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um rachel kevin kim uh where do you want us to start um we have i mean obviously we have the agenda we have the policies after the policies that were sent out attached to the agenda um you know rachel i think you you and i talked about convening the meeting i don't know if you want to start us and then we can kick it to kim or kevin on where we are with policy on this yeah i think we should just review the bullying policy as it stands i mean there's no need for if there's no need for any action that's fine but let's have the conversation and i want to get a pulse from kevin as to just what the school climate is right now so um you know i think kevin if you want to take it that makes all the sense in the world right so i mean that's that's a wide open one in terms of school climate as it relates to bullying um but i but i think we've you know we've talked about this quite a bit in board meetings um particularly when we first reopened our schools um and the level of um the level the the social emotional challenges that were brought back into the buildings on the hills of the pandemic um you know it's certainly some of the more serious challenges that we had uh in the fall uh we're not having thank goodness those same concerns um but our teachers and our administrators are still certainly experiencing um you know increased levels of support required for students who are still having trouble self-regulating and so i i think we're really just reviewing and figuring out how to support kids on the heels of the pandemic and the fact that they were out of buildings for 18 plus months particularly here in danbury and um and doing everything we can not just academically trying to get kids caught up um and accelerate learnings as we had you know emphasizing some of our goals but um the social emotional piece and behavior and self-regulation is also has been an adjustment for us and so because of that you know we've seen increases in discipline we've seen increases in suspensions we've seen increases in expulsions and so you know those are certainly some of the challenges that we're experiencing i would i would like to think as the school year continues and we get back we continue to get back to more normal some sense of normalcy you know academics in our curriculum will be the agenda for the day and there'll be less and less disruption in our schools i would like to think so i feel like the further we get from the beginning of the school year things are getting better but we're certainly still experiencing challenges kevin is there anything in particular with the bullying policy that you think we should address adapt modify add to take away from um look at or look at or talk about yeah i i think the the real tightening that needs to be be done is with our protocols and how we're informing families um you know whether it's initiating excellent investigation and informing families after an investigation has been held so i think some of those protocols um in regulations of the policy um is where the opportunity is with the policy itself i think um you know despite when it was written i think all those things still resonate and it's appropriate um the way it's written yeah i i certainly didn't see anything in it that i thought needed to come out i just wasn't sure whether anything you needed to go in do you need us to address or look at regulations to or tuning up those protocols and regulations and obviously if it's not on the agenda for tonight we can't do it tonight but we can certainly hold another meeting and put it on so the answer is yes yes yes and i say yes yes yes because one um we we are working with shipment and goodman to come in and provide a presentation to all of our administrators to update those regulations we just feel like they're kind of outdated and that's where our real opportunity is and i think we are looking to have them come in during our admin time in june um and so we're just waiting on confirmation um and then um again sure given that there we have not seen any updates to the policy from shipment and government arcade policies um we're seeing our opportunity truly with the regulations and having them come in make a presentation walk all the administrators through so that there's a admin council understanding of what's supposed to be happened what's supposed to happen when a family or child um shares that there's concerns about bullying how many days we have to respond to a family how many days we actually have to conduct the investigation and then what the reporting protocols ought to be and and that's some training that we need to to have just to make sure the system like we've all had the same training and it's been a long time since we had the training from shipment and goodman number one but two we've had quite a bit of um transitions in admin over the years uh so it's it's it's time it's time for us to just make sure we're all on the same page particularly with the increased number of um bullying cases coming up all right i'm sorry disciplinary fractions not necessarily bullying i shouldn't say bullying specifically that's like that that's excellent that's that sounds like a good plan is that some i lost you for a second and just so you know joe while you're trying to figure out your sound you continue to try to decide yourself as gone but we know it's you sorry you know i i really should get used to fixing that before these meetings shouldn't i uh now that my net is no longer quote unstable unquote um is that presentation something that we can be looped in on not necessarily during the presentation if it's going to be during the day and it doesn't work but even if there's written materials or whatever or or some kind of smaller version of it even if kim picks it up and gives it to us i think it'd be helpful if we got some of that as well yeah i appreciate the ask joe i think this policy in particular the regulations associated with this one are just too important not to share um and frankly um typically in districts they'll have if you want to report bullying you want to report bullying anonymously um there might be on some just some district websites there might be an opportunity to report that and the forms are available on the website um so that's my long way of saying absolutely um because we want we don't want to start doing any of those things until the board is aware of um our feedback from from shipment so absolutely um and you know i if there are more questions um obviously kim will be there and kelly will be there we can provide the feedback uh to the board any members of the committee rachel anybody have any questions or thoughts or concerns about what we just heard it sounds like a plan yeah i i i guess i should have put just disap you know all of our discipline policies up here and not just the bullying but um [Music] um how are families again i mean we hear it all the time in while we sit in expulsion hearings but how are families notified of you know our our policies around discipline so if it's it's my understanding in years past what we've done is the policy is sent to families high school is a handbook middle schools there's a handbook and kind of the expectations the scent is part of our opening packet in these last two years some of those things may have not been sent out consistently so that's something we're going to have to make sure is happening across all of our schools thank you anybody else's questions michelle did i see your hand yeah yes thank you and then after that after they have the actual binder um what is the process if there is an incident what how does that actually escalate in other words what is the chain of command if somebody has some sort of an issue where there's suspension or expulsion or whatever is involved you know what is that process that chain of command so our if there's a suspension um at the school level there is a notification of families um sent from the principal's office um and so it might be the principal of designee so if it's a suspension there is a suspension letter and call typically associated with the suspension if the student is going to be out for a significant period of time there are arrangements made to provide work while the student is not in school and then of course if it's an expulsion is in a different there's an additional layer of conversation and scheduling for the actual expulsion hearing but that's kind of typically if there's a discipline involved that requires a suspension um there's an official notification that comes from the school to the family and a discussion also takes place i guess i'm kind of really digging down deep like as soon as the incident occurs and the child is in trouble and is sent to the principal's office sorry um what happens then is the parent called immediately or is somebody else called at that time are they called before the parent when does the parent actually in the chain of command uh notified i i think it's situational right and so if you know and i think it also depends on the nature of the incident i mean we have some cases where a student can be removed from class and sent to the principal's office and the teacher can um get them back in the class without without any incident and it doesn't require a school discipline at all um you know the student may not just need to be helped to get back in classroom um if it's a discipline it should require out of school time um you know a number of things can happen but an investigation has to happen it really depends on the incident right and so yes okay i'm sorry i guess i'm speaking more in the lines of possible suspension or in the end suspension so if you have a child that there's an issue and it's warrants suspension what is the product what is the protocol in that regard when is the parent brought in who is brought in and like if a phone call to the parents requested is that um acknowledged immediately is that put on hold what is the process or is this the student that we need to define right so the student no it's pretty well defined in our schools so okay the student is not um assigned a suspension without a notification to the family um and so that will happen with a phone call and a follow-up conversation with the family walking the the parents through um you know whatever the infraction was and then formally there's a letter that typically follows to follow that conversation but there is a communication that takes place to confirm that the child is not expected back in school for a certain amount of days um and then of course there needs to be a rational why that that decision has been made so the principal assistant principal is having that conversation with the family um you know regarding that incident it's only the principal and the parent that's in that discussion or their principal principle or designate principle or designate principle or assistance only only those three there's no outside um help or social or no there's no other service or it's just not that is part of that right not as part of that conversation but notifying the family um that the child is being suspended now they certainly could be one as part of the re-entry or when it's time to talk about retribution um or services might be required um certainly those things will take place oftentimes but just in terms of the process in which the suspension and notification happens um it's principle assistant principle and we we try to distance like um our pps staff from that conversation because we don't want to involve you know the guidance counselor who's supposed to be really objective in this process and we don't want to include them in the disciplinary conversations so that the student so that the student continue to access the counselor as a resource without you know without any bad feelings about what may have happened in school right no i completely agree with what everyone is saying here about actually focusing in on this issue i just feel that like do we know what the like increase and the percentage like let's say from the last five years past to where we are now do we have an idea of what that increase is that we've at least observed where obviously we do need to address it i agree with everyone here on that matter i'm just wondering like you know have we taken that into account and to kind of get an idea of where we are right and i don't have the exact numbers in front of me but we've we've definitely had an increase in suspensions this year um and an increase in expulsions this year um i frankly i think and i think it's kind of well chronicled in our budgeting for the 21-22 school year we anticipated increases in um behavior challenges this year which is why we asked for additional pps staff and and deans for the high school to kick off the school year um and you know and and i think we needed that plus more quite frankly um yeah i think i think that's excellent absolutely i was just i'm just i guess trying to say that i hope that that area of what all that means obviously we take into account what's occurred and why we're here but that it's kind of really clearly defined for the parent or the child you know the student himself to realize you know where are those boundaries what are we looking at you know what is that process you know where are you in that you know when you're kind of getting um kind of maybe getting into trouble a little bit more than you may have in the past kind of thing so i'm just you know i'm just asking for that reason and i agree with everyone i think definitely needs to be addressed thank you kate thanks joe um i just wanted to say like i you know i certainly think it's important for us to to look at these policies um particularly since we're seeing an increase you know in things going on in the schools um but i would just point out that you know as a board uh all we can do is set the policy um and that you know to some degree this is falling to our administration to deal with um and you know they have repeatedly asked for the funding to try to bring forward more mental health supports both at the the local level and at the state level i know that there's a bill going through the education committee right now at the state level that is specifically around mental health support for students and you know that's the kind of thing that as a community here in communities across connecticut um we really need to try to support and push forward so that we can get the kind of funding that's going to make it possible for us to put support staff in schools to deal with you know the conflicts that may be happening there um you know i i think there's only so much we can do through policy unfortunately thanks louisa bridget um rachel do you have anything else on this topic bridget if you were talking you weren't muted okay uh rachel you have anything else on the this one no i just just to add like you know the board is really our purview is policy it's not so much regulation i mean that would be you know uh under kevin's purview and i mean you could certainly give us information so that we're aware of it but our job is like that that policy level oh yeah no no my question was just give us the information just in case we have to like impact policy or something the regs are certainly within kevin's purview for sure right um wait yeah no that's getting way too far to the weeds for um okay i i think that's it on this one um the next one on the agenda was um i believe public speaking at the board meetings um something i realized this evening because kate pointed it out for me we have a public speaking policy it's 39 93 25.31 um 93.25 actually talks about it too um can everybody hear me or am i locked up again you're good i'm good okay um believe it or not um our our meeting our conduct of the meeting section of the of our bylaws actually limits public speaking to 30 minutes obviously we can extend it if we want to the irony is that's actually not in the public speaking section of the of the minutes or of the bylaws which which i thought was interesting kate pointed out i'm like you know probably makes sense to have me all in one spot but um rachel did you want to start off on that because you would you and i had talked about it at least once before um just about the the maximum time frame no no just the policy in general but in general so what i'd like the committee to consider is a couple things you know we had um people from other towns come speak to our meeting which we don't have it's not addressed in our bylaws so just something to consider is limiting it to danbury residents in immediate family members directly connected to a danbury student or a danbury public school employee regardless of where they live i think they they should be able to come to us but i mean that's just my my thought on that um i know city council limits it to danbury residents only um so we could certainly do that but then you're kind of you're limiting it to you know the folks who attend magnet school and employees who live out of town um so that's that's one the other thing um to discuss is uh uh what would say i lost my train of thought with that one while you put the train back on the rails i can actually touch on that ironically our existing bylaws kind of aren't there they're kind of awkwardly and badly worded um it kind of indicates a limitation to people who live in danbury it it actually says the board of education considers it important of the viewpoints of citizens of danbury and school staff now citizens is absolutely positively the wrong term you're not a citizen of a state or a municipality you're a resident um did i lock up again okay good um so we what we probably should do and i agree with you wholeheartedly rachel is probably be a little bit more specific for two reasons the way it's written here i mean citizens is again the wrong term it's certainly not explicit enough in in if read the wrong way you're absolutely right it would limit the ability of not just parents of students at the magnet school but let's say the non you know the the divorce family where the where one parent lives in bethlehem one parent lives in denver um so it probably should be a little bit more specific the other problem too is this it could be interpreted here to limit school staff to danbury and obviously we don't want to do that um we should i think the logical the logical revision would be to have the viewpoints of something to the effect of you know residents of the city of danbury students or parents students you know who attend danbury schools the parent of a danbury school student um gambling taxpayer um and any staff or employee any member of the staff or employee i don't want to limit it obviously to teachers we have a janitor wants to come and speak we have a lunch lady who wants to come and speak which is almost certainly the wrong term i just used but um you know there could i mean we have how many county employees do we have 1500 employees um and more if you include the bus drivers i think we want to make sure that we click we're clear that any staff or um employee can come and speak um and and the city and this is actually would be a little bit broader than the the council's um criteria because the city account the city council limits it to residents and taxpayers because you can actually be a damper taxpayer without being a resident uh terry i like your list but people who work here uh would that also include their family coming to talk or just the people who work it's an intro it's an interesting question i hadn't thought about it i mean just throwing it out there i understand no no it's it's it's an it's an interesting question i i wouldn't think of an employee's immediate family but i suppose there could be a situation that may be rare enough that we can kind of leave it in the chair's discretion and the chair always has the discretion to recognize anybody um for sure so you know but it's i mean it's a really interesting question i know that it would come it would come up a lot but it's certainly something that could come up for sure um but i like your list um and like i said it's a little broader than the city who limits it to taxpayers and residents i think we need to be a little broader because we need to include our all of our employees i think we need to include the parents of our magnet school kids and any parent who doesn't happen to live in danbury but as a child goes to danbury schools yeah that's a good point thoughts kate louisa michelle michelle i do so um what about people that fall within the district like for instance so they're speaking a lot of talk about open choice open choice would allow other towns to actually um interact with danbury so how is it that would be handled um should that actually be implemented or not whatever the case is because i know with zoning we take in all the other um local towns um opinions surveys into the overall you know um solution i guess both same as we did when we were looking at um several of the of the um charts and slides that we've been seeing throughout the last year of the board of ed so would that be the case now what if that is would that limit that any exchange with any parent or family that interacts with danbury even though they are not a taxpayer would that be also included well if you have a student who you know using fairfield for example if you have a new fairfield student who's coming to danbury in open choice obviously they'd be the parent of a danbury school school school student for sure um [Music] a general a general member of the population of new fairfield well no i guess sorry i i i'm trying to make sure i understand the question um are you speaking about somebody specifically with a student here under open choice or just the general person who lives in one of those towns it's not here yet if the conversation isn't on the table but it's clearly in the in the area so for us to implement a policy like this could really hinder part of the 24th district as well as other surrounding neighborhoods that actually may be implement you know um brought into this process so i want to know before we make a decision like that and we know that there's other um discussions being had i don't want to limit this board so that can't be addressed later unless there's a policy committee or something like that we can always go back and modify it we always go back and modify policy again something's always obviously in the discretion of the chair but then again there's 87 000 people roughly 88 000 people who live in the city of danbury frankly if i were one of them and i am one of them i would be very annoyed if the board were acting they acting to do something based on the opinion of somebody who lives in new fairfield who doesn't have a student who goes to danbury schools we should be taking into consideration the opinions of people who live in danbury whose students go here whose children go here who work here who pay taxes in danbury not really the opinions of people who live in other towns that don't have a connection to damari or our schools like that now obviously there is an interesting issue with open choice we're not here yet that's not i mean no town is no town has agreed to join us yet maybe that's something we need to address when and if that when when we get to that point another town agrees maybe we look at it but in the absence of it i think that should be something that's incorporated somehow that it is an option or that it somehow can be addressed because we would hate to close the barn doors and then already know that there is stuff coming in that we won't be able to address because maybe we've tied our hands um on the matter we always have the power to come back and and modify apologies sometimes it takes a while to find the time and the calendar those issues so we it's just something that i feel that you know um based on the fact that i'm looking at our my district alone that issue is um and it goes across the board it's important to all three and they're all your your current district in your current district in relation to this job is the city of denver and it is it's i'm in i'm in the 138th ward and i'm telling you now that this is a discussion that's coming up for danbury public schools from the guidance from cave and our attorney there's several things happening so i just want to make it clear that um i wouldn't want to necessarily vote on current changes to the policy based on a certain lens when we know that there is more surrounding the issue that's all yeah no it's understood i think the purpose of this is to make sure that we're hearing from people with an actual connection to the danbury public schools not a hypothetical connection to the damn race public schools but you know if it went to town in budgets and in every aspect so we should prepare when we are writing our policy to meet the needs of today and the future possibly agreed and our concerns should be the concerns of the citizens of damberry not the residents of they are new fairfield or bethel or brookfield no you have two others yeah i'm sorry people with their hands up yeah i i i see kate i see bridgette let me just let me finish my last comment let me just finish my last comment if if the implementation of open choices being had in danbury as one of its models locations and it's something that the danbury board that the danbury board of the public schools should be as we are in line with the five programs for literacy and everything else the building out and overcrowding but you know all those other options this also is one just as rachel has pointed out bullying and i agree with kevin on the social emotional i mean there's a lot of aspects to be considered and we're forward thinking this would be one of them thank you kate thank you uh so a couple things about the open choice piece um one uh i the other you know area of residents of the other areas that that we might potentially be sending children to have to opt in so that's a responsibility of those individual municipality boards to make that decision and to get feedback from their communities about that participation two if you decide that you want your child to participate in this program you have to opt in to have your child participate in it so somebody sending a child from our district to another district has to make that decision on their own and then their their child is a part of that other school district at that point and now they're interacting with that school board to express concerns that they might be experiencing or problems they might be dealing with um so i think you know we just you know we have a mechanism here and i think you know when you talk about the magnet school for example where you have kids coming from other districts into our district to come to school here i think we need to be careful about how we freeze the policy here so that we make sure that those parents and those those guardians are included so that they can come to us when they have uh an issue with their student or with with something going on with the school system so i hear what you're saying michelle but i just think you know for the for the program we're talking about and for our responsibility as a board here in danbury um you know our concern has to be with danbury schools and with danbury students and feedback from uh folks who are part of that community whether they are living in the bounds of danbury or whether they're directly you know they're outside of the bounds of danbury but it has to be a direct connection to our school system because that's our function so um i think i i i michelle i had other people with hands up um bridgette kim i think you were were you looking at something here too i was um i was just gonna say i i think what i would urge you to to stay take a step back and think about what you're hoping to achieve with this policy because um you know we haven't had a lot of experience with people from other districts coming in or other cities until we had this conversation about the masks and the last meetings i think when it really came up and i think you know this is not the only forum in which someone can express an opinion about something the board's doing and there's always people who write letters we do surveys so i think that part of what this policy is designed to do is to give you a flavor of what the community is thinking at a given time but to do it in a manner that is organized so as not to overwhelm your meetings and if there are certain topics specific things like open choice there is always the opportunity to make a content specific call for opinion um and so you know the chair could post you know we would be interested in hearing feedback about open choice at this meeting and and modify what rules you have for public comment i think the one thing that i would urge is that as you think about whether this is really a mechanism for controlling kind of the course of your meetings and hearing in a measured way some some opinions to think a little bit broadly about how you write the rules so that you are not always changing them or deciding not to enforce them this time but enforce them that time because that's almost worse um and so you want it to be something that you feel like the chair can kind of consistently um provide the guidelines without um putting her in this case her in a position to have to make more exceptions than there are other rules those are kind of my general thoughts about this yeah that's that's true these are certainly not things we can always go back and modify but you don't want to do it every 15 minutes for sure kim wells said thank you that's exactly what my intention was thank you so much for making that very clear and and that and that's it it's a really good point that the we can always solicit opinion or comment from whomever we want you know there's a policy a general policy the chair obviously always has the ability to solicit beyond that or by the way or just allow any comment with discretion in the chair at a meeting anyway and just anyway usually it won't matter because as kim noted this is not something that happens regularly but it's certainly something we want to have you know be prepared yeah and art and here's the thing arguably the existing bylaws already say somebody who lives in for example brookfield isn't somebody that we're looking for comment from they already say that kind of what we're really talking about here is just being a little bit more clearer and a little bit more specific because it says citizens of danbury anyway which obviously implies people who live here i also think too that it's very important to have this conversation because these things come up as you know on the spur of the moment and so you're often in a situation where you're like right and not so much in where the person's from but if somebody starts talking about an employee you know we have pretty clear prescriptions about that or if they start talking about their student and and sometimes you're sort of a step behind in trying to control the dialogue so this is an important conversation i think it becomes very hard to like react without being rude right exactly um bridgette did you have anything i i couldn't so i i think a lot of my points are already covered but it seems the conversation is really just about inclusivity and equity in being making sure that we're hearing all the voices that are appropriate for us to hear and that we're not stifling other people who have to have you know the people who should be part of the conversation that we're making time for them because they are the ones who students go here who teach in our schools so you know i i appreciate everything that kim and and had to say i think that sums it up but um i think that clarity is important too and so you know taking a look at those bylaws um i'm not sure when the last time we've we've had a bylaw revision maybe kim you could speak to that that's a whole different world of of conversation for bylaw uh revision and maybe that's something we need to think about not just as one simple piece but as as a piece of a hole and so that takes it in in a whole different direction um but you know to michelle's point having these and and and kim's and kate's having these conversations about inclusivity and and equity uh just helped clarify so that when it does come up we're we're ready um and and kim i would just be interested just just out of curiosity at this moment uh when we had when was the last time we did a big law review well funny to say that yeah and we haven't done it since i've been here no we we we reviewed our bylaws just recently well this board policy is 2008.
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um everybody's here and now instead of items oh wait um in recognition of free speech and the following board agenda item we welcome all and would like to note that saying the pledge of allegiance is not a requirement to participate in the business of this public board if you do not save a pledge for religious political social or personal reasons you are most welcome here as an equal participant in the business of this board salute but i pledge allegiance to the light of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation indivisible with liberty and justice for all announcement of action taken in closed session regarding item one public affiliate display dismissal release no action was taken regarding item two student expense expulsions readmissions we have two modes to do so regarding uh student expulsion [Music] so let's do a roll call vote trustee anderson all aye dusty pope aye trustee kelly aye trustee lee hi and sure go outside so that is manageably approved and then for students 2122 [Music] three do i have a motion uh to accept just proceeding okay and do i have a second second okay motion of the seconds let's do a little call move trustee anderson adoption of agenda okay thank you so from the consent much okay any other requested changes to the agenda okay so do i have a second on the approved method okay in regards i don't want to pull them there's no reason to hold but i do want to speak briefly on item under consent agenda 9 and number 10.
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thank you for the opportunity to testify and i'll stand by for questions thank you thank you next to testify yvonne lao interim executive director of state public charter school commission good afternoon chair kidani chair kim and members of the committee we we thank you for your support and support this bill and stand on our written testimony thank you so much thank you yvonne next to testify jan govia vice president administration for university of hawai'i stand there oh present chair thank you their testimony is in support next to testify lee ann ibesugawa chair justifying for hawaii's civil rights commission aloha cherokee dani chairmarkado kim members bill hoshido for the hawaii civil rights commission now you have our written testimony in support of the bill with strong concern over the bill's statutory mandate that in any conflict between the state title title ix corollary and the federal title ix law federal law shall prevail our concern is discussed at pages four to six of our testimony and i'll be available thank you bill let's testify yankee overly public policy chair for aauw of hawaii good afternoon kim chair kidani and members of committee thank you for this opportunity to testify uh i am representing both hawaii democr women's coalition as well as aauw here today you have our written testimony uh and i'm here to answer any questions you may have i just want to emphasize that a previous federer administration has proven to us advocates why it is so important that we have a strong state title nine laws to protect our students so that's the only thing in addition that i would like to comment on so we are in support thank you thank you next to testify michael bologne jr is michael president not present chance thank you this testimony is in support next to testify linda lentil good afternoon i'm linda elenta thank you for the opportunity just to share a brief testimony this is also my son jason elento he didn't sign up for testimony but i want to introduce him he's been participating in the legislative internship program with the keiki caucus so it's a step-by-step learning experience so i can't believe it's been that it has been that so hard i guess it hasn't given me so we're um i'm teaching him but also you all are teaching him so i appreciate it and this is just i had some comments for this particular bill regarding civil rights i think um between schools and other situations we have lots of opportunities to have our civil rights taken away in the way we're being treated so i appreciate your looking into the civil rights of everyone including students but basically i wanted to share in addition or just you have my written testimony so i have different thoughts and ideas there i'd appreciate your consideration because there are other bills in and that i've seen over the years and hawaii revised statutes 368-1.5 and 3860.
