public powers petition drive that gathered uh 1 300 signatures for a feasibility study and you know we really saw the interest in the community for this study we're hoping that dr stultz will release the draft of the rfp so we can follow along um in this process can that be done what we will do is we will uh take up that question at the time that we give uh reports um including report from staff and osi so this is not okay i think okay q a session this is just a time for public comment all right thank you very much thank you looks like missy is frozen your back missy but your image is frozen if you hear me sorry about that it looks like it looks like you're now live with us i'm live i'm back alive i'm unclear if i'm alive but i think that i'm alive uh yes so did i cut did you hear anything i cut out right away didn't i you did we didn't hear anything um we had a question that was called in and um i responded that this is not an active q a session but that you would likely be able to address the question when you give your report um later in the meeting absolutely that's delightful great uh caller ending in to eight hello you're very faint hello can you hear me yes awesome uh my name is greg woodring i'm from ann arbor public power i very much appreciate the uh chance to speak today um i like gus i am calling in i mostly curious about just the progress with the rfp uh as probably everybody on the commission knows ann arbor public power is pretty committed to trying to bring about uh about a municipal energy facility in ann arbor um we have been in this interim period while we're uh waiting to hear the results of the feasibility study focusing on education campaigns learning more about what this process looks like and hoping to educate the public on it and uh in addition to just trying to see if we can uh you know help out where we can with bringing this about so we're really just hoping that we could get a bit of an update about how this uh rfp is coming along and if we could potentially have any sort of public input session or just some amount of public visibility into what that draft uh rfp would look like before it goes out to bid just so that as a community we can all kind of be engaged in this process together and make sure that we're all doing this uh in an open transparent way that allows us to kind of have that uh engagement that's really needed to run this sort of campaign so i really appreciate all the work that everybody's been doing on this and i appreciate the chance to speak thank you so much thank you for calling in and for your thoughts and questions that's your risky that's all okay great so uh anyone that um did call in uh or wants to uh provide public comments you'll have a second opportunity at the end of the meeting so we have an interesting agenda in front of us as we've already heard actually from some of the callers and the first uh topic is going to be solar at or on city facilities um and that's going to be uh initially a presentation from staff i believe missy and then um consideration of a resolution uh so i will turn things over to you great well i'm going to turn it over to semi barr who is on the osi team and has been spearheading a lot of this project and i also want to acknowledge that with us we have mark and scott uh two of our well the two bidders uh for the project so sami is going to walk us through it and the team is available to answer questions so send me a video thank you missy and thank you to the energy commission for allowing us to take some time to talk about this project to install uh solar on various city facilities uh my name is jimmy barr energy analyst in the office of sustainability and like missy said um we're joined by mark derogi from homeland solar and scott amaduri from enter logics we'll elevate them uh after after i present quickly and we can have more of a discussion around this um so i'll be reviewing high-level elements of this project um after which we can go into that discussion with our vendors so um the intent uh isn't to really analyze each design but but go over more of the overview uh you all have have access to this slide deck and if there are more detailed questions we can we can get into those um later on so uh we'll start with with a review of the interlogix work and then uh their portfolio and then switch over to homeland so early last year uh the osi staff worked on uh the creation of an rfp uh to to solicit designs for solar on various city facilities and in uh in the spring we selected two firms uh for those various sites um homeland for for a package of park sites and endologics for some of our larger uh municipal sites and then throughout the second half of 2021 osi and city staff worked with these two firms to devel develop designs for our various sites and and iterate them based on um feedback gathered so the intent is as far as the timeline goes is to have some of these uh at least some of these sites online by 2022 uh this year though supply chain issues are leading to long lead times on many of these so that's a consideration to have in all of this so overall we're looking at putting solar on uh 17 sites though some have some of those sites have multiple arrays on each because of things like multiple meters and things like that which which actually ups the number um the the uh motivation here um much of the motivation is around our 820 goals and the first strategy of a20 which is powering uh the grid with 100 percent clean and renewable energy and as we know from our energy principles uh we're targeting um local and resilience are our uh high priorities when we're thinking about our energy grid and this project really hits on both of those things in various ways so across the various sites we have we're looking at uh multiple array types and they're really based on the site specifications and and that's been part of that iteration with city staff so some of those uh are ground mount systems car ports rooftop mounted systems and we even have a floating solar option which is which is quite exciting we're also looking and at including things like energy storage and ev charging at these various sites uh where they make sense sort of hitting on on other uh other ones of our sustainability goals around around electrified transportation and resilience and that clean grid as far as our financing options go our our partners at enter logic and homeland um have helped us look at the various type various financing options so from upfront payments to uh a ppa option with with varying levels of down payment in the first place and then 20-year ppa options as far as um these are enter logic sites uh so we've got six sites um you'll see seven locations on the map that seventh is um up here in the northwest that's our water treatment plant the floating solar option that's on the retention pond behind wines across these sites um we have uh the the um total capacity between 3.2 and 4.3 megawatts uh up to 4.3 megawatts depending on that floating solar option these are uh all rooftop and ground mount systems other than the the floating solar option um there are more uh those types of of arrays rooftop and ground mounts tend to be cheaper than carports um and the larger sites having these larger consumptions give us more of an in a an economy of scale and uh present pretty pretty competitive cost per watt figures i'll call out this greenhouse gas reduction number 2700 uh metric tons just for context um that's approximately equivalent to the greenhouse gas emissions uh from our entire city fleet in in the year 2020 so it's a very significant amount and and we're excited by the prospect of of offsetting that amount of emissions i'm gonna skip ahead to our homeland uh sites so these are our the park sites i mentioned so we have 11 sites