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yeah so that's uh in the beginning i mentioned how that's the cares act slash s1 some people call it um that is the that's really uh money that in june or we received but we spent more than what we received so we're moving that negative balance into s or three okay okay thank you i appreciate it very good well john eddie mr walston i appreciate your all your work uh i must say that this this meeting has gone much better than i thought it would when i saw all of the empty columns and but that just means okay we are we are on par i appreciate the explanation about uh a moving grant monies that we can grant from item to item to make it work [Music] and uh if there are no other questions could i ask a question please madam chair gladys cooper welcome aboard yes ma'am could i ask the question could you explain uh account number 141 uh out of my time on the budget i've never seen a word just hanging out there or account just hanging out there by itself could you explain to me account number 141 minority the minority grant um miss cooper yeah is it a grant it is a grant and um i i honestly don't know too much of the grant i'm not going to pretend i do um okay i don't want you to pretend yeah that's what i say kevin or kelly are you aware of that by any chance i you know i'm just curious as why is it there uh could it be in with another uh some other account i just want to know what is it and i've like i said i've looked over um a lot of budget books over my years and i just never seen it seen an account just there and and really no sort of explanation i just want to know what it is well this is the first time i think we've seen a a list of grants right we've seen a list of grants before yeah okay i can look into it gladys for you and uh get you an answer tomorrow okay not just for me you know just for you know because if we go down in front of city hall uh you know next week and we get to looking at this and you know it's not a whole lot of money i'm just saying what is it for i'll get you that i'll get the answer for the committee for everyone to uh tomorrow and my last question is is there anything new that's going to be proposed out of this budget when we get down to um the education committee meeting on next week at city hall is there anything that needs to be corrected now or added to before get down to city hall next week gladys the the only thing that i think is different is um you know for the first time in in the last three years um we will not be returning unspent money to the city come june 30th you can see from the projections um i'm not sure if they expect that annually but not this year so and i think that's comes through on the report okay anyone else going once going twice i will attain entertain a motion to adjourn we'll see you all at the next meeting motion to adjourn thank you gentlemen thank you very much so moved gentlemen
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i i think that we're um reliant in a way on this right now we've already reduced it a bit i think longer term even i shouldn't say longer term but i think that for fy23 we already have such a significant gap and we've kind of factored in some acceptance of school students and that's not to say that it's not impossible to surmount it but i do feel like it would be helpful to take one more year of what the principal's recommended and would help prevent too much erosion and allow us to plant in next year's budget the best use of school choice um but longer term i agree with you like i feel like the state should have increased five pounds and it should have been increasing here but that you know that discussion has been going on for a long time so the chances of that happening that's that's an argument right i mean i i i don't disagree with what he's saying but i think that his boss says we do um in something with cups for july and the reason we have to have the discussion at the top is because if the money is in common school choice it's kind of something else what's the balance of the school choice funds that be has right now bes is the smallest of the three schools off the top of my head um it's in the ball park i can probably get up all my time back to say 300 we're going to overspend if we don't accept any school church students i think we take in 15 153 so it'll be fun pretty quickly um but you know ratchet it down in next year's budget and if you accept these you probably don't need to lose yeah you know i think the plan has to be if you if your enrollment is going up because we have development then it's a phase out you know how do we face this out so how do we face full choice out over over a few years and and then increase that i think it uses another revenue source the numbers i have in front of me don't look like we're facing a note though there's currently pes there are three no no no no correct the three school church students in bds right now they're all in fifth grade next year and we're being asked to approve eight additional students in the bds for next year so eight would be bored a thousand that would be those three will drop off and you have eight week 40 000 remember you don't necessarily need to take more the following year you have that 40 000 in revenue and you can reduce what you're spending and then that 40 000 will drop down over time districts like we had plenty of birmingham 24 kids in a grade two classrooms and twelve it's like it's not efficient um that's one of the draws was it i don't know about twelve in the class and there's people who i'm an expert on this but there's different studies that say something about you know is it good to have that small class size um and you know we could go look up five studies that you decided um i don't think that one you know any government 12 to 13 or 14 in class i don't think right no teacher there's no significant research that says at those levels there's a significant improvement if you're talking 26 27 28 that that's a different story but um not not with those there is an increment too i should have added you know if if there's needs beyond you get more than four or five uh more than five thousand is especially you come in for additional services for students additional needs it would get more than five and i just want to read you guys so i do a lot of the reporting on some of that stuff and helping out with the special edition school choices um i did hear that fear of what happens if one of these kids is in and out of district and and out of this replacement would pretty much be a dollar dollar um in terms of what we would get reimbursed so um if school choice kid came in and didn't end up being out of this replacement that that school choice money comes from the town lab so again if the placement was 125 would receive 125 in school choice for that kid not just 5 000.
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and then might even refer back i thought that we're planning to actually become another district student [Music] the programmatic responsibility for school choice student would stay with um without kids two or three years later um that's um that would be sort of the standard there are always exceptions but um that would be the standards that programmatically remain responsible theoretically if we didn't approve of the additional students at bes and didn't have that forty thousand dollars could you hear anything typically that's what you respond another forty thousand dollars to make a difference or that requires us to revisit the budget only we're could you make up for that by digging deeper into the assessment choice reserve well it probably wouldn't be [Music] is just a lower balance at a school choice fund and less time to um get school choice use the diet budget so the 153 000 that we're using the budget fy23 you might need to plan to bring that down to 50 000 period fy24 100 000 so that you know the town might say look you're gonna have a hundred thousand dollar increase in our budget we don't wanna support many more increases i just think it's it's the the pace of the production that is gonna be the challenge for the town of tourism yeah see i guess i'm most concerned about that because i i do believe that if the public in boylston are made to understand what the actual perpetual expenditures are at ees and how far below the state average and below the universe those are right now that they would be town support for fixing that problem more quickly than we might be thinking it can be fixed right now the perfect expenditure if eps is something around 14-5 it's eighteen five at bms the state averages are around sixteen five we wanted to get medias up to just the state average forgotten about another six hundred thousand dollars a year on the bes budget five thousand dollars at the time of school choice is not going to fix that problem and your project right this is a longer conversation in what we need to have more broadly in the town but i i struggle once again to try to continue to mandate this situation where we seem to have a structural not enough revenue coming in to be yes to make up for the fact that we've got new lots being cleared up right across the street from the school just this week yeah no i i don't i don't disagree with that but i still think i mean i i think that you can do both of these things at the same same time there's going to be a point where we've stopped this so let's have the discussion before you know we're in a place where um you know we take a revenue source that we rely on and just cut it out let's have a big discussion about this while we still can this is really the first time we've kind of had this discussion and we've been talking at least for a couple years when we do the enrollment is getting very difficult to predict and now we're having you know more rental units and stuff so i think what happened really the same discussion is just a matter of you know you're a great man but i think you know i mean you know i know bob feels the same way we have it right the the long-term discussion and say listen we're facing this out and here's why we're facing this sound so you know get ready for it or however you want um however you wanna you know present that to the top it also represents the safety net we don't have a stabilization fund like so you know aces had problems arising like financial problems rising school the last few years and knowing that we have a school choice balance as a safety and that is helpful we also have a special ed reserve that we only have 50 000 and that would be nice to build that up but i feel a little bit like at least the school that is there's something unexpected by moving forward one more year it maintains a bit of a safety net and then you ratchet it back as we go forward and those are discussions you know those are discussion points to basically say we want to have school choice it does provide that safety net but if building is going to be out of control we need to have room for our own students but those are legitimate conversations we need to have more people in the building as i look at these numbers it looks like we have three classes in every grade level except second might be two is that right and that brings up another point we we could you know one of the things did an above level services this year remember was a teacher at bes which we took out and basically said we can um basically move some teachers around for one year but that'll be one of the items and next year's budget will be the first thing on after this year um these classes will be too big to have like so we went from when i came here i think i think i don't think we had i think there were probably three classes two teachers and that within one year all of our classes will have to be teachers so you know that's the that's the other issue next year we need one teacher at least one regular ed probably another special edition one voice again and if i'm correct in maybe um janelle or charlotte or jack that teachers don't necessarily enjoy being bummed [Music] so bumping teachers at grade level but within one year that will you know that's one of those things that we'll have to change so now again we just did the 20 fy23 button already thinking about that by 24 issues that we know are you know coming down coming out of the fight here so i guess because as a result of the conversation here where i can i can i can get myself able to vote to add these seats i guess with two personal caveats of that vote one of them is that we as a district establish a finance and budget subcommittee next year for the school committee so we can be more involved in this earlier on and then secondly that we inform through over the course of the next year that the voice and finance committee in town that we're moving in the direction we're going to have to reduce and eliminate school choices coming into boylston and berlin based upon yeah and it is it isn't really the growth as much as the uncertainty right you don't you can't it's difficult to plan and as i said in the in my enrollment there are two factors that make um forecasts and enrollment difficult one is unprecedented growth and the other one is a small small district we have both of them and we have both those conditions so but i do agree and i know dr that discussion on school choice does need to happen with the towns and i don't know what the master plan is i don't know where they stand on and out of the building is the work of progress level i can see definitely we're a little see the same kind of issues as classrooms start to grow yeah i've already started to see that and it's a very it's a very small space there's not even a classroom as much as the common areas you know like the cafeteria is very small so yeah so we'll start this is more immediate there's more building going on of course [Music] i think that there's a strong argument to be made that the town of boylston shouldn't be given more funds for elementary even think about things like needing three hundred thousand dollars to whatever interest in that school to you know the comment that was made earlier we know what it's going to cost we just don't have the capital money but we have a 10 budget increase from wells elementary this year so that you know we talked about the gap i think 650 i don't know something like that and that that gap is closed i mean we're certainly getting closer to the media with this increase they're probably more than half that cap is closed you do have a potential big commercial development similar to thenx coming up with potentially two years you know last time that happened it was a decision to put some pictures reducing the tax rate and ultimately that's something that would be helpful to hear you know your perspective as a school committee i think having a subcommittee of the school community that's focused on this stuff will help us create a table for which to have those conversations with the selected with the town uh politically there are other people who are instrumental in what's in line with your responsibilities as well yes yes i'm sorry right nbes well yes thank you um i would like a motion to accept the mentor program job descriptions [Music] excellent discussion all in favor i'm an eye as well motion to approve the mentor program job prescriptions passes i would like a motion to accept the fiscal year 2023 revised budget [Music] thank you what does this need to be approved by the meaning is that's our special replication yeah a discussion questions all right um all in favor the motion to approve the fiscal year 2023 revised budget passes i would like a motion to accept the accelerates accelerating literacy grant funds second discussion i guess i'd just like to understand so what does that look like where are these funds coming from and how does that process [Music] i guess that's the best way to put it um [Music] they tell us we have to tell them [Music] my needs districts that are applying large urban areas tend to get very substantial funding when you look at our essa grants and we have we're up against districts certificate millions [Music] but that goes really fast [Music] um i actually don't know that i have anything to add to that you certainly have quite a bit more experience with it than i do you know at this stage you have a question for discussion all in favor [Music] to accept the accelerating literacy grant fund passes i would like a motion to accept the annual donation from energy north of 500 to bms for science or mathematics programs adam's second year mike discussion all in favor as well okay motion to accept annual donation from energy north of 500 to bms for science or mathematics programs classes and we already voted for this honda new york city field trip we have the first read of the student activity guidelines any discussion regarding that question um our next meeting is may come forth with the possibility of may 2nd meeting prior to that of meeting and could i have a motion to go into executive session for the purpose of discussing strategy or bargaining with the dbea and not to return to open sessions this concludes our meeting thank you very much
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hmm and i don't feel any side effects carol hanging out behind you i heard my name what'd you say i'm looking over your shoulders okay no ma'am [Music] okay [Music] is okay go pick out bathrooms do you want to speak hungry [Music] okay yes okay it appears to be 6 and on the clock on the log so it's 6 31 so we'll call this meeting to order um i am uh amy i'm the vice president we have our president carol bowden he's on youtube or zoom or whatever we're using today um so i will be leaving the media today because we'll say she can't do that remotely but i haven't done it before so i am not going to be as smooth as carol is um so excuse me if i say something wrong i'm going to try to start the pledge yeah so we will start with the pledge so let's place the flag of the united states of america into the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and uh we are also missing uh miss tracy today she is at a conference in california i believe and uh so she will not be here um mr doesn't have any modifications to the agenda tonight moving all right so the agenda we have um i have uh one public comment note um for tony knight so we will go ahead and move to recognition of visitors and comments from the audience [Music] so the way public comment works is that um you have three minutes um that is your opportunity to speak i just want to let you know it is not a conversation so we won't be answering questions those are your three minutes to tell us what you need to tell us um stephanie will be telling you and when she shows you a yellow card that needs to have one minute left and a red card means uh that you can finish your sentence but we'll be wrapping up at that point all right let me go ahead thought i would have to stand in front of the school board to bring attention to the major issues where i have a transportation department i've sent out an email to every person on this board i received one email back from carol that did not answer any of my concerns i have rapidly i have a rapid growing concern for my child and the other children my child has been my child being dropped off and picked up at a different time from a different bus and a different bus driver several times without a call text email parent square no communication at all i talked with scott for a bit today i told him it was unacceptable for example i could buy a bus it's like brown county school court on the side of it pick up kids and pray for them ain't no difference because of the lack of communication and respect you're getting this has happened several times this year i'm not even talking about the crap show last year i've been a part of this i'm part of the two percent that has to shuttle their kid over a mile to a bus stop because the transportation refuses to figure out the white house so my wife has had to sit in a car for up to an hour waiting on a school bus we have made several calls about this all we ever did is i'm sorry because god has to do one with someone else scott has excused my child twice this year due to no show or late school bus pickups i have lived here my whole life i know about every person here and no one can say this is okay we have a a guy running a park a major part of my school that is unqualified for his job if the bus driver calls him and there's no sub he sits in his chair passing the point not getting in a bus or solving a problem because he has no license to do so in my eyes it's no different than having an illiterate teacher you should never have a boss or someone you can yourself as a parent we should never have to question where or who our kids are with i should never have to tell my kid we don't know what's going on because the lack of communication of school after all this day our bus driver nicole said the text saying quote due to all the complaints and upset parents i will be coming to make sure our kids are home on time so be aware that your kids will be here arriving home tonight on time this is unacceptable there would be no issue if the transportation department was doing their job all right that concludes recognition of visitors and number four is presentations we have one scheduled tonight and number five are discussion items and they're also one of those number six is approval of the public session minutes uh from march 24th 2022.