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we also discussed a number of diversity equity and inclusion topics and i'll steal directly from this love's agenda because it was so well prepared uh we discussed breaking bias lessons from the onslaught training for grades four through eight with a summary that looked at african-american history throughout an anti-bias lens with highlights and contributions that african-americans have made to the united states as well as lessons on our country lessons which our country has learned from their history we applied for a district wide award for virtual three virtual workshops from k through 8 from new jersey state bar founding foundation including beyond bias talking about race breaking bias lessons from the outside and breaking bias unconscious bias we completed the cusack curriculum compliance checklist um the amistad telescope holocaust dei are also being monitored through atlas and lessons plans by the slug new jersey mandate section was added to atlas the amistad mandate has currently met all subject areas with multiple grades in addition to mlk and black history month emails are currently being sent to teachers with access to a multitude of resources to use in their classrooms there are several examples given from grades k through eight that include things from reach to guided social studies and subjects like uh important things like the underground railroad freedom speech the american quilt and just basic daily inspirations we also discussed health and pe updates all units currently being created have been created with uh at the end of february a second full day of writing curriculum and reviewing the health health program this love was using a curriculum evaluation rubric to determine the press program for our students and she and other staff attended an nc3 health pe live webinar from the state there was a upcoming atlas webinar again the program that holds our curriculum for us to see and as well this we were working on creating model curriculum and having pe teachers get together to make it a collaborative effort with that we've concluded the meeting with no additional items from the administration that is my report thank you comprehensive health policy updates you know to be quite honest policy updates so we have an update on how those policies are being pushed into the curriculum because one of the one of the discussions we had in the december meeting was that that would be reported back to the board for discussion so that's forthcoming that's my understanding okay second question are you able to share that written report i'm sorry are you able to share your written report oh yeah i actually have january any other questions thank you and any questions last thursday um president mrs valenzuela myself um mr becker and dr dean rozio um mrs carlson's cherry julian we also had a guest from new jersey school boards uh and we asked you to come there um still trying to figure out a solution to our current policies and how we host them and how we make sure that we have the most recent policies published and as school boards members you all have access to the njsba um you actually can log in go to the policy tools and you have access to sba we'll read through the legislation and and publish that similar to the service that we pay for from strauss estimate but this is provided with our views to njsva so i had a couple of questions because trying to get a grasp on how these policy updates come through i noticed that they haven't provided any updates for 2022 yet that's not consistent with other years other years had seven or eight updates so we were working on just understanding why that was but he did say that districts that use their policies have not his knowledge had any problems with liability for taking their policies and i'm evaluating the offerings for the hosting and how we actually work policy policy comes out update comes out we have an existing policy it doesn't match we have to figure out a way to make it you know congruent and make sure that we're covered and have a paper trail to say that you change this policy on this date and if there's an issue down the line you can say yes that is the policy now this is the policy is you know when this your interest or whatever this incident was that you were concerned with so we have a paper trading know what our policies were so school boards has an offering called or docs um it's in my opinion a nice technology and provides all those with those core services um and i asked them from there they have a critical policy guide so they already have the 000 and 9 000 in their numbering system the critical policy so they're a brand new district you come in and you confirm yeah some school districts especially in south jersey come in and they just take those policies and they start there um they also do offer a policy writing service and it's nine thousand dollars to have them provide customized policies that start from those implement our bylaws or we could do it ourselves you can take those critical policies and somebody would have to go through and you know make updates to make sure that our terminology is correct and our bylaws are correct but we could do it ourselves or we could pay to have it done properly and then i guess that comes with some additional them backing it up and standing behind it it's a build versus buy conversation but overall i think that the board docs platform is robust enough for the purpose of us having our policies on our website it also comes with some meeting capabilities so we can post our uh youtube videos uh nicely on the website also have the agenda side by side there's some time stamps for various reports or keywords um so i think it's something that we should we should seriously evaluate um in terms of how we make our policies available to ourselves how the policy committee actually services them and make sure that we're pushing them through and making all the updates and how the public uh can access those policies as well so hopefully now we're in discussion we discussed that we did have some past business follow-up as well uh wsu where mrs carlson had been asked based on the advice from mrs adams to talk to the chief of police uh about a policy in terms of how we have to report um bias acts we're used to the discretion used to lie with mrs carlson and now the state requires that all bias acts are reported and they work that out we'll work through our research officer and mrs carlson will work with the chief of police for every act that needs to be reported and the chief police will determine the next step from there whether that's handled as a criminal matter or if uh is handled doesn't matter by the school we also discussed bylaw changes and so i'm putting those hopefully tonight the first reading what i want to do is codify our streaming and video record of our meetings this is something that we started during coven and i've got lots of positive feedback that the others have as well in terms of community members that want to be able to access the video uh live because i can't make the meeting in person or afterwards because you have an intertime shift i need to be able to follow up on the video so these two uh changes are policy 0168 we already have a recording of board meetings which really just talked about the public being allowed to report board meetings and then oh 157 which talks about content for our school website so these bylaws will basically codify that we'll continue to do this and offer this to the community finally we talked about uh covenanting policies and i'm happy that we're all here mass and the students have been able to get back mrs charleston recorded that um it's gone well in both directions that the students are being respectful of everyone's decision no matter where they land and i've heard from many teachers that they're happy to see their students smiling faces and same for my kids as well um dr dean rozio asked about some of the continuing policies however in terms of coding testing criteria which basically if a student presents code like symptoms they have to present a negative test at a time um that's that test was required to be a pcr or not uh it was excluded a home test um i believe everybody saw the update as a monday mr carlson that that is no longer required you can provide a home test but the question still remains uh you know this is not a state mandate anymore uh so it's it's a health department recommendation but it is incongruent with what we do with our driver disease if a student has flu-like symptoms we don't require them to provide a negative flu test to return to school um and finally i just said that we appreciate it we can stop sending out the code 19 screen guides and emails and that mrs carlson would talk to doctors about all of these issues so those are my that's my report anyways any questions um but i don't know if you want to talk about the the board docs piece now or session i was going to ask you um during your during your committee meeting um that the members of you and the committee members have a recommendation because like they've provided the information the links and i'm sure that everyone got a chance to look at it did you guys come up with a recommendation we don't have a recommendation at this time um check with uh school boards as to speak to the representative on the policy side it seemed like the referee he was very good but he would seem like he was the technology side of the hosting so maybe check with the house right yeah thank you for that you can just as possible i think maybe at our ranks we should talk about the different so uh programs that we're looking at pros and cons and monetary commitments and then we can maybe make a recommendation and in the meantime if the other members if you haven't had a chance to take a look at the information and the links um it would be a good idea to do so that way when committee comes back with their recommendations you know will be well informed any other questions i have a pragmatic question sean i appreciate the efforts because i think it'll be great for the district to have the finances posted we're currently using the number and system for stress right i'm sure they talked about the fact that they're proprietary and they have their own numbering system so if they talk about assistance with the conversion did you say that just now that i miss it or no point you brought about the last time i was i'm not quite aware that they are on different numbers i think it's a question of like you know do we go through quickly and find the ones that are that are most relevant to the district from strauss and work to convert them and move them in or start from scratch in order to move to school boards and start with their critical policies and then fold they could review our current policies to compare to their own and any differences they can bring to our attention as we want to update ourselves without differences or if they had something that stressed us so there's assistance from that yeah that's what they offered they could do that if you want to that's the the rewriting yeah okay yeah that's i mean like i mean that does seem to me like to be money sounds good and if anyone needs that information sean maybe you could be sending on and then dawn can then send it to anyone else so that um with the links and this way you can see have all that information can anyone else thank you sean all right and uh next we have community relations sarah uh yes mr becker and i met this week um we discussed primarily the cpac meetings that have occurred in the past couple months um kurt i think medallion you attended the new jersey the zoo meeting yeah um and currently reported that the majority while helpful focus on very large districts um which was somewhat relevant uh but i think the uh brielle specific cpec meeting which occurred on march 2nd here at the school which i attended in person was a little bit more keter to say and the meeting was facilitated by kelly baltino and jane hard there was a panel present of the school's interventionists so um oh and child study team members and administrators i think i got everybody's name but i'm not sure uh mr prendergast was there his love doesn't matter mr man mr stevia this is o'reilly if i missed anyone i believe all of those people were present on the panel and mrs o'reilly gave a thorough presentation uh covering brielle school's intervention and referral services response to intervention and the multi-tiered system of sports after the presentation parents in attendance ask questions of the entire panel and they engage in a dialogue it seemed that for most of the questions and kind of underscore that there was a little bit of confusion from the parents and on how best to communicate with the interventionists um and the child study team um just to better understand the issues that their children were having and any uh progress in that next steps um so then after the discussion with the panel uh the parents met exclusively panel steps uh left and the parents discussed you know uh the presentation and the information that was presented to them there's a lot of productive dialogue um the facilitators were very uh helpful they were invested and well-versed in special education themselves i believe they are employed in special education uh at other districts um and so a lot of knowledge sharing with parents um and most of the most of the conversation went to um understanding what their children were going through in irs services and kind of um how maybe the program could be built out given that it seemed there were a lot of children in these services but a relatively smaller number of interventionists at least that was the what was um kind of the what everybody in the room felt um given given that they were interested there was a lot of talk about ways that um parents could or ways that they could learn about um brielle expanding their irs services and uh the support staff needed for kind of the increasing especially with covid um the increasing numbers that the team's seen so i'd say overall it was a really productive meeting everyone was very engaged but i think definitely underscored an opportunity for increased communication between parents and um and the cts team uh and administrators um but i think that that's also the plan for future meetings to increase that communication overall um i believe there is a meeting in april and may again for the cpac team so i will i can announce that and i believe emails go out to the entire parent population um so a plan i plan on attending that and then additionally apart from the cpac meeting there is a brielle pack 63 cub scouts um they will be having their annual spaghetti dinner fundraiser at the brielle firehouse on march 26th from four to seven pm mr walton any questions on or any other community announcements so thank you for that report yeah now just a question when they talked about increasing support services uh not enough interventionists did they give give a suggestion or a plan of you know what their next steps are um well this was mainly a month of the parents discussing so there were some people there were some parents present that also had experience in other districts as i mentioned and they mentioned some of their some of the things that they have done in their districts uh including obviously increased numbers of interventionists and offering um additional group and one-on-one sessions at different times not just during school but before school after school um which i again i don't i don't know all of the details um but it sounds like the majority of the intervention happens during school hours from what i could gather so there was some suggestions there from parents that had experience thank you i think it's a good opportunity for parents usually parents who are in education usually know how the system works yeah but you have so many parents and i think that as educators you kind of take it for granted but then you have those parents that are not educators and are not so familiar with the system so i that's why i think this is such a great group that they're able to meet and answer questions to so many of our parents agree yeah as a as a non-educator myself again very interesting and uh um i i'm definitely invested in what as well in the services yeah because if we have that concern about um not having them support services or interventionists that's definitely something that we want to help definitely address that if our students need that and we want to be able to address that and put that in place any other questions i don't have any questions but i i did want to just comment how unique it was that the basis of my takeaway as well as medic's was communication communication was the key and the foundation to trust on both sides so uh it was unique again my my meeting there were people made me from like camden miller in bigger districts and the fear and the anxiety that some of these parents had was alcohol and consensus but likewise in brielle that will point out coming out in a fearful but you know larger sense we also can go our way in working with communications on both sides to bridge the gaps to create a foundation of trust where uh it is on march 26 4 to 7 pm yes and i just have to say that don't miss them i look forward to that when my boys were cub scouts i i looked forward to that they do a great job they still i don't know if they're still getting the donations from julian and then the dessert this hoffman's ice cream and then the potato salad i just you know so so make sure you attend that because that it's a great it's a great fundraiser for the kids so um that's the plus and so uh before we go to the administrative report i just i just have a brief statement that i'd like to make um and i'll just read it during our february board meeting there was a presentation about how brielle elementary is infusing african-american history into the curriculum i was pleased with the time and effort that went into this work more importantly i appreciated the effort towards trying to understand the significance and importance of integrating black history into the curriculum this was apparent to me when miss love shared a video of nigerian author cinematography i felt as though miss love was not simply putting together a curriculum but she was trying to put herself into someone else's shoes however during the meeting a statement was made and it was also quoted in the co-star it was stated quote brielle has always embedded black history into its curriculum end quote second quote the curriculum has always included inclusion and diversity these statements are not accurate these statements dismiss the lasting negative impact that african-american students experience while sitting in a classroom year after year where their stories are not reflected in the curriculum it does not acknowledge the social and emotional toll that a child internalizes when their ancestors are only depicted by hardships enduring struggles and lacking hope or success black history is vital to understanding american history we do a disservice to all of our students not just black students but all of our students who need to not teach history accurately before progress can be made there needs to be an admission that we've missed the mark on this as we move forward let's take this opportunity and embrace the change that will cultivate students to become individuals with strong minds with well-considered opinions who will blaze a trail for others to follow like the american author maya angelou said when you know better you do better thank you any questions or comments so we'll move on to administrative report thank you at our last meeting i shared with you we began our kindergarten registration we're up to 38 students on that friday with the pre-k open house and then that saturday after our board meeting i shared with you that our boys and girls uh basketball teams were playing in the muslims at the high school both teams played outstanding but both teams lost two private schools the boys lost to college achieve and the girls lost to saint patton's two great programs but real families and children filled up of the gym at nashua high school and we witnessed two two great games we were hoping that the following day um madison girls and boys were playing in the championship game two and the same thing that happened for real happened to the high school kids but i'm happy to say that the high school kids are now in the states and boys and girls and the girls came home the state champion title just this week we celebrate the high school invites our freshmen to celebrate a freshman for a day at the high school and over 50 percent of our students have taken advantage of going to the high school and spending a day there and reporting back that it's a great experience also the high school freshman counselor came here and talked to our eighth graders about their high school schedule and um it gets our kids thinking about you know the next steps and the courses that they're going to be taking so they're up working on that as i speak uh in the last three weeks our school has hosted a professional development in mathematics and language arts um across descending districts we're hosting it here so it's nice to have teachers from outstanding districts come here and network and do pt together uh i'm happy to say that um i can't believe it we started in december but the play annie is next week mark seemed a long way off but here it is the 24th 25th at 7 o'clock that's next thursday and friday and on the 26th we have two shows at three o'clock and seven o'clock um we have close to 70 of our children involved in this play and the children are doing an amazing job and it's going to be nice to see people come here and see our play spring sports are getting started we're offering baseball softball tents and track and a number of children of course are signing up to be involved in those activities in sept i'm sorry in january we did not have our annual snowball dance hosted by um our pto but i had our pto meeting last week i did share with parents that i would like to do a spring fling maybe with the snowball theme white lions and the kids like to get dressed up so they're planning a snowball dance spring fling for all our sixth seventh and eighth graders and our student government is working on doing our first stance and it's going to be we're not fooling around april 1st april fool's day we're hoping to host our sending district student dance right here in this room keeping our fingers crossed right now it's hard to get a dj that is an honorable problem right now and i can't believe we're even talking about i hosted on our eighth grade parents it was last week or the week before talking about end of year activities for eighth graders the trip together their boat trip their dance their breakfast and so we're in those planning stages i had a first grader tell me uh and i was in his math class that he calculated because yesterday was 118th day of school that he has calculated that there are 62 days left of school that was his exact words and so i said yes ryan 62 days left it seems hard to believe but yeah we're counting down so thank you very much uh hiv there is a watering point in your control it's in your drone so we'll move on to action items while items below are from the recommendation of the superintendent we'll start with um kirk thank curriculum very much i'd like to look forward to mentioning this evening to move action items a1 through 85 on this evening yes and district operations ted i have one question are we going to be in the library the media center for the april meeting okay because in the v3 it states that that public hearing is going to be in the media center we could just change that into v3 over the chart where the money is on page five yes [Music] yes updates for first reading and number two the second call policies from prior meeting for second reading second yes and human resources bill i'd like to move items d1 through d15 and human rights second yes yes yes and at this time visitors business visitors are permitted to comment on agenda and non-agenda items at this time [Music] miss carlson mr xavier my name is kelly baldino and this is my friend jennifer bard and we are co-organizers of the special education parent advisory group here at brielle elementary school our group is comprised of parents teachers and administrators who aim to collaborate on policies programs practices and services which have an impact on students who require support academically socially and or emotionally at our first meeting mr savia coordinated a statewide parent advisory network it's called span to work with us to get our group up and running this collaboration has been a very successful in the creation and implementation of this group one of their suggestions was for the organizers to speak at the board of education meeting and to inform the board in the community of how the group is evolving and how to maintain a partnership with them we've had an overwhelming response from both general education parents as well as parents of students who are classified attending our meetings parents at this meeting share their child's successes and ask for suggestions to help their child in areas that are challenging for them for example parents have asked for outside therapy resources social group recommendations intervention questions information regarding extended school year for their child and benchmark data questions our group has has been a tremendous resource for our parents at our last meeting mr savia coordinated a presentation from the intervention and referral team as well as the interventionist this team was comprised of miss love miss o'reilly ms krendergas miss thompson and ms matter questions were submitted to mr savia by the group to ensure that the presenters could explain and answer any questions without any surprises the goal was to understand the tiered levels of support the protocol and understand the level of intervention being provided and offered from the school the feedback from the presentation from our group was exceptional parents found the team to be able to be knowledgeable and very comprehensive our group has thanked the team privately but we would like to take a moment to publicly thank them for taking the time to connect with the parents within our group at the conclusion of our meeting mr stevia asked to meet with mrs bart and myself to follow up with each to follow up after the meeting with him regarding the feedback from the parent group as well as any additional questions that may have come up mrs bart and i have met with mr savia and we are still waiting for some responses from a few questions if the board would like a more detailed understanding of the topics discussed when we meet we would have be happy to share them for you guys to provide us additional feedback one example of a request from the parents uh regarding the interventions for math and ela is that maybe it could be provided after school for 20 and 30 minutes rather than having the student being pulled out of their academic day our school our group has communicated with other neighboring districts and has learned that some of these offerings after school are offered and they pay the staff with the coven relief funds we think this would be a beneficial way to bridge the gap for our children who have experienced covid the last two years we would like to take a moment to thank mr savia for his collaboration and support for our group he has helped us take the necessary steps to include parents of all students of include parents of all students who have a learning difference providing an interpreter for our meetings as well as sending out our emails in spanish we would also like to thank the following board of education members mrs mcdevitt mrs jones mr woltman for attending our meetings sending emails and showing a genuine interest in the success of our group our group looks to expand and grow with its new members our meeting is on for april 5th at 6 30 for a parent only meeting in may we are planning a meeting with mr sebia to have a focus on speech therapy as well as occupational therapy and to to conclude our statement we would like to invite administration as well as teachers and staff to share any topics that you feel would benefit our parents we believe that education starts in the home and blossoms when it's facilitated in direct collaboration with the schools the more we can help our children build their skills academically socially and emotionally the greater the outcome for our children thank you for listening and supporting our children so i finally get to see you in person because we've been emailed so i didn't realize it was you but um well thank you for attending the meeting and sharing the information with us because it's really important and um and so we will definitely take these requests into consideration because it is important for our kids any comments or questions yeah comment just this is what randolph can be and you're doing a phenomenal job of it and you're doing it the right way you're you're bringing everybody together at first point and having different communication um you know the parent with classified children now um i take these issues very very seriously and you've just been outstanding in the way you've approached this so thank you and thank you again for being here on this educators for many many years but um you know we just think that's going to take a step further so we're signing up for that may speak thank you a okay discussion um an email i wish received a question apartment banned any update or maybe it's tomorrow.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
and i said awesome and they said dr p what would you look like and i said i don't know so the teacher came over and took my picture and she hit the button poof i'm transformed to 100 years old and she holds it up to show the kids and there's an awkward silence five seconds ten seconds and a little boy says um dr p you don't look any different awesome and bless her this little girl in touch with ruler and our emotions notice that doctor who's very sad that he looks 100. dr p watch watch guys guys look if you look really closely they added a wrinkle to his forehead and his glasses are thicker thank you [Laughter] that being said fast forward now one month later very proud and very pleased to introduce zach in third grade jackie whiting who's our technology coach has been doing amazing work with our teachers because of the amazing work she does with her t our teachers our students benefit so zach is going to show you tonight how he benefited under the jackie whiting guidance and also jackie if you don't mind i want to put you on the spot okay so we're really highlighting book creator yes but if you don't mind just briefly maybe some of the other wonderful technological resources you're providing for our teachers and students absolutely and andrea's a good example of this so you got to come to the bike thanks jack you got it so andrea is a great example of this because while i'm using book creator with zach this evening andrea has also used a program that used to be called adobe spark it's now adobe creative cloud express and that helps students to make slideshow animation videos we also have teachers who are building google sites with their students particularly in elementary school they're doing biography web pages and we have teachers now who are also exploring using green screen technology with their elementary school students so we've got a lot going on at huckleberry now and did everybody get a chance to see the microphone did everybody get a chance to see the teaser that we have in the board agenda there was a link to a book creator didn't see okay at your leisure in the agenda please click on that link not necessarily now just a little teaser about the wonderful work people created in our school and we have natalia in fourth grade all right there you go good so this is a library in book creator right and if we scroll through the shelves we come to zach's book all about cheetahs talk to them they're your audience over there can you lower the length a little bit yeah it's right next to it all right zach you ready cheetahs by zachary rank like all the other books my book has a table of contents tonight we will be looking at the habitat of a cheetah and cute little cubs anything you want people to notice about your um those are hyper links i can just click it and it takes me right to the page so i'm talking to the microphone so what's this a audio text box where do cheetahs live cheetahs primarily live in the white plains of africa and some still in india live in india africa is one of the seven continents of the world they live on the white plains white plains or grasses cheetahs live there because they eat gazelles grasslands is a domain specific word so when you click on it it takes me right it takes you right to the glossary i'll show them that on the next page right a mother cheetah can have three to five cubs at a time they are about 10 inches long that's smaller than a ruler they are helpless when they are born they need their mother to feed them her mom they can crawl up to 10 days old they begin to eat me at six weeks old they learn how to hunt from their mother they leave their mother at one year to 18 months if they live on the room for the rest of their lives and if i click this what's going to happen it brings me right it brings you right to the glossary where you have to find all of your words excellent zach can you talk into the microphone and tell people if you would like this your notes just in case you want your notes zach's going to tell you how using book creator has made him a better writer i wasn't really a big fan of writing before book creator it made me enjoy writing because i can make links you don't have to figure out how the author wants the author wants you to read because i can record it for you thank you for taking your time to watch my presentation tonight all right and now would you like to go to the microphone natalia and while i get to your bookshelf you can introduce yourself okay tell them your name i'm natalia pegan natalia help you find your book um are you top shelf um oh this one the blue one are you ready yeah all right what's this project about natalia this project is about george washington today i'm going to be teaching you about his about life leading the army and as president and life leading the army and being president george was one of the delegates at the first and second continental congress the continental congress was a group of representatives from each colony who decided to fight with the british together they appointed george as general of the continental army in may 1775.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so i'll pause that for a second because that covers the classroom components there's you know i'll direct it back to mr martelly you know the chair if there's any questions or comments or thoughts yeah um can you address the teacher storage who are the three adults that's my question all of them have all storage storage that would include the paraprofessionals who might be working within that classroom i did meet with paraprofessionals and one of their concerns was they had no place to put their things so um that's a design consideration uh now in the design consideration the architects may come up with another place to put lockers for them whether it's a staff or somewhere we wanted to make sure we're remembering the other adults and like you know typically you'll see a personal storage space for the teacher and that's it so that's that was our intent so it's built into every classroom this is teacher storage for free imagine it would also include you have a student teacher if there are interns in the space and i know that the number of extra people in the room varies from year to year based on the children in that classroom but we thought three would be and you've done so you've had some experience with these is that pretty common it is becoming more common i think it initially it wasn't considered it was just the teacher basically standard what does the teacher need what do the children need and then you know going through this process from other districts we came to realize that we really need to attend to the other full-time staff members who are working with our children um yeah they deserve some of their own personal mistakes great thank you very much yeah i think that makes sense to provide space for the other full-time staff i'm just curious though in general so my understanding of my classroom works is kindergarten is generally a classroom teacher and a paraprofessional and then from first through six i thought just the norm would be one classroom teacher and that's it and i know there's more i know there are professionals in each class so my question is i'm thinking you could easily have two people and maybe the situation where you have a third intern student teacher how many of your classrooms actually have like three people right now because we're talking about seven times five so 35 classrooms basically we're just wondering of those whatever you have in order right now call it i think it's like 24 classes or something like that how many of you actually have three people at any given moment in the year i think it fluctuates right we have um learning support tutors who go into those classrooms in all of our schools we have a grade one ia who switches into different classrooms so you have a myriad of adults in and out how many need to hang a coat in a given year i think that makes reasonable sense to have a space to perform to provide for those things you don't want to leave a purse or you know a laptop bag you can put it away and um we've been included for a long time but when parents come in to visit that would also be something to consider okay i could see that i just i was thinking we don't actually we don't normally have over the course of 900 teaching hours in a year we don't normally have three people yeah all right got it you know that was part of the consideration that you know the chief the para might be hanging there putting their stuff in a different room but sure yeah now you said that we're out of space it doesn't mean that that those three people are in that room all day long yeah paris rarely are unless they're at a grade level where there's an assigned classroom [Music] during the design phase would be good is to make those additional ones probably flexible storage so you can hang them but you could also you can never have enough storage in your classrooms it's always a shortage that no matter what um or what we also have seen in schools where they've had lockers for pairs like the teacher workers when we go to lunch has like a concentrated area that they can you know see you know store their their belongings as well so that's another option for you know these additional just one thought do we do time cards does anybody do time prepared so even though our average class size is 18 if you look at highland right now we do have some classes at 25.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