across here but like i said some have multiple meters so things like the golf courses we have both clubhouses and and barnes maintenance areas and pumps all these things are on different electrical services and different electrical meters so um they'll they'll they have a arrays designed for each um we also have some designs that uh we have multiple uh design options for some of these sites so things like a a cheaper option to a more expensive expansive option um and that gives us some flexibility depending on our funding amounts so this slide gives us a good summary over what those options look like um we have between about 0.8 to 1.15 megawatts depending on the that sizing and that's going to cost somewhere around 1.75 to 3 million dollars depending on those options carports are more costly like i mentioned uh it's engineering designs and sourcing materials for those make them significantly more costly but from working with um park staff and the parks advisory commission both expressed uh um you know interest in maintaining uh as much ground space as possible for programming you know one of the great things about our parks is there's uh there's places to to run around and do activities and um in some cases putting ground mount systems in there just just wouldn't make the most sense based on how those spaces are programmed so in conclusion um [Music] this is really fitting into our goals in a number of ways one we're maximizing on-site renewables this is a massive expansion of distributed generation on on city facilities also this this gives us to on the this gives us the opportunity to unlock recurring savings um for for various operational uh investments we can make in the future so um by paying for these upfront or by doing partial ppa options we can actually achieve uh energy rates that are that are lower than what we're currently paying for and that delta can be used in a number of really exciting ways um to further various various climate goals we have here the the estimates based on um based on the financial elements run by uh run by our two firms show something uh on the order of 15 million dollars in savings in the next 25 to 30 years over the lifetime of these systems this also shows great city leadership in the space of of local distributed generation and local energy generation uh the first year electricity generation a conservative estimate based on these uh based on these models is almost 5 million kilowatt hours which is over 12 of city usage electricity usage that's based on 2018 numbers which it's actually reduced since then so it's it would actually be a larger percentage even than that um for and and that would be for a cost of around 9 million uh dollars and and that's a pretty uh competitive cost per watt um also the the annual greenhouse gas reduction uh from that would be uh almost 3 500 metric tons of co2 annually which is about uh which is quite a bit more than than that figure i quoted um around the city fleet which is um closer to 3 000 metric tons of co2 uh emissions so as far as the next steps go uh we're working through prioritization of these sites with the help of of city staff and um as as uh city council uh debates uh arpa funding uh we'll have you know we'll be able to sort of plug in that that prioritization um understanding that we've that we've developed in order to to see uh where this project um might end up so with that i'd like to thank you all and i'd like to elevate mark and scott from enter logic and homeland uh who can speak to this work um at a very high level and and also um are great with with uh the overall concept so i'll do that and also would love to hear questions and comments from commissioners if you have them uh do we have any additional presentation then or do we go directly to questions this is scott imminently with analogics we do have additional material that we can present but no no need that we have to and more a question of following your direction go ahead um yeah i'll just i'll make a couple comments um and i think this is probably germaine uh for a variety of reasons uh number one uh for the reason we looked at third party ownership of this projects and third-party financing there is a federal uh or a series of federal tax credits and other tax advantages so the federal investment tax credit drives us to having third party ownership uh from our experience both uh nonprofits that can't utilize that uh municipalities and and even corporate off takers don't have the uh necessary the ability or the capability to monetize that internally so that's one thing we are uh we built into the financing mechanism of this to give the city a lower cost of delivery power under that regime the second part of that is that um a lot of the buildback better um proposals had uh increasingly stepped up that investment tax credit none of those have been successfully passed yet but we are uh continuing to watch buildback better and would pass any of those past savings on to the city in terms of a lower finance cost and lower deliberate cost of power under that those regimes last point around that uh and again is is just kind of what we're seeing globally across the the the everything is uh the the challenges with supply chain we have put this together with pricing based on what we know today we know there is no guarantee of future prices until we place orders on key equipment and as as recent events have played out even shipping costs are going to be um somewhat uh in flux as as we all deal with the increase in uh cost of uh of fuel in particular so i guess i'd say you know for a variety of reasons time is of the essence we want to give the city the best benefit of this and we'll pass on any future cost savings from uh improvements investment tax credit uh or improvements in supply chain costing i'll just add to that while we didn't go through every single slide in the deck in the packet you can see each of the sites and the initial designs we just thought that was going to take up so much time to go through every single design and design option but if you have questions the team is here to answer those questions i'll make one one more comment too and i think this price speaks to both our portfolio and the homelands as well um many of the sites we wanted to go larger and solar we weren't able to hit a significant percentage of the overall consumption that is limited somewhat by dte policy on net metering we can't go um we can't go off-site we can't go necessarily um you know on an off-site kind of regime uh and again that points to sort of the prior discussion on on establishing your own public utility that that does probably give you guys some flexibility that you don't have currently with the dte regime uh that's point one point two uh again on site we were limited by not just what was available from a roof tape or ground spot ground space we were also limited in some locations uh from the existing mechanical structure of the roof and our ability to add more weight by adding solar onto the roof so again we were always balancing that as part of our design i'm sure mark would say the same thing on on their designs as well so um council member race yeah thanks for um presentations we're interesting um i didn't you kind of briefly mentioned the the floating um solar the water treatment plant which sounds interesting i wasn't sure if there were going to be other types of installations there as well and then i was curious i'm not sure you know um i didn't see that one kind of in the in the chart i wasn't in terms of um that installation i'm not sure what sort of power needs the water treatment plant um has but um what are there additional advantages to that location in terms of you know security for i just wondered if you could speak a little bit more to