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[Music] good evening i'd like to call the brookfield board of education regular meeting on april 6th to order please stand for the pledge pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay we have six board members present bob couldn't be with us this evening so first up on our agenda student spotlight center elementary school mrs diamond please come on up [Music] all right um will it just start excellent thank you okay good evening everyone my name is mary rose diamond i'm the proud principal of center school we're grateful uh to be here this evening to share with you our collaboration on digital portfolios that students in two of our first grade classes have been developing over the course of the year with their classroom teachers and with the assistance of jackie whiting our district integration technology integration coach over the last several years we've spoken about self-navigating learners and what that means children particularly young children are naturally curious and will persevere through tasks and challenges in which they are highly invested growing truly self-navigating learners though starts with intentionally fostering that curiosity by nurturing a growth mindset then providing the instruction and coaching that harness students natural curiosity and channels it this requires students to learn skills and strategies for goal setting action planning accepting and incorporating feedback understanding success criteria identifying appropriate strategies searching out evaluating and managing resources and self-reflection among others this work begins at home with parents and caretakers who are students first teachers and we are working hard to ensure it continues when students come to center school so the impetus behind the digital the digital portfolios was really the interruptions from kobit as we all are well aware of and dealing with it was an opportunity for students to show progress and show all the growth that they were making over the course of the year in a different format and also to build students efficacy so some of the work that you that you're going to see tonight is really about that efficacy and we're really working hard to make this part of how we do business and instruct at center school teachers like heidi natalino i think that's our next heidi natalino and michelle tuck are pioneering these goals with students by not only giving them the instruction and support necessary to grow their content knowledge but also providing the conditions within their classrooms for students to grow their self-efficacy their beliefs and attitudes were there toward their capabilities to achieve academic uh success as well as their beliefs in their their beliefs in their ability to fulfill academic tasks and successfully learn the content jackie whiting's support and innovation has made the project manageable sustainable and accessible particularly given the age and development developmental level of our students she has been working beside heidi and michelle and their students since day one so these digital portfolios have made students learning visible to them the students the teachers and also the parents and have increased engagement across the board students are engaged because they can track the growth they're making for the goal they have set for themselves and therefore they see themselves as agents of their own learning they might not be able to tell you that in those words but they will absolutely show you with their actions parents can watch their children's growth and see their excitement about the progress they are making on the learning goals they have set for themselves teachers and staff are gaining greater insights into students motivation and learning preferences so that they can modify and adjust their instruction everybody wins in our video we will feature james who is whose parents are here with us this evening and can attest to the growth that he has made um we'll see part of his portfolio as well as his self-reflection about his growth and then we'll also hear from two other students bella and thomas about the growth that the goals they have set for this year and that they're continuing to work on and then finally mrs natalino and mrs tuck will both uh be on the video briefly describing the process from their perspective so here we go spotlight on our digital portfolios [Music] so [Music] hi james so today we get to watch the videos that we've been making of you since way back in october are you ready yeah okay one two three four five six seven eight nine ten what would come next um that's so fun now i'm gonna pick a number and i can you tell me the number that comes next okay 52 53 oh my gosh let's try it again 67 one more time 99 100.
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of the whole the cheshire boy education april 7th 22. can i have a vote call please mr probable here is him here ms harrigan here mr martial here mr murder president rosenberg you're flag of okay united states of america into the republic for which it stands one nation under god who is liberty okay do we have any communications from the audience emails thank you so many purposes meeting is to get back into the education specifications for the northern elementary school and the new north elementary school um up first on the agenda is update and deliverables timeline yeah jeff first of all thank you um we're excited about tonight and you know feeling this is this project is is culminating here almost to a degree that you know we're we're almost there hopefully we cannot had sex tonight to move forward for our next uh business meeting after this evening's meeting and so the timeline if you see the handouts that i shared called miles milestone schedule on front uh if you look you know after i'm committed two years of the way down the page perhaps friday april first draft of final specs budgets and redistricting by april first we're you know pretty close to that um on sixth this past wednesday we held our executive steering committee meeting so the draft have really been pulled together i think this is a good final bet for us the budget stuff should be resolved soon uh next tuesday i know that um players chuck and john probably speak for that a little more but they were working on that with jim jesco and sean the trying to finalize the the first to present with the council uh on tuesday and certainly all that information you should have that well in advance of the meeting um that it will have on the 19th next thursday so um that could have sent the timeline uh the the council will seek to approve the final approval of the proposed referendum budget approval the referendum in november uh as well as authorizing the board to submit a grant application establishment of a bill committee it doesn't have to be done that day but they just have to do it and then authorization repairs schematic drawings and outlines facts which you know obviously we're in the process of doing that um may 10 is the town council date for that already set so we're making great progress for that date tonight our focus on is on reviewing the educational specifications that have been designed um just kind of walk you through that process to a degree the next pages in the packet to kind of provide an overview of what we're talking about here uh the first one is space standard so it's a formula that the state uses to calculate the square footage uh that they believe should be the building size now these were established before 2013 it goes back they haven't been updated uh and as such they can be particularly tight at the elementary grades so you can see there if the projected enrollment in the far left hand column is between 350 kids you see that this per square footage for each grade level and as it you know moves up you can kind of uh the number of students increases you can see that the the square footage actually per student decreases because they factor in what they consider to be what's called the core spaces that aren't really uh [Music] respected in classroom cafeteria things like that on the next page [Music] now elementary school because it's a smaller uh space this single submission for grant reimbursement reaches about 92 and 96 of the space standard some higher some lower but if you're looking at the bell curve it's you know the typical submission for grant reimbursement is about 92 96 so you know we want to at least get inside that target range we can apply for a waiver based on special program needs to reclaim reverse if we fall apart so let's say our percent of space energy is 90 percent we can write a letter outlining why we believe our programmatic needs uh call for a lower space standard and will therefore uh potentially get reimbursement a higher reimbursement rate they may say to us okay we'll qualify that extra square footage i want to give you an example of where that would play a minute each percentage of reimbursement for cheshire so every time we kick up one full percent that's the equivalent of three hundred thousand dollars in reimbursement money so you kind of sense of if we're at 95 percent five percent difference that means five times three hundred thousand that would be our our money that we're not eligible for uh finally i want to be clear one of the things that we learned in this process since the last time we talked is that the c does not reimburse birth to three any square foot is related to birth three they do not reimburse and you'll see here on the next slide um next couple slides really about how their space birth to three and pre-k in particular influence are our space standard uh we we seek to apply for reimbursement so in the left-hand column you see school it's notable at norton k-6 and really i don't know what i've ever said this is birth to six you know we're we're all the way all the way from birth to six there so the percentage of space trans standard uh achieved in the initial design was ninety one point four percent said okay what spaces do we need where what we did at that point and that was the original version that you may have seen we read laying that out um and identify a number of spaces that okay we maybe we don't need a health office dedicated to uh for the three or excuse me uh we can donate that and add you know 100 square feet or something to the school health office and locate the health office and architecture closer to the birth or the excuse me the pre-k area so strategies like that through those strategies and in space reductions at both norton and at the north end school we reduce the space that we are requesting and in doing so we went from 91.4 to a ninety three point three percent space standard ratio norton and up from eighty two percent to eighty nine percent at the north end elementary school so reduced you know spaces if you if you remember i said three hundred thousand per percent that's eight percent or two point four million dollars that we recouped in making those case reductions and we think we can do that uh marlene ben and myself along with dan's here and um john spent a couple hours the other day up at one of the elementary schools that and they're you know just looking at rooms looking at the square footage and that helped us contract and find you know trying to identify some efficiencies that we could use sometimes it's things they missed and sometimes you know less time from them which is great some things they took advantage but we were able to get them while we're down you know eight percent on a improved eight percent on the space standard the difference between these two buildings is really birth to three to a small degree to a great degree its recap is the issue um so our goal when you look at these percentages is to apply to seek at least three percent additional reimbursement on each building by asking for a space standard waiver we think that that's you know certainly then niche uh although nobody can guarantee that we feel like that's in reach for us and if we can do that that's another 1.8 million dollars in reimbursement you know nobody's going to walk away from if we can get that so uh some reason the waiver is not accepted sure is the other and you legislated so they're the last path that we can take uh tony knows called not withstanding legislation so we address we will meet with our probably do this uh for the summer maybe there are local legislators they can produce legislation that would close the gap frankly you know i feel pretty good about the um the three percent that's that's certainly achievable if we were going to do that maybe we're looking at that for birth to three uh for seat to make an exception for us around that no other district has birth three it's not like every other district is going to run out and ask for it we're the only one that hasn't so that could be a real option for us and on the next page you can see the implications of darcy on the space standard that we have so you know if you recall from the first slide the space per student when you have 105 students the allotment 124 square feet per child when you multiply that out by our our number of students that we're projecting 105 that's 13 000 square feet when you add what it's called before factor like i said before the multiplier that they have they just multiply this on top of the number again one point something i forget it looks like it's about one point five um you have 19 734 square feet did the total there so i told you the building itself where it in total is 89 of the space standard that's on average that's what we need no spaces the pre-k area alone is only 66 percent reimbursement because the high number i am honest we have relative to the low number of kids that we have it's a perfect opportunity for us to apply for a spacing or waiver to close that gap um so that's that's really the bulk of the difference between the norm specs because otherwise they're identical except for pre-k birth to three it was very you know that additional space is making a significant difference because birth to three is literally only 500 square feet it's not a significant number on a building this size but it does two degree influence we could certainly get that um you could look for that and perhaps something else legislative not with anything but everything else uh i think we could really aggressively pursue labor there and potentially have a granted so that is the kind of context of what i'm going to share with you in the next documents the first document is the darcy execution norton i'm going to go there first because like i just said uh north end is identical to the uh norton version and uh would be exceptional pre-k and it'd be easier to just highlight the detail and go to the next next one this document is very very close to what was already distributed to you a few weeks ago it is nearly identical with limited adjustments um we did take out things for example like a world language classroom that only benefits sixth graders but um it you know takes a thousand square feet we we decided to cut that to get higher up on the space stand when we looked at some of the adjustments that we've had here and now another example of an area where i think we're right for reimbursement uh is the art classrooms the music classrooms these specials we had a second classroom for a guy with me here um had to add a second classroom at a thousand square feet each because of the way that our contracts are written we only do seconds per teacher um for our music and in these buildings we'll have at least 35 sections we need two spaces to offer that because otherwise you have one teacher for our who's in the classroom all day and then you'll have another detroiter i don't know how you deliver our cart but they would have to go on a car i mean that's not actual it doesn't make sense our program that's the exact sort of thing that the state would issue space favor for so we can see places in here where the space standard waiver would uh be applicable and the state could be recepted to they have a pretty good history of being accepted to recep to these things so we think that's where you know some and one of the other places where we make up ground what we've emphasized as well is you know i think or these are communities to their our buildings are not that not just the educational center but that's where youth basketball happens that's where boy scouts have this is where everything happens um we blaze here we have the you know there's a social area as well well so you know the gym which might typically be 800 square feet where it's very tight on a court uh in the fact that we have two be classes in there we're extending that to six thousand square feet um so that there's more space available for youth sports or parents to come and watch the kids play so we're trying to be um focused first on classroom space making sure that the classrooms are adwords space second on community services third on you know other things are important like space for services things like that that was kind of our prioritization as we we were through this um i do want to give arlene a good opportunity to share any thoughts on you know norton or the process before we look at some of the detailed differences in the north end program for pre-k and and versus three that i would just make a couple of miles the educational specifications that we distributed his path back on march 16th these are substantively the same we did tweak just some of the spaces so there's no major changes to where we started in fact march 16 for norton we were at sixty five thousand two ninety this attempt to sixty three thousand nine