we we reviewed all of the bylaws um as part of the 2019 um in 2019 um every single one because the poor committee um actually it was entertaining for me because you can only imagine how rich the discussions were um but before we created the policy the bylaw manual for the board um each one actually was revisited by the board at that time in the subcommittee of the the policy committee at that time so uh teresa you're right some some of those policies actually the the the approval date has not changed because there was no action on them right in cases where those dates have changed it's because the committee actually made adjustments to them so can i can make one more comment so that that's wonderful you know if we've had a bylaw review in 2019 then we are up to date we are you know taking a look at policies by themselves so that's a really healthy thing and and i think that speaks well of the district that uh we've done this kind of work um and i i did the royal we but i wasn't involved in any kind of way so i'm impressed that you guys did all of that works that's a lot um so changing small pieces of the bylaw um is complicated and uh maybe uh maybe spending a little bit of time in rewriting the section joe that you were talking about um is is something that we could do as a group uh just so that we do have that kind of clarity and to michelle's point that equity just just wait we the the general policy review that rachel's led for the last nine or three four years we will be starting that up again soon where we get to look at whole chunks of whole policies all in one shot um the last two meetings have been rare most of them will not be nearly this entertaining um we can certainly look at this i can certainly draft put together work with kim to put together some clarifying language for the next policy committee meeting if that's the pleasure of the committee that we can look at and maybe do some clarify clarifying here because again arguably this already does what we're talking about clarifying and already limits it to people in gamer now one issue that i didn't even thought about rachel had actually told me about what some staff don't necessarily feel comfortable coming and commenting at a meeting because they don't live in denver now this does say school staff but clarifying and making it making it sure that the people who work for the district know they can come to a board meeting i think also has a lot of merit too because we certainly don't want them not to come so because they happen to live in new town i'm wondering if um as part of when we read the expectations for public participation that first line is tweaked and who the board actually does that does invite in to come talk and speak and so whatever language um uh the committee lands on we make sure it's included in that first sentence hey the board welcomes right and then we outline him be very clear who we welcome in of course that's right um bulleted well this is the reason why maybe tonight's not tonight to amend our bylaws on the fly because ironically kevin that's a really good idea i hadn't thought about um what we read at the beginning of our meetings is actually in a bylaw it's in a different one it's in 9325 which is the conduct of the meeting by law the irony of course is that's where the 30-minute time limit on public public participation exists not in public participation um now that's okay you read them together and you can you know as kim would as kim will laugh when i say this you can read them harmoniously um but yeah they know we're looking at that that opening sentence that italicized sentence at the beginning of probably the public address bylaw probably makes a lot of sense to this way we make them consistent but we can certainly so which one you're gonna change which one are you looking at to change it it's not a lot of change terry it's if you were to look at 93 25.31 it's on page it says page 35 at the bottom of the page yeah i've got like what you were i'll get to that in a sec but if all i'm talking about is when you see viewpoints of in the first sentence just making citizens that longer that longer list of people that's all okay no if you go back to page if you go back to page 31 in that packet yes kim i was going to say you know at the last meeting i think it was last meeting you had someone made a comment asking if you would continue the email comments which goes i think that was the other thing rachel forgot about people feeling uncomfortable and you know you might want to talk about whether you want to amend the policy to do that yeah that that was the other thing that you did off the rails neither neither could i and i knew you wanted to talk about i knew there was something else yes that's exactly um to put a pin on this one terry if you look at um on page 31 it's 9325 if you look at where it says public address there's that italicized sentence that comes right after the words public address that's the sentence we read off of our agenda at the beginning of every meeting on public comment i think that's the one kevin was talking about maybe tweaking to make consistent with whatever we do to the public speaking uh policy thank you rachel um email comments emailed comments so it's come up a couple times i'm gonna be honest with you and and be very um clear in how i feel i'm not a huge fan of the emails because first for several reasons email could be from anyone anywhere um you know we're talking about limiting in-person public participation to you know but this could be from anyone i mean we could ask for a na your full name and and physical home address in the email um so it just it it just further makes it very complicated in that sense but and then the other thing is the public has access to us via email all the time they can email us any at any time the full board our email addresses are on the district website so and and i also feel that behind a computer gives people um a different sense of i don't know what the right word is courage um you know and and then you run into like well how does how do you present how do you limit the time you know do you limit time when you read it out loud in a meeting it just becomes very complicated so that's my thought on that but i i didn't want the decision to be made in a vacuum so i'd love the committee to have the discussion and i'd like to hear your your feedback on that terry and then bridgette just because those are that said the order i saw your hands i i was thinking uh maybe one way would be have a form uh for uh email comments to fill out the name rank serial number and explanation that type of thing uh just have it all so they have to all fields need to be populated just a suggestion it's an interesting way to do it bridgette so i i i see what rachel is saying about the complexity of accepting uh commentary from people that we cannot see or interact with um and don't know for sure are in the district but i'd like to just throw out that this is a complicated district where parents work two jobs and some people have accessibility and mobility issues who ends in other issues that might make the attendance at a meeting rather challenging and so email is a an easy way or a a fair way uh for people who have challenges uh in attendance to get their point across and and i'd hate to see it go away because i'd like to make sure that we are as fair and as transparent um and as possible and so having that email option in in a way maybe as terry suggested in a very you know in a different kind of format maybe in a formalized manner um makes it fair uh across the district and um i know that we're all trying to to get to that place so that we're hearing the voices and we're making sure that people are part of the discussion and i don't want to take necessarily take email away because i feel like if we did that we might create a stumbling block to people whose voices should be part of the conversation so that's my two cents thank you michelle i saw your hand yeah i saw you goodness oh my goodness sorry i lost you there you go zoom users back um sorry i um i agree because there are certain people that don't even speak english and there can type out their email it will translate perhaps they can have another family member convey their messages so i think email as we are preparing it seems our whole curriculum around technology is clearly something that is used every day so i think that would just be a sense of the times maybe we can implement some way of you know taking the weight off of whoever that individual is is getting all that additional work from and you know kind of distribute it somehow figure that out or maybe kevin can but i think it is important to keep that open somehow in parent square or whatever we were initially discussing thank you kate thank you i concur i concur that you know this isn't this is for me is an equity issue um but i i do like terry's idea if you did something through like a google forms you know where folks had to fill out you know name rank and serial number but then also you could limit the size of the field where they're providing comments so that to rachel's point you know the person who's reading these aloud you know doesn't have to spend five minutes reading that out loud and it sort of you know puts put some level of um cap on you know the feedback that we're getting um i i think it might be also important to consider that um you know we're not going to read anything that has inappropriate content in it um because i don't think you know that's something i think we should explicitly you know state as part of this um thank you kate um my two cents and i kind of i i i agree with a lot of what rachel just said about some of the issues we've had and and for bridget michelle terry these are some of the issues rachel was just identifying some issues we had last year uh number one there was no way to know who some of the people were and there were emails and i think there was one this year as well but there were emails that just smelled like they weren't really from anybody who was local um more importantly there were also instances where we were being done with what were clearly form emails where you get the same email from seven different people you know or three different people would send the same exact email in and our secretary's reading or our minutes or our functional secretaries and sitting there reading three emails that say exactly the same thing at a meeting um but i also agree there there's a certain benefit to being able to email especially if you can't physically get there or you don't speak the language i actually honestly i didn't even thought of that um that's that's definitely a concern maybe maybe part of the solution is as terry said you're creating a form the other the other part of the solution may be this these are written comments we don't need to read them in a meeting they can be circulated to us as members in advance of the meeting and they could certainly be appended to and made a part of our minutes so that that they are public comments they don't necessarily need to be read more importantly reading them at the meeting we had emails during the last two years that were truncated that weren't read in full because it would take longer than 30 minutes to read them a couple of them probably would have taken five or six minutes to read so that may be someplace where we land where instead of we we allow the comment to come in by email but instead of reading them at the meeting we distribute them to all of us and make them part of our minutes and this way we all get the emails we get to read them we get to go back and reflect on them rather than just hearing them in a meeting and letting it go out you know go out to the ether after we heard it terry um and we could limit so many words in the description of the of the comment uh and we can also uh do the you know i'm not a computer uh you know recapture yep yeah that type of thing uh i think that would help i'm sure uh and have a a spanish form english and spanish form or put in portuguese uh so whatever they feel comfortable and then it gets translated to english for us you know just throwing it out there yeah yeah i mean those those things get it those would all work either whether we're reading them or whether we're getting them in print because sometimes i think i'd almost rather get them physical emails so i can actually like sit there and read them rather than just hear them in a meeting while we're you know trying to do other business um is this something where we think we need a policy or maybe we should draft some kind of policy rachel for consideration at the next policy meeting um what do you think um i ask for your opinion both because you're the past policy chair and our chair yeah yeah i think if you if you i don't know if it warrants a policy i mean i would refer to kim on this i mean we could put something in you know our public participation policy but maybe it doesn't warrant a policy true yeah we can always do everything we want by practicing robert's rules kim yeah no i i agree you know and i'm wondering are there regulations i haven't looked at that to see if there's anything else supporting that we can kind of tweak a little bit i mean again i think going to i try to always think about what's the purpose of the rule or the policy and if it's that you know it's it's equity and quotable access as bridget's talking with people that can't physically get to a meeting what are we trying to accomplish and so you i think you can tweak a regulation that says if there are alternative means which with which people would like to communicate with the board here's one way or something like that um and and then obviously within your discretion as the chair um you could or could not i suppose read them at a meeting if you chose to um you know i i just i i think it's important to honor the inquiry with some kind of a a forum for folks that are looking for an alternative way than coming to the meeting but i think a regulation would do that so that you would be a little bit more nimble so bylaws don't necessarily have regulations well wouldn't this be with the is there not a public i thought there was a public policy i mean i thought that would you you could do it as a regulation to the public speaking policy right exactly thank you we could work with of the public speaking policy right because we've got these kind of scattered across these documents right so you could link it to one of those policies and some of the stuff here can just as a simple matter of parliamentary procedure could be some of it could be the discretion the chair or just a vote of the membership in other words if we had everything distributed before the meeting and there were five emails that are distributed somebody could make a motion i move we waive reading of the emails and make them part of the minutes and just vote on it yeah that's the other the other so i mean i just want to make sure i'm following i if we are looking to adopt email public participation or electronic public participation i'm not sure email would be the best way to do this and i'll share some thoughts in a second but if if it's an electronic public participation it it seems to me that should be included in the policy and then we would come up with a form that would be acceptable by the board to receive this information um and then i mean that's just my initial thoughts anyway after hearing the dialogue carrie also when we get a comment do does it should we require that we respond or just the acknowledgement that it was received uh i think there should be some sort of feedback um that it doesn't go into the you know the realm of the never never land generally speaking general comments to the board address that we we've used for the last couple years when we were meeting remotely there may have been an acknowledgement that that the email was received but generally we don't much like the comments at the meetings we don't generally respond directly to them um i mean in theory we can but generally we don't emails obviously to our email and our email addresses we we all respond however we all respond sometimes i was you know there are there are emails i respond to thank you for your email there's other ones i respond a little bit more detailed some i probably won't answer at all but um generally speaking the general emails we got in the general comment email we didn't necessarily respond certainly in any detail um and that email address that we were using for comments was a on the fly thing to accommodate public comment during our remote meetings kevin raises a very good point this is maybe this isn't so much an email issue as electronic comment which may be a different format than email kim i'm sorry you had your hand up i i just i i'm sitting here kind of listening to discussion and i'm i'm wondering and i'm spitballing a little bit here but i'm wondering if there isn't a different vehicle for people who can't get to a meeting to express a concern to the board like we we mentioned a little while ago in this meeting about you can always email but and i'm thinking and this may be a terrible idea but i'm thinking about like a not really like a a bulletin board like an electronic bulletin border some other vehicle that's not part of the do we incorporate it into the minutes do we read it at a meeting where we could meet bridget's goal of making sure that people's voices are heard across all sectors by you but it may not be in the meeting context i don't know if that makes any sense i'm kind of making it up as i'm going along here but like parent square if it had its own kind of area that you could go to so like is that what you mean something like that i i think michelle if we're talking about public participation we could certainly put together some type of survey where our families and you know parent participants if they're interested in submitting um submitting comments they can include their name their email address we can match it automatically if they're an employee or a parent in this community um and you know we there may be some folks who don't necessarily fit in there but if they're connected to our system those emails those emails will match one way or the other but we've certainly had enough experience in this district with google forms or other surveys and we can set that up on our website and as an extension of the board agenda they can click on that and public participation can be submitted in that form we can have you know they could be three or they could be 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
the center high school media communication academy here here to santa cruz and also the fbla field trip to ontario bob it's been two years since this has happened and i want to say thank you all involved for getting these kids back on track with these field trips and to visit your colleges is quite important so thank you all as well and also i'd like to make comment on the dudley elementary project i'm excited for that and hopefully that ground will be improved and then lastly but not least i would like to thank mr richard putnam for including on this agenda for approval that h.r davidson um as i call it my back floor in disney but as we know it at the district it's a property restaurant so thank you very much okay so we have motion and second to approve as amended uh thank you yeah approve the agenda thank you for clarification um can we just do a general consent all favor okay gender approved uh organization reports first we have vanessa mason the president of cuta hi flip flip it one there we go last month i neglected to mention that this is retirement season so cuta would like to recognize last month's retiree announcement jeff wise who has been in the district 30 plus years and this month's cta retiree tony hill has also been in the district for 30 plus years and so we look forward to celebrating them with this uta gift at the end of the year as well as hopefully a little party to celebrate all of these great teachers and all their accomplishments will be the first time that retirees will be able to have had some sort of celebration in the last two years so i'm sure that we pick one hopefully and um let's see what else is we are too also excited to see those uh field trips on the agendas and we've been having um populations coming to the campuses like mad science who've been doing field trips on campus and so it's exciting to see basically they're from room to room to room to do a field trip in a box kind of thing but we're excited to see that we're able to go off campus now okay any questions thank you thank you very much okay next we have maisha harris president of csea and i actually will be stepping in for miss harris tonight i was able to meet with her yesterday and she sent her regrets she was unable to attend tonight and wanted to pass along she had no comments from the board but she'll see you next month okay including my mom especially uh committee updates curriculum instruction and special education update from mike jordan good evening good evening [Music] uh just a couple of things going on in the curriculum instruction special end and health services world we are coming up on our next third round of our i ready testing uh we've completed two been working with scoe uh and analyzing the data and all the sites have been doing that as well uh we are also starting to look at independent study options for next school year based on the trailer bill for the governor's budget they're they're looking at some possible changes to independent study so we want to gear up make sure we're ready for those and then uh we are also currently enrolling students in preschool through grade 12 for summer school so parents out there if you have don't have that link contact your school office it was in the uh the update that mr jackson sent out from the district as well as your school sites have sent that out so we're hoping for a robust summer school program and all school sites this year same as last year and finally and this is uh if you approve number six on the consent agenda we're teaming up with kobe clinic uh for free covet testing uh our numbers are down that's fantastic but just in case there's another rise another surge um golden clinic will come in to not only test our students in the school who who give consent but they're going to set up some community-based ones where we're going to set it up at the annex they'll come through anyone from the community it's free to everyone so that would be fantastic so please approve number six thank you very much okay next we have a facilities update from richard putnam good evening everybody we have officially broken ground over at uh the new uh rex fortune school site uh benzene is up they've started their initial work uh we are anticipating april the seventh or the ceremonial groundbreaking and then also in in tying in with that on april 5th i'll be sending out invites for those that have been part of the facilities community in the past we're going to start doing that on the first tuesday of each month that way it gives you guys or anybody who's part of that able to have updates on facilities items and the community more than one day in advance of a board meeting so it i think will help to streamline things for us um we as you see we've got a little bit more um progress down here on the dyess and that is a work in progress um we are starting to paint the buildings around here i don't know if you've noticed some of the buildings have been painted more will be painted by next month and that is pretty much it for right now i just want to say i'm very excited about the groundbreaking but unfortunately i will not be able to attend the groundbreaking ceremony please don't take that as a lack of interest and just have other schedules no it's perfect we know everybody's got stuff so it is all good and we will go from there thank you for your time okay um moving along uh item 11 comments from the audience regarding items not on the agenda anyone may address the board regarding any item that is within the board's subject matter jurisdiction however the board may not discuss or take action on any item which is not on this agenda except it's authorized by government code section 54954.2 a speaker shall be wanted to three minutes board policy 9320 all public comments and items listed on this agenda will be heard at the time the board is discussing that item um i also want to take this time to make a little announcement regarding this as we're developing our new boardroom we are going to be bringing in a plot so speakers will see how much time they have remaining this is not meant to pressure anyone because frankly we haven't had issues with this but just so people understand you know you you have time and frankly i think it might actually help people know they have more time than they realize i was trying to design it on my phone last meeting and that did not go well fine i'm really looking forward to this okay so do we have any public comments all right hi i mostly just want to give my thanks for the services that the district has been providing for me do you identify yourself sorry okay thank you um i just wanted to give thanks to the district and our school my son attends specifically the my son in recent months has been experiencing some issues with um other students at the school who have been rude to him bullying things of that nature and so one of the options that was presented to us was independent studies something i wasn't aware of previously or didn't have a good understanding of my son's been doing that for a few weeks now and it has been such such a game changer we felt very supported we got set up very quickly with the program the resources that the teachers that are helping him out with learning that program and being diligent about his work it's just been been a dream so i'm really thankful for that and thank you for all your efforts to make sure the students are safe and that they feel welcome at your school so i know that it's a lot to ask with so many students and what i've heard a labor shortage for teachers it's a lot of work so i appreciate all your efforts thank you very much [Music] okay any other public comments online thank you i keep seeing a raised hand for it says see connor okay it looks like she is muted miss connor can you unmute your mic i'm participating because i'm concerned that i did not get a response from the president of the board of trustees mr bruno or the superintendent i have requested that diversity be put on the agenda and i did not understand why that did not happen staff and mr bruno you and i know i've communicated via email with i think this is the same person so we can work with uh miss connor to see what she needs to elaborate to get that uh the request that we did get we i think you did respond however it was after the agenda made so anything we would would have gone on for our april meeting anyway so if we can well can i can i just talk to you there because i still have time under the brown act um when you responded when i made that request there was still time to [Music] amend the agenda under the brown act you had more than 72 hours to respond and i think that this is a very important issue and i am very concerned that it is not on the agenda so when i made the request i will just iterate reiterate one more time i was aware because i'm very familiar with brown back to california public record act and so on and so forth but when i made that request there was proper time to notice and to make an amendment to the agenda and that did not happen and i think that this is a very important issue and also i would like for the principal of dudley elementary school to be present when this is on the agenda because there are some issues that will be directed towards him and it's only fair that he will be able to respond with these questions that i have for him okay because of our limitations as far as dialogue on issues not on the agenda i will reach out to you this evening and we can discuss this further okay all right i hope to sit on the agenda next month thank you very much and good night to all of you thank you okay any other public comments yeah okay so consent agenda uh with item 12 removed for separate consideration do i have a motion regarding the consent agenda the the modified consensus number 12 volt okay and do i have a second second okay so it's removed and seconded do we have unanimous consent yes okay unanimously approved so and that includes item six okay uh so moving on to item 12 for the consent agenda um the contract amendment number seven facility needs and implementation planning services for modernization projects agreement capital management capital program management okay and do i have a second one okay do we want to discuss this yeah i actually thought i'm sorry do we do public comments at the beginning oh i mean if anybody has all the comments certainly on it's a amendment to a facilities contract but once we we've pulled it to a thing we have to ask are there any comments on this item okay go ahead okay um yeah i was just hoping mr putnam could come up and just give us a brief um summary of what this contract is why it's being extended um and just just so that it's it's a lot of money and so just just kind of so let me start and then i'll turn it over to mr putnam so cpm is the uh agency consulting group that we use with facility needs and finance needs of support the the work we do on the facility side this contract was put in place originally probably six eight years ago each time we have a contract amendment we look at the total cost of the projects that are that are coming and then also the duration of their original agreement so this agreement is going up just under 900 000 it means that we will not exceed that amount but what it's for is the facilitation work they'll do on the rex fortune elementary school we have a multi-million dollar at least a million dollar air conditioning project that we're working on uh we also have modernization that will this will be included in that also our cte facilities and again there's one other that i'm missing that they're helping on and i i think oh the bandwidth there's some technology stuff that they're helping with so uh let me say that and i'll turn to richard to see if there's anything that i've forgotten thank you sir and thank you uh yes superintendent blair pretty much nailed all the items that cpm is helping us with originally their contract basically had like run up against the point before we started having all these new projects going on for the district and so they are an integral part of helping us move these projects along in a timely efficient manner and also trying to save us the most money possible by helping us not fall into pitfalls or make mistakes because they're really good about catching their project management fund right so they're helping to manage all of the facility projects that we have going on which is great and they also didn't they originally do the assessment the site assessment for us and then we're still working off of that process basically we're taking that fight assessment in phases adding money to it but then in addition to that we have so many new projects that it jumped up quite a bit this time that is correct correct thank you okay any further discussion on this issue okay let's do a roll call vote kesley anderson honey trustee both hi leslie kelly hi trustee lee aye and sheriff outside unanimously approved okay moving on to business items business item a center high school performing arts center control booth dedication to running bishop do i have a motion on this item oh motion i'll second it okay uh you're motioning to bring it to the floor yeah okay can i start it okay so uh superintendent you want to give us a background on this i wouldn't then i'll actually ask uh principal ferguson to come on up but come on up mr uh ferguson but as many of you know mr vernon bicho was a long time employee of the district unfortunately passed away recently but he was instrumental in actually many things around uh our mca academy actually started as a band teacher if you can believe that i was laughing like you went from band to this and uh probably single-handedly helped develop and build the structures within the the control booth and so i think that's where this recognition is coming from so i'll turn it to mr ferguson so i wanted to read a letter that we put together the center high school theater and control booth would not be the same without the hard work and dedication of vernon bishop who sadly passed away in 2021 mr bishop was a teacher in the center joint unified school district for 30 years and helped found and developed the media communications academy also known as mca he was also actively engaged in performing arts both at center high school and in the community as a musician himself mr bisho was extremely involved with siva student educational video awards ncme and northern california media educators in the sacramento education cable consortium helping create sacramento's student media day since inception in 2017 nearly a thousand students have gained valuable knowledge and skills from sacramento area media professionals in fact i got to attend one of those and it was just a phenomenal event on the campus he was also a staunch supporter of the arts and stroke to create a state-of-the-art theater and broadcasting studio for students and community performances one of my first experiences when i went into the studio i was quite tempted with all the buttons and he said go ahead you can't do anything wrong it's still quite intimidating but he knew all the buttons he knew what everything did center high school staff and administration would like to receive permission from the center joint unified school district board of trustees to dedicate the control booth inside of the performing arts center in the memory of vernon bishop we would like to place a dedication plaque on the wall near the booth's entrance and assign above the booth windows on the inside of the theater so it would be visible from the stage in the seats that states bishop's booth i have provided a replica a mock-up of what the plaque would look like and what it would say and just as bernie bishop welcomed all of all to his world of music video and broadcasting we hope that the bishops booth will continue to welcome all those that enter the theater and control you thank you um is there a way we could display this so that people watching at home can see [Music] that is intended to be a separate yes we want to have a picture above it so that the plaque is one thing and then the picture can be explained the students will recognize i wish we could have done this when he was still living so he would know that he was being recognized he gave so much to this district um before we get into more discussion procedurally do we have any public comments on this issue okay very well sorry that's all i guess he did do so much for this district for years and i think all the graduations and i mean he grumbled about it that was part of his personality it was more fun than it was anything else you're going to cry again good he enjoyed it and he loved the kids and it's really too bad that he didn't one of the few teachers but i do know i unfortunately don't know a lot of the teachers in west bengal jamie was teachers but he was definitely one that was very influential in jamie's education she didn't she wasn't part of the academy but she did take a lot of the ncaa classes she was a broadcaster on morning news she posted the video awards one year she participated in the video award so very involved in all of bishop's programs and so um i mean he so one last comment is with approval on the clock as it says at the spring plays in october on the 24th he would like to do a brief ceremony before the play which would be the official dedication of the booth on that night if it's so free um i just want to comment the sunday the in general um i tend to be against naming things after people because you know as history goes on you might learn things or history might not be the person the same as you do that in the moment however this is a clocking you know if the unforeseeable happen which i i let's just say get along the record i do not see this happening and we needed to rescind this for some reason a plaque's not as big a thing as a building or a school but um i also want to say that although that's my general stance i do feel differently on this issue because my daughter was an mca she worked with mr bishop um i think she's gonna probably she sees this she worked at nothing she worked on news with him and i i think it's so wonderful too so he made a big difference in mike's life as well yeah that's at least three of us where our game is impacted by him so yeah he's he he left okay business id or bylaw 9310 or policies do i have a motion on on this item to bring you to the table for submission um handbook workshop that was brought up or requested that we possibly talk about this to have our handbook mirror our board policy um so at this point to be honest i don't remember exactly who requested it but what i would suggest is we finish the handbook we want to make sure that they do absolutely because remember that the sample handbook we had the outline that was in there was different than this because of the sample so i think someone had made a comment about doing that so we can happily table it and then make sure they align in a future time when we get that finished up but that's all i remember okay do we have any public comments on this issue when we actually do that segment of the handbook we can look back at this policy and then if we need to adjust either one we can do that okay uh do we need a motion tabling or just a recommendation um it just falls yeah i think it's just being tabled because no one's emotionally okay oh we are moving quickly um imc board policy zero four one five uh equity uh do i have the motion regarding this i don't need to bring it to the floor for discussion okay and we have seven oh second okay uh at that same meeting we discussed that we do not have a policy that it provided a vision for equity for the district and so it was asked that we brought forward an example so this is a sample um or for policy board bylaw for an equity statement so this is just for your either approval crafting if you want to change it bring it back whatever but this was just a sample of language that as a starting point unless you guys are good with it okay and we have any public comments on this issue please hello i can wait okay this time yes well this gets to my point about the diversity issue because i think that there are from what i have experienced there are truly some things that are not understood in regards to diversity or perhaps people don't want to learn new things i have come upon some very disconcerting issues with a few of the teachers at dudley elementary school including the principal i'm not ready yet to mention the names of the teachers but when i say that this concerning i'm being very nice with my language i think that it's very important given that this is a very diverse state and that california is named after a black woman there is not enough about diversity at dougly elementary school for right now i can only talk about dougly but i think this is a broader discussion that needs to be had throughout the district and i would like for diversity to be on the agenda and for the teachers of all of your school levels come to the meeting or share an opinion thank you hi i'm learning i'm learning um james anderson aaron um as for on the topic of equity i've been looking for this on the agendas to pop up at some point i think the diversity should be the main focus i think that there needs to be more celebration of diversity i think equity on the other hand is dangerous because it focuses on the differences of people and how that has hurt other people i know that it's important to know our history but i from what i've learned about equity and the movement to incorporate equity to education it demonizes and criminalizes the actions of our ancestors without understanding the context of their actions specifically i guess bluntly i feel like it targets white people it makes white people to be bad guys and i've seen it happen at different schools where i've had family of i've seen it happen in different states where this has been incorporated more fully and i'm just afraid i'm afraid that equity be taught to children without proper context it will make them hate other people instead of celebrating those differences thank you any other public comment thank you okay more discussion uh okay um i appreciate your comments in regards to not providing context however equity is definitely something that everyone needs to better understand particularly so we don't think that we are demonizing people that that is absolutely not the case um understanding the history and feeling blame for that history are two separate things not making the same mistakes that were made in history and and acknowledging that this is the history and that we understand your pain is completely different from demonizing the people whose ancestors may have been the cause of the pain that does not make me the cause of the pain it makes me the cause of anything that i do personally um equity is something that we can't just take a sample of policy and go okay sure check that off my list that's not going to happen i mean maybe it'll happen if the votes for one but it's not going to happen on my uh in my world so no this needs to be a much larger discussion we need to have possibly a subcommittee that includes some staff and some board i think and define make some definitions make definitions exactly and and having a policy doesn't necessarily mean we have curriculum those are two different things curriculum may come at a later date uh but definitely having a policy that talks about that we want to make sure that everyone is provided the tools that they need to succeed is uh is definitely written in written policy but that's not my understanding of equity because there's an opportunity i'm sorry public on it has been closed but you yeah we moved on support discussion um i just i just want to clarify that this item is a board policy um regarding making sure people are treated fairly it's not about uh curriculum or what's being taught it's about looking for and eradicating bias making sure that all communities are treated fairly and with equity making sure that we monitor the impact of our board policies to make sure that we don't have negative unintentional impacts from them and continually striving to do better so um mr president i um i actually have several suggestions for this boilerplate policy to make it relevant to our local contacts and i uh i printed them out for the fellow board members um you're seeing an art and in yellow what's being recommended to add in and then strike out so it's being recommended to strikeout recommended by you okay um there are a significant number of changes here yeah to the point that i would say that this is not something that would be easy for us to to discuss and include the public on um in this meeting so could i recommend that we schedule a board workshop prior to our next board meeting is that something that we can do an extra hour to focus the idea of having a sub-committee with certain okay within the district i would really prefer to have a committee on the whole not a subcommittee because this is a policy that has wide-reaching effects well yeah i think it's just a surveillancer at that point the purpose of a subcommittee would be to work on the language of this and then bring it back to the committee as a whole you're saying that we should do this as a whole equity committee that's separate from this policy right and so those are two different peak topics in conversation do we have an equity committee district-wide and we need a subcommittee for the board and staff to address our what our policies and i think we should have students what other suggestions with timing so people don't feel like you have a time constraint we could try to tag it on we have about probably an hour or so left with our handbook that we're working on we could tie it into that saturday finish the handbook and then have that conversation uh if that works i mean because i think if you limit the conversation to you know five to six if this you know a little longer possibly um it might be because it's it's a big topic and i mean certainly you could take a smaller group to come back with that shell but but talking through what it means making sure you all understand all of it is important not to have any assumptions i think this is a big issue though that the public should have knowledge and a chance to comment yeah absolutely so we can also traditionally we can work on the language at a workshop for this and bring it back to a board meeting for the the actual approval and have a solid way another revised if we have a sub committee that maybe comes together and gathers various examples and recommendations and then the workshop to go through that the workshop would be public but we would have some prepared documents and then we would bring it back to the board meeting for a vote a couple things regarding this if we were going to do it as a workshop we have to look at how what the scheduling would be and i'm not sure if we can necessarily get the scheduling done before the next board meeting um i would make myself available for a subcommittee order for sure but that was one of my questions later but one of the things i would say is you could start first you could send in the subcommittee but everyone was going to pull groups but you possibly you might want to come if we do it with that handbook finish that up and then the board as a whole talks through it you might be able to then craft stuff if we had the time to go up the sleeves sit around table and talk about it um i don't know if the subcommittee would just delay the process more i'm i'm happy with either way but i i think part of this is that kind of productive work through it talk about it get an understanding i think it would help but is a byproduct of team building i think understanding where everyone's coming from the community everything so and certainly any of these would be open to public did you get a copy of the okay i just want to make sure um because i think that this is a as everyone has said it's a really important topic um it's not something that we can afford not to have a policy on or take a position on um so i'm just hopeful that we'll be able to schedule something so we can all come together and define a policy that's relevant to our local community not just going along with trends that are out there and some of the dangerous things that some of our public um has pointed out um really damaging things taking place under the name of equity so one of the things i can throw out is we do have i could uh april i think 26 was the date that was floating around that can i get anyone to i've heard from i've heard from a couple of you and to be honest i think so one one i think there was 1626 that april 26th and i can get monica to come in the morning and then we can drop her off and then we could do this as a second item that's tuesday i'm sorry i'm sorry yeah 23rd 23rd my map is off a little bit okay um i think i would be available okay so do we want to do a subcommittee first to work on language or should we just do it all together as part of the handbook workshop i mean i think what i hear people say is that they're concerned the subcommittee is going to delay the process so we have this recommendation if anyone else wants to gather more recommendations maybe send them around what i could do too if dr lee if you'd like my sharing electronically i could share that around or we could share it through mr bruno and then people could go through their time make their notes and then each person could have an opportunity to kind of talk through it um i still again subcommittee we could go out and find a bunch of policies but to your point dr lee making it relevant to our community and what we want instead of taking again this was just the csba template to kick us off but if we can get that i'll request it electronically from you i can ship it out to you guys and then we could we could agenda i would really like to encourage some of our executive staff to also participate in that conversation and provide input whether it be you know in the form of paperwork in advance or comments during the actual workshop whatever whatever they're able to contribute i think that would be really beneficial for us as a whole absolutely so um however we are looking at doing this potentially after the next meeting is everyone okay with that and i would suggest instead of trying to rush it to get something forward next time i would rather take time to do it right then okay and i'm not saying no one you guys didn't want to do that but i just i think that's important just because on a saturday we may all have to go back and digest it again and then come back again um uh 4 23 apparently about 26.