that installation yeah so the thank you for the question the water treatment plant uh uses a very significant amount of electricity and as scott noted there uh are constraints based on on uh that site in particular so using that that um that uh retention pond for additional floating solar uh would would increase the uh capacity uh greatly of that site certain considerations there um there are considerations there uh when it comes to um certain uh nesting birds in particular uh so we decided uh to in in uh collaboration with nap natural area preservation uh we talked about you know how how we could um display the the efficacy of floating solar and uh increase the capacity of the solar on site overall without negatively impacting that habitat scott do you have anything to add about that floating solar uh just one more comment and this is um probably not as qualitative but it is uh part of what is being done in california in particular um in california the addition of floating solar on reservoirs in other areas has been shown to have a reduction in the amount of evaporation so it does help uh provide a benefit to um reduction in algae and reduction in in evaporation again very very much an issue in california with the droughts and extended droughts there but there is a benefit to it in addition to just the solar production this is just the graphic so this is behind wines in the water retention area this is where we modeled the floating soil you see the plant obviously over here and then for the plant itself there's roof mounted and ground mountain systems if you can jump ahead um i think on slide 27ish there's a photo of an example yeah oh sorry this is a different deck my bad i think you you you passed over it uh i didn't even look yep of a floating yeah uh there we go bottom right thanks councilmember riggs do you have another follow-up question no uh commissioner calvin garcia thank you commissioner mursky my question uh is with regards to the um ability to have enough production that will offset as much of the load as possible and that um you know considering that the constraints um with our utility and then looking at opportunities in the future for a micro grid um like how that works and if that's any if that's part of the design already at this stage for um uh the designing the um the solar arrays to be able to be expandable in the future maybe to save some money now at the beginning um just wondering that's my first question my second question is are you seeing um significant price increases these days going on with um with materials especially considering what's going on right now yeah thanks so uh prices are increasing and i'll let um scott and mark if if they have additional comments on that uh speak to it because i know we've seen with the supply chain that that occurring scott sure do you have anything to add on the uh expandability of these arrays yeah i guess you know two twofold one is um all of these systems that we put in the larger ones at least uh we we did put an option for energy storage there so with that energy storage effectively that building has the ability to be islanded or have its own mini micro grid associated with it um we did not look at yet integrating in say a backup generator against that so again each building has its own uh conceptual microgrid that it can do on the side of it larger scale as as as you guys look to say a district energy or district microgrid that is something that certainly makes sense in particular if we look at wheeler center with the larger ground monterey that's going to go up there with gte on the on the landfill that is a great opportunity for a much larger microgrid really the kind of fundamentals come down to both a regulatory policy question and then also just a physical interconnection how do you isolate that we know from some work we've done with cuyahoga county and in cleveland as an example they are also looking at their own district energy plant to service the downtown region again we're very very much focused in on on a downtown region a specific region to be able to connect to that we continue to watch sort of what's happening from both a technical perspective from a cost perspective and from a policy perspective um and certainly would want to make sure we can enable as much as we can but right now we focus in on what we can do within current policy constraints and do it sort of all behind the meter in building on on cost in particular steel costs have escalated yet again today so all all the key components that are steel-based like racking is going to continue to increase um all the major commodities i think are still stable but uh it is a daily fluctuating price right now uh that we're seeing on that the biggest risk right now i think on top of all that is just again shipping costs so things that are even landed in the us uh to get trucked from uh california to uh to ann arbor is going to be a different cost today than it was just yesterday just with the the increasing fuel costs thank you very much uh yes thanks for the presentation sami first of all i had a few questions i'll start with kind of an easy one um with the floating storage how does that work in the winter when the pond freezes over is it so functional yes it is uh it's actually uh the mechanism of it or how it works uh it is a plastic thing essentially all it does is just bubble to the top it sits on top of the ice um it is designed and has been deployed this technology even in uh call it wetlands that have a marsh area that evaporates so it can sit on the ground as long as that ground is relatively flat it's still fine um but again it is designed to sit on that kind of a regiment environment cool cool very cool um and um i don't know who's the best to speak this i saw on one of those slides that you are considering uh battery storage i was just wondering like if you could speak a little bit towards that a little more like is it at every site and how does it compare to the energy the daily energy requirements at the site um where the batteries are located yeah certainly uh it was not at every site we focused in on on the analog side and then i think mark had some kind of focus on uh some level of critical load and and what sort of the effective or the cost-effective approach with batteries are um typically we're looking in and and pjm as well on where there are the largest demand charges and how we're able to effectively address those from a cost perspective with batteries uh we didn't try and cover we didn't try an island we didn't try and take any of these facilities fully off-grid we just don't have enough physical space on on building to go do that with a combination of it batteries and solar but we did focus in on on where we had high demand charges on facilities and we could cost effectively address that with batteries at the current pricing we continue to watch as you say we continue to watch battery pricing too battery pricing was going through a pretty good decline until the last couple years now despite all the plants being announced in the u.s they haven't ramped up the production so we expect battery pricing to come back down again in 2023 and 2024 uh but really it's it's still at a at a somewhat high price right now that's a good tee up too to say what we designed for is battery ready for every site so not all sites we're ready to deploy the battery but we're designing the system so that we can when the time is right uh so we don't wanna we don't wanna preclude that gotcha okay last question um so regarding um some of these are at carports and is there a consideration to have those available for charging cars and also can we count like if we start charging cars does that count towards the amount the dtu will allow you to offset or no does that