seven five so we just did some some tweeting that none on the classroom cases or principal office and uh some other resource rooms the only thing that i'll kind of add to what jeff said that when we were south windsor first of all we were able to visualize what a 900 and foot whatever classroom looks like uh what a 200th foot office looks like and we went actually see two elementary school locations and cafeterias which were of particular concerns so we're pretty comfortable that the the sizes that we have in the respect after that visit it were in good shape and the gym in particular um which was about 45 4600 square feet at elementary schools in south windsor you literally have enough room you know just stand on the sidelines of the basketball court for a round which isn't that great if you're using a community space so the six thousand square feet people does that targeted sweet square feet gives us room for bleachers which we talked about last time like we haven't done and now that not only does it become community space but it becomes meaningful for the school population as well so you know i think that is a an important compromise if we can keep that in you know for both schools because it does allow that space to be useful i think a lot more effectively plus obviously serving as a gym so that's really all i wanted to and i know yeah they wanted like an auditorium space which the state will not reimburse and for us this is a compromise on that we can have a thousand square foot to the building in in fact it's not an auditorium but we can add bleachers and have enough room to have the kids sit and meeting style in in the gym so it's we're trying to leverage the space of the greatest thing that we possibly can in this process tim you have a question before we go to marley yes i apologize but in case you haven't covered it in terms of the community space you know we had discussions about community desires for space have you had a chance to look at that and match that up to what you're asking for or is it simply a matter of we know we need 10 000 additional square feet and this is an additional 2400 square feet type of thing i mean i'm not using goods okay the the so if you look at chapman that building has very limited use for community sports the the general is very small it's very tight space uh norton is a little bit better but not much um and so those cases people don't want to use them okay if you look at both of these spaces those these faces will be used and we want to design in a way like i said by adding a thousand square feet of each building you've really opened up the door not only for community use but also for daily use you have now uh put a divider in there you can run two classes in there a little bit more comfortably because we're going to need room for two classes at the same time at some point it's also a meeting space for the school so we really think we're leveraging that square fish well um that's all i appreciate i'm just curious though is it so what i think is the potential for an overbuild in just the community space and that's all i'm talking about right now yeah are you confident basically that you've had these requests and people want it wait a minute i mean i was there for whatever yeah so i get that but if you had a chance to just like think of like it's not talking 365 days a year i mean a lot of this basketball in the winter when people knock me outside i don't understand just a match up temporarily if the space you're building out does kind of match up with the requests have been pleased with you well first of all their sizes i think what you're saying will help but i don't know that we could ever build enough community space in this town know yeah financial issue with that even if we said okay we need another auditorium up to 2500 square feet we know we're going to get reimbursed so we're having a hard time squeezing in to this place and trying to you know maximize the reimbursement so i think i think we're kind of optimized what we're trying to accomplish to balance the community space with the available square footage that we have to build and have useful school spaces certainly if the board and town council design a true auditorium there you pay for it right uh but if that we're gonna not do the cost but if that were gonna happen but it still will say reverse the portion that uh that's right it does start standard and i wish it was that simple because in other words it's good he wants to pay an extra [Music] share seven eight nine million dollars in the auditorium so the state doesn't say well we'll just cut out this class and reimburse you a hundred percent right it don't work like that so sure yeah it's really um it's that space standard ratio but we also reduce it um and apply to his reimbursement so what's the reduced rate against um it's very long but we've obviously been on the call recently with them in that regard um full regime that did not support it and no now it's a much softer approach um and um we're still it doesn't sound like they're gonna tell anybody we're not gonna put you on the list and that's good and bad because we're kind of middle we're kind of in this gray area now so that's the hard part you know almost impossible over overbuilt that's through the framework that we know today and the demand that we have today keep in mind our elementary enrollment i shared with you the islam report will increase by 25 percent next 10 years so you think there's man in 2022 just wait right i mean so i think like been kind of saying it was almost possible to build for them with furniture in it you were just looking at thematic you you were looking at a filled room which was truly um i truly appreciate that the other thing i wanted to tell you is as for building this for the future and we're looking at the capacity of these buildings you're looking at how many cloud sections you will have we're looking at building uh 35 content sections so when you look at this you will see that um just because we have foreign be able to take 24 classes of art the other 11 classes on day one or your music class and you're at the teaching hall you can have a space for that so if it's looking a little different than chapman or norton look now because they're only accommodating those 24 sections max this we're looking to accommodate 35 sections so there's going to be some duplication of rooms again you want to get there and not have enough space to put the kids who are arriving when it's a brand new helmet yeah i think that's you know conversation that's right for a waiver that we could close the gap on you know 92 percent already is a solid uh we we obviously every bit more we can get is better and right for the go picking i'm just really quick uh maybe percent so i'm clear we're trying to do the massive amount of reimbursement rate which is what 30 so are we aiming for 92 percent of 36 are we enough right now we have 90 uh well 92 of the eligible costs are covered for reimbursement at 36 percent you know of course we'd like the closer we get is that no it's correct so you take your reimbursement rate multiply 0.92 so if you're you're you're so we're gonna get they're gonna say you're gonna get reimbursed is um um the elementary schools these gyms do they provide more flexibility presumably do you expect there would be more potentially more services so not even necessarily by the schools but like say how it's coming something up do something the ymca chapman has them before care this year they will next year actually because of them this is okay so without space there's the demand not just more flexibility assuming it does but then do you expect an increased desire for services provided not investment third parties uh it's a good question i think what i anticipate is that you know we have an x number of services now accommodating x number of shoots i think it's going to grow in scale we'll have probably the same number of services and groups using the building more so for athletics now or space people who need the gym space that will increase because people don't want to use gentlemen or not right so that will increase other clubs if you had boy scout meetings with those building before you're going to have the same voice out being here but i think there's going to be more kids because we're looking at a lot more students living in health yeah there it is so the thing is with regards to like actually in the country and the size of the classroom that i also expect more demand because it will be yeah a large indoor space where you know our sports teams are creating those sort of opportunities and i know you had another question before we go to the campus um yeah so it's in regards okay perfect um so the reason that so that the slide you have here the reason what 93.3 of the standard right is because we actually won't have enough space for art and music and we want to have to be able to have parents be able to have chair around the edge of the gymnasium that's why those those are significant factors right uh you know certainly the music and art are big factors that the gym is a bit of a factor in that uh when you the way that he calculates it like i said is the um the other thing that i don't i don't want to miss here before i jump to how this state calculates it is that when we calculate numbers out you have that core factor that i mentioned before to account for always and things like that it's a target when you go to the architectural design component to find ways to minimize the core factor which reduces your square footage and improves your enroll at your reimbursement so i think i shared an example via email when we were at south south windsor they had a gem uh a south side gin a stated one builder there was a stage elite stage at one end of the jet with an acoustic wall excuse me that's music took place inside that room however when they needed to do performances and school events or whatever you could help this over almost like like a garage door you open that and now you have that space it was in design it would have been crazy to think we're gonna have the gym here a hallway with this extra room off it for musical but they utilized that and gained a lot more core factor space increase the reimbursement rate right so we're looking for so you're starting at 93.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
especially uh dr selig and dr mead appreciate you guys uh being here to help us learn about what's going on um michelle would you be able to take notes this evening i'm sorry i can't hear you you're muted i said today's not a great day i'm not in a great spot can somebody else take it i'll do it okay listen i'll do it thanks mrs cooper thanks sorry kate okay no problem um so with that i will turn this meeting over to dr selig and we can begin to go through this agenda here thanks so i'll start with number one and then um i'll i'll pass to ann who can talk through a few of the other um items one's probably the big item for today um and i do think kate will need uh an action on this one if everybody is is content with the the outcome so we put out a survey to the community a couple weeks ago regarding the school calendar for next year there were two options one and they were both very similar with the exception of the way we were treating our professional development days one option had 10 days that were early one hour early dismissals and the other calendar consolidated those early those professional developments into six half days so the the logic was you could actually get a lot more done some of those one hour ones are really tricky sometimes you um you have people that come in late and you know people that without with a who are at a late start school versus an early start school so it can get a little tricky and it really gets hard to sort of get any depth into a training with just one hour so the thinking was that by going into a half day you'd actually get more more productivity out of some of those days um but anyway we put it out there right and the other thinking was parents might prefer only six days having to figure out child care for an early dismissal as opposed to having those 10 days to try to figure out what to do with that extra one hour so we put the survey out and we had a pretty good response um we had 2238 total responses and out of that it was about a 60 40 split so 40 percent wanted the one hour dismissal and 60 wanted the half day calendar so it was pretty overwhelming uh uh to go with a half day calendar um and i don't know uh kevin or ann if you guys had any more insight into some of the the distinguishing characteristics of the of the the you know the two calendars i think from a parent's perspective um they like the fewer days where they have to find care and it's easier to take a half day off from work than just an hour off from work to be able to um receive their children off the bus and i will say that in the survey we had 137 students respond and so although we can't tell who they are we assume that many of them might have been at the high school and work after school and so this gives them a longer chunk of time to be able to work in the afternoon so that's it and one thing that was common to both and um this year we're going to be doing a kindergarten orientation for the first three days of school um the parents will set an appointment with the teacher the kids will come in you know learn where to hang their coat and put their lunch and all that kind of stuff you know how to get on the bus and then we'll also be doing uh a sort of general kindergarten assessment to just get a sort of baseline diagnostic reading for the teacher so they can start to think about how to calibrate some of the curriculum for the year ahead i may ask i just want to confirm with my understanding that the administration also felt like the half days would be more useful in terms of putting together professional development programs yeah i didn't want to really promote one calendar over the other but from a professional development standpoint the the half day calendar is certainly more beneficial it just gives you a better opportunity to sort of dig in and do something productive um and not have people kind of rolling in and out over the course of an hour and just sort of you know you know making appearances so thank you um other committee members any any thoughts on that or any um any comments uh i just think it's a good suggestion i'm sorry mike can you i had some technical difficulties there i don't know what's going on i i think it's a long time coming uh to look at half a days and i understand back in the olden days when we uh you know get release time for our early dismissal but it really makes sense as a parent and and i've been that root and they are it makes more sense to be able to uh do what you need to do for your child do it and instead of having an hour trying to reconnect your schedule and work and a lot of our people don't work full-time eight-hour job they do four hours over here and go somewhere else so it really makes sense to for us to move in this direction and then hopefully if it doesn't work and we might have to change we can go back and change to the one hour early dismissal so i i think it's a great choice great thank you i agree as well i guess flexibility is always good so yeah i think it provides that so i'm good thank you and so miss cooper to the point you just made and michelle the point you just made um i'm hoping with this one-year district calendar we can come back and kind of uh reassess maybe this time next year and then we can have a two-year calendar that the board can consider at that time so i appreciate your feedback this evening so um dr silly can i confirm you we're looking for a recommendation to to bring this back to the full board is that right that's correct make a motion on that um procedure i yeah i believe it is emotion um i'd like to entertain a motion that we uh make a recommendation to the board about uh going with the calendar that has a half day six half days uh for professional development on it please i'll second that i'll second it okay thank you all those in favor aye aye any opposed uh motion passes okay that was the first item there moving down the agenda uh the face update great thank you kate um it's great to see everyone again so i wanted to give a couple of updates on things that we're doing here in the community as part of our role in the family school community partnerships in the face center our first one is we have been able to leverage the work of correct the capital regional education council to do welcoming walkthroughs through the connecticut walk-through initiative for all of our schools and so over the last few weeks we have trained 77 people in the protocol under the guidance of the folks from crack that are the trainers for this this program was born out of the desire to improve family involvement in our schools the initiative makes families feel welcomed to celebrate the diversity of their school communities and set unique goals to improve how inviting their school appears to be in the community which ultimately if you have a welcoming school and families feel part of the school then students will score soar in their academics so the welcoming schools protocol goes through four different areas of the school physical state school-wide practices and policies how welcoming school staff is and written materials and so we've gone through the first part of this of training staff and so we had a day where we had all our family liaisons and then a day last week where we had principals assistant principals uh social workers secretaries um you