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they are related giving the hawaii civil rights commission jurisdiction over certain types of um complaints so having to rewrite three eight six four three six eight i apologize i think it's three six eight so i get that confused correct thank you that i'd like to see that um i hope i wrote it right has to do with our bill today but um i just hope that there aren't too many rewrites and more descriptions i kind of share the same point as the hawaii civil rights commission they briefly talked about it in their monthly meeting earlier today and anyway as far as charter schools go having been a mom of three kids at charter schools one with special needs i'd like to ask that um they have what they need the resources in order to protect their own students but being a charter school funding is an issue so if you look at the doe they already have their equity specialist they were meant for the gender gender equity issues but i push that they make sure they get training for 504 disability issues so i would hope that those equity specialists could take on the responsibility of making sure that the charter school students just like the special ed students that the des is at the doe oversee can take care of them as well so um i appreciate the opportunity if you have any questions thank you look me up thank you bye next to testify and free for the democratic party of hawaii women's caucus hello ann aloha chair kim cherokee donnie members uh this is my first time doing this on zoom this is kind of amazing we have this kind of access i just want to say i really appreciate it and i want to say i stand on my written testimony and pretty much concur with everything that my colleague jungi overly had to say that's it for me thanks thank you so much is there anyone in the audience that wishes to testify that has not provided to someone no thank you um members are there any questions of our testifiers for the attorney general yes i have a question um more in regards to what the civil rights commission is raising that right now i guess chapter 368 could actually be um more expansive in terms of protections afforded by the uh the state corollary chapter uh what is it in whatever chapter we're looking at 368.
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and we don't have any other discussion or questions we'll move on to the payment of bills secretary is authorized to draw rewards of the treasure and the total amount of 1 500 2 975.6 for the march 22 yes okay so we'll be going into an executive session and um i'd like to make a motion for this competitive session reaction items
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he didn't have an organized and put together group and now what would you like to share and now i'm just gonna share um my about the author natalia pegan is nine years old she is in fourth grade and her teacher is miss hair she has three siblings one golden retriever named chip and two cats oreo and cookie natalia likes to dance in her free time and play with her pets and that's a picture of my pet can you tell them the same thing the answer the same questions acted how does book creator make you a better writer it makes me a better writer because text features are easier to put in and text features help readers a lot excellent job thank you well i'll speak for the board that's fabulous i i wish i'd been able to play you know work with that kind of uh making a book when i was your age guys so well done well well done thanks so much thanks everyone thanks dr p another round of applause for them okay next up is our student representative report so ben i'll turn it over to you hang in because there's a lot okay so starting with um school-wide events so we have the senior six flags trip which was just announced so that's wednesday june 15th and it's a hundred dollars for a round-trip coach bus park access all day the private pavilion two catered meals and unlimited soda so the bus would leave at 9 30 a.m and this is for anybody as a part of the class of 2022 and again it's just adding to our like week of events at the end of the year to make it so that obviously the graduation date was moved so there's a few days there where might get a little slow towards the end so this is our way of kind of bringing light to those last few days we also have actually friday this friday our fundraiser for again the class of 2022.
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so it's not out of the norm it's not out of the question that you would have a classroom that gets as many as 26 students but isn't a typical design you have storage and layout et cetera based on what we have in class so this is 26 the mass max class size you can see or those classes can't hold that looks i mean yeah we could push it to 30 right as as well if we wanted to but i don't know if that would change the square footage but yeah those are those are the exact type of things that you know we need to discuss in this especially for the furniture we're really driving at not so much on the enrollment technology we do but we've got to refine our process to look at homeroom seats homerooms and orange seats because when you add up your enrollment and you add up the actual number of home room seats usually the home seats will exceed your home and it can vary depending on the spec but having that full outfit for the ffme dan can attest to this when we were we did the first school in southwest orchard hill we came in we were projected for 576.
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um and we can all aggregate them we can have a record of them we can have their email address in there their first name last name to some of the points that teresa had raised earlier um and we can limit the comment section right we can limit the number of words that can be included in there to make sure it doesn't last more than three minutes so i i think we could develop a system you know pretty easily um and kind of direct families and people who want to participate um through some type of form so not not terribly different from the parent square but at least it would be a structure in which folks could participate that's great i think that's great yeah sounds good i think it would help with uh community relations as well and kate i think um it's kevin you you had an interesting point maybe maybe we need to look at whether something like this should go towards our policy um the good thing is we're not amending that policy tonight we have to look at it for another policy meeting uh maybe this is something we look at to deal with that pause because it's the same policy we'd be amending um so maybe this is something we look at in in connection with that as well um we you know work on some language um and it made maybe it's possible that somebody else has a policy that we can look at and crib off of or use as a template but i i like the notion of some kind of electronic comment more than just a blanket email address here all the world please email to this address because right right rachel has a really good point there were emails that really looked i'm curious let's just leave it curious i'm sure i mean we got and we got into our personal emails this way our board emails as well they were curious yeah to say the least i think we all received them oh yeah oh yeah i'm not even talking recently i'm talking the last two years um you know i actually ironically the last run of stuff we had as much controversy as there was i didn't see that many that there that i thought were really curious that were like really oddly like you know not real or not out of nowhere most of those i think most of those i think we're like real people who are here um but yeah maybe it's something we we we um play uh do some word smithing on and drafting into the existing policy um maybe it's just the next sentence of the last paragraph or as kim suggests maybe just have it as a vehicle i mean we're redoing our website anyway maybe in that board member portion of the new website there's a here click here to send you know to write to your board of education yeah and it's not even part of this yeah yeah you know possibly couple it from decoupler from a meeting so people don't think they're limited to commenting related to a meeting right well that's true yeah sounds good making works yeah and possibly if we develop we could maybe begin exchanging you know but at least start it off that way i think that's great yeah and i think putting it on the website is a great idea rachel that's an accessibility thing you know um yeah if people are looking us up they'll see hey there's a comment section yeah well but i i like that notion actually the the combination of rachel's idea related to kim's decouple it almost decouple it from the meaning so it's not so much comments in a board related to a meeting or related or what people would assume is related to an agenda but just make it just make it comment to us period joe cara joe cara has extensive um experience with surveys in a district and she she might also have some some ideas here as well we can lend on her expertise here works for me i do think that there's ways to create a form a google form where you're forced to fill out the first five or six sec sections it does not let you advance unless you complete those pieces there's also a way to create an add-on so you can actually upload identification you can snap a picture of your driver's license or some other type of photo id that might indicate you know with where you're from um and i also believe that there's a way to do voice notes as well so even if a person uh felt it difficult to actually type in a paragraph um that you can load in a voice note and upload it the same way that you can upload a driver's license and then just hit the send button but i can certainly play around with it and see um different ways that we can configure it but there's ways to kind of at least flesh out a minimum amount of information that would kind of validate who a person is so in other words terry your idea is possible and karen knows how to do it good job i'm sorry yes michelle yes um the only part that i think and i haven't really thought it through in all of the but when i first heard the comment about the driver's license i just think a lot of people would be apprehensive um for whatever reason they might have they are in the school system whatever whatever their background is whatever is going on in their life i might i think that might actually stifle them a little bit um or the community i don't know what everybody else's thoughts are but that was just like the first kind of no i i agree it's a fair point yeah we don't want to create a process that's going to suggest we're going to create more barriers to the process so yeah that's that that's a that's a very fair point it also would impact people that don't have one more people that are going through something that you know or just don't have a driver's license yeah or you know whatever you know yeah i guess the the i guess the point is that it i think we can program it the way anyway that's and i think the comment was more i think kara's comment was more i tried try to do something to honor the notion that they're they're connected to the district and i think kevin had a good point before we may be able to email match them now because basically just about every parent has an email address in the system uh terry uh students uh some of them won't have an id and if we're going to be accepting comments from students as well but they all have a student they all have a student email yeah a student id number an employee really in elementary school or i mean uh elementary school too elementary school my son my son's on google docs all the time and he's in fourth grade oh yeah what they could do by the way what they learned how to do in a computer in the last two years is absolutely astounding yeah um you know it worked a lot um doesn't mean they don't complain about their ixo homework for kids and takes right gibson yep you got it um anybody have anybody else do we have anything else we need to address this evening it's an excellent question i'm about to go to my kitchen and figure out right now um everybody have a wonderful entertain a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second second made by kate seconded by terry uh all those in favor hi hi eyes have it
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[Music] no i i feel that um having another workshop would be redundant since the board has displayed that they do not have to follow their policies and procedures the workshop is to set on norms and protocol and if we don't follow our own procedures then if i feel it's redundant um i probably would not be attending the workshop that's been point policies and procedures so having a workshop to determine our norms and should our protocols maybe how should we separate this from them so just looking for a direction here i would just ask that we move forward on our own consciousness and our own willingness to work as a team and to come together on an agreement as far as policies and what this does um so what i'm hearing is could we use the 23rd because i saw some nods the 23rd to dive into this and then we'll figure out the handbook stuff at a later time is that okay okay so i'm gonna we'll slate the 23rd and then i'll send it out just again just to confirm but then we'll okay okay so we are tabling this for a workshop discussion okay can i 9 and same kind of thing does that still work for you guys can i ask that stakeholders other than the school board are invited to the meeting because if you are expecting the staff to implement these policies and procedures yeah so many of our saturday workshops are open too but i don't know that in general every csca member and every cta member and non-members for that matter are aware that these meetings are taking place okay just hearing the conversation between just the five of you i think this is not going to be a one three-hour session that we're done i think this is going to be something that we've talked through bring it back bring it back so i think there'll be opportunity as it gets refined so and certainly we're we're communicating you know every time so we can and we can talk with that all of our meetings whether the regular meetings or our workshops are open to the public and all staff i i want to make that abundantly clear but if we haven't been clear about that maybe on this one we need to reach out a little bit more so okay moving on to item [Music] e we know i'm sorry item d uh sport bylaw 9220 governing board elections uh superintendent do you want to give us uh yeah if you just go ahead and bring us before and then you're absolutely right thank you uh do you have a motion regarding this item move to right and at the last meeting this uh item was discussed there was language that was talked about we tried to capture that and then the board had requested to bring it back to further the conversation so that's where we are so in your packet as backup there is uh warning and then behind that is the actual current policy and i think the consideration to do with the residency verification paragraph um so that's that's the item as we put together okay and we have a public public discussion on this item [Music] i would just like to say that i would like to see included in this that at the end of the month when they're supposed to prove residency if it's not been done they should be censored by the board because there's no consequences to it and censorship is something that should be taken very seriously i've never seen anybody censored by the board than the whole time that i've been here but at least then it would give them something on their record that they did not go by the board rules and it would be something that other board members could point to during election time or whatever that this person did not go by the rules there was some questions to whether or not the presidency was established it would make it a public item i think before we would add that to this policy we would have to have a separate policy on censorship i believe that our legal counsel has advised that we don't have any sort of ability for punitive measures um i did was i was kind of hoping that we could put something in that just says you know we refer to the governing authority but we already did that and got don't got nowhere with it so um yeah i i i understand what you're saying nancy i do have a couple of other changes minor changes to this one is just a little bit of a clarification where it says um board member addresses should not be made public um it also needs to say that the documentation and address will not be kept on file um and what was it you were saying also the document and the the types of thoughts the type of document would be noted but not the documents themselves nor the um nor the address and then so that it's not anywhere where it could be discovered found shared etc etc and then um and then at the end where it says uh reasonable accommodation i that seemed a little ambiguous so i wanted to specifically say reasonable accommodation for verifying their residency that the attorney said we couldn't do that i think that yeah you would that a board does not have a right to unseat another member based on this so what you would have to do is you would have you could still sensitive yeah so the report would be aware that something like that that would logically be what this body could do to one of them [Music] have some sort of flexibility in what the action to be taken i mean we could say something like this and including censorship you would still have that option because you could vote no on censorship or something just a point of clarification it's sensual not sensory sure it's a small bit different so just want to clarify that um so go ahead yeah maybe what we could do is add something that said um if if residency could not be verified actions would be taken up to an including censorship or something but we don't have flexibility on censorship in our in so that means we need to invent a policy we do not have one is that yeah but it doesn't it by the fact that it's in the brown act that it's we don't need a policy only you you would you would want to try to not try to create but i i would want to get it policies it's more local the process there's a process within the handbook but it doesn't outline the process for it so my suggestion would be that if that's what you want to go with that as a consequence then i would work with legal to get something that's legally defensible for lack of work i mean i wouldn't want us just to try to create it off off the cuff certainly and if we are making policies you know about sense censorship um i'd like to really see issues that should be addressed through that like making homophobic and racist comments being included in there because those are things that are really offensive um that that would involve censorship yeah if anybody ever did that it would be it must certainly way um i think we would have a broad broad description of all areas that would be included inside yourself that would only be found would we be would it be acceptable to consider this policy adjustment without making good censorship at that point you could make that decision just as if just the same as if i could make the decision not to vote for censorship someone could bring it forward for censorship i mean it goes both ways and then it's not an automatic but it also resolves the issue of you know the chicken before the egg thing that we have going on here because we don't have a policy on censorship and we need to get this policy finalized so do we want to postpone it and work on a censorship policy which is going to be another big big big discussion or do we want to just cross that bridge when we get to it i mean i don't know i don't know what the answer to that is i'm just throwing it out there so my feeling is uh personally that if you put in there that not complying with it results in censorship that in my eyes takes away from the impact of it um whereas if someone didn't comply and then we as a board move to censure to me that's more impactful because it's not an automatic response it's a deliberate in this circumstance we feel that this is a significant issue um i thought we did have censorship in our bylaws i will have to look into that so um that would be a separate issue for another topic yeah that we used to use all the time um it may have been used but not officially a part of the written rules so um just that that's my take on it i feel that having it the automated response takes away from me that's my personal which were to clarify that the reasonable accommodation was for verification of residency and what was the first one um and to clarify that the documents and address would not be kept on file that's my motion okay um so regarding this to make sure that we are getting the language 100 accurate and everyone's all on the same page would you be comfortable with um making the changes and doing the second reading that's not that's not me i would like to add to that then kelly's verbiage on censorship where you send yourself where you said possibility of yes is that we didn't get the wording precisely so yeah we don't want to haphazardly do it again yeah we're taking those so we'll we'll i would i would rather make sure that you're all understanding what you're so we can do both i guess okay okay so what i'm hearing is that we will make amendments to this and bring them back next meeting okay so just for for mine and carol's clarity we'll make those adjustments bring it back as an item in or because they're very different but very similar okay so moving on to item e second interim report for fiscal year 2021-22 hello hello all right first i wanted to take an opportunity to thank you for allowing me to restructure my office so that it could work most efficiently the coordinator of categorical programs said not i'm not saying this both but she said it's a brilliant idea because it's a bridge between me and working on the financial records and her who works on the programs and making sure they're implemented and writing the plans for them so the fiscal analyst is the go between between us and so i just want to thank you for that christina degrange has been fantastic she helped with some of the calculations on this report and it's really made my office run better i've also talked to the two employees who came on board and who have fewer days in their calendar and i did their evaluations this week and brought up do they think they have enough time to do their job and they do feel that they have enough time to do their job so everything's been great and i want to thank you for letting us make those changes thank you so how does this work oh there we go all right so he's put where we're at in the budget cycle because it just goes round and round and round and we are at the second interim financial report and it's our last look at this year's reports we're getting feedback um this year's reports this year's budget what we've spent what we've taken in um and then we're not really going to look at it again we're going to start moving to the the budget for next year will be our next report and then we look at the actuals what we spent later on in september so this is just our last look at this fiscal year before you move forward i always want to show what our district enrollment is like and because it continues to decline unfortunately on the official census date in october we were down 52 students from the prior year i've projected that enrollment will stop declining because of the new housing that's coming in so we really need to see those students of course we're not funded based on enrollment right now where we're funded based on the average daily attendance of the students it continues to be based on our 19 20 figures so whether students attend this year or not does not affect our funding i know that sometimes parents wanted to say because i brought it before that you know they just want to want them in school because of kova they don't want to miss or you know with the mask issue but really whether students attend this year or not does not affect our funding it just affects their learning and that's our concern um so next year would would be a cliff this is what we're calling it in california and it's not just for our districts it's for all districts our enrollment is declining so our average daily attendance is declining statewide next year if the current formula stays in place we would be funded on next year's enrollment or this year's moment sorry attendance or this year's attendance and this year's attendance is uh quite low and so it's about 3 900 um students and then instead of the 4 000 that we're being funded on so it drops what would be 238 ada next year and that is an equivalent to almost or over two million dollars and so we don't want to see that happen luckily the governor in his budget proposal in january gave some different formulas that we might use to base our funding on and it'd still be negotiated his plan was to allow districts to use the ada for the current year which would be actually next year we're talking or the prior year which would be this year or an average of the three prior years so this year last year the year before but the concern and it wouldn't be one year would be out of there because we didn't take attendance for uh coping the concern is that the covenant years will be part of that three-year rolling average and so it's still not it's still going to harm us and so where people are negotiating trying to figure out a different way to take that covenant here out of there i know that we had a letter by capital advisors today that they were sending to the state the governor i'm not sure who and they asked us to sign it where they're looking at a different formula to help us so we're just on the edge of our seats waiting to see how we'll be funded next year but i'm quite hopeful that you know that there's a problem that something will be resolved and we won't see that two million dollar hit i wanted to put this in there because this was and there were two errors in the narrative that i gave you and one was that i put for the the planning pull up i put what the governor proposed in his budget and that's not what i based this report on so the planning cola that i based this report on that's cost of living increase is 2.48 for this year and 3.11 for next year the proposed cola what the governor wants to pass in july is to increase it to 5.33 um for next year and 3.61 for the year after that i did not use those figures in this planning because um it's not decided yet i like to just use actually what we know oh the second error in the narrative thank you trustee kelly is there's a number on page 13 that says 817 thousand million so that million actually should not be deleted [Music] okay so then when we look at total unrestricted revenue this is unrestricted again so these aren't those title one programs or uh you know el programs this is general fund money we look at the revenue that we're taking in versus the expenditures this year we are having a surplus of about 250 000 i want to remind you that i base the budgets on the highest that we've spent in the past three years and so money always falls out so at the end of the year when we do unwanted actuals you'll see that that number's probably higher there are other things like supplies i mean budgets for school sites and they don't spend all their budgets might let them carry over each year so that kind of money will fall out too in 2223 it shows that we're just spending by over 800 000 there are two figures in there that i want to pull out one is that i have us contributing to fund 13 our nutrition services program we started feeding our students for free right when kobet hit so we haven't got a good judge of how much money that we will receive in revenue for fund 13 yet and so um based on what we seem to have gotten this year compared to the salaries that we have to pay out it looks like that will have to contribute to that fund about 230 000 next year and then also i have in there 200 000 going to fund 20 the other post-employment benefits so that's 430 that doesn't have to be in there or might not be in there of that 800 000 if we needed to cut some some dollars out of there and then again a reminder that i choose the highest so if we had legal fees that were fifty thousand sixty thousand seventy thousand for the last three years i'll take a budget of seventy thousand and carry that forward just to cover what we might need it also does not factor in salary savings from attrition so i have that all of our staff will all move over on the salary schedule but we know some are going to retire we heard a couple today and they'll be replaced by um employees who are not as high on a salary schedule and so that'll be a savings too so that's not factor in here so really when i look at this i i look and i think that okay it's kind of a wash we're spending what we're getting and that's a good thing because you want to spend with the lower ada that's even with the lower ada so um you want to spend this year's money on this your kids so it shows that we're doing that now when we put in the higher cola we put in those ada calculations we're going to have a surplus that we'll have to decide how to spend maybe okay the reserve uh for economic uncertainties this is sorry this is the look at the indian fund balance and it's less the unspendable and less the reserve economic uncertainties so it's just that we have about 10 million dollars that is one-time money like a savings account that we can spend as you desire um of course to meet the needs of our students and then next year it goes down because we're spending by 800 000 and so of course this an income balance is going to be reduced etc i flipped this out of order on you because this was more logical to come next the cap on local reserves hits next year so there's these tests there's test one test two's test three i don't really know how they figured out what it all means but what i do know is that we can't carry over more than 10 of our reserves so when we look at that the amount would be that's held in reserve will be about 5.11 million over 10 so 5.11 million has to be committed by the board otherwise we have penalties i'm not quite sure what that means but we have penalties um so in may then we'll bring to you some some um ideas of what we can commit it for i'm going to be working with mr lair i'll work with you know bargaining groups i asked him to let her talk to you to see what priorities are and then we would pass a resolution to commit the funds and then we're allowed to keep those buttons so the reserve cap is currently in play it will be for the next year's budget for next year's budget so this year we're going to only hold ten percent for next year when i'm doing that when you approve the budget in june we have to show that we've committed what's above that ten percent so we have to do that to spend next year so we have to do that before the budget in june which is correct thank you sorry so and then if you do vote to commit those funds you can vote to uncommit them to and you can spend them on something else if something else comes up so your hands are ready and another resolution so any questions about that all right looking at other funds but beyond our fund one general fund we have our special reserve and fund 17 of 2.45 million dollars and that's kind of set aside for any construction costs that we need building the rex fortune in the cte schools i mean buildings etc and we also have our other post-employment benefits we call open in fund 20 we have 1.44 million dollars we were saving that because i was worried about an ada cliff falling off of that we were have new school costs and i should mention that those new school costs are included in the multi-year projection so it looks like we may not need those funds and we can commit them i mean move them over to the trust if um since we don't need them in the trust currently there's 544 thousand dollars and our net op liability that was asked last meeting and so i added that in here about 8.4 million dollars that means if everybody retired and everybody got there five years this is how much it would cost us we are we use a pay-as-you-go model so we just pay for our retirees every year every month and so it doesn't affect us but it's still something the state wants us to do is to build up a trust with that money where the interest will pay for those retirees we also have fund 11 that is not on here but i want to mention and that's our adult ed fund and the adult ed program was closed in december and so the funds that are in there have to be returned to the state or the local cohort and so i'm working on doing that and then as soon as that's done i will bring a resolution to close that one down i'm also going so you don't keep that and so um but it is meant to be it is going to be spent on adult ed though in other programs so that's where it should go and then when i close fund 11 i'll also uh have a resolution to close five to nine which is the charter school the relief funds i just keep adding this in here just so you know how it's looking without spending all of it is assigned the salaries are assigned some of those positions are open positions and so we might find we have money left over that we need to spend at the end of our three-year period but as of right now there's nothing unaccounted for star signs looking ahead so i'm eager to see the may revision and when they come up with that ada calculation and then of course anything else i also like that they're talking about special ed and how it's impacting the district and knowing that we need some relief because we contribute so much of our general funds to that program and then looking ahead also at new construction so as i said we assigned teachers and administration and custodial staff and all of that is included in the multi-year projection so i just need to see how that plays out and how the numbers look any questions on that so far so trustee kelly asked about a budget workshop just to kind of get to know it um what all these reports mean in here in this packet and i know that that's hard you're having trouble coming up with dates and things so i thought that after each report i'll just take a few of the reports in here and mention them and so i wanted to start with focus areas if i was a board what would i look at you know what should you be looking at when you look at all these reports so the first thing you should look at is average daily attendance is it increasing or decreasing because that's how we get our funding um and then i put on there which forms you would want to look at the average daily attendance numbers are in the multi-year projection combined and criterias and standards report numbers one through three so you can reference back to those to see where you're going to find those numbers i already talked about that so let me talk about it again budget and comparison variances you want to ask yourself has any area changed by more than 10 since the last report if we were going to spend i'll do legal fees again 50 000 on legal fees and they increased by 100 percent now we're spending 100 000 on legal fees you want to ask what happened what why are we spending so much on like what's going on and so in my narrative it breaks out each section each category like supplies and salaries and you want to look to see if there's anything more than 10 and then in the actual reports it goes line by line for every type of revenue every type of expenditure and so you also want to look at those to see if it makes sense that we are spending more revenues and expenditures is something you want to look at you want to know is ongoing debt to the spending projected is it a lot of money are we going you know why are we overstaffed are we not um are we giving too much too big of a budget to sites you should be asking those types of questions cash flow that is a separate report so you want to ask can the district meet its monthly financial obligations is there any month in the cash flow that we won't be able to payroll or do ap runs luckily that's never been a problem when i've been in the office but that was a huge problem before that during our decline or recession i know uh they were you picked what bills to pay because there wasn't enough money to pay them all so that's something that i'll look for and then you want to look