count towards your total that are allowed to generate i should say yes yeah hopefully i can hope you can hear me um yes the load that's added by charging evs would be part of the dte load that could be offset as long as it's on the same physical meter at the site um so generally with car ports it it provides kind of a convenient place to put car chargers so for any of the city park sites where we're contemplating car ports we're we're assuming that some number of car chargers will go in at those facilities thank you george thank you mr chairman um given the history uh the city has had uh with some of the installations of solar projects i i wanted to ask uh if the workers that are going to be handling and installing these solar panels licensed journeyman or registered apprentices i don't know if missy or you or simi could state that uh the contractors is that you speak to them yeah sure sami yeah so the requirement of is unequivocal that everyone has to adhere to michigan law and michigan policy full non-stop right in terms of who and how uh regulation and what's required within that we have uh this contract was before the responsible uh purchaser response got a trip on it you're gonna help me thank you lots of words in my head uh that said though we have asked both scott and mark and they have agreed to fill out all the the documentation even though they don't have to so that we can have that be part of uh the process when we come forward to council so i don't know that i can answer that specifically i'll give space if mark and scott want to but we are going to do all the documentation because we want to respect the fact that while this predates it by almost a year we recognize that's an important sentiment to the community uh yeah at least from homeland's point of view we are licensed electrical contractor and follow all of the regulations and uh would comply with that certainly yeah as will we awesome thank you very much thank you commissioner peck yeah thank you i just want to follow on noah really quick i'm very intrigued about how these things manage to uh survive the winter and the ice um but rather than trying to and visualize that i'm just wondering in the winter uh it's in the ice the ice isn't uh thanks to global warming isn't safe enough to walk on probably um but you got your panels out there and they're covered in snow how much have you calculated how much generation loss there is given the number of days that are likely to obscure the panels with snow yeah our um our methodology is using a very proven technology we model and simulate every single one of these arrays every one of them has a a snow loss factor associated with it it's essentially a monthly factor but it takes a location specific weather data and a specific design does a simulation looks at a weather normalization over the last um i think it's the last 50 years worth of noaa data and looks at sort of an average energy production from that we then apply a soiling or a snow loss factor so there's a loss factor associated with just dirt uh so if it's a dry month a typically dry month it's going to have a little more of a factor of dirt that would accumulate on it you know in particular if you think of desert southwest you have a lot more of that in michigan you have a lot more rain it cleans the panels there is a additionally a factor there that looks at the impact of snow as you pointed out global climate change um likely will reduce the amount of snow we have on that in those winter months but again we have modeled that fully um i think it's a 35 40 loss factor in in january alone just because of the fact that we have snow on the panels thank you very much a real quick comment to that there is a unit within the university of michigan that has developed a coating that is supposed to reduce um snow accumulation on panels i don't know how far along they are um i don't think it's um reached the market yet and i don't know what the economics are but that might be something that um we may want to look at at some point in time certainly yeah we'd love to collaborate with them and figure out a way to even test some of it on a real life system actually just picking up on that wanted to show that we have talked to that unit and scott mark will put you in touch so far uh their research is phenomenal for one year application but they do have to do a reapplication every year so they're working on a longer term application otherwise you have to reapply the substrate or the surface coding annually so not they're not quite ready for commercial viability we thought we were going to bring it into solarize from day one but not yet commissioner peck did you have a follow-up question no okay uh did anybody else have any questions i have a couple of quick questions hopefully in comments um first of all uh it sounds to me like um there were no that the size of the units are constrained by physical constraints not based on any kind of load and therefore adding electrical load through electrification um or ev charging really would not have enabled us to install larger arrays is that correct i think it depends on um it's a site specific thing so for instance uh vets park has a very large load um that could accommodate almost anything but other sites are are fairly limited in the load and then we we just match that pretty easily with a certain number of panels sometimes what i'm wondering is if we electrify first would that allow us or at a later point in time would that allow us then to add additional solar to be able to power that load uh yeah sure i don't think you necessarily have to electrify first if we're doing it at the same time for instance adding ev load we can go through with dte certain assumptions on uh how many miles are being driven and how many chargers are being used and we add that that capacity in the beginning it's more relevant for the park sites for the larger sites the sites that enterologica is working on that we're site constrained that's space constraint for sure but for example the farmers market we could vary we have a lot more space so we just don't have high usage hence why we're looking at adding some chargers and others to increase so park sites tend to have more flexibility yeah quick quick exception of that though i think it's the airport right so at the airport we're we're driven really on the hangers uh and again it's not as high volume of an airport as as most ones that have commercial traffic but again you know if there is ev charging added there uh it would support larger load we were more uh there's more land available than we have actually usage there okay good um a couple of other just observations um just something to look at you don't have to respond um there's going to be a fairly loud tall building that's going to be built near the farmers market i don't know if there's going to be any shading issues probably not it seems to me it's probably too far away but might be something that's just protecting um one other thing um are we re-roofing in any of these cases and my understanding is that when re-roofing is done that if insulation is added to the re-roofing then that cost of re-roofing can also be applied for the federal tax credit is that applicable in any of these cases i checked with a tax accountant because i was looking at that from my own home and that was that was the ruling yeah i think um go ahead scott mark um i think that uh on the shading issue for farmers market we did model that uh building and it caused something like five to seven percent loss so some amount uh not not a not a huge impact right and um yeah and then the second what's the second question again proofing eligibility for ipc installation yeah so we're not cost and eligible for the for federal tax credit yeah we normally