name it principal sent folks out to take the training in total as i said we had 77 folks to complete the training they are now forming teams in their schools inviting families in to be part of that these teams and signing up on our sheet with the folks from crack who will be the team leaders in their school so we have been able to leverage these four wonderful individuals that are trained in this protocol to really be able to support the team walk them through the protocol itself debrief with them and then they will generate a report back to us and to each school principal as to the recommendations this is now a national tool that is used and so we feel very very comfortable in using it and um getting the feedback from our um correct folks as to what um needs to be done in our schools and so this will both support um how welcoming their schools are and improving how our schools appear as well as will inform these um school improvement plans as well um it's part of this bigger picture of how do we welcome families into our schools and so that that's one initiative we're really excited that we've been able to do that um this initiative has um we are part of the connecticut family network schools which is part of a federal grant that correct received and so that's where the funding comes from to do this program and to cover the cost of the crack folks and their report back to um this the school principal so we're really excited about that initiative um i wanted to give you a little bit of an update on the actual face center family and community engagement center as many of you have been aware over the years it was at 49 osborn street and last year we moved from there while they do the construction to 17 cottage street so we had to do a little finagling on how we were doing that but still making it welcoming still providing all the resources and the services that we offer our families um i feel that we've been pretty um successful in doing that for our families we certainly can tell by the doorbell ringing um on an average every three minutes of a family entering the building for whatever need that they're very happy and coming coming back to us and so um one of the big highlights of the center is that's where central registration is so families are registering online and then they're bringing in their paperwork they receive a nice welcome package while they're there and loads of different types of resources both in the community especially for our new families so they um you know are still trying to acclimate to danbury become familiar with the resources so it's important that we put these resources right in their hands we also have recognized that over the last year two years we did not have our play groups and so this morning moore street frc at moore street school began their play group and we will begin a play group uh next wednesday at 17 cottage street and the benefit of these play groups is we're able to support parents with children birth to age five identify developmental needs develop dementia developmental delays and help these families get the services as well as get books into their hand and songs and all those things that are the precursors to getting children ready for kindergarten because we have so many new families coming in and we know that there is definitely a shortage of health care services in danbury or or those that provide services have long waiting lists we've been fortunate to be able to partner with ritual vna health and we now run two health clinics a month we see anywhere between 14 and 20 children that need full health school physicals in order to start school what was happening is families were coming in didn't don't have insurance who couldn't leverage the community resources because of their waiting list where were all set registered and ready to go to school but couldn't start school because they didn't have their physical so uh the vna provides these services we're there usually we start about two in the afternoon and go to seven or eight at night they send in several registered nurses and a doctor so a child gets a full physical eyes hearing sight weight they receive a nice bag full of goodies to take home books and food they meet with a social worker as well so it is a comprehensive physical for these children and then we make sure that they receive their vaccinations and whatever else they need and are ready to start school so we're really really proud of that initiative another thing that we've been really working on is upping our parenting program programs to our parents i'm proud to say that we have 20 parents in parents supporting educational excellency right now and we'll be starting people empowering people at the end of april we also have zumba classes going on we have a positive discipline class that's happening all through our eop and our 21st century learning program so there's a lot of parenting program that parents can partake in at any time we are currently of course doing registration for our summer learning programs the sensational summer program is filled at this point we are taking more families on a waiting list but we always know that that program fills up fairly fast and then our 21st century programs will provide after-school care in the schools yet to be determined for students that are going to summer school as well in those 21st century schools our liaison project is almost filled that we've been able to have a liaison at every single school they too have been trained in a welcoming protocol and we meet every friday morning to do further training around community resources and the feedback from principals have been very very um positive they like the bridges that the liaisons are creating between home and school and helping our families to understand the expectations of schools but also to make parents feel that they're welcome in our schools the last two years um didn't do us a lot of good in being able to get engaged with families in person and so families are happy to be back um but we're also or and we're also doing some major training upcoming with teachers as well to help them be able to better partner with families our newsletter is just about ready to go out we have been working with mr walston to do a monthly newsletter activities that and i use three e-words engage empower and educate our parents their workshops that our parents have asked for so we have one coming up on talking to your child about drug and alcohol in the home another one on safety internet concepts um or safe internet safety so that newsletter will be coming out and by the end of the week that does go out in three different languages through our robocall system in parent square so we're really excited about that i think my our biggest news today is we heard from stop and shop charities that they are funding our for food pantries um at four of our schools in the amount of twenty thousand dollars so we know that food is still a big need need for our families um and so that will go a long way in helping help our families put food on the table okay we also got a pollinator grant that part pollinator garden grant for great plain school so and the community a community agency match that grant so we have a nice thousand dollars to be able to put that garden in so being a gardener i'm really really excited about that and i think that's about it i encourage everyone to come out and visit the center and take a walk through there are children there um every day there are our preschool special ed classrooms our school readiness classrooms are in that building it is a fun happy place um to visit so um do do come out lastly i'd like to just quickly talk about our k bridge visits that we did um last fall we were fortunate to use some of that i think it was cares one money or s or one money one or the other two um or that we recognize that we couldn't have those in person um come walk your kindergarten class come meet the teachers but we still needed to we felt we still as a team needed to do something for our families um to get them acclimated to what kindergarten was and so there's several different national models out there we looked at a home visiting lawn um but we came across this kindergarten bridge visit and it has been used very successfully here in the northeast as well as in connecticut and so we had 745 visits conducted by our kindergarten teachers and so this was data that was collected up to um december of this past year and so we had 99 of our kindergarten teachers participate they called each incoming kindergarten student introduce themselves and then set up a um about a half an hour the call averaged um call zoom meeting or a google meets meeting to ask just one question of the families what are your hopes and dreams for your children and that just opened up the door for parents to talk freely with the teachers about their child it enabled the teachers to ask questions the parents to ask questions of the teachers as well as get an idea of the children that were coming into the schools you know get to know what these children are what makes them tick what resources the families need needed and so i will share this with the committee in written form it was really great to see the feedback from all the surveys that we did um and how on and how the teachers would love for this to continue on so um that's all there's probably a bunch of little other things that are going on our as i said that doorbell rings constantly um people just show up they call there's three of us on phone lines um during the day all day um and the bilingual staff i have do an absolute wonderful job in meeting these parents in their native native language and make them feel very comfortable when they uh arrive at the building so that's it so that's beautiful and i'd like to yeah that yes um and there's always a lot going on in ann's office and thank you for that update i just wanted to share with the board and anyone who's might who might be listening won um i just added in a chat for everyone and as you were speaking just like i did on monday night um i i pulled an excerpt from um the crack welcome in schools page just so the board i mean the committee can get a little better understanding of the connecticut welcome schools initiative um and then for anyone who might be watching at home www.creck.org backslash welcome in schools backsplash black splash backslash is the website our families can go to to learn a little bit more about the work that's happening but i just want to applaud anne my family liaisons who have been amazing engaging in this work and for appreciate you and for your leadership and the principals who have really taken an amazing first step in this work um engaged in professional development last week every single school was represented in the training um and i think it speaks volumes about our our principles and the liaisons and and and how engaged they are and how committed they are to making sure that their schools are welcoming for our parents and for our kids so ann thanks thanks again for your leadership in this i just add something we're very um fortunate to have this this crack group and our connecticut family school partnership because they everything we do through them we're able to send them the data and dave beckel is our evaluator and so we get great feedback from him he looks at the date everything that we send him in the form of you know pre and post surveys and things like that but i just wanted to follow up on what kevin was saying just just five different things really really quick on the summary of the workshop evaluations from the principals uh principal a said how this can help move our school forward the actual welcoming protocol opening about what we thought was welcoming that did not include a lot what was mentioned and these are all principles for uh vice principal comments how to view our school is welcoming it gave me a new perspective on what it means for my school to be welcoming practical applications to improve our practices and systems and then lastly they talked about uh looking for some plans on how teams and schools can meet to have better transitional stages in student education especially between like that fifth and sixth grade on to um you know elementary under middle and then middle to on to high so um we're on to something new here and um you know anything we can do to help build the capacity of the schools and build our families that's what it's all about we know that those two components are the major drivers of student student success thanks again dr mita i just wanted to ask you a couple of quick questions if i could um you mentioned the sensational program the summer program that runs um how many how many spots do we have available in that program we're at 130 right now students that registered in three days and so we are looking to still recruit more staff if i'm able to bring in more staff then we'll be able to open up more spaces for that program we have about a hundred families on a waiting list right now and that's the full-time program and that's and that runs uh for part of the summer or the whole that runs for six weeks in the summer starting the last week of uh june through the first complete week of august august and and just to play on words it really is a sensational program and i can understand why that there's a waiting list to get in um i i mean i walked through that program last year and i called in immediately because it's the same program i would have been fishing for for my kids when they were that when they were that age from tennis to game to board games to team sports i mean the kids are just having fun and being bounced from activity to activity um it's it's a well-run program and this year it's going to be a little bit different we're still going to include all those things that kevin said but last year the students were able to spend one day at new pond farm in redding experiencing farm life and this year by grade each grade will go for a week so they'll come in the parents will drop them off eat breakfast they'll get on the bus with their counselors uh by nine they'll be on the road down to reading and then they'll come back around three or three thirty and so they'll partake in the activities of the farm so they'll learn how to clean out stalls and milk cows and in the whole milk thing you know how milk is processed yogurt and then there's a new weather station down there they'll be able to do some of the native um american things that they have going on um there'll be all kinds of arts and crafts so they'll get a good week down there experience in that farm and that suggestion came directly from families that they were very excited having that one day could we expand on that so that's phenomenal wonderful partners there yeah um as far as uh this the staff he talked about trying to recruit more staff to are those typically teachers that that um apply to to do that work or are we recruiting other folks from the community or so for the summer camp so for the summer we um encourage staff that's with us during the year to stay but then some key points of the program uh we do use the scholastic lit camp program and so we do have teachers that are there as well because they're looking at student scores um towards the end of the year the most of the students that are in sensational are not required or asked to go to summer school but yet they may be on the cusp of still needing you know more reading and you know we don't want to hear about summer loss we want students to continue on so using that lit camp curriculum um that that scholastic has written they're able to do all kinds of activities so we do use teachers for that and there is a tutoring component or a real strong you know for children that parents want more for them during the summer too yeah thank you i know there's a lot of demand in the community for so many programs so that's wonderful absolutely committee members do you have any questions for dr mead hi just one quick one is it possible to get one of those welcome packets um is it the fcc relation but when you first go into register like is it in different languages is it possible to get our hands on one the welcome package for the district yes yes yeah absolutely um and so we um have all kinds of different things in it and one of the things that the principals passed for last week is a sheet for their school so we are now in the process of working with school principals to develop a sheet so if you come in and say i'm a new family i know i'm going to go to ellsworth school we give you the packet and then we give you the sheet for ellsworth again we're trying to create that bridge from brand new here's your your district welcome package has a great letter in it from kevin has the calendar um community resources heating fuel medical all kinds of different things in it but then we're able to give them we will be able to give them the sheet from their school too so there's that bridge to their school yeah great and there's like sports information in there or teams like that like if they wanted to like really have an interest in that in a connection with that absolutely so our resource list is two pages it's pretty comprehensive of all the different things going on in danbury organizations sports uh our pal our park and recreation our mental health providers all kinds of things like that yeah thank you yeah do come see us i do yeah uh any other board members have questions oh okay uh it looks like we can move on thank you dr mead for that comprehensive update to the strategic planning okay so i'll be quick with this i know um superintendent walleston's updated