for the ending fund balance how much unrestricted one-time funds are available and if there's a lot you should be talking amongst yourself to say what are our priorities what should we be spending this money on so as a board those are the main areas that i think that you should review and that i would review any questions about this that's very helpful yeah very incredibly helpful thank you i know uh i know that uh trustee kelly wanted to go over some other forms do you want to do that now or do you want to do that next time we could do that now um [Laughter] and while wellness kelly's thinking giving is at any time you need board members if you want to come in i know lisa said hey this is a brilliant way to just start giving snippets i think it's great because it's chunks because this this is not something that you just pick up one day of 300 pages ago oh i get it so this is a great great tool but if anyone wants to come in and sit down and really hammer through it i i know your door is always open so i'm sorry i think the big thing i wanted to know is that 5.11 million like how much are we going to have to figure out how to spend that's big and then um that fun page on on page nine i think you covered most of that um what was that ass let's see um just explaining what the fund summaries chart on page nine what it means so it's on it's in the narrative on page number yeah in the narrative so basically it says the illustrate glow is a summary of each fund's balance and corresponding change so you have your 20 20 21 22 beginning balance estimated net change 21 22 any amount so these are estimated ending balances correct right so that is taking expenditures in revenue and um and and projecting the house and then projecting at the end of the year what they need for the balance should be so in that regard then i'm wondering why um we have quite a bit left over and many of these obviously building funds we know why that's there it's right because we're getting money we've got money to build a building so um but like um the 1.647 in the opdb how would we go about getting that transferred to the trust do we have to do a resolution um i mean i wouldn't want to do the whole thing clearly right but that's a lot to have sitting there not drawing interest when we can join right right so um so you've already directed me to do that so i would just i do two hundred thousand a year i'm just doing that because i just wasn't sure you know i'm more conservative money but i feel comfortable that i can move that over to the trust now okay um you had asked about the child development plan that's her catalyst after school programs so it's a wash the money comes in from the state and we pay a contract to the people that run catalyst sometimes we get a little bit too much money and that goes in a special reserve that can only be used for program needs okay so that 66 grand will carry over yes to next year right in the child development but rightly but okay um maybe it's an effort so the maintenance of effort there are two actually there's one that is for special education students and there's one for title one basically federal programs and they so they're they both want to make sure that you are not using that money to supplant the regular funding for a student that is supposed to supplement the funding for a student so i have to do special ed to make sure that we're keeping the same level of spending um for special ed students and and they're not getting less of a service because maybe it's encroaching on our charter fund so we want to cut some money we have to keep it the same or greater each year um so that was a problem last year because it actually goes by a percentage of how much you spend and we got all that coven money and so that came into the calculation and reduced the percent that we're spending on special ed students so i had to move some money to uh paid out a special ed instead of out of coping when it was appropriate to do so so that that maintenance of effort can stay up and then we also do it for title one programs to make sure that our students who are um have lower socioeconomic group that we're not taking title one um general fund money i guess away from them and then just using title one money to support them it should be a combination of both so that's what's called the maintenance of that yeah so basically you have five dollars that you're contributing to the lemonade stand somebody comes in and donates twenty twenty dollars to the lemonade stand now you have twenty five dollars right you don't have twenty you can't take that five away because now you have twenty coming from another source you can't supplant it i just thought that was something that people might be interested in understanding because that's end of the world and in respect for nancy saying next month we'll uncover some of these things thank you i will add i know what your questions are so i will add them to the next report i just so appreciate all the work you do on this it's a lot i mean it's very complicated and i rarely know exactly what i'm looking for when i look at it so i just kind of go through and go i wonder what that means let me try i'll be doing each section okay thank you very much luke to approve oh we need public comments oh you never got emotional it was a very worth it all right sure it's fine it's kelly and delray okay and do i have a second i'll send it okay so do we have any public comment on this okay any more discussion okay we'll call vote hi hi hi hi i'm chairman i mean that's the approved okay moving on to board superintendent reports um okay just a little something um we spoke earlier when vanessa was speaking and i did with the consent agenda in regards to the activities coming back into our school district which is all all just wonderful but i want to remember or remind people to support your ptas ptos and your boosters because their intricate portion or part of the school that brings well-needed funds to the school and to the classroom um and that's all i have to say okay um i am happy to report that they have reinstated the dates for the next super report on the governance with with an equity lens so uh dr lee and scott and i will be attending um and those will start in august so we have um it says it's going from august through october there are four sessions we're not going every day yeah four sessions starting in august so uh really looking forward to those finally happening they've postponed it twice so it was it three times i don't know whatever it was it was not good so hopefully we can get that moving and other than that okay okay um hi everyone um just want to say happy purim and happy st patrick's day to all who are in observance of those holidays um as many of us recognize acknowledge and celebrate women's history month together during march i want to extend my thanks to some of our teachers who are already doing the work of culturally responsive and culturally relevant teaching and for recognizing that educational teachers and leaders do not need a board resolution to engage our students in meaningful ways that elevate the heritage months that have been established and recognized by our federal and state leadership to center the voices of our traditionally marginalized community members recognizing the heritage months is a baseline way to demonstrate respect for and inclusion of the diverse cultural backgrounds and cultural knowledge in our communities indeed the research confirms that when instruction and in particular when social emotional learning instruction and supports are provided to students in an a cultural way it actually does more harm than good for our most vulnerable students so if you're a certificated staff member that's attempting to engage the learners in our district in social emotional learning curriculum using a cultural culturally agnostic or culturally blind pedagogical method methods and finding yourself baffled about why you aren't seeing results and in fact why your students may seem to be worse off in the face of your efforts i encourage you to look to the authentic inclusion of your students home cultures and lived experiences for some much needed clarity because in short in every day every way all day culture matters and so i'm really excited that we're going to be going to this equity and governance participation starting in august i think it was the third time it's been rescheduled so let's cross our fingers that california school boards association is going to have it together and that we're actually going to be able to participate this time and with that my next open office hours are monday april 4th from 4 to 5 p.m you can access the zoom link on the board website they will continue to be virtual it's convenient for community members to be able to access those so any and all members are welcome to drop in four to five first mondays on zoom and i look forward to connecting with you all be safe and be well and we'll talk soon okay uh i'm going to keep mine brief i just want to share without going into detail that i and my family have been feeling some health issues recently as happens and i want to remind everyone students staff parents community members everyone in this room please take care of yourselves make sure that you know you take your health seriously uh if you need to take time off from work to attend your health it's better than pushing the issue and uh i need to remind myself of that sometimes as well so thank you superintendent thank you trustee bruno i just wanted to thank miss coronado again for her work on that she makes these big reports seem so easy and they're not caroline just leaned over and said wow look at all those numbers so it's easy for me to say hey we need to do this and that but i always appreciate lisa how she makes sure we get it all done and get it done right so thank you for that uh just a reminder april 7th i think i mentioned to you we'll be doing the the groundbreaking we'll get invitations out to that um so looking forward if you can join us i know it'll be during the the workday so i know it's hard to separate sometimes away so hopefully you guys can try to get away if you can um and then as mr jordan said gearing up for summer school we're looking to to have a great experience for our students again over summer just to echo the the i hope these august dates for the equity network stick um i think we've all expressed our frustration and so i i hope uh august will be the magical number uh or magical time to make that happen and then had a great opportunity to tour a bunch of classrooms at spinelli dudley in north country and it's just it's so joyous i don't know any other word to see the staff teaching the the the students learning and the smiles on everyone's faces and hearing them being around and i know that's not easy i know people have worked really hard to get where we are but it's starting to feel like kind of getting back to what we were it's definitely different but we're getting back um and it's just fun i had an opportunity to visit mrs mason today and a young man had come in and was doing some work in there so it was fun just seeing the teaching process and he was so excited just trying to understand where the kids are where they're going and i just think we're doing some great things for our students and i thank everyone for their contributions in that so other than that um that's all i can thank you thank you very much okay advanced planning future meeting dates we have a regular meeting wednesday and we're looking at a before workshop on the 23rd yep okay suggested agenda items do you know how they want to add diversity in the curriculum for our next meeting with discussion of that item okay uh been requested a few times now by multiple people okay um actually i was going to bring up the same issue um i'm questioning where would be the appropriate time whether the next meeting would be good or if we should schedule it for during the summer time just to make sure we understand where we are and set i think it's important that it be done during school so that we can get the input of the community yes while schools stay separate consider that yeah thank you did that work for you mr jordan yeah okay are you asking me to present um you're gonna have some part of the discussion so one of the things is is there more specific that look at how diversity played on the curriculum inside the curriculum all um just from what miss connor has mentioned she has some things that she wants to share with us and that wants us to discuss and look at so i think maybe there's two topics as well one is diversity in the curriculum and one is just diversity in general so i don't know um i don't know if we want to limit it to diversity and curriculum or have two separate items but i don't want to make i want to make sure that whatever miss connors and anyone else wants to discuss relating to diversity is not kibosh by our i know our focusing so that she wanted to discuss some diversity curriculum issues i am planning to reach out to her and touch base and see if there were other diversity issues to discuss i think diversity as a subject is very broad and we do need to dive in more specific so that we can have a more productive discussion we might have to have multiple agenda items on it only because if we're going to present something i i mean the topic is large so we would just for my own sanity mr jordan we would want to know where where we want to start so if we want to hear an item on i'm trying to figure out how to not narrow it but have it open but still i just don't know like based on this conversation right now what we would bring forward to other than open conversation around that because diversity in the curriculum is different than diversity curriculum right diversity curriculum is actually a purchase program diversity in the curriculum would be our current curriculum i also think it's outside of the curriculum too i know from mrs connor's uh emails over with i think you and i might make with board is some of the things is not necessarily mr jordan was it not just you know the diversity that's represented in the standards that then our textbooks reflect but i think it's additional to that so i there's a couple different tracks and we're happy to bring forward whatever i just don't know what i just want to make it better i'm not sure that we would be asking you to bring in anything necessarily um i think it's more just an open discussion for the community at this point why don't we talk to ms connor to see what her thoughts are and then see if you can get a a topic of sorts and then bring it to mr weiner and see if we can narrow down some specifics okay um from my personal point of view i i would like to hear more about how our curriculum currently does approach diversity so that we know where we're coming from um so the topic of diversity in the curriculum yes not the diversity of the curriculum so would that be a starting point because i i think again it's gonna this is gonna be more than one talk it's gonna be more than a ten minute conversation yes um so what we could start with is how in but we can we can at least figure out diversity as it relates to the curriculum that we have but but remember we serve pre-12 so we can find snippets within that to share with the standard i'm just trying to inhale these are we are waiting are we looking for examples within the curriculum within the frameworks within the standards and when we say diversity are we looking for examples of like uh racial diversity are we looking for examples of female writers in literature are we looking for another maybe that'd be our first step i i think then at least we start with something and then i would suspect it's going to spark more from each of you and then we can keep following up with that i i think the equity conversation that we're going to have will also play into that significantly so i think that this is something that will um it's going to be broader than just one meeting and then it will it will keep circling back on many topics you know mentioning that we have multiple curriculums as we go through the different grades i do think that we are likely to need multiple meetings and discuss this you know let's just come in as a regular or as ongoing okay so i think if we get back to it yes so let me let me clarify specifically what it was that she wanted to address so that doesn't get overlooked um from my point of view um diversity would include racial diversity it would include you know gender diversity lgbtq contributions you know disability awareness all of that kind of just you know how are we as a district making sure that we are giving children a full broad education you know when i was going to high school frankly i learned more about uh contributions of the african-american community to american history from rock music than i did from the curriculum and i took an art history class that spent more than half the class on european art um i think we may have mentioned at some point um asian art and did about a week on african art and then it switched over to more modern stuff for the remainder of the year so back then i don't think they were doing a very good job of including diversity because they focused primarily on european history there and not other so so again just to clarify you're talking about diversity of the curriculum not the topic of diversity in the curriculum so i think we need to make sure we talk about people right when we do have this discussion does that make sense did you i didn't answer i i need to clear clear my head a little bit and think about the the differentiation between diversity and the curriculum so one is you're presenting a diversity um like artists and history and things like that and the other is you're specifically talking about diversity which would be a social subject [Music] so i think if we can get an idea of what the request was that would be a good starting point okay and then we'll see what comes out of that and i would suspect that it will it will go off from there on different avenues that you guys would want to hear or have conversations and it will directly tie into the equity piece i know for that okay wow we could also define curriculum because i think when i think in curriculum i'm thinking of state adopted curriculum materials that we're buying but i think we're talking about a whole broader thing here like celebrations at schools i think i thought i heard that the speaker talking about uh you know black history month women's history month those kind of things those aren't necessarily standards or purchase curriculum it's part of the state adopted standards but i think that's what we're talking about am i am i incorrect on that what i've heard miss connor say um was i i heard a focus on elementary level specifically so if we're looking to narrow it a little bit um and then two um you know just really looking at not what the state says but what happens in the classroom space that's the concern uh that i heard her raising and that i've heard from other community members as well you know there's something that the state says and there's frameworks and standards then there's the actual curriculum the real curriculum that's lived and experienced through the students when they're in that classroom with the certificated staff and then are we looking at like we talked about ap and are we looking at uh for example in our construction program are we looking at traditionally that hasn't been a female uh latent are we looking at numbers for that we're looking right as you can see our planners and with the specifics we will provide to you after he has the questions so we're going to have to do this in bite size chunks over a period of time because this is a much bigger topic than i anticipated i'm being seriously you email the board on your ideas of what to talk about next month on diversity okay and then maybe if we could have a discussion item continuously for ongoing because that's you and you may want to send that through scott to avoid any issues with that well that was the problem with her first email is it was really hard to try to figure out what it was exactly she wanted on the agenda we're going to find out i will clarify okay perfect that's a journey items before we do that [Laughter] yes
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
but they're concerned about languages being added now that the scope of this would be limited to what the federal actually approves and i think your testimony suggests that we wait until until the federal rules are approved but right now don't we have the authority to be stricter um yes i mean well i can't answer my question thank you further questions for the ag continue i'll follow up on that so currently isn't it the schools um or any educational entity that's receiving state funding now like the university of wire schools can't they adopt their own policies yes yes and they would be working to be in compliance with with title ix and i think this chapter is meant to be the state corollary to title ix um our concern though is that right now the federal the title ix regulations are being um revised at the federal level and so we're concerned about potential confusion if there are inconsistencies between the federal title ix regulations and what is set forth in state law or regulation okay but the individual entities education entities can in fact put into their written policies right i mean they without this measure they can still do that yes yes and so i guess i'm just concerned like with the university for not doing it and not having done this and having to wait for us to do a measure i know there's certain things like the data and perhaps the positions but certainly um they have been and we've been encouraging them to do so which they've not done and you know they keep telling us especially the university well the university how they have autonomy and we shouldn't be meddling and we shouldn't be telling them what to do and yet they don't do what they're supposed to be doing and so in this case it's okay for us to meddle but in other cases it's not so i continue to raise this issue so thank you sure thank you members further discussion yes so do you disagree with what the with the preamble in this bill that suggests that the trump administration did cut back on the how title ix should be applied and that it's okay for the state to be stricter and to set standards are a lot higher than what the federal government has i'm not disagreeing with the the preamble no i think we're just concerned about um inconsistencies between federal law and whatever might be passed by the state but if they're consistent by when you're saying that that you're basically saying we should go ahead and just follow what the trump administration they've done if those rules are the ones that are implemented is that what you're saying now my understanding is that the biden administration is making revisions um to the the trump administration's rules that um in all likelihood will may reverse some of what was passed by the trump administration okay but then i don't understand your point then if you're saying that we need to be consistent then you're basically saying that if the administration doesn't follow through then we need to be consistent with the trump administration's standards then well we're just we're just i'm i'm sorry i need to just reiterate the position of the department that we just want to make sure that we're not creating confusion by having inconsistencies i think what would be especially um confusing is that what set forth in the bill is that if there is a conflict then the the federal rules would um would um would apply and so to the extent the federal rules are more narrow than there will be um there will be confusion at the state level in terms of what is applicable and what is not that's if that language is in here right correct okay thank you kim did you have a question of the university well is the university on do we have a representative from the university of hawaii um if there's no further questions we're going to move on to the next bill so house bill 1848 house draft two relating to student journalism this establishes freedom of speech and freedom of the press protections for student journalists producing school-sponsored media or university-sponsored media unless subject to certain exemptions and here to testify on this measure akitayashi doe hi good afternoon both chairs makato kim and kidani and members of the committee i'm teri ushijima interim assistant superintendent with the department of education testifying on behalf of interim superintendent kitayashi we stand on our written testimony and respectfully offer comments on hb 1848 house draft 2 and would like to additionally note if pass the need for an appropriation to provide training to students teachers advisors and administrators related to the provisions contained in this measure thank you thank you laverne moore from hsta a lot of chairs and members of the committee the hawaii oh i speak on behalf of also to junior hsda president the hawaii state teachers association supports this bill in relation to student journalism we have our testimony but on a personal note i'm from mckinley high school and miss reeves who will be testifying has worked for six years to get this pass at the legislature why because she wants it into statues statue set standards principles and procedures that must be followed in hawaii in regard to student journalism and implements justice in our society yes the board of ed has a policy but statue is stronger than a policy hawaii needs a law that protects the first amendment rights of student journalists to support our teachers and students the hsp urges this committee to pass this bill mahalo thank you jay hartwell hawaii publishers association in support hillary davis student press law center also in support ryan an individual in support i'm sorry kibailani ozawa cynthia reeves individual support cynthia thank you for the opportunity to testify in support of this bill my name is cindy reeves i'm in my 10th year advising the student newspaper at mckinley high school i was a high school and college student journalist now as an educator helping young people grow as writers leaders and thinkers through the production of a school newspaper is my greatest privilege current law and state policy allow unnecessary censorship and interfere with this task that is why this bill is needed i'm here to support my students and to answer any questions you might have i want to thank you for twice passing versions of this bill and to ask that you do so one more time thank you cynthia shane connoisseur also in support welcome okay thank you committee for letting me testify in person um hi my name is shane conocho i am the second year as a student journalist for the opinion at the kenya high school i am in support of this bill the opinion is currently 101 years old student journalists in the past have written about major historical events they wrote about the truth from a student's perspective we're doing that now too even if it's controversial or might not make the school look good what we don't write are things that this bill does not allow for example articles that are libya's we have a staff editing structure and an advisor to help us with this however our current laws will allow a principal to censor articles for reasons that are far too subjective this bill clearly spells out the rights and responsibilities of all involved in student journalism that's why this law matters please support this bill thank you thank you shane jennifer zuma chu chopal pollock i'm sorry jennifer jerome linear jerome good afternoon um my name is jerome lanier speaking in support of this bill i'm in my second year as a student journalist at mckinley high school in news writing class i've been taught press law news value and journalist journalistic ethics we are very lucky at mckinley high at mckinley high school that our principal and advisor understands that understands and wants to help us grow as journalists even if they don't even if they don't agree or like what we write so so so long as we do it ethically but that's here mckinney i want all hawaiian student journalists protected schools are supposed to help prepare students for the future how is letting administ administrators censor articles that they don't agree with help our future journalists this bill will create better education and better democracy thank you thank you jerome i'll see you cunningham everyone good afternoon my name is althea cunningham and i'm a reporter and editor for the pinion at mckinley high school currently school principals and advisors can censor student productions but as an editor i get to see firsthand how responsible and passionate my fellow staff mates and friends are about covering current events through my experience of working with them i have never seen intent to misuse information to purposely harm anyone hawaii student journalists should be protected and report in confidence without the fear of censorship and truly show what they've learned about press law ethics leadership and integrity i believe this bill will create better education opportunities and promote healthy growth within the journalism community thank you for this opportunity and please support this bill thank you i want to say that black and gold have certainly been well represented today mckinley um members there is there anyone else wishing to testify on this measure if not members any questions i have a question go ahead okay sure thank you my question are for the students of mckinley high school have you written any pieces uh regarding the call to rename making high school i would love to see them if you guys could send them to us we would appreciate reading them thank you very much senator chitagon question for the department department you mentioned the two board policies like this right now but how is hazelwood and tinker applied in practice um i would need to um get back to you and i'm not sure is that covered by your uh by any policy that exists right now i i would need to go back and take a look well i understand that if you're giving it up to each principal or each teacher isn't it better to have a policy set on a statute than that that appropriately applies the hazel wouldn't take your decisions so if you if you're asking if it would be better for a statewide law to guide this work rather than individual principles i think the programs that you have at different high schools will depend on how they may need to provide their procedures and processes some programs are larger than others the question for for us on this bill is whether or not censorship will be applied individually by the principles based on some unarticulated standard or whether or not the hazelwood and tinker standards should be put in statute and so that all teachers all principals know what the standards are i mean you haven't brought a policy that talks about hazelwood or tanker and how they should be applied here okay well i i think um yes we we would need to um maybe provide you with more information on that oh but you've gone to this was a triple referral on the house side so you've had three opportunities to provide testimony on this bill and i think the most of testimony has been about the same so is there more information i i think we provided the information that uh we in in relation to the bill um if you're asking specifically about the hazelwood case and health and applications i would like to go back to review more of the details and do you know what the hazelwood and tinker cases said i am not um i would need to go back and look at the details do you have any idea what pedagogical reasons could be given to censor a student publication do you have any examples of what that would be um no i'm i'm sorry not at this time okay and yes thank you sure any other questions i have a question for um miss reeves cindy what kind of training um do your students your journalism students get right now um we start out the year with law and ethics okay so they are aware of tinker they are aware of hazelwood they are aware of libel despite the fact that they mispronounced libel as that they are aware of what libel is and they are aware that i am an advisor and if they choose to break rules they know i can stop them if they do something that's lifeless they also know that if they do something that's not illegal but that is against my advice they're the ones who are going to sit in front of whoever complains um so that's the beginning of what they are taught is law and ethics so if this measure passes what more training would they need at mckinley none i have taught them everything that they need okay fantastic thank you uh so um d.o.e terry you said in your testimony at the end that if this measure passes you would need funding for training and yet we just heard that kids in journalism already receives the training so i'm not sure what kind of funding you need and what more training are you talking about um so i think it would be more awareness that it's now a law and maybe what that means and also guidance to schools in terms of procedures that should be included in school in the school student publishing approval process there's things in here such as needing to make sure that they have reasonable timelines in order for the advisors to review otherwise the items would be considered approved and also to um just reinforce and make sure the student teacher and advisor and administrator roles are cleared and possibly other identified areas okay but that shouldn't that be in the normal world of or teachers and education and as we've just heard um from mckinley that that's already top so yeah you may have to add a few but to say that because this doesn't have any money in it this bill doesn't even go to ways and means so to say at this juncture that you would need money for training um i'm really perplexed by that i'm not sure what more training that's already embedded into these journalism students i think it would be to um just bring folks up to date on um the most current um [Music] extra money shouldn't that be part of whatever updates you folks do now on a regular basis and whenever there's a change to something you don't come running to the legislature every time there's a change and to update do you no we do not okay thank you thank you remember there's any other questions if not turn it back over oh i guess we're going to decision we're going to go into decision making so uh can you put us in a breakout room he says resuming the joint hearing on the committee on education and committee on higher education members for house bill 1775 hd2 the recommendation of the chair is going to be to pass this bill relating to civil rights with amendments to address the concerns from the ag's office by adding a definition for the educational program or activity and also some technical and non-substantive amendments any questions members if not house bill 1775 hd 2 to pass with amendments chair votes on the committee on education chairs recommendations the past with amendments generals i vice chair kim aye senator de la cruz i vote aye sarah favela share five eyes recommendations adopted okay for house bill 1848 telstra do you want to do sorry same recommendation for higher education committee uh house bill one seven seven five house draft two uh any discussion for higher ed committee if not chair votes i the committee on higher education chairs recommendation password amendments chair votes i senator kirani aye senator keith agaron senator wakai hughes and senator favela chair four eyes recommendations adopted okay thank you um it's a little confusing because education had the lead with higher ed and now i'm the lead and education is second and that's why we have somebody else taking the votes because it gets confusing okay hospital 1848 house draft two relating to student journalism the recommendation is to amend the bill to just put in some clarifying language on page 4 line 15 and page 8 line 20 um just adding in the words or the first amendment of the united states of um united states constitution following under this section so just clarifying and to put an effective date uh upon approval i don't believe that we need any funding in this if you do you can come back in but at this point it doesn't appear that funding is needed and there is no appropriation in this bill as well members any questions any discussions hearing the chair vote side for the committee on higher education with four members present are