say you know we are not tax advisors however we are aware that many customers and organizations do take that uh credit when they find they they need to replace the roof kind of as a condition of putting solar on it so a good example of that is actually the maintenance barn at cobblestone you know the shingles are are really in bad shape so if this was a normal commercial client then sure they'd be able to uh to monetize that uh roofing cost and include it on the for purposes of the iitc so so it sounds to me like that may be an opportunity um particularly like i said if insulation is added then i think um it's pretty clear that that's eligible for the tax credit but we're not a tax paying entity yeah i know but you're we're using a third third-party finance for the ppa if we do it that way right right so so we we have done projects that way uh and there is different private letter rulings from the irs on how much that roof is cost is eligible for that investment tax credit the strongest argument is doing uh white roofs with a bifacial module uh so a module that produces this energy on both the front side and the back side of that getting the reflectivity off that white roof that drives a lot of it um again like mark said we are not tax advisors but we have worked with a number of different investors to make sure that we have full itc eligibility for that okay and then i'm in the case um where we have third-party financing on these um are are these going to installations going to revert to city ownership at x years down the road how does that work yeah all the ppas have a term to comply with irs rules we typically don't have a um a you know it's like a dollar buyout they have a a a buyout that's based on a fair market evaluation and a calculated value that preserves our itc eligibility otherwise it looks like a capital lease and the irs treats it very differently from an investment tax credit perspective but it is a an industry standard um publication on on how you structure these uh we followed that guidance and and follow that contract as our draft contract um but again it's it's a it's a well-proven methodology we we uh analogics has done 12 megawatts of ppas in ohio alone uh everything from universities to uh to communities um and municipalities right okay then i have one last question missy would you mind putting up slide 21 i think it's easier if i if everybody can see the slide you'll understand my question um this relates to homeland and the difference between the min and the max um so on the right hand side um if i take the the min and the max um it's there it seems to me that the incremental cost going from um min to max really doesn't make sense especially um if you consider that in a sense there's an opportunity cost um so what what um what i you know if you look at the the cost per watt um the cost per watt goes from 209 to 255 but if you just look at the cost per watt for the incremental fifty thousand kilowatt hours um so you're going from one point um eight four one um megawatt hours to one point eight nine one so that's roughly 50 000 kilowatt hours um the cost for that additional 50 000 megawatt hours is really really high and um you know if if if we were just floating in money then spending an extra seven hundred thousand dollars um to get that that money or maybe it's not seven hundred thousand where is the the cost okay yeah it goes from 1.7 to 2.9 million so it's actually you know 1.2 million dollars more to get just a minimal amount of additional generation and it seems to me that 1.2 million dollars would be much better spent on some other way of either generating electricity or electrifying or insulating or something else so i'd like uh or mark to comment on that yeah i think the most logical explanation is there's probably a typo in one of those numbers so i should uh go back and take a look at it the you know the cost is going up quite a bit because generally by to increase the uh to go to max we're talking about adding carports basically so you are talking about adding you know fairly expensive equipment to the sites but having said that you're right i mean you see the the kilowatts dc is going from 843 to 1.15 megawatts so the kilowatt hours produced should go up uh concurrently so i i'd encourage staff and all of you to look at that i mean all of the numbers may be pegged to the same mistake but if you look at the irr the irr drops dramatically and that that drops for them for the whole the whole investment and the same thing for the npv and if you just look at it incrementally um it uh to me it unless there is a mistake it would be it would we would be foolish and and council member briggs i would ask that when this comes to council that this be scrutinized that we really do not want to spend an incremental amount of money for relatively low contribution in terms of generating power and what we should be doing is using that incremental cost or that incremental expense and applying it to something that gives us much better return on our investment yes i think that first row is is the usage it's the initial energy so what hours about fifth row down that is actually the difference of energy production so it goes from 980 000 to 1.3 million ah okay okay yep yeah still i mean this the point still applies yeah yeah a general comment on that we've we've uh see me and missy and i have talked several times about it so carports are um a relatively expensive way to do solar so there's no doubt about that and um you know if you're looking at it on a marginal basis it's not going to look very good so it there are certain sites for instance leslie science center where that's pretty much the only option there are other sites where we can decide it's going to be up to the city to decide if they want to put carports there there are some places for instance fuller fuller park is another place where there's really not any ground opportunity so your only option is kind of a fairly expensive way to do that i think at one point scott also had a carport option for city hall i believe and uh so you're correct it is it is uh if you have a better place to put your money where you can get more value out of it that's a discussion that you know needs to be had exactly that's that's the opportunity cost question if i spend you know a million dollars on this where could i spend a million dollars and what would the benefit of that million dollars be or whatever it is so okay that that's that's it and missy i think you want to show us um unless there's any other questions or comments i'll make one one last comment uh back to your your point about the roof i guess i'd say i'd encourage the city to consider any buildings that need a new roof uh to look at a hybrid solar roof third-party ppa ownership for that tax credits again just something to put into your planning process as you look at those great so um missy or simi would you like to introduce the resolution of support happy to introduce the resolution of support so let me pull it up here uh in light of i'm not gonna take for granted i think you all probably know this but uh right now this project was up for consideration for american rescue plan act funding and that went out to public vote uh this is a project that is as you can see while we have to make final decisions a lot of it sort of chicken and egg between knowing how we're going to fund it so we can determine how how to move forward in terms of which sites and and which designs or we go which sites and designs then figure out how to find it so we're sort of in this interesting moment um but what happened last week as the city administrator didn't send some initial recommendations to council for consideration council is going to move forward with making a determination in the very near