the board um he sent a letter out last week and then there was also some um a little overview given it i think the board training a few days ago um but i wanted to make sure we we spoke to this committee about it because i know when the the original strategic plan the pre i'll say previous the current strategic plan uh really started being formulated around 2019 and at that time superintendent wallace spent a lot of time out in the community talking to you know town halls and community forums and making sure to just get a lot of feedback so the community really saw themselves in the document the high-level document that has the sort of six major goals on it was the sort of i guess the road map for the strategic plan and that that really got finished up right around um late 2019 early 2020 so it never really had a chance to sort of grow the legs and get sort of baked in to you know into action plans and all the things that come when you're doing a strategic plan it never really happened just because of the pandemic so it basically got put in a drawer and you know sort of these ideas around you know big thinking ideas long-term planning all that kind of stuff just went on hold during the pandemic because we were just so busy triaging the issues of the moment so last few months we've been bringing that back out and we because it had so much community input in it we wanted to preserve that original document that was made in 2020 um but we're going to be restarting it now as the 2022 to 2027 um strategic plan so it'll have a five year arc to it now we sat we had a little cabinet retreat about two weeks ago where we had a moderator dr john ramos from the connecticut centers for school change and we went back through the document and we made some very minor tweaks to it and that was intentional we did not want to add goals we didn't want to turn anything upside down or rip it apart so we made some adjustments with an eye towards what's changed in the district there's some new realities now that we have to pay attention to in light of pandemic um and also just some some economic and budget realities that we wanted to make sure we accounted for so that document got sort of a i guess a scrubbing i guess you could say um and that will be shared out with uh the full board in a um workshop that's going to be happening on april 28th uh from six o'clock to eight o'clock and that will also be moderated by dr ramos who who moderated our cabinet retreat so just a few critical dates that i want to run through so march 24th to 25th was the cabinet retreat um on april 12th we're actually going to be meeting with our entire administrative council so all the principals and and um and director level uh positions to go through the document to make sure that everybody feels they have you know they they see themselves in it that's you know you know the the important uh work that their offices is reflected in the high level goals so they'll all be on april 12th um and then april 28th is going to be that board workshop with dr ramos and then we're going to be at putting out a district uh survey right around that same time too to make sure that people who aren't able to come either to a workshop or on the administrative council that teachers and other staffers are able to see just what what the plan is and offer any feedback on it that they want and then we're going to go into doing the hard work of really building out those high level goals into an action plan that really just says what are the things that we're going to do everything from um you know fixing facilities to rolling out new curriculum to all those different things and making sure that we have that all very clearly laid out and then we'll be working with the principals so that they can put make sure these goals are baked into their school improvement plans and have them ready to go starting in august so a lot of that work's going to happen over the summer and then we expect the full plan to be completed in early fall where we bring it back to board hopefully for a an action for approval uh sometime in september okay thank you very much um in in speaking about this actually jacked my memory about something that dr mead was talking about as far as uh you know getting feedback from uh parents of the kindergarten you know incoming kid in class um is that information being funneled into either the strategic plan or to the portrait of a graduate somehow to to sort of you know take that feedback and incorporate it yeah that's that's actually a really good point um you know what we're hoping is that a lot of the the you know the feedback mechanisms that we've already put out there that have have a lot of that already pumped into the plan but then also through the surveys that we're going to be putting out and then some of the rounds that we'll be making in the next few months we're hoping we'll be able to solicit all that make sure it gets it gets included right and and and kate um we we will also as part of the feedback loop originally we thought we quite frankly thought we had enough feedback without including students um but we're we're gonna include students as part of this process um and i think i had updated the board recently um i know i had updated the board recently the new board members that had made them aware you know we had engaged quite a few students as part of this process middle school i'm in high school included but as part of our survey process we will also make sure students are part of that process and we'll see if we can get some of our principles to to help us with some structured time for feedback um to see if this can also happen during the school day as well great thank you sure thank you uh committee members any questions uh about the strategic plan no will we be getting um the previous version i think teresa had mentioned that and then the updated version of the original plan i think that was a question her last meeting we will have a side by side uh for sure michelle um so that the board can see the updates wonderful thank you you're welcome any other board members have any questions all right well well thank you so much for providing all this wealth of information and letting us know how you guys are communicating um you know with with our school community um i certainly look forward to those updates and and to that meeting on the 28th to learn more about the strategic plan that's being developed um i will uh ask if there are any other questions going once going twice uh then a motion to adjourn please if i could get a motion to adjourn uh looks like michelle's making a motion there can i get a second please yes then uh mrs cooper i don't know you just blinked out so i'm i'm gonna second that motion uh all those in favor all right bye all right thank you so much for joining us this evening thank you
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
go ahead and move on to item 2.01 uh dr bauer just very uh just a clarification and a reminder trevor is here uh representing teamsters tom shared with us that he was not able to be part of the committee just to remind you gotcha okay all right thank you very much i appreciate appreciate the clarification thank you uh for joining us trevor um all right you guys can hear me correct yes yes all right uh 2.01 public comment if the speaker wishes to address the committee on an item on the agenda uh time will be provided for public comment before or during the consideration of the item are there any speakers wishing to address the spotty i do not um raising their hand for a comment so there's nobody raising him for public comment seeing none then we're going to go ahead and move on to item uh three a review and approval of the order of the agenda is there any anybody wishing to move things around no um is it appropriate to make a comment or um just at this point if you want to move or remove an item move it from i guess i guess before we go on with any um specific items on the task force and you know related to this matter um i i do see linda chavez slash frank chavez in the audience and so i just want to make sure that we don't break any brown act um you know if we discuss any matters that might be in future agenda um and things like that so i just wanted to make that comment um all right with regard to that situation i'm not you know i'm i believe that if there's no engagement then we would be covered so as long as there's no interaction amongst us and any another member of the board however if dr bauer if you want to shoot a text over to rohingya um just to be i don't want to be caught up in sort of some sort of issue with brown act and it could be that it's frank you know and not linda but i just want to make sure to make us aware i know that when we agendize um agendas as like a committee of the whole then everybody can join and participate but this was not an agenda as committee the whole is just a regular committee so we should get clear yeah dr brown can you get a response from i'm working yeah let us know and at this point yeah is there any uh nobody wishing to move items on the agenda all right seeing none then we're gonna go ahead and proceed as is with regard to 4.01 uh item uh county santa clara measure a uh is there any public comment on that good afternoon board president uh at this time i see no request for public comment all right so uh we're going to go ahead and move into that item i reached out to the county santa clara and made some initial inquiries as to whether or not there would be opportunities for partnerships and the response was you kind of a mixed response they weren't sure what it is that we were looking for and but uh that more than likely there probably wasn't gonna be space for for uh a partnership given the the types of things that they're doing and how we're a school district and they generally don't partner with school districts and so we were given some information and updates uh i'll go ahead and pour them over to dr bauer she can send it to the rest of the committee and then post them up as part of the minutes for the meeting um and it was a good overview over um measure a um the individual that oversees measure a let me know that there was a possibility for them to come and present at future meetings but at this point um they weren't uh available um and so completely understand they got a lot of stuff going on um so that was the extent of the measure a um kind of conversation um if something else uh comes up then i'll bring it forward to the committee uh but it didn't really look like it was there was gonna be opportunity to move forward with anything there um but as i said it was a very it was a brief conversation so maybe they can come to a future meeting and present on other uh information that i mean not may not have received due to the how brief our conversation was so um like i said i'll forward over the information that i did receive it's a small handout and so you'll know about more about measuring to some of the work that they're doing i was uh there was confirmation that they have been working with um palo alto i believe a lot of school districts would i was informed on teacher housing in a particular program they have going over there um they didn't have a lot more details to provide me though so that was uh the extent of the information that i received wish i could have gotten more um so uh moving on to update information about workforce housing development dale scott um is there anybody wishing to speak from the public on item 4.02 at this time i see no request for public comment uh mr board president okay um all right so if there's no public comments we'll proceed with uh dale scott do you have any updates or further information sure um last night uh the board approved an addendum to our agreement which will allow us to do two things the first is we will begin to put together a survey for voters within the community so i want to be clear this is for voters not it's not about going out and talking to parents or just community members we're really trying to survey the people that are not only registered but registered and show up to the polls that survey will be undertaken probably within the next 30 days it will be a telephone survey there'll also be an internet email side to it where people can fill out the survey we'll try to get a balanced view of how people feel about the opportunity to use general obligation bonds to fund the construction of a teacher staff housing project and then there'll be a fair amount of other information as well that we'll be sharing with the board the second piece which i just discussed with this committee at the last meeting is we will also be putting together a smaller survey that will go through surveymonkey that will go to every employee of the district and what we'll be asking for that information from them will be what their current housing situation is whether they would be interested in teacher staff housing if they would be supportive of the project whether they want one bedroom two bedrooms or larger so general information now that will go out through the superintendent's office although it will be and it will be explicitly described as confidential so it's not like we're gathering names of anybody and i would expect we're going to have at least 50 participation and possibly more on that and a good sense then of what the level of interest is among staff of the district that'll probably go about the same time it'll go a little faster um because it's a run over uh usually we put it out on a wednesday or thursday and cut it off on a monday or tuesday of the next week and then we'll make that presentation to the board as far as updates that is all i have um the i'm happy to go back i never made a presentation at your last meeting i think there were a little bit of head scratching during the middle of it i'm happy to go over any of those questions again that you want to talk about in terms of how would a reauthorization work how does that general obligation bond work what are the activities that are required on the part of the board and then what would be the timing of the entire process or anything else and i have the presentation that i made queued up in case there are any questions i'm happy to review that um so if members of the committee do have questions then now's a good time to ask them so that we can make sure that because i know that there was a some some coverage in the media about the conversation we've been having the committee's work and so if that um elicited any sort of uh or raise any questions then that was a good opportunity to because i'm sure other people have the same questions is there any questions of dale scott all right i guess you did a pretty good job last time well people are thinking can i just make one comment about that about that article i was as you saw in that article i was contacted by the reporter um and i've had a you know fair amount of experience uh with with the press and uh she immediately said i want to talk to you about the alum rock uh school district teacher staff housing project um and i said well hold on there there is no alum rock school district teacher staff housing project i want to be very clear about that there is no project there is nothing that has been uh voted upon by the board uh there has been no decision made whatsoever there is a committee that has been established by the board to look into this issue and that is it as far as i understand that didn't deter her from writing an article but i was trying to dial it back a little bit um so we wouldn't have an article where people were saying when did this decision who started this and make sure everybody understands this is really in its infancy still going forward there are going to be decisions that have to be made maybe it's to proceed maybe it's not yeah thank you for clarifying that i think that it's important to note that um there's plenty of opportunities for this to not proceed if the community chooses not to support it whether it's at the board level or you know you're a committee you can also be informed in our recommendation may be negative and then there's also the fact that the voters ultimately will have to give the thumbs up uh or else this did not move forward so plenty of safety checks here from uh the community the public the voters um remember um i did but i think we'll be covering it in the next item so i'll just leave it for then and if not i can ask uh thanks for adding the clarification uh dale any other uh comments or questions from the committee all right uh well i think that speaks to the um how comprehensible uh presentation you gave last time good uh good job on that so um if there is no further uh comments or questions from members of the committee then uh we'll go ahead and uh well personally i appreciate the the the um the survey that's gonna go out so that we can determine whether or not this is something that is needed uh or that is supported by the public because there's no intention on my part and i'm assuming that everybody else's committee i won't dare to speak for you but i'm assuming that's the case we don't want to go ahead and force anything upon the this district that the community doesn't want to accept oh uh dr bauer uh yes i just want to give an update rogelio just call me back and he's gonna send me his opinion in writing there should not be more than two board members even if she even if it's just in attendance it should not be this is not uh agendas as a board meeting okay she explained that that trustee chavez has not said anything and he says she should not it should not be there he should not have more than two