there any reservations any opposition share your recommendations adopted thank you very much [Laughter] for the committee on it committee on education is to pass with amendments with four or five members president any with reservations any uh opposition share recommendations adopted thank you this hearing isn't good afternoon we are now convening the committee on education our 3 10 pm agenda the zoom meeting and youtube live stream event will include the three o'clock a gen 310 agenda for the committee in education in the unlikely event that we have to abruptly end this hearing due to major technical difficulties the committee will reconvene to discuss any outstanding business on friday march 18 2022 and 3 o'clock p.m in this committee room and a public notice will be posted on the legislature's website i'd like to take this time to remind our testifiers that due to time restrictions on our hearings we will be limiting testimony to one minute per testifier per bill for people participating remotely please remain muted and video disabled until shortly before it is your turn to testify when i call your name staff will unmute you so that you can move so that and your time will begin after your minute is defeated staff will mute you that we can move this hearing long in an orderly and efficient manner first on the agenda is house bill 1561 hd1 relating to education establishes within the department of education a workforce readiness program to provide opportunities for students to earn associate degrees workforce development diplomas pre-apprenticeship certificates and other industry recognized certificates requires a department to designate schools including adult community schools to participate in the program appropriate funds for the workforce readiness program and two full-time equivalent adult workforce workforce readiness program coordinator positions to testify kitayashi interim superintendent good afternoon chair kidani vice chairman carlo kim and members of the committee again tereshijima interim assistant superintendent with the department of education testifying on behalf of interim superintendent kitayashi the hawaii state department of education stands on its written testimony supporting hb 1561 house draft point thank you for the opportunity to provide testimony thank you terry next to testify also tui jr for hsta aloha chairs and members of the committee laverne moore speaking of behalf of osaturi jr the hawaii state teachers association president the hsa supports this bill and we stand on our written testimony and i want to make some comments as a sped teacher this program is truly the way to serve our diverse student population with different modes of learning this program will improve graduation rates and assist 9th grade retention for the transition from middle school to high school is where we lose our 9th graders after the first semester this workforce readiness program is a second chance for our students and adults and the appropriation of state funds earmarked for this program is needed for the development implementation and coordination of a workforce readiness diploma program for hawaii mahalo for the opportunity to testify thank you laverne next to testify trevor of barzua the chair vice chair members of the committee uh trevor abrazo with the chamber of commerce hawaii we stand on our written testimony in support of the measure and just want to make some comments and with the rise in student debt in the workforce shortages across multiple industries you know our small businesses and all our members are behind this bill and many other career and sector partnerships uh within um the education community so happy to answer any questions and thank you for hearing this bill thank you trevor we appreciate the chambers testimony next to testify helen sante mckinley community school for adults good afternoon helen sante principal mckinley community school for adults we stand on our written testimony in support of this bill and are available for questions should you have any thank you thank you and we have other written testimony one with comments and all the risks in support are there any others in the audience who wish to testify on this measure if not members are there any questions i have a question for us trevor this quick question put you on the spot here so so trevor i certainly appreciate what you have to say about student debt and how we can help our students to get into the workforce and limit what their um burdens are going to be in the future but what else is the chamber doing other than just supporting a bill like this how are you trying to get the university uh to lower the not just the tuition but their expenses so they don't have to pass on all this costs to the students right well i could speak on what the chamber is doing to partner with high schools and also middle schools throughout the state to bring through work based learning and sector partnerships so talking about university how are we lowering the cost of education for our graduates high school graduates that attend the university well with our membership you know across all industries and across large and small businesses you know we have a lot of stakeholders at the table with the university and you know us being the convener of the private sector with the education community as well as the university that's been an ongoing conversation and one that's active right now and i know it's an issue across the country but especially here in hawaii and uh one that's topical so kind of what we're doing is is convening the leaders and along with the with our board and our members and with the private sector to help because it's an issue you know not only with students but also too with the workforce and people graduating and having this extreme debt so i appreciate you bringing that up sorry i certainly appreciate uh our chamber taking a practical role i just would like to see folks more front and center on some of these issues um regarding the university and some of the expenses that we keep pointing out in the leadership so thank you thank you sorry members further questions if not i don't think we need okay moving on to let's build 1834 relating to education requires the doe to establish and administer the strong students grant pilot program to provide grants for eligible education expenses to eligible students requires the doe to submit progress reports to the legislature prior to the 2023 and 2024 regular sessions appropriates funds for the pilot program to testify interim superintendent yoshi thank you good afternoon again chair kidani vice chairman of cardiff members of the committee teri ushijima interim assistant superintendent with the department of education testifying on behalf of interim superintendent kitayashi the hawaii state department of education stands on its written testimony and provides comments on hb183 house draft two thank you for this opportunity to testify thank you terry next to testify osatouli jr lahoya state teachers association aloha chair of members of the committee laverne moore speaking on behalf of osatui junior president of the hawaii state teachers association the hawaii state teachers association respectfully opposes house bill 18334 hd2 we believe that those funds would be better used if provided directly to the doe to provide this technology tools directly to students rather than establishing a potentially complicated and administratively burdensome grant program implemented by a private third party and another note i want to point out is look at from another perspective the funds appropriated in this bill could also potentially be used to support teachers directly by providing them funds to purchase classroom supplies rather than our teachers buying them with money from their own pockets as they currently do we appreciate the opportunity to testify thank you next to testify yvonne now interim executive director hawaii state public charter school commission good afternoon cherokee dhani vice chair kim members of the committee we stand on our written testimony in support of the bill and are appreciative of your committee including our charter school students in this potential program thank you so much thank you yvonne next to testify david miyashiro founding executive director hawaii kids can aloha chair kidani vice chair came in members of the committee hawaii kids can stands on our written testimony in strong support we did want to highlight that this funding is by definition not duplicative this streamlined program would help parents fill pukas and address needs they can't already we also don't believe this program needs the full appropriation articulated by the doe to start so it won't divert significant resources and doesn't take funds from school budgets lastly this program is about helping kids and families and would actually take some of the pressure off of the backs of schools and teachers during these challenging times we've heard from educators who are burnt out and exhausted from having to wear all hats during the pandemic this bill would be good for kids parents educators and our state mahalo thank you david testifiers uh additional testifiers are not present on zoom the uh the comments and support and practice with comments on the bill is there anyone in the audience who wishes to testify on this bill that has not spoken yet if not members i don't think we need to go into the great public yes i guess oh d.o.e terry [Music] i'm trying to figure out and maybe i'm not reading the bill right so how exactly is this money given out and how how is it monitored and being spent um so based on reading the the bill it would be a third party that we would have to select and i believe they would have to identify which students would be qualified and also examine documents such as their tax information in terms of monitoring we would need to learn more about the the tool that whatever third party is selected so um and it would be on a first come first serve based on how many how much money i guess is available so what can they spend this money on um according to the bill it would be computer hardware internet access textbook curriculum or other instructional materials fees for national standardized assessments or placement tests and therapies for example speech language and uh and i guess therapy um occupational behavior or physical therapy and so that's what's being proposed and the third party what what kind of expenses would we incur for that uh if this bill is passed we would have to figure that out um [Music] so what part how much of the of how much is this program gonna cost so if it's done in a equitable manner where we estimate that there's approximately 79 000 students who currently receive free or reduced price meals and if that's a thousand per student they'll receive 79 it'll cost about 79 million [Music] 79 million and of the 79 million how much of that is gonna go to the third party i think um there would need to be additional funds that would go to the um that would be needed to uh obtain a third party when we don't know that information we would have to research and figure that out well remember the program you folks are now looking at where um you would do assessments of kindergarteners that one time assessment and it was going to be it was going to cost us at some point a million dollars for a one-time assessment um the kindergarten entry assessment or during the kindergarten at some point and i mean it was like horrendous amount of costs for what we were getting for a one-time assessment that changes so quickly for kindergarteners that it would not even probably be good a year or two later but that kind of expense could be better utilized other ways and i'm just looking at this third party to get them to one get the families to participate to go through the documents and then somebody's got a monitor yes to make sure that these monies are spent in accordance and then it's so broad you can use it from speech therapy for medical for i mean it's it sounds like it's crazy it would be um a very large challenge for us to um but you guys are supporting it nowhere um providing comments okay so you think it would be difficult for you folks it says supports the intent yes we support the intent because we care about students and um [Music] we all care about students i mean it's practical that these monies are gonna okay because didn't the federal government give each family for child monies um and it's done okay that's not true no no i know i'm just saying it's helping yes probably families that are are on this lunch yes and our schools do um reach out to families in need and we have those some structures in place that our folks are working very hard to do thank you okay thank you members for the questions if not i think we will go into the breakout room we're convening the committee on education we are deliberating on the two bills before us members the recommendation of the chair will be to pass out house bill one five six one with amendments and the amendments is to insert a defective date of july 1 2051.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
it's a hockey game the danbury hat trick so they've run a bunch of fundraisers there where we get a certain percent of the profit when it comes to the tickets and other sales and people can buy tickets online and there's a certain code bhs22 and that goes to the senior class it also gets a certain percentage of tickets on sale and that's again working towards the senior activities which those funds would end up going towards something like senior prom or other activities at the end of the year then there's the penguin plunge on march 19th at 11 30 and that's a fundraiser for the special olympics then there's also the distracted driving program save life tour wednesday march 23rd for 12th grade students the musical is coming up on starting says the 23rd but i looked into it at the 24th until the 27th people can reserve tickets online and then the sat which i mentioned last time they're doing it across a week since it's online and they're separating it up so that way there's less people taking it each day and the schedules change according to that and then also the college fair that's taking place at newtown high school on wednesday march 30th which they'll go through colleges trade schools and other training programs moving on to the next section there are four national merit scholar finalists samita shersat sam cotron zane kaiser and sophia kemp and then also for voice for change that was a grant that's given by the state they had i think it was 1.5 million dollars that it was part of getting students to have more of a voice in the changes at their own schools so myself and jackson sharp submitted a proposal to the state for approval and they ended up approving them both so now what would happen is we move on to the campaigning stage where we'll spread awareness of our proposal throughout the school and then on march 28th we would end up voting as a school so every student would get a vote into the election or election or ballot whatever and that would then choose one proposal to move forward and receive the twenty thousand dollar grant um mr blanda recently has announced the top 10 students for the class of 2022 those specific names will be released later and some more graduation updates so the caps and gowns have been ordered and paid for by the school and students who want to receive those have to just make sure that they submit all of their school property or pay the replacement costs for outstanding property there will be a voluntary grad walk for students to wear caps and gowns and walk through the hallways of their previous schools and current school so center school and huckleberry for the last time wms and bhs so obviously this is something that was done before and didn't happen during covid but we're trying to bring that back and it will happen and there'd be bus transportation for that we're also going to keep the car parade tradition going so having those cars go from one place to another we're trying to figure out ways so that it's not as chaotic as sometimes in past years but making it nice and smooth and planning ahead so that it's something good for the seniors and then the ceremony itself is saturday june 18th in the morning time to be determined at the vhs stadium hopefully as long as the weather holds up otherwise we would move to the auditorium and the idea is to have if it is outdoors to have more audience members able to come so each senior would get two tickets that would access those audience members to the fields but then there were also more seats available in the actual bleachers themselves that other visitors could come and see the graduation and then also the grad party planning is taking place which might look a little different from past years but still it's taking place so then with the clubs key club will have their district district educational conference from saturday april 9th to saturday sunday april 10th national honor society is continuing to plan for our annual mother's day we care 5k that takes place at the school here and it's we've chosen um sandy hook promise as our beneficiary or our fundraising we're fundraising towards um that organization and i think in past years we've had like multi-thousand dollars that we end up donating so it's a nice fundraiser for that future teachers of america is working on a play date at center elementary school for students on a thursday evening run by the members of fta brookfield youth commission had two new official members brought in we have mr davila who's actually here tonight um he was he's always been involved with the youth commission but now he's an official member and also sean turner club e is partnering with tree planish to plant 150 trees which equates to bhs's total paper usage for the year trees are five dollars each for families across the town to purchase so it'd actually be for their own homes and they can either be brought to their homes on may 1st which is the planting date or you can pick them up from i think it might be the school or some location and then there's also the option to volunteer on that day to help plant trees and then national art honor society is running a fundraiser right now to paint portraits of families pets across the community moving on to athletics boys volleyball tryouts which is the first season ever for vhs um is this saturday the ice cats played in the ciac state semifinal this past monday the brookfield dance team actually hosted new england's last saturday which although they didn't compete it was all the concession proceeds went towards the bhs dance team so they got to i know like a few of the dance team members made posters for the other teams to help root them on so it's a nice way to boost morale and then the swim team state trials are um where last sunday and i know the swim team is also competing right now as we speak so and then finally student government invitations for senior prom have been sent are being sent out this week and once those get out to families we'll have more information to post and then um we also attended a casc high school leadership conference on friday march 11th unfortunately it was virtual but um next year we're looking to do our the underclassmen will be looking to do a lot more in-person events and then also outside guests for the junior and senior prom um have been allowed for this year any questions on all of that i hope you had quite a list this morning yes i'm working hard there ben there's a lot going on at that school yeah and i have to say because dr burl asked me to update i have not decided on a college yet but we're working on the process thank you ben we can't wait to hear any questions for ben all right thank you ben appreciate it really appreciate the update okay next up on our agenda is uh written correspondence okay deborah case wrote regarding the fourth grade class aaron scalera wrote regarding an foia request stephanie lownsberry wrote regarding an employee concern and sherry styronovsky wrote regarding concerns at bhs okay thank you um next up is uh approval aboard minutes i'll move the board approve the minutes from the regular meeting march 2nd the special meeting expulsion hearing march 4th a special joint meeting march 8th and the special meeting the continued expulsion proceedings march 11th second it's been moved and seconded you all have had a chance to get those minutes any questions or edits hearing none all in favor unanimously approved uh next up is the superintendent's report so dr bro i'll turn it over to you thank you mr belden so i'd just like to start with my typical covid report not a lot of information um but um our new information just so everybody knows as of last week uh our dashboard indicated that we had four positive cases at center school for at huckleberry uh one at wisconier and one at bhs i'm aware of about two cases right now this week but the nurses will have me fully updated by the end of the week and we're we're staying the course of the numbers for you know the last three weeks uh staying in that range and we're obviously watching it closely and in a lot of contact with dr sullivan to make sure we're monitoring everything the other piece um that i just wanted to mention is that dr sullivan and the health department continue to encourage vaccinations and so he has made a recommendation there is a mobile vaccination van that might be available to schools and so he's made a recommendation for me to take a look into that and so we will it'll be something perhaps after school that we can make available to families if they so choose um and we're not sure if it'd be something that might be in the town hall parking lot or in one of the school parking lots but we'll uh we'll work with the health department on that that is all i have on the covet update and in terms of special education director search update just to let everybody know that the first round of interviews is tomorrow so just to keep everybody updated we're moving along uh with our progress on that and we continue to receive applications for the assistant superintendent position in terms of security i have a nice little update here for everybody we are going to be working next week for a little bit at our principal meeting with wescon in the connecticut center for school safety just to work with our administrative team talk about our crisis plans and he has some new threat assessment training that we can take advantage of so we're going to be looking into that this hopefully this spring getting all of our crisis teams trained and or retrained in threat assessment and we've worked directly with the brookfield police department as well to make sure the state requirements the brookfield police department and our westcon connecticut school safety team are in alignment and what we're learning is commonplace and uh accurate in terms of the different agencies so we're all working together and uh we are consistent another piece to that is uh letting uh speaking of uh the youth commission and i heard sandy hook promise earlier uh mrs greenstein is on the youth commission uh a couple of weeks back mr conklin mr renda mr belland and myself met with mrs mcniff and some other members of the youth commission and we talked about the say something app which is an app that is a 24 7 app that is for students it is grant funded through sandy hook's promise is something we are looking into seeing how we can implement at the middle in high school for next year um and we'll give you more information on the app itself but we're pretty excited about that it's something that uh our administrative team is looking forward to in supporting our students when they might be in crisis or in need or have to present something off hours especially and then finally just a reminder from two weeks ago at the board meeting i did uh put out there so everybody is aware that the last day of school at this time is monday june 20th and i just wanted to let everybody know that and lisa and i will be putting a little note on the front page of the website just to let everybody know that that's the last day of school so there's no confusion out there um and we have a lot to do with the equity and inclusion uh presentation this evening and we also had a spotlight so i will end my remarks there i don't know if anybody has any questions for me any questions for dr burrow okay hearing none thank you very much i appreciate the informative update as usual thank you um so now we're going to go through uh board uh committee minutes um and uh we'll start with facilities okay we reviewed the school dood reports and specifically discussed roof leaks hvac issues and ceiling tiles that are missing and are clearly damaged in the hallway in classrooms at the high school one classroom is due to the fact that the heating coils had froze and then busted the ceiling towel in the main hallway has been a recurring problem it's an extensive job and it's a mechanical project that we may possibly need to bring a mechanic in for the problem is that the heating units cool and then condensation comes down so it's the main heat line and we can't isolate it at this time update at the middle school water update no changes and the most recent sample came out fine and showed acceptable levels of lead possibly one more sample will be taken before april as recommended by a water systems operator we can then re resubmit it to the state and close out the issue we reviewed our capital projects so the hvac we received four bids the lowest coming in from abs and that's who we're going to go with to do the work and the installation since the bid was over budget we're going to reduce the value of the scope of the work um the boys locker room project i'll come back to that at the end the guidance wing roof we received three quotes to update the specs one was for 8 thousand one was for 24 25 000 and the third came even higher um but they have since declined the work so it's it's and it's not a highly technical re-offense flat so more discussion will be coming with that we discuss plumbing and fixtures and equipment and discuss the security measures we discuss paving 60 000 square feet needs to be paved we only have 150 000 budgeted so we're going to wait and bundle it electrical service at the middle school we're waiting for the specs so we can go out to bid we talked about the wall at the middle school the rfp for the restoration work will be going out if it hasn't yet already buildings building condition study the project was on the town's arpa grant list the contractor estimated that the study would cost up to 200 000 and could take three to four months to do the middle school and the high school custodian staffing update um now we just had we hired a new knight custodian at the high school who who was at huckleberry so now we just have one vacancy at huckleberry but we transferred green light to huckleberry until we get a full-time custodian to fill that position we discussed some new business mr colbert reported that he provided hillyard with floor plans and other information needed for them to develop cleaning and staffing protocols for canada lake elementary school and hillyard will be their analysis that will present their analysis to the committee at a future meeting from miscellaneous discussion we discussed the board of selectmen's capital budget and that was submitted to the board of finance back to the boys locker room project so just some history so 1.3 million has been approved for the project but the bid came out at 2.8 million so although we're very disappointed at how high the bid came in we felt that we really kind of needed to weigh our needs versus wants and supported scaling back the project in order to get started on the work because if we continue to wait around we may never get the funds so the new plan is to do the locker room only and take out the weight room so i made a motion to use the 1.3 million that has been approved and moved forward with a plan to rebuild the project at its original scope which would not include air conditioning or increasing and enhancing the fitness center and the motion passed unanimously but it is important for us to mention that especially for the community to recall and understand the high school was renovated 18 plus years ago and this portion did not receive all that much as far as renovation the boys locker room hasn't been renovated since 1974 and the project was cut in 2006.
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we came up with 630 dan we had an outfit computer we took their computer lab off space and stole two or three from each and outfit an entire room with those extra two or three two or three in each grade without having to go out because lead times on this stuff is 12 weeks and to have those extras you know three or four there um you know or if you hit the bubble you can you know you build a new type of scenario and it exceeds some of those other spaces unfortunately it turns into general classrooms and like we need we need that classroom furniture as well so having that is definitely beneficial um [Music] can you use it for a variety of other things besides the kids i mean it's a kid's cubby right they're coming home where they put their jacket that's only this tall or whatever it is so the teacher could use it for a variety of other things like um supplies whatever it might be okay probably well we are we are recommending various one through six that those student companies are unlockers in the hallway because it saves space um in the in the classroom itself oh that's fantastic and we've done that in several other new school constructions where they can design the hallways wide enough to accommodate them but the teachers love it because all of that stuff that never seems to fit on the in the interior and we still do the interior cubbies for kindergarten but grades one through six those 26 we're talking about would be in the hallway and of different sizes for different age groups what's the benefit to that because i look at this literally you're seeing the wall on the so you get the window you have the classroom and then you've got cubbies or lockers here and then the wall is either to the hallway or the walls to the classroom either way that's space that's being filled by with jackets and books what's provides an entire additional wall within the classroom where they get thanks to a mother whatever instructional type of storage got it either cabinetry okay charts white the student artwork on the hallway walls so that comes down and that storage space goes up in the form of final cabinets or whatever it might be a little higher right yeah you do you can do um tack boards over they're kind of sometimes difficult you gotta be careful if they're higher but you usually say that but it's a little high but yeah we put in um as part of the art specs to include display cases in the hallway throughout the school so that there are places to display studentship work because of course you might see that visiting school adam um so uh my two questions uh firstly the sinks in the first and second grade do we have those now yeah oh we do um definitely kindergarten first grade in some buildings we have them in the second grade i can't attest to every building having it in second grade but yeah okay sorry and and you need i don't remember that when i was live um all right so then there goes that um so my second question is for the large screen interactive system um i know that we have been planning kind of for that converging in recent years the replacements so if you need for these two schools then the the cost that we've been planning for that already built in you know over the years that's not going to be partially built into the company for this for these projects or yeah um being new they'll be eligible so we certainly mean we see that pretty much in every project what will be important as we as we're finalizing your budget is uh speaking you know with your team rit folks with exactly what type of unit because for years in the past going with the elite short throws uh the absolute elites but now they're all converting to this type where right you know and on the technology it could be five or six questions oh yeah furniture ffa uh furniture fixtures and equipment sorry about that so basically it's anything if you take the building and you turn it upside down all this loose furniture is what we consider so it also includes again i.t digital equipment they can include maintenance equipment as well for it they can include small wares some districts will buy their one-to-one devices they're ineligible though so we really want to talk about that but you know how you use your operating much use project budget it ends up getting used you know in bonding but well it does happen this is a plus being able to buy these devices and have it these ones are definitely reversible so it's not this stuff that walks they don't remember 17 years ago whenever when you guys started the initial smartphone purchases capital cycles would just be including the budget because there's a big delta between a short throw in one of these um i think the prices are starting to come down yeah [Music] what are we doing for um assisted listening is in every classroom yes i didn't have a chance to read through it like you know there's um sound fields front rows and new systems some folks are coming out with but there's other equivalent in those we've just got to account for two good systems but making sure that i t budgeted great yeah the technology is going to continue to change over the next you know two years so yeah that's why you're not seeing specific like smart board we just wanted to try and make it generic so i would anticipate you know the interactive system would include some speakers which we know that became important you know so the key is it is reimbursable so you do want to do it at the time that you're constructing the school okay just hit on the lighters real quick the good thing about them being in the corner too one of the benefits we you know like to think about is hardening of that corridor um you know when you have lockers lying in the corridors it does provide another level of safety um you know we don't want to think of it that way but the reality is it does you know give another layer over the classroom as well yeah i mean it's functional but instead of it's a lot of our our years ago um some some quarters would be constructed with you know concrete natural units or brick of course that's very very resistant um nowadays a lot of its full formal frame gypsum board you know corridors because it's fast it's less expensive but unfortunately it's not as is resistant as you know cmu so having that those lockers five or six feet high provides that another layer of harden so that's another benefit um indirect you just mentioned lockers five or six feet high because i mean you're not gonna have first graders with like six foot tall lockers that they're trying to reach up just to be clear on that they might vary two tier ones here the challenge is gonna be providing enough lockers for all the kids and getting them in the proximal locations of the classrooms because you only have so many linear feet of walls so that becomes the a little bit of a challenge sometimes a specific layout typically scramble three through six would have stacked up you know two tiered lockers that are wider okay but for the younger kids it would be a single locker yeah with a seventh grader you can say go out to your locker and get whatever you need you can't do that for a second greater so there's some reservations there too all right so just moving along page seven there's a 300 square foot teacher staff room you know which includes things like um you know multi-function printer you see that we deleted copy we really don't use copiers all anymore so they continue to print from your device they do serve a copy function hopefully we're not using faxes anymore by the time we get to spaces are visual arts so you can see that there's a 1450 script but visual art classroom so that's bigger than a classroom but it's because it's used for you know a different purpose and i think it's commonly used across all the grades and then there's a visual arts auxiliary classroom which includes a kiln and i i don't want to speak to this much beyond that because i'm not the expert and then the next on the bottom of page nine general and instrumental music thousand square feet for that so um and then there's page 11 a music ensemble practice role and then on page 12.