term about how to allocate arpa funding and this was a resolution for consideration by the body uh that basically outlines the process the resolve clauses are that the anar energy commission recommended city council submit our funding without identifying a specific number to support the project that is literally it do i have a um so missy what what's the plan if i may i'm sorry i didn't talk to you about this um we have a first and second reading or is this uh basically um limited in terms of controversy and scope that we would potentially vote on this tonight what was your um what was staff's thought on this 100 percent up to the discretion of the body we weren't sure if you would find the presentation to be controversial um this is symbolic would go with council just to say that the the energy commission is supportive of the project so i think sequentially i i don't know i might actually tee up councilmember briggs i'm not 100 sure when council is gonna take this up i think it could be as soon as their next council meeting it might be longer so uh if the body is supportive of the resolution potentially passing it tonight would be uh good timing yeah i would say i i am not sure if it's gonna come at the next meeting or the following meeting but um i would agree that um if it's if there's support it might be beneficial to to pass this tonight yeah especially since we need monthly and council means every two weeks that would make sense that we act on this tonight do we have any comments or questions from commissioners or additional comments from staff with regards to the resolution so i have two um and i'll leave this up to staff as to whether or not they make sense um so my understanding is that um in the whereas clauses this potentially could be strengthened uh by having two whereas clauses one that would indicate the amount of co2 emissions that would be reduced there's i don't think i saw anything indicating what that was just the number of megawatts and the second is and this is i think one of the unique elements of uh this particular investment with um arpa funds is that by installing this we also would get a reduction in our um annual or monthly energy costs which reduces expenses to the general fund and so we actually get a financial benefit that general fund expenditures go down and i don't think there's very many other arpa funding opportunities that actually have a positive impact on the general fund of course i don't know what the net savings are based on the financial models that are being considered here and then of course the discussion that we just had about the incremental cost between the min the medium and the max installations from homeland also impact um what the savings would be in terms of metric comes tons of carbon i think the three and a half that was the minimum um that you're 3500 i think that was the minimum right mixie i think that's right i'm it's hard for me to toggle between oh somebody's telling me there are 404 all right i will update it if that's okay with you all i'll go for the the median i'll pull the numbers it's just hard for me to go between screens so you just hold it so i think showing the minimum there is uh or or at least or something that's in the range there we are something like that um and do we do we have a figure on slide 21 that we can or not me i guess is not on slide 21 because we have to look at the two to combine but is there um cindy can you provide us a figure that what what the what the total net savings would be at least in the minimum case i mean councilmember briggs i do you agree that and missy that this this is potentially important i think that we that we provide that information to council because council is going to be looking at giving money to this versus bridges versus uh affordable housing um those have obviously a lot of benefits but they don't have an impact on the general fund mia sent me a note that it's 440 or 400 metric ton co2 for the base case with without the floating solar and kind of medium homeland scenario okay [Music] the minimum will be about thirty four hundred thirty four simmy yeah yeah i'll go 34.
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september of 24 so it does there's a couple things that are happening during this whole this year next year i know mr neal has been working on i don't want to say staff reductions but efficiencies with our staff and all of those things along i know i and gentel are also working on efficiencies in our systems and all of that so that when we get to a point at 24 you know we're able to sustain what we're doing so you put them in the budget and then that's the point is that what we don't want to do is make some really good changes and then in two or three years have to be just dealt with the decision exactly what are we going to do we want to be able to maintain that you're exactly right and so that's that's what we're doing um right now and again i don't know the numbers up top my head and i'm actually uh i've talked with uh robert dinardo who is in jontel's office who handles a lot of the grand stuff i'm going to be going through over spring break actually it's one of my projects to kind of do an audit of all of our grants to see where we are because you know we haven't we haven't even come close to spending all that 9.6 million dollars you know as i as i shared with the board we want to spread that out over three years so i have to go through and see exactly what is left in a lot of these different areas and then you know we'll begin a process of reallocating that for the next two years and then you reallocate for the next year and all of that so it's a constant kind of amendment that you have to do with those grants and everything the good news for the district is it does set the district up very well when the tiffs are rolling off the two major tips that are going to be rolling off and again as i share with the board last month i'll be addressing that when i present my budget in august and september but it does uh set up well because um there'll be an influx of money probably beginning in the beginning of calendar year 25 so that'll be in a 24-25 budget so it sets up very well at the same time for the taxpayers as we talked about there's this property tax relief grant that is out there um that what i'm hoping for um as i shared with you we applied for it we didn't get it uh 39 schools got it we were number 40 on the list so uh and i couldn't even finagle anything mr brown i tried but i couldn't um permit what should happen is this should set us up for next year getting that which again will help us because as you all know cpi is up so it'll be a five percent increase if we balloon our levy so you know it works out really well it it plays it playing out very well as we go here so i think it sets the district up very well financially in the future and now but mrs whilst you're right i you know we do have to look at these things and you know while it's an influx of money we want to make sure we can sustain all of this right it's not so much what we're doing right now but in 2024 going into 25 everything that we've done in whether we've hired people or put them in positions we don't want to just we want to be able to maintain that to continue what we're doing yeah and you know and again you know you kind of look at our financials right now and i think last month we were projecting a surplus i think it's around 1.5 million something like that of a surplus this year so that'll just go in the bank you know and all of that so um so things are things are playing itself out pretty well as we move forward here we still have some work to do you know we're not satisfied with that but it's playing itself out really well financially thank you oh the next one i had i was