board members so i don't um board member travis if that's you in the audience please uh refrain from being here in the meeting you can always follow you're not talk yes this is being telecast on youtube where there's no opportunity for interaction of any sort so if you want to want to be aware preview what's going on then that would be the place i'm assuming that that might be acceptable you may want to check in with the council before you do so if it is you please uh log off so that we are not in a violation of the brown eggs we've received uh advice from council informing us that there should not be more than two members of the board in this meeting and so the two members who are part of the committee are here if it is you board member chavez please thank you all right i want to make note that board member travis has logged off appreciate that um all right sorry for that disruption uh let's go ahead and continue on oh my comments were that uh in line with not wanting to push anything onto the district there is no interest in supporting it so we're doing our due diligence by ensuring that the support is there then we proceed uh or our recommendation i'm assuming we'll or will be reflective of what we learn so um uh justin thank you i just have a quick question for mr scott because i failed to write it down when did you say those surveys were going to be coming out um i'm not exactly sure um i will tell you if you'll just give me a moment i'll look it up we are hoping to bring the results of the survey uh back to the board uh at the meeting of june 9th okay guys that would mean um we would probably be uh holding interviews with voters in early may uh and late april but it depends a little bit on getting it together getting it translated getting everybody set up and then moving it forward thank you all right cool all right uh for the questions for members of the committee seeing none then we'll go ahead and proceed to item 4.03 then update on developing an action plan um so uh as a committee we've been charged with going out there getting information as to what um what are the potential opportunities are out there um we've been given some indication that some of the pools of money that are out there may not be accessible hoping that that's not the case and that in fact uh there is an opportunity to provide us uh funding or some sort of um sources out there but um it's not looking like it's gonna be the route uh so at this point as a committee we need to be realistic and start uh identifying what the direction is that we are looking to move towards and so um it's part of us kind of narrowing down our action plan um one of the things that we have done is begin the process of going out there and looking for that information so that's an initial step and so moving forward we need to as a committee determine what it is that we want to do and what is the end product of our work here and so um i want to open it up for any questions or any thoughts that can the committee might have i'm just remembering i know last uh the last meeting um dell you know gave a very great um overview of kind of you know if we went in one direction what that meant if we went in the other direction what that meant i'm not gonna lie i don't remember all the details um and so with that i think um i know i do know that there was you know we went in one direction very tight like deadlines and um you know things like that and so i guess maybe right now might be good to figure out um what direction we're gonna go in and i don't know if he needs to repeat you know some of those details and then maybe go from there um would be something that i think would help me as far as you know this um and then again you know do we just wait for the survey because we might find out that none of the teachers want this it's a bad idea it's dumb and we don't do anything so i'm kind of like stuck in between both if that makes sense thank you for listening to me i could have just kept that all to myself but that's where i'm at right now yes you're thinking out loud here like many of us do so uh dale if you can go ahead and just uh re uh recap some of the deadlines that we have to meet if we choose to move in one particular direction or the other sure well there's really um i would say two or three directions and and let me give them to you briefly um and some of them are a little more amorphous than the others the first and one and it's the one that has the tightest timeline is to as has been discussed with the survey is to look for voter approval to sell a in this in your case a previously approved general obligation bond in order to fund the teachers the construction of the teacher staff housing and i'll come back to that for the timing there is there are a number of districts that are pursuing various private development opportunities i will say that there is no real timeline excuse me no timeline on those they have i'll give you one example about naming it as a district down in the in the monterey area they have been chatting with various developers for i think two years now trying to figure out if they can come up with a project that combines private sector housing and teacher staff housing the constraint there and the difficulty there is is is fairly obvious the cost of the housing makes it very difficult to offer subsidized below market rents if any substantial amount but there's really no reason why you can't pursue that option as in exploration i just don't want to hold out false hope i'm unaware of any successful projects within the last year or two in the state simply because of that problem and then the third third has already been described by the chair which is to attempt to find some other other public program or public project to go forward with i was very interested to hear whether measure a was a possibility i went back and after the meeting i went back and read that legislation i was dubious that it would work after i read it but i think there's that's an opportunity to continue to pull on the string about what comes out it comes to pass that would be good however going back to the voter uh approval um and i'll sort of take the take the steps backwards as the chair noted the ultimate deciding factor is the vote of on the ballot measure that would be placed on the ballot by the board that vote would take place the final day being the election on november 8th of that tells you whether you're going to be successful or not and in order to pass that measure it would require a 55 voter approval so it's a little bit higher than us than a simple majority but not that kind of high level of two-thirds to place that ballot on the that measure on the ballot you have to have board action passage of a resolution requesting that the county place the measure on the ballot and that has to be filed with the county by i believe it's august 12th of the of this year now obviously you could but i would suggest you don't wait until august 11th to sign the file that you can file at any time in front of that that resolution which in the calendar that we have tentatively identified would be coming to the board if that is the intent of the committee and the intent of the board would be coming to the board after they after the survey is done and there's some direction um in the july meeting june or july meeting and i would add that that resolution has to be approved by four out of five of the board members now and obviously all five can vote for it but it's not a simple majority passage of that resolution that five board members it's not just passed by three it has to be four board members voting for that resolution to put it on the ballot and so that's really the time frame here we have a fairly i wouldn't say it's tight but it's narrow we have time between now to look at the alternatives survey the teachers and and the voters and then allow the board to decide um whether they want to put that on the ballot the only piece of the puzzle that's right that's sitting outside of that to think about as a committee in my opinion is um something that is called a feasibility study now that's a that's a big topic um feasibility studies range from everything from you know people sort of googling property uh to doing environmental biological engineering work and become very expensive i think it would be um this is my personal and professional opinion i think it would be a mistake to put much money into a feasibility study on various sites until you determine whether you have voter approval um it's just a lot of money i mean now i won't you know i won't be shy about it to do that to start that kind of feasibility work it it becomes a big number very quickly and you want to have those dollars of that general obligation bond available to pay for those otherwise you're paying for it out of the district general fund which may work and may not um so but that isn't that is a decision that the committee could make as a recommendation as to whether to proceed with the beginning of that feasibility study or not again i think it might be premature but those are the types of steps that committees like this um face um that's pretty much it for the next april may june and july it moves pretty fast um at that point in time if i could just add one final detail at that point in time when the district if the district decides to put that on the ballot um then it becomes a public issue the district itself cannot advocate for its passage i think you're all aware of this the members of this committee certainly can but the district cannot use any of its resources to advocate for a yes vote or a no vote on that measure they have to be impartial that doesn't mean board members can't can't be supportive it doesn't mean committee members can't be supportive it just means that the district can't spend its own funds in supporting that measure it can send out information it can make sure they send out information to voters that's balanced and doesn't take a position but they can't send out that yes on measure a ballot or piece of mail or or a bumper strip all right uh so is that the extent of your update bill yes sir all right thank you very much um so part of our conversation or part of the item was when the intention of the item was to see if the committee was ready to start looking at a particular direction what we see here is that we have um the survey that's going out to determine whether or not the will is there from public and uh so that's an initial step are are we interested in setting a particular direction or do we want to um wait i don't think we can wait until the results are back because that's pretty far out there june 9th correct uh correct so if we are moving in a particular direction you may want to start setting that that sooner rather than later that way we already the public's aware as to what what we're working towards uh without you know any formal commitment until we see what the results are we we've already committed to doing that so it doesn't mean that we're going to recommend anything in particular but we are working towards something yeah justin well i'm just looking back over the notes that i just took and originally i mean you brought up um three possible directions but the second one of the private developer opportunities doesn't really sound like a that would be i mean it almost sounds like that might defeat the purpose if we're looking for to be able to offer lower cost housing and that might not work in that direction is that right yeah i want to be clear i'm i'm biased on this on this topic um there are numerous i shouldn't say numerous there are a handful of districts that are that are attempting to pursue this type of alternative and i understand it they are saying in this particular district's case rightly so we have too many other problems and projects to use uh general obligation bond funds for this let's atta that's and we're not going to dismiss the problem let's go out and try to find a private developer that can do this now um let me give you an example of a of a project of a type of project that hasn't been done by a school district yet but they are being done by cities around around the state and that is the acquisition of already constructed apartment housing and then as those tenants move out tenants workforce housing tenants move in at a reduced rent most projects have a place in certain situations they're not creating any new housing that's part of the problem it takes a long time for those tenants to move out that's part of the problem but there is funding available for that in certain situations can that work in the alum rock district unlikely because i don't think you have significant amounts of available um rental housing that's on the market but that's the type of project that is available to just say let's bring some private developers in here and see if we can make this work i again personal opinion i do not see that as an opportunity that's going to bear fruit for your district so can i follow up on that thanks that so then the third option was going in the direction of attempting to find the public a public program which at this point were not there isn't a specific one that we're looking toward right well i was i was interested in measure a and because that's not i'm unaware of any others there is much talk at the state level to fund there is a one state senator who is in discussions about funding the feasibility studies for these projects i think that would be a big help that's a big piece of the puzzle um i am trying to um i won't go so far as to say as lobby but i am trying to be in contact i'm working with a group of political consultants in sacramento to have the state be a participant in funding with a match grant for districts that want to put up some of their money in their case geo bonds for example and that would bring the cost of that down or it could be some other type of private funding i think that would be a big project but these are these are a long way off um these are really they're in discussion people are excited about them but they are not i am unaware of any current program that is available to you further questions from the committee [Music] all right well it's looking like there's one realistic path um and so um i mean i'm encouraging us to start identifying you know are the goals we want to achieve like i said i'll continue to reach out and see if there's any sort of uh um you know path forward with um with the measure but the initial conversations weren't necessarily because it i guess it doesn't align with what they are trying to do or it doesn't work out well as dale had mentioned he said he looked into it too and so it's similar information that i got back from the person who's overseen the program it's a large pot of money but it works with agencies uh not necessarily school districts like ours um so it's unfortunately that it wasn't tailored to to work organizations like ours um so any suggestions on a path forward uh from you dr bauer or where you're both members of this committee as well and so if you have a strategy that you think would be um should be pursued and feel free to speak up where yeah thank you for president um looking over the um timeline and action items that was presented at the last meeting and one of the action items is to draft a ballot language that's something we want to look into and be proactive about or is that something that the committee would want to wait until the survey comes out um yeah sure um that's a great question um the ballot language and i hope i don't get too geeky on you on this on this issue the ballad language and this is the this is the language that you see on everybody sees on their ballot when they are going to the voters this is unfortunately highly specialized language it is just to give you a sense it can be no more than 75 words it has to be a question it has to be a sentence and about 50 of those words um are mandated by the state as to what has to be in that language so there's not a lot of real estate that's available in the drafting of that language now i have already started drafting pre-drafting that language because that's one of the things that happens in the servant we will actually read what we believe that language is going to sound like to the voter and let them react to that and then we will move that language and edit that language around based on some of the input we get from that survey and so as far as drafting i would say that would be something i think you should leave to us as far as input and comments we're absolutely excited to have those and that will be available between the time the survey is completed and the board uh considers the resolution great question um so if oh jocelyn sorry i it's there's so much information and i know one of the um and we may have discussed this or you may have presented this but i'm not clear so we're asking ultimately we're probably going to be asking the voters to repurpose the um the general obligation bonds that were already passed what were those what work wasn't completed that that was originally earmarked for that we would be changing the direction of that money to too in other words what are we taking away and so dale if you can provide an explanation as to how we our assessed valuation caps us at a certain amount when we go out because i think that's what the public um is a little bit uh yeah it is confused about correct um let me pull up the elections uh again this requires just a little bit of detail um so up until and again when a person starts saying up until you can you're you're you think oh my god where are we going with this but up until the year 2000 um