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questions share both sides okay voting on house bill one five six one house draft one to pass with amendments uh by chair votes aye by shove roadside senator de la cruz all right senator kanu senator favela five eyes recommendations adopted thank you members and for house bill one eight three four house draft two recommendation of of the chair is going to be to be to defer this bill noting that there is a senate bill uh 2816 that was passed out earlier and is uh in the house now questions members thank you you
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so some of the larger needs of the boys locker room were are the showers that don't work there's insufficient ventilation there's no separation in the locker room so teams can hear each other which builds a lot of tension there's only one bathroom that's to be shared by both teams and they must cross paths to access the bathroom in the locker room referees have no privacy and most important there's no handicap accessible amenities plumbing lockers or benches and most important our athletic program problematic needs have changed over the years and we need to reorganize the existing space and repurpose this area that houses some obsolete showers and toilet rooms to provide a more appropriate setting that aligns with our program and most important provides safety and security measures measures but we can't forget and dismiss the important and necessary work that still needs to get done the fitness center affects our entire student body it's utilized 345 days a year for athletics pe and health classes so about 250 students a day use it and the fitness center alone is utilized during all four seasons by every sport so on average each athlete spends about two hours a day in the weight room so however the weight room is overcrowded and is only able to be used for a third of the year because the current equipment doesn't address the needs of pe classes we're restricted to the size of the current weight room and lack of fitness and cardio equipment we only have one bike one treadmill and a broken elliptical this is just as important as any other space in the building and it's about fostering the health and well-being of our children so although we're moving forward with doing the work it's just as important to complete the project and find a way to get the rest of the work done we've got to get this back on the agenda yeah right it's a new project for the weight room adjustable by itself yep does anybody have any questions any questions on that i have a question only because i was on the committee before so i'm i'm just remembering some of the other stuff we talked about but i thought initially when that higher estimate came in we only got one bid right at that point only one bid came in so there was talk about sending it out again but giving a longer lead time because we felt that maybe only one company responded because it was a short response period so did that ever happen that we tried to never it never happened i'm not sure why we never went back out to bed but um because it it's just disappointing to see parts of the project already being cut from it before we tried to get additional bids that maybe could accommodate those features i think we assumed too with um the increase in cost and materials and things that we didn't anticipate a bit that would come in lower can they at least give us um sort of an itemization of add-ons so that if we if it did come in like sure we can everyone is going to give us submit yeah yeah mr checo from the mbc is working directly with eddie from techdon you know we've all met eddie to scale it back but also we can talk about um the pieces yeah sort of an a la carte again you know some do when you do these projects and i can't speak to this specifically when when you don't move on one or move a certain wall at a certain time it becomes a whole different issue so that's what the architects are for to figure this out for us and it'll be harder to go back later and decide to add air conditioning if we want to so i think it would be nice to set it up for that but although like i mean trying to spin it in a positive way and have like the hopefully get the building condition study to do a really i mean that's not the only section of the school that really needs some serious attention yeah and so maybe this is you know a way that we can we can fix what really really needs to be fixed like right now and get like a nice long-range plan for the rest of the building okay okay any other questions for joy all right just moving us along we got a full agenda this evening uh i'll report on the strategic planning committee uh next it was a very brief meeting on march 8th basically was just getting organized you know talking about the dates and talking about the makeup of what we would like the committee to be we settled on somewhere between 15 and 20 individuals split probably 60 40 between educators and members of the public in various ill you know whether it be pto representatives or at large representatives or board members so um and uh we have some time to get organized we asked dr uh barrel to talk to john costa about setting the date for when we'll do the formation meeting and then which we had targeted for may june and uh and once we set that date i don't know if we think we're looking uh may 24th i think going forward will then launch us to start recruiting members for this commitment so both educators as well as the members of the public so that but that was the entirety of the meeting it really was a pretty short minute so okay next up is uh kate another another short meeting yeah so we started meeting uh dr ruby discussed the open positions for special special education director as well as the open position for assistant superintendent and around the special education director we talked a lot about the outplacement experience that the new person would probably have to have but also we had a long conversation about how the new special educa special education director needs to really coordinate with uh with parents and have that as a valuable skill and that's that's pretty much it okay any questions right short meeting um all right the last one is equity and inclusion not a short meeting but a short update since we'll be presenting shortly we just um mrs holly reported that she and mr hill are gathering the programmatic and achievement data and there will be some information forthcoming on that and then each teacher quality and stakeholder just went into breakout rooms reviewed their slides practiced our presentations then we regrouped and did mock presentations each for the other group and just received some feedback and planned for tonight thank you all right next on our attendance to consensus i'll move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires second moved in second any questions all in favor all right okay new business first item our equity and inclusion presentation i'm sorry new business first up is our equity and inclusion presentation and the recommended action is that we receive a presentation from the equity and inclusion committee so uh yeah so amy if i could just say a few opening words before turning it over to you and just just to bring um the board and the public back through a little bit of history and process to you know what's gotten us here tonight as a reminder um about a year and a half ago in response to the board's decision to establish the equity and inclusion uh subcommittee the core team we initiated a process to establish membership where we were focused on board objectives and to that end we had a robust response we had about 34 uh people that sent in letters of interest in regard to being on the equity and inclusion subcommittee which was wonderful after reviewing the letters of interest we settled on a number i think amy around 21 maybe it was 22 i don't know but it was there so um we were a bit selective there and really trying to look at the different stakeholders uh additionally the committee um it's important to um just credit them with how hard and diligently they have worked we had a um retreat in the summer where we did a little bit of redirecting as a board and we talked through some of the kind of a really want to go to a fine-tuned data approach to do some fact-finding before jumping into initiatives and so on on the board's recommendation after that nice retreat that we had we had a good long talk about that we've been in that focus in that direction going forward we've um unfortunately due to time commitment we have lost a few members but we've gained a few members so right now the committee is around 18 or 19 folks um because it is there is a lot of work in between each monthly subcommittee meeting that has to be done and you'll see that this evening in the uh the presentations the committee has really worked hard this school year they're ready to present tonight um each powerpoint as amy said one is on stakeholder um and teacher the others on teacher quality it really reflects the board's priorities and the objectives and then have some recommendations at the end so um we're really looking forward to it we're excited to have a number of representatives from the team here um it's good to see them in person it's our first in-person meeting we've been on zoom so it's great to see everybody in person i'll turn it over to amy just probably i'm going to turn it over to mrs holly who i would like to give sincere gratitude for stepping up as a co-chair and an admin lead on this very large undertaking of a committee thank you everyone and uh just to give the subcommittee members a bit of a heads up due to the positioning of the laptop since it's not here if you want to bring up your device bring up the presentation on your device so you can refer to it that would probably be optimal so we're facing the board and the community so good evening members of the board dr barrell dr ruby and the brookfield community my name is kevin hawley and i am the k-12 curriculum specialist for world languages and english to speakers of other languages and i'm also the co-chair of the equity and inclusion subcommittee along with mrs foster so tonight you're going to listen and view the two presentations each one presenting one of the four identified focus areas that dr burrow was mentioning so we still have to deliver on programmatic equity and achievement equity as well but tonight we're going to start with teacher quality and then move on to stakeholder equity and i'm charged with introducing the teacher quality presentation this evening in collaboration with miss whiting who's going to help me out and also mrs fernandez uh and last but definitely not least our two student representatives uh trem and belokio and nora graphgaard so during this presentation we'll be uh discussing why we're focusing on teacher quality what are equity assessment yielded and a recommendation for future direction [Music] so firstly in an equity assessment where we're tasked with identifying problems of practice in relation to educational inequities it's important for school districts to equitably distribute quality teachers among their schools to reduce the likelihood for inequitable outcomes among student groups we engaged in a data driven approach by analyzing existing and historical data regarding teacher quality to ensure that we were perspective taking and making teacher quality claims that were as unbiased as possible we want to increase transparency to the brookfield community about teacher quality data and from national data we know that quality teachers are unfortunately not distributed equitably and we wanted to know if that was the case here in brookfield you can't say around the world and we know that quality teachers positively impact the social emotional and academic outcomes of all students [Music] the historical and existing data we examined were socio-demographic data and teacher qualification and retainment data we did so because nationwide data and research indicate that minority student groups such as students of color and low-income students are at higher risk for not having access to high-quality teachers additionally we know that increased diversity along with high quality teachers has multiple benefits for students including increased high quality relationships among students and teachers due to their asset-based views of students particularly diverse student learner characteristics student representation and curricula and lower dropout rates and higher expectations for all students okay so what we already know understanding that this is the very beginning of the potential work in equity and inclusion we began investigating what we already know about teacher quality in brookfield from readily accessible sources of public information with uninterpreted data to do this we primarily used edcite which is the source of publicly reported educational data in connecticut being that our variables of focus are teacher and student demographics teacher qualifications and teacher retainment we have concentrated our initial research to understanding these particular aspects in brookfield we discovered significant limitation factors as well significant specifically the manpower required to do this level of research many districts have employed full-time professionals with experience structuring the investigative and directorial tasks that are required to yield true organizational improvements across a complex system like a school district later in this presentation when we question what we need to know it may be that the information exists within our own systems but tasking our hr professionals and others in central office to do significant work in this area requires board support and prioritization according to the state of connecticut to be considered a highly qualified teacher a teacher must be fully certified in the subject area and grade level that they are teaching in brookfield all of our permanent staff as well as most of our long-term substitutes meet this criterion questioning what other qualifying information brookfield collected of its teaching applicants we found that only marital status was gathered in the state of connecticut there's an average annual treacher turnover rate of just over 10 percent about one third of this turnover is due to retirement another third leave pre-retirement which may include leaving the profession altogether and another third to those moving these statistics are far more favorable in this state and region of the country compared to others teacher retention is vital to instituting educational policies equitably and with fidelity when teachers feel supported and valued they're far more likely to stay and in brookfield we generally have a smaller annual teacher turnover rate compared to the state average nationally the highest teacher turnover appears in the area of math science and special education which contributes near fully to the high demand and short supply of qualified teachers for those positions considering the most direct student-facing positions being teachers and paraprofessionals we calculated brookfield's ratio of students to those positions as you can see over time brookfield has prioritized manageable class sizes and support for teachers and students more importantly you can see that this that it has mirrored this priority as it concerns our students with special needs but to be forthright about the limitations of this descriptive analysis i must be clear though it does seem equivalent visually we cannot infer from these data alone that this response is equitable and commensurate to the needs of this population unfortunately it is far beyond the scope of this committee to produce a meaningful analysis where we might be able to determine the cause of an increase in support for students with special needs or even a quantifiable relationship between special education needs severity and support provided so the next thing that we looked at was the demographic makeup of both the faculty and the student body across the district so in the chart on the left what you see is the demographic makeup of the faculty k-12 excluding faculty who identify primarily or entirely as white so it's actually african-american asian native american or hispanic and latino identifying faculty members in the graphic on the left then we added in or in the chart on the left then we added in faculty who identify as white and we see that the overwhelming majority of faculty members k-12 identified themselves as white so we then wanted to look at how that compared to the student body k-12 and what we found is that there are more students of color in the district um as a as a proportion of the full student body then there are faculty members of color as a proportion of the entire faculty makeup in the district and then we compared each group individually and what we saw is that while for some groups within our community while both the number of students and the number of faculty seems to be increasing in general when it comes to students who identify as black or african american those those students are those families their numbers are increasing in the community but their numbers among the faculty are decreasing so on this slide you can see what we also know from brookfield's professional development and minority recruitment plans for professional development we see on this timeline that we understand the socio-demographic differences between our staff and our students therefore we can see on this timeline that our district prioritizes strengthening adult and so and social emotional skills and competencies with cultural competency considerations by infusing a trauma-informed approach so for the past couple of years staff have been working hard to examine their mindsets their biases and make sure that they're affirming our all of our students identities experiences and assets that they bring to the classrooms additionally we know that brookfield has a minority recruitment plan and that our former hr director attended a minority recruitment fair uh last school year um so next we're going to go over questions that we have and what we need to know so the four questions that we have are what other credentialing data would be beneficial to collect in the public schools to fully represent the expertise of the staff how can we increase transparency as to how the teachers are placed in their positions that match their expertise the third question is as brookfield public schools has a minority staff recruitment plan can it be reviewed and further analyzed for effectiveness and the last question is as brookfield public schools has a professional learning plan to develop the staff's cultural competency can it be expanded okay before we go over our next steps that we suggest it's important to note that these recommendations do have limitations as a lot of them do have responses but due to our subcommittee bandwidth we're still emerging in our data analysis because of factors like the pandemic and time and lack of volunteers so it's important to note that these are questions that we paired with recommended steps but they shouldn't be taken as district deficits and things our district is lacking but instead of things that we should further explore so the first question is what other credentialing data would be beneficial to collect in the brookfield public schools to fully represent the expertise of our staff and the action steps that we recommend are to determine if there's additional credentialing criteria for educators that brookfield does not already collect and values in highly qualified teachers and another action step that we recommend is if additional credentialing criteria is identified we should develop a plan for collection and analysis the next question is how can we increase transparency as to how teachers are placed in positions that match their expertise and the action step that we recommend is to increase the transparency as to how teachers are hired and placed in their positions and to determine if the current process is effective in the distribution of expertise when assigning faculty to their courses especially at bhs when teachers typically are teaching multiple courses the third question is as brookfield public schools has a minority staff recruitment plan can it be reviewed and further analyzed for effectiveness and the action step that we're recommending for this question is to further review and analyze the effectiveness of the recruitment plan and then the fourth and final step that we recommend is as brookfield public schools has a professional learning plan to develop staff's cultural competency can it be expanded and the action step that we're recommending for this question is to further develop the plan and incorporate it into the district's updated strategic coherence plan and continue funding it thank you you've got to introduce yourself too oh yeah i'm nora gravgart um i'm a senior at brookfield high school great job thank you that was awesome thank you so much and i thought we were gonna have trem tonight i don't know oh okay okay by the way grease next week on thursday just another plug for grease the music is there right now um so now uh we're gonna actually take questions at the end of the second presentation from the board so i'm going to introduce mrs foster for her work on the stakeholder equity good evening everyone i just want to introduce our team and thank everyone again and as i'm introducing and i'm looking at this i feel we have a really good representation of stakeholders um the people that have been working on these slides and some will be presenting to you in a moment for this group we have wisconsin mr dean renda we have um two teachers from brookfield high school mr ernesto davila and mr chris buckley we have community members miss logan solander and mr jeremy farrell and we have our students julia roberto and mahidot i want to thank everyone for your hard work on this and i will let you guys take it away hi everyone i'm mahidote as ms foster said i'm a senior at bhs and so why are we looking at stakeholder equity a stakeholder would be any student staff or family member or community member in the district and we believe that we need feedback from these stakeholders and community members to make brookfield more representative representative and inclusive as a district we think stakeholders need to be represented and heard in the community and we have yet to determine which stakeholders have to have their voices elevated yeah through this work we strive that we will be able to provide services to parts to have our school committee participate in all um equitable mannerisms sorry so what do we know our main source of stakeholder information it's currently the panorama survey and we currently use two types of panorama surveys we use the teacher panorama survey and parent panorama service so these are not equity-specific surveys these are surveys that have general information and uh the data collected from these surveys potentially uh might be non-representative as they are non-equity-specific service and um we currently don't have any direct community or um or a student survey so uh some issues that we have with a panorama survey are that we have uh difficulty triangulating information and acting upon the information that we collect uh we also have some challenges with direct and indirect question mix we have some questions that um only contain limited demographic information due to confidentiality and uh we also have some all that applied questions that result in more uh responses than respondents so uh besides that we're also uh seeing a low uh response rate and we're not really able to see uh what um demographic groups are responding more than others so um on the next slide we have uh some examples of uh some of these questions are troublesome to us so uh the first one is a question that has been asked on the parent panorama survey about a student experience so as we see right here is an indirect question that results in a 25 percent of don't knows so that's a an example there that you know it's being indirectly parents don't know uh how to uh properly reply to that another example that we see is uh all that all um all that apply and a question on the second one so that uh for example generates more responses than respondents and uh finally uh an example that we see on the third one is um a question that has about mean-spirited behavior that's a very broad definition right that is difficult to triangulate so um yeah you know as we don't have that defined we don't know how to like join it or evaluate against other sources so in trying to address uh issues as far as what we can do to add to this information and find out additional pieces of the parameters that will help us focus our look at equity we thought about the the following concepts that are up here we thought about asking new ways in which we can find additional expanding the parameters is what we can ask and what kind of data we can collect and things along the lines of finding new ways to engage with people who maybe aren't participating in the surveys and finding ways to get more people to participate so finding alternate ways to engage community and parent we need community members and parents in the collection of our data also finding ways to to address some of the questions that have multiple meetings like the question of respect some of the questions that were addressed in the survey talk about respect within the classroom and that has multiple different meetings depending on who you are and even within the same like what teachers think about when respect might be different what kids think about respect we were really curious about finding additional ways to collect data um questions can be very very stark and the questions the data can be maybe not as clear uh and so finding uh qualitative and quantitative data so are there focus groups that we can do are there ways for us to put some humanity behind the questions that might give us some additional clarity behind some of the information that the surveys that senor davila mentioned might be able to give us a little bit more clarity also addressing um oh sorry i looked up um our current system so in in collecting new data are the are the surveys that we need to collect do we need to use existing surveys to to do that or should we be writing our own that we might be more specifically tailored to the needs of brookfield and the public schools here so can we add new questions to an existing survey or given the fact that there might be some survey fatigue do we need to do this in a different way because we're not turning out enough people because they just ignore the surveys that we're asking so we had some questions along that lines and then lastly at the bottom are there ways to engage people uh differently right so finding maybe extrinsic motivations to get people to participate in the surveys to help collect the data one of the things we found is that our numbers are pretty low and so if we can find more people to participate maybe that would engage and give us more accurate data when it comes to stakeholder equity thank you throughout this presentation we have laid out what we already know and what we need to know in order to perform stakeholder equity work at the level we believe we should be in brookfield while the barriers to getting this information are complex and therefore require complex solutions we have come here with three solid recommendations that we believe if brookfield takes will improve our equity stakeholder work each of these uh recommendations also come with an action step which we can take to start fulfilling that recommendation and putting us on the right track as a town the first of these recommendations is to seek qualified input from seek input from qualified individuals with experience and equity work there are people who have done this work before there are people in this state who have done this work before and know what they are doing we need to identify and connect with those people and learn what we can from them in order to jumpstart our own efforts the action step for this recommendation is to identify individuals to collaborate with as a resource our second recommendation is to develop an equity survey reflective of the needs of brookfield brookfield is a unique town full of unique people we need a equity survey that understands and reflects that however for an action step for this we believe we need to start by connecting with neighboring districts to collect comparative documents while brookfield is unique the towns and districts that surround us share a lot in common and we can learn from them in order to make sure we don't have to figure this out all out on our own and can use their understanding as a foundation for our own work our third and final recommendation is the collection of complete and qualitative data as we have talked about earlier in this presentation we do not feel we have holistic enough data as a town to truly do this work as effectively as we think we need to our action step for this recommendation is the development of focus groups to be held at varying times of the day and in varying languages by doing this we believe um brookfield can make um stakeholder equity work more accessible to make sure all of the community and all the stakeholders are involved while also getting qualitative data that will complement our quantitative data from the surveys and help us paint a fuller picture of brookfield and its stakeholders we believe that if brookfield takes these three recommendations and works towards fulfilling them brookfield can strive forward in our work for stakeholder equity thank you so much for listening tonight all right so good mr puzzle so mr baldwin asked the question yeah sure is i think it's time for discussion um for the second recommendation action step what kind of comparative documents would we be looking at as for from neighboring towns like would be an example i don't want to you know speak for the stakeholder equity group but i assume that um perhaps whether it's other surveys we know that there are equity surveys uh that other towns implements even like panorama has an equity survey that is student facing and teacher facing and we have a relationship with them so even just implementing that i don't know mrs foster did i so to answer joy's question that was really we were talking about jeremy there wasn't other documents it was mostly on the server the survey end i didn't think about what we were referring to is there are tools out there that we could use and have been used by other caps in other districts if we can learn from them by comparing or having to try out that we think we can make sure we know what's worth trying and what may not be thank you [Music] so the question i had as i was listening which by the way very nicely done presentations i could tell you guys practiced and rehearsed you guys did that really well both presentations were rooted in i think i walk away with we need to design better information information so we can make better decisions that i gather that correctly out of the both presentations yes do we have in our head what the goal of the data and what actions we would take off it if we had better data so i i.e you know projecting what the what it might look like and feel like when we do collect data what types of different decisions we could make as a as a district and as a community what sorts of actions would come out of the better data would be very helpful i think in designing the data you need so and i completely agree and i think just to echo dr burrell's point during the retreat you know we're trying to define problems of practice and we can't do that with incomplete data so i don't know if my answer is going to fully respond to your question but we can't even have those goals materialized in our minds without looking at complete data and i think you know what you took away from both presentations is completely accurate both in the teacher quality and stakeholder equity even within our recommendations we kept highlighting the fact that um you know there were limitations within our own body due to the pandemic and time and volunteers we had absences that that's true but at the same time the the capability of our um of our subcommittee membership uh not to disparage anyone's intellect because we have amazing amazing membership but um we felt borderline uncomfortable making assumptions about data when you know we didn't have necessarily the expertise to analyze that data to the fullest extent to make evidence-based uh to even formulate evidence-based goals so these recommendations are more so how to get more data in order to get those goals that you're asking about yeah my question was actually a little bit different than that it was more like what kinds of questions would you be wanting to ask for example on the first presentation should we be hiring different types of teachers should we be assigning different teachers to different you know types of courses and and that that that type of question if that's the type of question we're answering that defines a little bit the type of data you would think you would need on this one if the question was um are we reaching the right constituencies and listening and getting feedback it's one set of data but if it was are we examining demographics in in depth enough you'd ask for a different set of data right one you're asking more of my listening to you types of questions and the other one you're asking more about tell me more about your profile and so i would think that the types of questions you would want to ask are very pertinent to the types of data you would want to collect i i would think that in order to formulate those questions and to make sure that in the questions like if we're asking for example to what extent do diverse teachers impact student outcomes let's say for example if that's a question that we wanted to ask i wouldn't feel comfortable asking that type of question because i wouldn't want to put the perception out there that we are trying to infer causality between those two variables without having a look at the data first both quantitative and qualitative so you would want to have data that would help you understand the causality yes in order to formulate the clear that kind of goes right to the point which is if you know what questions you're asking you'll you're going to look for causality questions right and and i would love you know i think as you continue to refine the both of these it all you ought to start with what are the questions we're trying to answer and not you know this one was a little bit of i wanna i wanna go get an expert i wanna go look at what neighboring towns do i want to look at others i think we ought to have a stronger opinion of the types of questions we're trying to answer as we go into it because it would help you set the world-class bar of the type of data you're collecting right and it's not to try and presuppose the answer it's to try and say if we could get this type of data we could answer these kinds of questions you know if you think about it that way and and what are the important questions right now what's the hypothesis if you go to the scientific method my friend here who is the expert in scientific method you start with a hypothesis or a problem statement and then you go after data to help you understand it better so and i think the issue there too is that after our assessment um you know as both groups emphasizes that uh you know if even if we were to identify those hypotheses the data out there as our capacity as a subcommittee isn't they're incomplete right now so um you know that's why our recommendations are based on how to complete that data i understand we can't because we don't know you don't even have preliminary data you don't even have preliminary data we can't i mean obviously the ultimate goal is what we talked about last summer at the retreat was to identify some of these problems and use data to do that but we can't even i we can't even identify the questions to ask that are necessary to identify those problems so we're having this sort of you got a chicken and you've got a chicken in there you're a foundational problem with the completeness of and again like i said you know the the some of the data is what we have we can scour our human resources records and things like that that requires an incredible amount of time and quite frankly money because of that and so that's something that you know we don't know how to ask a particular question or what kinds of questions we want the data to address because we don't know what we already have or where that where those data might take us so it's a bit of a problem but i think i think the point that that you're is right in front of us and jeremy started to talk about it a little bit is um this committee and frankly now our board we start to own this issue and how do we go about solving it to the questions bob was asking and there are some neighboring districts that are uh maybe a year 18 months ahead of us on this work and we could we could talk to them and learn from them and see what kind of surveys they started with they may have more pertinent data they may have a more community approach rather than just a school district approach to how we we get at this information so there's a lot of ways we think we can get there and i think if we're creative and we're open and we learn from others um and we go at this with the database approach i think we can get there and start to realize okay now we have this data and to um ernesto was talking about triangulating that data and figuring it out from there but a lot of it starts with the stakeholders um as mr buckley was saying they've got to be comfortable maybe there is survey fatigue there's a different way to ask the surveys we certainly could work with panoramas the vendor that puts the surveys together for us to design something update the survey whatever the case may be add questions that kind of thing so i just i just find when you have a data centric project it's so much more fulfilling and effective if you have an idea of what questions you're trying to answer right um specific questions as opposed to okay what's the best type of data collect