reading the fyi and the only question the question i had was um it said discipline review committee there were some numbers on there that i think need to be you know again we're working on that the communication piece getting that out i mean there were numbers on there it said defiance was down 51 um it said disciplined behavior was down and fighting is down 25 the only problem with that is no one knows that so i think that's where i know we get that information but that's the information that we need to share and what we're doing to to correct that um because it's as weird as it sounds as we've all talked is that a lot of our perception is based on the high school and there are so many good things there and i just think that they need to be out i mean these these are good numbers that what we're comparing them to yes and thank you for that we were very proud at those results what we want to do is take a look at the trend data and from month to month and then we'll probably make a presentation again when we have quite a few months to take a look at but our trend data is looking really excellent and that is certainly the result of you know everybody's job here everyone's been working very hard and bill you know it's interesting what you're talking about the perception because i was lucky enough to go to the njrotc help me say that again ami inspection list last week and um it was so impressive and miss trish you might want to finish this off for me we were we were awarded an outstanding rating and my understanding is it's the first time the commander has given that rating so those are the other things i mean i i can't remember the number of students we have in that program but it was amazing to see and those are are the other types of things i mean that they were awards for community service hours how many you know each platoon competed against the other ones and it was academics and they get a banner for their their flag thing and it was you could see the faces when they were when their platoon was named a winner the faces were like they couldn't smile but you could just tell how excited they were that they had worked that hard to get it so i agree with you that those positive things need to be really hitting home because um it's very very important yeah i mean it's springtime it's march the next the next the eighth graders are coming in so we want them to be a part of that we want them to be you know coming into the next phase of that and being ready let alone i think the fifth graders going to the sixth sony any of that you know we've talked about that that's the biggest that's a big thing i had the opportunity i know we were invited to read at moni elementary to a class and i was able to do it and so i wanted to give a shout out to miss smith's third grade classroom they were awesome i mean they were really you could tell that she really um she really has a good relationship with her students when i walked in they were doing a book reading a book together and she was asking questions and and they were all engaged and and good behavior and then when i read my book they just were very well behaved and you know whether or not they were really interested they acted like they were they were great listeners i was really impressed with this third grade class so i think we have a lot like you're just saying we just have a lot to shout about and i think we just need to do that more okay thanks everybody any other board updates okay i'd like to say a few things about the discipline committee okay i know my colleague if you want to add on anything here if i you know i want to comment a couple of things here so it's been very informative what i've seen thus far since august of last year with the discipline committee and they basically started off using the restorative approaches which is good not not you know looking at a infraction and the first thing they're going to do is discipline so they're not looking at that so obviously the year 20 y20 to y21 there was no infractions because we was not in school so that's a good thing no suspensions so i just wanted to share that with the board and they are looking to pick up the mentoring program that the district had a while back at mec and places like that so i chimed in i said let's make sure that we because one of the issues with a couple people with the mentoring program and the question came up were they qualified to do mentoring and i had asked the question that we make sure that we get qualified mentors before we start interacting with our students and they agreed that they were going to do that so they said that they wouldn't we're going to continue to review district policies throughout the year which i thought was a good thing and one of the biggest things that they see is a a potential opportunity to excel is book bags throughout the district what should book bags look like should they be clear should they not be clear so they our discipline director when it did some market research out there in the industry and came to find out it was like 18 issues dealing with book bags when it came to the elementary grade level and she was like wow you know so it's more to follow they're still trying to firm up a policy on the use of book bags and they will incorporate that and bring it to the board as they incorporate that into the which document is that uh the parent and student handbook okay so that's a good thing anything to add on that sandy about the book bags anything like that no i think you have it i actually had to leave the meeting early so i didn't get to finish the rest of the meeting but i was impressed too by the numbers um i know with kovid it was hard on kids you know and it was good when we did the comparison to 2019 to see how those numbers are now coming down with restorative practices so thanks to all of you guys keep up the good keep up the good work oh she's back there i didn't know if i said anything i didn't know he was back there oh well since you're back there and i know you're back there i want to make sure that i give myself kudos because i made a comp i made a um a statement saying what a good job you guys are doing when it came to no expulsions and our director said there may be one coming to you guys sooner than later and we had it tonight so but nonetheless a good job for again using those practices restorative practices de-escalation all of that because our whole our whole thing as a district is to get our our kids educated and get them out and as our missing statement says to make them productive citizens in the world at large and i don't want to inundate you with a lot of data but the first couple months of this school year we did have as far as infractions or offenses we had more towards the middle school seventh sixth seventh and eighth but we did have some trending up in our lower grades i believe specifically from our last meeting just a couple days ago the fourth grade and so we walked work in progress on that the committee is going to be coming to the board in may of this year at our committee as a whole to bring some things to us they should have a draft for the nine it's two documents it's the code student codes anybody send this right director yes oh yeah that's the one doc we get the parent student handbook and we also have japan's student handbook two things same thing okay so again i'm i'm excited to be part of that as i talk a lot here in the board meetings i talk a lot in the community i ask a lot of questions right we have had all meetings on a virtual method and my hands are constantly coming out because she really runs a tight meeting she said you don't talk until you ask and put your hand up on my hand and somebody said maurice mr brown's hand is up i said no i'm not my hand is up but he said well you got