general obligation bonds for school districts in the state of california required a two-thirds majority to pass there was a measure that was on the 2000 the november 2000 ballot it's called proposition 39 and that measure gave school districts the option to go to the voters and ask for approval of a bond measure at a 55 percent level now that measure had actually been on the june 2000 ballot and it almost passed it got 49.8 percent yes in that measure in the june ballot it was simply to change the current law and move it from two-thirds to fifty percent and it lost so then they said okay how can we make get this to when let's make it fifty-five percent that'll make it a little harder and let's put some tax rate limits on it let's put these tax rate limits on is that there wasn't a large study done to try to figure out what those limits should be it was a political deal that was cut really over a course matter of a couple of days and the limit is for an elementary district thirty dollars per hundred thousand dollars of assessed valuation that's the total of all the assessed valuation of all the commercial residential industrial agricultural et cetera et cetera private property within the district that 30 tax rate limit is applied per election so you can have multiple elections each election having that 30 limit the problem with that limit is it's tied to assessed valuation and the cess valuation can go up or down and the people that are putting these bond measures together especially the earlier years and even today unfortunately sometimes they might over assume overestimate what that growth in assessed valuation will be so in the case of the measure that was passed by the voters in that was a 125 million dollar measure um i didn't work on it but i will read you the language um for some of the projects which was um fixing roofs replacing heating and ventilation improving fire security updating computers uh repairing restrooms etc etc so the types of projects that are not necessarily specific but district-wide the district then issued approximately 50 million dollars of that the assessed valuation growth rate that was assumed i think was probably over early optimistic and that tax that those bonds that are currently being paid off out of that 40 or 50 million dollars that was issued have taken up that full 30 tax rate limit so even though you have this authorization of the remaining 70 million you can't access that for many many years until those older bonds have been paid off the reaction to the district i'm assuming was well that's fine we understand we have a tax rate limit but we still have additional projects that have to be done the fact that we've reached this tax rate limit doesn't mean we've reached the limit of what we of what our needs are and so the district went back onto the ballot in 2016 with a measure for 140 million dollars so i'm not sure if you can see where i'm going had it not been for that tax rate limit on the 2012 the district would have continued spending that money on improvements to all of the sites but since it was restricted they went back to the voters in 2016 with a second measure to continue that on so i will turn it over to corvair here in a second but i do not believe there were specific projects that were then put on hold and not done i think those projects and poverty please correct me if i'm wrong i think those projects rolled in to the 2016 measure is that correct cover yeah that's correct okay um because the the language the valid language and measure i uh simply just kind of um was the mirror of measure j yeah so that was a very long explanation but unfortunately it's a very complicated mechanics and i don't think there's anything that has been not done by that measure sorry about that one of the things to kind of illustrate this better is uh alumrock goes and we tap out at 35 million uh or 40 million uh palo alto goes out and they can block or hold everything they need in one shot uh with like a billion dollar uh bond measure that they pass they fix up everything it's our assessed valuation that limits our ability to continue to move forward uh jocelyn you're stellar muted you're muted we'll get used to this someday um along that same line then i know that one of the things that we plan to do eventually and i'm kind of lost at what point we're at it now was air conditioning in all the schools um is that all done you know it's like so are there still some of those major things that it was originally like planned to be used for that hasn't been done it looks like yes is the answer okay thank you dr barry matter of fact colvera and i that's exactly what we're working with our program manager jocelyn to kind of you know um resurrect that list of things that need to be done in our sites so we we cannot forget that those were board approved and we're moving forward now one of the things that we found out that we didn't know was you know the the the unfortunate thing about the people that were managing and that we had to cut you know ties with um did not finish did not close a bunch of projects so now we have you know all of those things that we have to i feel like the cleaning lady right and forever cleaning someone else's um someone else's um really um negligence that's the word i wanted to use an appropriate and professional words someone else's negligence and so the unfortunate part of that is that dsa does not allow the district to move you know with here it is here we go until we are done with that having said that our program our current program manager has been very swift in trying to address some of those deficiencies and negligence that happen and we're cleaning up today we were talking about the the rest of the schools that need the hvac so we're moving forward with that over um yeah just to piggyback on dr bauer's comment um and to provide some clarification for jocelyn um you know in terms of some of the projects that we were still working on um you may recall that uh dale mentioned measure i bonds which will ask for 140 million dollars uh we have not issued any of those bonds yet so uh measure i bond is still available for us to um move forward with in terms of providing resources to do some of those projects i think we need to be clear about this measure is moving forward and it's going to go ahead and address the issues that it's were identified in the bond um and that's on on its own um the conversation about the previous funds is a whole separate conversation so it's important to not convolute both of them if we were to just stand still and just kind of let things go and measure i continues its course and we go out there and take care of the things that we have to take care of that were listed in the bond uh am i correct i just want to make sure i'm not mistaking this and so that's the way we would proceed this conversation about the previous uh bond measures is that it requires an a whole new action requires us to go out there the voters and get them to to say yes um or say no and then no longer moves forward so it shouldn't be convoluted two separate things even though they sound very similar because it's two bonds but basically as dale mentioned or you know when it described the measure j is tapped out and uh for uh how long would you say 20 years is going to be yes i would say 20 years approximately 20 years before you can even uh even consider tapping into that those resources without any voter action so um further comments or questions from the board to appreciate the dialogue i think this is very good because the public needs to know that this is taking place and we're having a good healthy discussion about this all right so if there is no um further questions and maybe the way we can go ahead and um start thinking of some sort of a work plan or plan of action would be through next steps and so um if there can be some sort of next steps that can be outlined then then the the committee would be able to consider that to see if that we would go ahead and adopt those as a plan of action are there any uh is that something that would that we would be comfortable with asking for possible next steps so we can review them members of the committee yes now sorry my internet is low but um yes for me yes all right um loud and clear uh others are you comfortable with asking for next steps i'm getting a consensus that it's looking like and they also if you'd be able to put together uh next steps and that way we can go ahead and uh consider those and then see if we can um uh adopt them at the next uh or place them before the committee's consideration failed sure if i could i'd like to suggest uh and i'm looking for direction a couple of those next steps that may or may not be appropriate for this committee and i and i leave it to you and to the chair and to give direction one is to review the results of the surveys uh prior to being submitted to the board with comments or recommendations another might be a review of the financing plan and the third would be a review of the ballad language those are the types of things that you might consider and i'm not suggesting that they're right or wrong and i hope i'm not stepping on any toes but i need a little bit of direction as to what the board would like to do or what the committee would like to do no i appreciate the guidance because you know you literally wrote the book on this stuff so so i am i'm looking for and i'm assuming the rest of the community is looking for for guidance on what the next steps would be do you have a time frame for those do we uh call for uh the next meeting at the in the early in the middle of next month sure let me if i could let me um let me give you the time frame um and i'll give you a few different dates one since the measure um the 2016 measure was discussed i'll mention that there is work that is now being done no decisions have been made but there is work that is now being done to prepare for the potential of bringing an item to the board at its may meeting to begin the first issuance of those bonds to get those projects going that would be may 12th um the survey will be completed and being brought to the board for presentation at its june 9th meeting i would think and i will have some very angry analysts in my office but i think we could get that done a week or so earlier with the possibility of briefing this committee if that's the pleasure of the committee and then secondly thirdly the financing plan itself um uh that can have a number of different alternatives it might be worth it to do that at the same time and have if not necessarily a recommendation at least an understanding of some of the decisions that the board is going to have to make and have those framed and so those are the all of those could be done by this committee and in order to be taken into consideration uh any time between for the survey anytime before june 9 and for the action if that is the intent of the board any time um in early june i think that was anytime in early july sorry sorry anytime in early july so is there any any reason for us to well i think there is i would like this to to have a conversation with other school boards um i had a conversation with santa clara unified a couple days ago a counterpart over there and uh he said that he was interested in coming over sharing his perspective as a board member that has that has a um a teacher um housing on their land and what their experience has been and then um he is also interested uh willing to invite uh members of the administration they can speak more about the details and what they've gone through so obviously the structure might not be the same in terms of how they got there but i think it would be beneficial to listen uh to those who have gone through the experience of having um housing of their employees on on district site to see if it's if there are any pitfalls or anything or maybe it just doesn't pan out for us because there's just going to be some cultural differences i don't know some and so i think it'd be worthwhile just to get that information uh dale you know if i can make i think that's a great idea i'll give you a i'll give you two data points the the santa clara project is is very mature um it's up and running and so i think that's a great um takeaway to see what can it become um what can happen and what culturally has that been like for the district and some of the challenges that they've looked at and there there have been challenges but so it's good to hear the project that is the most immediate is the jefferson high school project which is going to have ribbon cutting i believe in may i think it would be possible if the board if the committee is interested to having one of the representatives from jefferson high come to one of these meetings and answer questions she's very accessible and very happy to you know how did you do this how did you do that how did you do this what were they what were those problems and what were those problems if it coincides with our schedule i'm not sure if they're at the stage where they can allow for public tours now or not but i'm happy to reach out to them and ask that question but those would be the two kind of data points the one that's about to open and the one that's been opened for over 20 years now great so what say ye members of this committee are we good with inviting santa clara unified for a brief aviation as well as jefferson uh is it jefferson union high school district correct jefferson union high school district and you know we'll be sure to let them know that there should be a a brief but very thorough presentation shouldn't take too long to go through all some of the particulars i'm getting some nods yes if there's anybody in opposition let us know if not then i'll consider that um it's looking good and then so dr bauer can go ahead and coordinate that and help us coordinate the the dates for that meeting and for the guests to ensure that everybody can join to find that right date all right um in this well we'll um we'll let dr bar go and pull the committee to determine what uh what time frame is looking right i know that we have to go with the for sure a late may committee meeting so that we can go and hear the results and then craft our um the committee's recommendation if we have one um but uh obviously this would take place beforehand um is there any suggestions on some particular uh weeks in the late april are we looking at early may for this potential meeting to uh hear about other projects i don't want to uh suggest a uh a week where there's um meetings taking place by our staff or um i'm just also um thinking of what dell uh mentioned in regards to reviewing also the material so i'm wondering if we can set maybe two meetings um one for that one that you just mentioned um and then a subsequent one when we receive the results possibly yeah that's why i mentioned a late may meeting is for sure because that's when we when uh they would have the results so we have to have that one what i'm asking for is the previous uh the uh earlier meeting uh for the uh conversation with the districts that have teacher housing already dale you had your uh i had a question which i should have asked earlier um for the superintendent when um when is your last day of classes ah june i believe is june 9th or june 10th okay um so we will be doing the teacher staff housing um i believe in either late april or early may even though we've talked about the two surveys as what they are actually two separate surveys that may be maybe that you can review one before the other if that works out with your timing the intent is the last day your terms thank you all right so yeah if they're ready then uh that should be brought to the committee and we'll make sure to agenda is that uh so that could be a discussion we can accept the the results and then start using that information to frame not frame but to be the basis for the recommendation so um i don't want to keep everybody here waiting but would you talk about or would you rather pull everyone or um do you want to kind of come up with some target for a week it's really better if we all you know if we're all here and trying to come up with one because sometimes we start negotiating and it just takes forever to to get everybody's calendar all right are we looking for early may for the one where people come and speak from the other districts and if anybody knows of a week that definitely does not work then you should um speak up now or forever hold your peace how is may 10 it's a tuesday um and we can have it i i believe trustee herrera i don't know if you were available that week but we can have it it's back at six o'clock yeah we have it at six um that would work just uh i don't know as a point i know that it's a public meeting and um we like inviting our public and it is mexican mother's day and i know you know there's a lot of mexican mothers but that's fine if everybody's open that day um unless we want to hold it at 4 30 again i cannot do 4 30 on tuesdays i don't teach a class at san jose state so if it's at six i can but not before any other days now we can do it may 11 which is a wednesday is anybody not able to make that day i'm open the 10th if you're all open and okay with it i mean i don't know i just wanted to point that um i have a board meeting with another district on the 10th of may okay so does 11 look good for everyone i'm getting some nods yes all right it's looking like the 11th unless somebody absolutely can't make it trevor you're good sharon just to confirm is that would that be at 4 30 on the wednesday of the 11th wednesday at 6 00 p.m okay gosh i hate to be the one uh we'll do it at 4 30.