and then we'll go find out what it tells us right you start with a body of knowledge that you understand i understand and then you formulate these questions we don't have a complete body of knowledge to start with and so we need to first gather all of that before we can figure out what what are the important questions and i think that's that's sort of i i would i would argue that you could come up with the important question the important questions you could come up with now and say are the questions we're collecting the right ones to help us answer that right and and i think that would be a foundational point of improving data collection i don't have an issue with the actions i mean i really don't i think understanding expertise and understanding what others do and things like that but i just think it's a stronger play and more fulfilling right as a project if you said here's the five questions i think we want to be able to answer right high level right without bias right in the questions but this is the topical area i want to be able to generally ask answer now are we asking the is we our neighbors our experts do they even address those types of that type of data right then i think if you go into it with a little bit of an opinion a little bit of an opinion of what information i need it helps an awful lot in terms of you know driving the process right i don't disagree that we have to we have a lot of work to do obviously on you know finding out what data's out there and how can we improve it right so i think we're so foundational i think of my maslow's hierarchy we're way down here right in terms of you know how do you how do you get data but it's uh i think this is just keep having a uh opinion not on what the answer is but what the questions are right i think it would be helpful just my two cents worth well i want to kind of add to that because you do have variables so with variables you can formulate hypothesis so i mean you've said the term problematic practices uh hiring transparencies uh you know just with you know just the general term stakeholder equity there are variables so you can build those questions off the variables to help formulate the beginnings of the data exploration because then it's that's a little bit more guided uh but yeah going to having a hypothesis is you know you you prove it and you cannot you cannot prove it you're not doing that something that specific but if you start with the variables that that becomes the makeup of those initial questions well i mean we did ask those questions example if we wanted to understand if our minority parents are feel represented or are represented in our district in terms of do they feel like they have access to administration as an example we have no idea who is answering these surveys so we cannot even ask that question because we already understand that we don't have the information to do that but that's a that's a perfect example of what i was just saying right which is you had a question in your mind therefore i need to be able to do something with our data collection that gets us more better structure to the information right that's exactly wrong that's all i was saying that's all i was saying yeah and we can we can certainly highlight some of those questions we kind of took this presentation as um sort of our presentation of the back work that we're doing to get to that point okay cool well yeah and that's exactly it because what we're recommending in both of these uh presentations is pretty much the foundation of how you start with an improvement science framework to complete this work so in order to formulate a problem statement you would need to engage in end user consultations empathy interviews examine historical and existing data but have it be complete in order to then formulate um an evidence-based measurable observable problem statement and we don't feel comfortable uh uh formulating those problem statements without conducting those which is why many of these recommendations include uh focus groups and you know within those focus groups there could be end user consultations etc so the second question i have um or it's probably it's a question more than a comment but the timeline on both sets of recommendations right is uh there's great recommendations to go attack the question of better data right is this something that we it's a one-year effort a two-month effort a three-year effort it was hard for me to tell kind of what kind of timeline and i do realize this is a group organized with volunteers and that's always the challenge with it but the uh i'm just kind of curious what your vision is well i wouldn't uh feel comfortable just basing it on my soul vision since we have a community based approach the timeline that we formulated already for the beginning of this work we're a bit off because of as i stated absences time commitments we had members drop off because of that and um you know and that's also why we mentioned in the recommendations perhaps uh partnering with uh experts who could actually because i know um in conducting environmental informant um consultations for example in another school district where i spoke to an administrator who happens to be an equity in inclusion you know hired by the district an equally inclusion expert is working with a myriad of stakeholders but not on a volunteer basis and has a whole network of data collection and of course this individual would be able to better formulate a timeline and i'm not comfortable to put forth that timeline it's something we need to talk about as a committee exactly we have recommendations the committee hasn't sat down and timelined this out just that's a great question but we're just not there yet there's two other deliverables as well two other presentations can you talk a little bit about what's coming i think that'd be really helpful so um the other two presentations are gonna be programmatic equity and achievement equity and mr hill and i and i'm going to be asking for the rest of the committee's help to do as much as we can to collect the data that we can given our you know our roles uh outside of this committee as well uh but in terms of uh achievement data we're gonna be looking at sat data and desegregating it uh mr hill is helping a tremendous amount with that along with ap data as well for achievement data we're going to be taking a look at some of our discipline data we're going to be taking a look at our special education data that already mrs wygonic has provided thank you so much for that and uh we're going to be uh taking a look at um other uh our you know gifted and talented program um you know we're going to be taking a look at that and uh we're going to be doing something very similar with doing the best we can collecting that data and giving these presentations i love some of the data you presented that's very helpful i didn't want to uh when i asked kevin to to present that i wasn't sure if there was any other questions either i didn't want to cut anyone off or and i really it's important to say just to thank amy for her uh stepping up and coordinating this being the chair of the committee and i have to thank mrs holly for her leadership she really stepped in this year and coordinating the group and as you can see she has a real command of the material um and actually has a lot of leadership and organizational skill and making sure this went on and while we say mrs holly we're looking forward to soon to be dr holly she's working very hard on that as well so she's had a very busy year this year but kevin thank you you deserve that thanks thank you appreciate it thanks to the committee for coming tonight really thank you guys thanks everyone great job okay very informative thank you all right next up on our agenda is uh item b which is the healthy food options certification and apologize in advance i think i i know i think you have to actually read each one of them so you can make what you if you'd like you could make two recommend two motions as one and we can vote on them together no thank you pursuant i'll move that pursuant to cgs section 10-215-f the board of education or governing authority certifies that all food items offered for sale to students in the schools under its jurisdiction and not exempted from the connecticut nutrition standards published by the connecticut state department of education will comply with the connecticut nutrition standards during the period of july 1 2022 through june 30th 2023 this certification shall include all food offered for sale to students separately from reimbursable meals at all times and from all sources including but not limited to school stores vending machines school cafeterias culinary programs and any fundraising activities on school premises sponsored by the school or non-school organizations and groups and i will move that the board of education or governing authority will allow the sale to students of food items that do not meet the connecticut nutrition standards and beverages not listed in section 10-221-q of the connecticut general statutes provided that the following conditions are met the sale is in connection with an event occurring after the end of the regular school day or on the weekend the sale is at the location of the event and the food and beverage items are not sold from a vending machine or school store an event is an occurrence that involves more than just a regularly scheduled practice meeting or extracurricular activity for example soccer games school plays and interscholastic debates are events but soccer practices play rehearsals and debate team meetings are not the regular school day is the period from midnight before to 30 minutes after the end of the official school day location means where the event is being held and must be the same place as the food and beverage sales second moved at length and seconded well done are there any questions on the motion or any discussion the only question i have and just as for the administration are we executing on our our operations in the district in order to comply because the board is a certified network complying and i just want to confirm from the administration yes verbally that we are complying yes okay without any further ado at all in favor any opposed unanimous okay that's it for our new business old business uh we have um the first up is just a discussion on uh board of education adopted budget status i understand the board of finance met last night and there may be some new information yes no it pretty much confirms the finance committee conversation that we had last night in addition to that mr post um did some sharpening of the pencil and had additional information you can share this evening as well uh in regards to some of the discussion we had last night did they take a vote on the board of finance i don't think they did no they did not okay so mr poswana you share the savings opportunities with the uh with the board i know the finance committee had a chance to review it yesterday so i think it's just appropriate that you know you share they share that we probably ought to turn off the presentation that's being shown behind you i don't know if this is the first mark thank you so i uh in uh looking to refine some of the estimates we have in the budget i found four areas number one i looked at the energy consumption at huckleberry compared with the estimated energy consumption at the new school and since we're moving huckleberry over to the new school mid-year i calculated about nineteen thousand five hundred dollars of savings from february through the end of june and finally uh being able to look at a full twelve month period of copier usage without interruptions from the uh the pandemic it looks like we can reduce our estimate of copier costs by about fourteen thousand dollars and it certainly appears that uh people have learned to do a little less with paper and a little more with their computers in the high school we have extended duty for guidance counselors in the summer contract requires us to provide them with up to 10 days and that's what we budget for it but looking back at the history we tend to not use that much so i think we can remove 9 600 from that line and then similarly with our teacher mentor stipends in the extended duty we budget for a certain number of them every year and we tend to come in lower than that so i believe we can lower that estimate by five thousand four hundred forty dollars and that's a total of forty eight thousand five hundred forty dollars and i don't have specific data from eric yet but he said he's been refining estimates with some of his software programs and he's got about fifteen hundred dollars in additional savings there so the total is about fifty thousand yes so thank you for that you're welcome well we did last night as a finance committee is we reviewed this with ken we've been asked by the board of finance at our last discussion with them to could you go sharpen your pencils and see what you could do and the report we received back from the from our board of finance representative and from the town controller is the board the board of finance would carefully look at our what we what we could do and try to put back some of the money that had been previously uh removed no promises they still are deliberating in fact i believe their meeting this evening as well they were meeting last night and then again this evening tomorrow also and tomorrow as well yeah the meeting all week yeah so the we sent them a note last night saying okay we found we believe fifty thousand dollars that i we all felt was a relatively safe you know reduction we could take and that's the feedback i gave him them was anything past that we're going to start dipping into programs right including the things that we presented at our february mid-february presentation and we would urge them to please not do that and the board of education would ask for their support to keep that money in the um so i sent that note last night i'm on behalf of all of us even and i did tell them we had not voted on any reductions right so that's still on us but my sole limit was reasonably safe at 50 000 given the things we knew um so um so we so we and we won't be voting on those tonight right because that we won't vote on an updated budget for the from this committee until we know where the budget target in the end will be so we don't know anything particular about whether they've actually voted or agreed to do anything relative to our budget because i think some of us had heard maybe some other things were brewing that there was no no vote that we know of we just continued conversation uh in a positive light to support the school budget as best they can yeah okay the other thing by the way they we heard from mrs koch coach cook that that they were not asking us to do pull aheads or adjustments to the our best or stuff because we had talked about that at our last meeting and the reason was they had discovered a number of one-time spend opportunities on the town side and they would rather do those pull ahead types of things on the town side than on the school side so they have they actually so i asked very explicitly do you need any input from us on those types of options and the answer was no we do not so that discussion seems to have you know it's fallen on the wayside for now only because they have other priorities on how they're going to saw you know use that type of opportunity to fund balance so and i hope that's a positive energy signal to us so anybody else have any answers a quick question i thought about it after our meeting last night any savings from now that we don't have a lot of appliances in all the buildings that were being used in the past that were personal items oh that's a good question joy i had not factored that in that would probably be a few thousand dollars or an additional we could do okay so any questions on the on the budget update so we'll know relatively quickly what the board of finance decision process will be because they have to finalize a proposed budget that they'll take forward to their public hearing so they have to actually publish that so that will be i believe by the end of this week they have to complete that so correct [Music] okay thank you well thank you ken thanks bob um okay that's the only old business item next item up is public comment and i'll just read this the board of education welcomes public comment individuals or groups may address the board concerning any subject which is within the board's jurisdiction three minutes are allotted per speaker comments and questions at a regular meeting may deal with any topic related to the board's management of schools discussion of personnel or individual members of the board shall not be considered appropriate so i've got my handy-dandy timer here that i will use and we did have a sign-up sheet we do have one uh member of the public who would like to speak and mr fentress i think uh um to the up to the microphone the uh john could you just make sure the microphone's on and i need uh name and address um for you to speak definitely ready yeah i'm going to start my time or two hi okay so uh in brookfield we're in a bubble and um we're coming across some real confusing times uh from the information i'm sorry we needed name and address i'm sorry what's that all right let's pause the time yeah we'll start the time again yeah so uh i'm warren fentress uh 137 173 bart street torrington my son goes to wisconsin okay uh so anyway brookfield's a bit of a bubble and these times are very confusing we're inundated with a lot of bogus information there's going to be a lot of truth coming to light this year that's going to be difficult for a lot of us to accept i think and uh but we've really got to stay focused on truth honesty integrity and um one of the things that i'm concerned with when i see things like the recent emails saying that you guys are still going to be like doing covet testing and the information that i'm reading is that these tests are not reliable they don't do any good and therefore there's no point to doing testing it's a waste of money because they don't offer anything accurate and that's the cdc's even acknowledge that now that's that pcr test and uh so a lot of these things are gonna as we see of the year evolve right like we're gonna learn things that kovit was a fraud all along and we're going to learn that the government authorities have been trying to murder the citizens with this vaccine this mrna drug that's called comranati by pfizer this is a toxic gene therapy containing graphene hydroxide which is a very toxic substance by the way i'm an ex fiser executive and i was a medical engineer at the beginning of my career so um if anybody parents here would like some facts i've got a fact sheet here with a lot of this information in here but um so i'm just very concerned with the you know if the schools or where our kids are here i know you're taking your cues from the state board of education but honestly like uh i don't want my kid getting swabbed by this test there's a the gel on the end of the swab on the pcr test is toxic as well so you know if you guys are just taking your decisions from the state that's not going to cut it because you have to look out for our kids here i don't care what's happening in the state so uh i really hope you're going to stop the testing because it's moot and any other thing related to covid look this is going to come out it's going to change society but it was a sham from the beginning this is the most grievous uh crime ever committed blows 911 away this is uh really sick demanded people in our government that are really literally trying to reduce the population killing people there's over a million people dead in the united states from this drug already a million people it's unheard of it's it's worse than nurnberg so uh we need to work together to uh make sure the truth comes out and i think that should be important for our children in school to get the truth and not the the politics thank you thank you very much mr belden may i make something very clear i want to be crystal clear the brookfield public schools has never and will not test students for covid or frankly anything else we have not done that on direction from on direction from the connecticut dph and state department of education sorry they provided they've provided almost 8 000 at-home tests for this particular school district but all over the state every single school district and it was strongly recommended by the state folks as well as our local health department to provide the boxes of those tests to the students and to the staff to bring home and if people so choose use the test that was it doesn't administer any school has not administered a test and will not administer a test i just got an email though saying that because we're going to do testing for someone sick i don't know what you're talking about there mr fentress we can we can address that and mr rend is here as well so we can address that but we were not absolutely but we are not testing anybody i'll make that crystal clear you have to worry about a thing we're not testing any student i want you to know that thank you i appreciate that you're very welcome thank you for that clarification sir okay so um next up is an update on the candlewood lake elementary school project okay um so last time i reported we were the roofing materials had come in and we were excited that they were going to be able to get started on that and they have they've started roofing and it's even finished in one of the sections and because of that then some interior stuff has already started so framing mechanical electrical plumbing it's all happening and it's going to start going very fast so it's very exciting herpetologists will start resuming their routine checks of native reptile and amphibian species that live near the site the nbc is going to probably start moving their meetings back to huckleberry so they can start doing their monthly walk throughs again and hopefully we'll be able to join them at one of those and techton and arcadis are still working to finalize some parts of the ff mini package like small wares so thinking like anything from like clocks to like door handles and all of that including a technology package that eric has put together is going to be sent to the state for procurement so exciting stuff and to build on what rosa said um i love when i was told about small wares i've never heard that term before i love small wares and all the flags for every classroom and the garbage cans i mean all the things when you're moving into something new you have to start fresh so that's always exciting and um speaking of moving the meetings back to the huckleberry site um it looks like i've worked with the construction manager as well as mr checko it looks like and everybody put this on your calendar for the elected boards they were thinking of a tour on may 17th it's their may meeting tuesday may 17th would definitely be i'm going to say after 5 30 p.m their meetings start at seven so we can get a walk through uh in obviously daylight savings time we anticipate it would be warmer as well as light out and drier on the site this is quite a muddy site uh at this point so we're excited about that get through and i think rosa it was either by the end of last week or this week and i haven't confirmed that wing you're talking about may have some heat flowing through that too so i mean there is there is utilities moving into the the facility now actually working so pretty exciting excellent so when we go through a walk through we'll actually be able to see framed out classrooms and i mean it's going to be moving along with the better weather and more daylight and everything else that'll be exciting yeah timeline is still as it had been still on track exciting okay any other questions on that okay three main points well i was thinking um the huckleberry spotlight was very exciting i think i'd like to write about that sure for sure the equity and inclu inclusion presentation i thought was awesome um and then i guess probably a summary of the candlewood lake elementary school yeah people like to know what's going on with that that sounds great [Music] and rose if we work with eric for the candlewidth update can we get one of your labeled drone pictures can you would you mind yeah i like doing that right i knew it wasn't a chore to ask you that okay upcoming events um center school has early release tomorrow and friday for conferences and i believe is mrs diamond still here she is [Music] their community meeting is the 31st that will be streamed huckleberry has early release tomorrow and friday also for conferences and next week the book fair is back in person during library classes at an after school family event on thursday from 4 to 6 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
is that that would be the gym that's six thousand square feet you'll see on page 13 we eliminated is that this center so this is an example of something you know that was requested you know at a school level that was changed it was in favor of a larger gym the gym originally was 4 700 square feet we thought it's best to do a larger gym so that there is available seating and give up the fitness center so that's some of the give-and-take that was done before it got into the draft so there's no programming natural fitness center the fitness center wasn't just for staff that was for we saw uh cruising and all those physical education activities too that's going on well the other thing that we were conscious of tony is the fact that there's a lot of uh as i know most people in this room are really aware that there's a lot of demand from groups in the community for gym space and the original spacing was really tight got it and we can't do both because why you're already pressed on your space standard ratio already this is one um that we suspect the state would probably challenge um it's gonna be that give and take of we'll you know if you keep that you're gonna probably have to get something else up you're already kind of pressed on your space or we don't get reimbursed on it right that's the other option well that's the that's gonna be the big question when we go to meet with them with the changing of administration there is is how do they look at that because um there was a different attitude previously and are they going to let us build and take the hit on it because there'll be a hit to your reimbursement rate is what it would be if you did that so even though you know when we have in all school districts of country health and cultural education as possible applying to that well you have to give a gym but most elementary schools don't have a fitness room that we've seen can you speak at all to that fitness room well um i have never seen it included at the elementary level it's very common at middle school in high school and i think one of the things that the state would be asking is how does that space support the elementary physical education program and it seemed to me that the request was coming more so of interest as a benefit to staff to use which is very nice hey physical education correct i figured it was cool and as you know you could always ask tony i mean i'm not it's not something i would you know follow my style so i was kind of curious yeah i mean we're only giving you our experience i just want to reiterate that things are constantly changing so we can get to everybody no problem what's the advertising check like let's start with your high school day one of the documents i gave out in the package tonight is actually all our existing schools and what the size of the beach places are so that's a great question andrew yeah we've been uh we've been referencing this left right in the center to say all right well how big is it is is just under 6 000 square feet so that on one side you do have room for the bleachers that you push back so that gives you a sentence it's not the size of a high school gym but obviously just under six thousand square feet that's at the end of our range well we built um it it's a good it's a good size we built two of them down to snowington um it's six um all the ones so far in south windsor were that forty five forty six hundred and similarly then was saying um there's good size but there's limits there's no seating for any your you know realistically you're gonna use it for parks and rack in your program so it's just reality you know being able to say that but um with six thousand it allows you to put a full-size gym in there for your i don't know i could call new school but like 15 news and whatever they call them i know that before but the older kids above in early men's groups too above grade six can utilize those in a really you know suitable way um and there's room to there's plenty of room to play so it's a nice it's a nice size for it if you can you know afford to put it in your school because they end up being so small and everything complains that we can't use it for our programs and it's you know really you're pushing a wall a couple feet this way and you unwall this way it's a big box so the cost per square foot isn't as much as you know adding a classroom space for it is the divergence pass is certainly appropriate for an elementary physical education of course but the direct department wasn't happy with that yeah nor are many boards and town councils that want to see space in the school the gym space would be a demand to make an investment of this magnitude of the community and not be able to use it i understand why people would be upset with that i would just change the floors to the wood though in the six thousand squares the wood floors are definitely better for the larger gem it just gives you more you know almost like a high school feel but not being as big and you can themselves probably you won't but not in the bleachers [Music] those are used um all right so so to be clear that synthetic rubberized supporting plates that would not be for the 6 000 to change right now okay yeah we've seen it with both and the six thousand the wood is definitely just it's super sharp it performs better you know to heavy mesh yeah it's just it's it's about i think that's just my personal opinion i mean i guess if you did it with stunning and then so um if i'm reading this correctly this will be a genitorium yes right yes unlike the yeah these are going to be like about i think it's like six or seven feet you know on the on i'll say the wall side it just it's a big difference yeah the parents are you know you're sitting on the border looking through the small little window you're talking about chapman yeah or extra production chairs yes not auditorium there is storage included for chairs so it wouldn't be like pull out kind of thing it would just be like enough room for like a highlight you have enough room to put a chair around the basketball floor sort of that well you have your bleachers they're like saying for a bed you're getting your bleachers oh yeah actual bleachers thirty four or five rows okay at least the ones that we built over six thousand about five rows um with the divider um the plot the stage will actually right i'm sure there's probably a platform land let me express my platform but because the stage is higher and with a platform um i think it relieves us from our fire rating and sprinklers underneath if you have that storage you have the sprinklers a cost factor and in the stack of all the chairs these days are not on those nice carts from the good old days that really condensed storage systems now that'll go in your storage so that's right about the classroom spaces that the classrooms um grades one through six or nine hundred square feet how does that compare to our classroom spaces um i i have to check i don't know if i've done a direct comparison but uh oh this doesn't make our classrooms spaces bigger in many cases it does but i think these are average i mean there's a range on the existing classroom so i'm looking at chapman and there's a range of classroom spaces from 420 to 19 but that would include kindergartens which are typically larger and if you have the storage in the lockers in the hallway then you just freed up quite a bit great one of one of the things we need to take into consideration are the state standard space standards so the state typically thinks of a typical classroom in many products you can't get there because you just don't have enough space to accommodate that but 900 is usually what we aim for with the exception of kindergarten and pre-k which tend to be 11-12 so my question really goes to what were the what was the state standards back when our elementary schools were built are they 900 or are they less it's 900 a better square footage in most schools than than some of the rooms that we have it is we see a lot of districts with 760 like the high 700s low 800s you know that that was part of the discussion when we went through dog middle school was if you have to deal with the footprint that you have then you're never going to get class room sizes big enough to accommodate the furniture the flexible furniture lady yeah there are definitely challenges when they're doing a renovation i was kind of wondering if the state standards had before the square footage had changed over the years yeah i don't know how they did the stack of 1971 yeah i mean the standards today were developed just in 2015 so i don't i actually don't know if they had like a similar type of standard like a classroom to an x and you know so forth um one thing it does is it it gives you consistent classroom sizes because right now those you know some of the small roads are really swarming in some cases yeah i was impressed with the size of those atoms yeah they're they're good size and they'll get a little crazy just have so much stuff yeah that's cool the gym in the gym in the 6 000 we built will have retractable pull out bleachers and particularly about five rows and i think we see around 170 500 people i think total and what's the use for those it's for if you have a game um you know or you have a presentation sometimes your sensation you know instead of being on the platform you might be setting you know uh you know perpendicular to that um but it's really you know for you know your athletic games and exerting and it gives you more just more flexibility uh for you know community use you know as a whole so is that is that supposed to use it for assembly purposes in a gym so um you know some kids on the floor some kids in the bleachers if you have you know parents coming for those you know and sometimes you did a grade level meeting with sixth grade you wanted to get another class together you can have them all from the teachers for some kind of a special presentation so that can make total sense to me because what i'm envisioning is bleachers that are going down the length rather than the width and the width i think i'm thinking you have the principle standing in the middle of the width not the length the bleachers run the length so yeah so if you're having like a wall it's awkward yeah if this is your gym typically your platform will be maybe on this end yes right and one side will have bleachers it won't be on both of those bi ones so the far side will just have padding yeah the line will be six foot and then you'll have a divider you know we can you know those can vary um but the ones we put in our the the soundproof type dividers um so you can really separate there'll be a door between and you can have separate classes um you know for those but yeah typically one side and you can present this way so if dr solomon's here and you have you know folks in the bleachers and some kids on the floor they can reset long ways or you can present you know going this way too so it's a really flexible space you can use you know clearly school-related activities and meetings okay right all the time okay okay because those bleachers when they compress they're probably only i don't know two feet off from the wall at most the way they compress maybe even less so you know gives you a lot more room for your phys ed classes as well um you know having it but it's nice to have it just nice to have that benefit it gives you more flexibility on a long term you know basis yeah and i can i can i can support the idea that makes sense to me about going to save 4 700 to 6 000 square feet because there are a lot of uh non-elementary school age people whether it's you know high school students you know some sort of league or adults yeah i totally get that i'm wanting to use the facilities all the time particularly in the winter like for basketball freezing outside so i totally get that um but i do in terms of asking about the bleachers i'm really looking at this through the lens of this needs to be primarily for the elementary school kids that is how i believe that's how i see it and i do believe that the voters and referendum will be seeing it that way which brings you to my second point here which is just part of the fitness center uh having i appreciate having taken it out something like that makes it make it more difficult for me to support this because i i can just see somebody i see dumbbells here and i can see that be a talking point this is why you're spending money on dumbbells and i just think that that would become a problem right yeah i don't see why but i'm looking at this through the lens i want this to and i think that i think taking that out was uh yeah i don't think that would just work that well i think i should have mentioned i think this this is an iterative process so i know this is the first time that as group playing canadian board members are here seeing it so you know you have to adjust this i want to you know make a couple of passes to get it to where everybody's comfortable and then you know the other thing worth mentioning is that once these are done simulated passes a referendum so you know the design profession of that target has got to take these specs and design a building around it and there'll be flexibility you know within that design so you know as we go through that design stage you know there'll be discussions like this except a lot more detail and a lot longer which would be a great process to go through sure i hope i'm happy all right so um page 14.
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