to tell us to take it down so one time it stayed up pretty long so but i'm excited and they're doing a good job but that was my compliment it said mr brown acknowledged the hard work and attention to keeping students out of expulsion which i already mentioned before that's all i have to ask anything else sandy again [Laughter] i took me some notes about four meetings we had and i think we got one more meeting we got actually made a 12th but we're gonna have one in april right april april 28th remember he serves me right i'm pretty good with dates okay april 28th that'll be our last meeting we have one two three four five okay okay thank you mr brock you're welcome i have one other thing that i don't know you were going to bring up or not but mr albrecht and i are on the acme negotiating team and we're having our first meeting this thursday correct mr hill that's right so we will keep you updated on that just thought i'd let you know okay next up administrative updates and with that i'll turn it over to ken you've got three items for business i do thank you very much [Music] not the calendar though the first one is the resolution providing it for abatement of the 2021 levy adjustment i believe as i discussed with the board uh last month and you gave me direction to prepare a resolution of not accepting that money and that money is uh automatically added to our levy extension that we will receive at the end of march based on adjustments that have occurred uh on equalized assessed value in that so uh this is another one that's the other one but so you'll be getting a resolution and it is uh abatement of 307 572.88 um so we will not be accepting that money from the county which will uh help the taxpayers um it does not hurt the rest of our extension or levy of money that we requested this is an additional money that is new to the illinois school code as i shared and that the will county clerk puts on the extension so if approved next week or not next week the 22nd if approved i will share this with the will county clerk and then that will be taken off the tax records okay okay um the second one that i wanted to talk about was just the contracts that will be coming up um and again one of the purposes of moving the meeting to the 22nd was so that we could prepare and get out to bid the contracts for the mechanical work at balmoral creed and coretta scott king those projects are now on the street the bid opening is the 15th which is next tuesday and then once we have that we're preparing the documents for approval at the board meeting on the 22nd i don't have any numbers on that but the projects are put out there as three separate projects we didn't put them together they're put out as three separate projects so that will also be coming to the board on the 22nd i'm hoping to have that probably by the time you release the board agenda i'll have all of those numbers and documents and all of that stuff when we share that out probably the friday prior to the meeting i wanted to talk about uh and that's what you're going to see up here uh is a discussion about a contract with bci burke company llc to replace the courtyard of the early learning center with an ada compliant playground in the amount of four hundred forty eight thousand eight hundred sixty seven dollars and ninety one cents um don can you put it as a full page please yeah i can flip through but you can put it in the page the first part you're going to see is just the board report i've put a whole packet of things together i'm not going to go through it's 50-some pages i'm not going to go through all of that but i wanted to share with you one of my ideas here is to begin trying to upgrade all of our courtyards throughout our buildings and the first one we would start with is the elc building and what it would do is one of the issues we are having with all of our courtyards quite honestly is the maintenance of those courtyards in this building itself as you well know there's grass in there so we have to move the lawn mowers through the building in order to cut the grass in there also the issue is it is not ada compliant that facility and i say that because this is the way the courtyard worked it looks right now and what you'll see is that if there's no way that i can get a child with a wheelchair up into this area at all there's no ramps we could probably install some however there are wood chips in there and everything and in all honesty a child wouldn't be able to maneuver in there in a wheelchair or even with some type of walker that would have to go in there the area in here is really a perfect area to put a confined rubberized concrete facility in here so i've worked with this company along with which is uh it's called play illinois along with our administrators in the elc uh ms chester and also mr shetty to develop this playground in there and what it would be is the entire entire area is 15 000 square feet and about 9 000 square feet would be rubberized concrete that's what you'll see in beige and colors and all of that and all of the materials and devices that are in there are ada compliant and also need all safety guidelines in that the green area that you're going to see around here is actually astroturf the sidewalks will not be in there actually but there will be concrete walkways that will come out into this area so everything is ada compliant and everything is wheelchair accessible or walker accessible for all students though right one of the reasons why i chose this area really to start first because it affects all of our students throughout all of our entire district is it affects all of them and so uh at the elc program and it is really the basics and the foundation of the rest of our programs and that the current equipment that is there will be donated there's a company that comes out and actually takes out that equipment and will donate it to another organization that is in need of it you will see up here uh this is the current shade area so that is staying so the only thing really in that area is going to be the shade area the reason the cost is so high is they actually have to boom all the materials over the building so all of the concrete is going to be boomed over the building in order to lay the concrete for this and all the rubberized surfaces the price tag of 448 000 because you say okay how are we going to pay for this so one of the things i think i shared with the board last last month is that the district has received or is allocated an additional 1.2 million dollars in idea funds that is a carryover money that we found so we have that allocated so what we are doing with that money this year we're taking 600 000 of that and taking our special ed salaries for the rest of the year and moving it over there so it frees up 600 000 in our general fund and so this money that money part of that money that is freed up will be used to pay for this then so we're not going to take it out of construction funds we're going to take it out of our regular funds i can't use straight idea money for this because this would be for all students not just special ed students on that so i can't use i can use part of ida funds but it was just simpler moving over special ed expenditures that we have currently in the budget over there and it still leaves some additional money there that can be utilized you know for other things that may be needed the second part of that 600 000 that we're going to be getting we'll we'll use next year and that's what ms perkins is going to be working on with the special staff to allocate funds for next year for the additional 600 000 okay you will also see there are two proposals that are there in your packet one is for 448 000 the other one is for 478 000.
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