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[Music] wow [Music] no no no no [Music] hello [Music] [Applause] [Music] yes test one two three four live stream tests [Applause] kind of hard to get used to yeah i walked out the door this morning [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] she should come in [ __ ] so all right the anaheim union high school district board of trustees meeting of april 7 2022 is called to order at p.m the following members are present and al piercy anne-marie randall trejo i know kathy smith is here she'll walk in pretty soon and brian o'neill and al-jabbar staff has requested the following amendments to the agenda page 2 of the agenda item 7.1 replace the word business with foundation page number six of the agenda pool item 11.4 and page 15 of the agenda full item 11.8 just want to recognize trustee smith arriving to our seat 11.22 i'll repeat it again yeah so kathy where staff has requested the following amendments to the agenda page 2 of the agenda item 7.1 replace the word business with foundation page 6 of the agenda pool item 11.4 and page 15 of the agenda pull item 11.22 move to approve balance second i have a motion and a second all in favor aye aye opposed motion passes unanimously we will now proceed to the study session perfect um okay can you guys hear me okay so um this afternoon we have um dr tim mcnarney from true north he will be here um with other two other consultants as well charles heath from tbwh as well as keith weaver from government financials um he does all the financial things for our district so they will be uh co-presenting this afternoon and and they're happy to answer any questions that you may have afterwards or in between as well thank you thank you nancy and uh good afternoon mr president members of the board how's that better um i'm dr tim mclarney i'm the president true north research and we are a firm that over the last 20 years has specialized in working with school districts and using surveys to help them develop a statistically reliable understanding of the communities and the customers they serve today my business partner i have worked on over 1200 research studies for public agencies and about 400 of those studies are what we call revenue measure feasibility studies like what we're going to be talking about today where the goal is to understand if it's feasible for a school district to move forward with a bond measure for example and if it is feasible to understand how they might go about structuring that measure in a way that it's consistent with the type of measure their community is interested in supporting um we've helped our clients have a lot of success over the years to date of the measures that we recommend go to ballot about 95 percent have been successful we've also had the privilege of um having our research underlie about two-thirds of the school bonds that have passed in orange county for schools over the last 10 years and that includes three of your feeder districts with anaheim city school district centralia as well as savannah today i have a powerpoint presentation covers the highlights of the survey that we recently completed as i go through this presentation i welcome questions from the board along the way or at the end whichever is your preference okay so before we talk about the actual results helpful to take a quick moment to review the purpose of the study or why school districts go about doing this type of work as well as the methodology or how we went about conducting the study uh in terms of the purpose i see these studies as really being designed to sort of address those three bullets that you see there the first is to answer that simple question of is it feasible and what i mean by that is if you as a board were to take the action of placing this measure on an upcoming ballot does that measure have a reasonable chance of success right answer that question isn't always yes sometimes we do this type of work and no matter how we look at the data we just don't see a path to get you from where you are today to where you need to be to have a reasonable chance of success on election day and if that's the case i'll be the first person to tell you that right i don't think it's in the board's interest the community's interest the administration's interest to invest effort in a process that at the end isn't going to have a reasonable chance of success fortunately when you think about all the things that voters are willing to tax themselves for education tends to rise to the top of that list um and so when we do find that it's feasible move forward that second bullet kicks in which is how do we go about structuring a measure so that it's consistent with the type of measure that our voters would like to see there's a lot of pieces to a bond proposal right there's what are you proposing to do with the money in terms of your facility plans how much of the is this bond going to be what is it going to cost me as a as a property owner right what election opportunities uh are out there etc what sort of accountabilities might be built into this measure so all of these sort of important decisions that have to be made before you were to place a measure on the ballot the survey can help guide and then lastly it's also an opportunity for us to understand the importance of information and communication to voters making a decision about this proposal i'm a i'm a big proponent that if a public agency is going to take the step of putting a measure on the ballot and asking voters to make this decision it's really incumbent upon that agency to inform voters about the decision you're asking them to make as a public agency you aren't advocating up or down right but you can give information you can't educate and what we tend to find is the more informed a voter is about a proposal the more inclined they tend to be uh to be a supportive of that proposal so let's see here all right there we go um next slide is the methodology slide just sort of how we went about conducting the study survey was conducted in february of this year and we spoke with 619 voters who are what we call likely november 2022 voters these are voters who based on when they registered in the district what elections they've participated in the past their demographics we expect would actually cast a ballot in this upcoming november election we use a process called stratified and clustered random sampling which i can get into if you like but suffice to say what it does is it guarantees us that at the end of this process we have a random sample that is in fact reflective of your likely november 2022 universe on all of the dimensions that we know are related to voting behavior so things like age gender party affiliation household party type where they're located within your district because you are a big district all of those things we control for so that our sample is in fact representative of that larger universe and that's really what allows these surveys to be as predictive as they they are once we had selected voters to participate in the study we used a mixed method approach so we recruited them using three different methods email text and telephone they had the option of participating online or by telephone whichever was their preference we administered the survey in four different languages and on average the the phone interviews were about 17 minutes in length and now because this was a random sample of 619 likely november voters and not a census of all of your likely november voters you have about 120 000 of them it has what's known as a margin of error due to sampling and in this case it's just under 4 and what that means is we can be 95 percent confident that the results we'll talk about today are within four percent of what we would have found had we spoken with all 120 000 of your likely november voters okay so on to the results uh this first slide shows uh the results to what we call our importance of issues question and for each of the issues you see on the slide we simply asked voters to tell us how important is this issue to you is it extremely important or very important which are represented by the dark blue and medium blue bars is it somewhat important not at all important that's represented by that negative space off to the right and we ask these in a random order to avoid a systematic position order bias but we are sorting them here from high to low based on that combined percentage of folks who said it's either extremely or very important we asked this question really for two reasons one is it's just a nice warm-up question kind of gets voters into the groove gets them thinking about local issues at the beginning of the survey but it is also an opportunity for us to understand how education as an issue stacks up against some of these other issues that also compete for tax dollars and in particular how does the issue of improving the quality of education local public schools stack up against that issue of preventing local tax increases right kind of makes sense the more importance that they place on improving the quality of education local schools relative to this issue of preventing local tax increases the better positions you might be to move forward with some type of bond or parcel tax related education and what we find here is at the top of the list we had two issues that were sort of tied for number one one was improving the quality of education in local public schools at 90 saying they're that's extremely or very important along with reducing crime and gang activity and then as you move down the list you see creating jobs and improving the local economy maintaining local streets and roads etc second up from the bottom there you'll see preventing local tax increases that checks in at 68 percent so you've got about a 22 point gap between the importance assigned to improving the quality of education and the importance assigned to preventing local tax increases that is very average and what i mean by average is that is right where we've seen a lot of districts landing the last year and a half right we have some or the gaps bigger we have some where the gap smaller 22 percent is like right in the middle the other thing i'll point out though is if you look right above preventing local tax increase increases you have repairing and renovating aging school facilities checks in at 70 percent so a little higher than uh preventing local tax increases but not much i point that out because that pattern is very typical right we always see that at the end of the day voters that care about the topic and the end use of of you know in sort of improving the quality of education they care about that overarching goal much more than they do about sort of buildings and facilities and so i mentioned it mainly because although bonds are about buildings and facilities at the end of the day what they care about is what's happening inside those buildings and facilities so we always want to be connecting the dots between what this bond is going to build right or improve and why it matters in the classroom okay so from there we get right to what we call the initial ballot test and the idea is early in the poll before we talk about tax rates before we talk in more detail about projects that would be funded by this bond before we share with them arguments pro and con we want to present to them a mock-up of what we think that 75-word ballot statement could look like and get their reaction it is a really good gauge of where your voters are at on the natural with respect to this proposal because all they've seen is a 75 word statement and so the language that we tested is shown here and the results are shown here at that initial ballot test we had 61 percent of your likely november voters say that they would support this proposal we had 26 percent who were opposed with the remainder being uh unsure so in the state of california for a prop 39 bond you need 55 so at this initial ballot test we check in six points above that 55 threshold that you need to be successful so that's a really good place to start right you're you're above water you're not under water one thing i will point out just as an aside i know that the district had gone for a bond in 2020.
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all right thank you matt all right so i'm going to call this to order as we now have a legal board number and i ask you to join me in the flag salute i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you now we are at announcements and i have uh several uh one of which many of you probably already know that this is autism acceptance month so perfect timing yeah the other one is that on april the 12th is chico unified choir day and four choirs marsh bidwell pv and chico high are all performing at the center for the arts they're going to start at 9 30 and go to 12 15. each school's choir is going to do a segment and then they're going to come together for a combined presentation of a single song okay there's our fourth board member yay so are there any other announcements okay matt um i just want to um say thank you to my wife for being such a good support to me because today is our 20th anniversary and uh yeah i'm spending it here with you all [Laughter] wonderful fun for me and fun for her too i'm sure well may not be the wisest choice but you know hey okay all right and now tom's here that's great and here's caitlin okay so uh so no one else has any other announcements all right thank you then okay so we move to our agenda and the first thing is on the consent agenda does anyone have wants to pull anything from the consent agenda anyone all right can i have a motion then i move approval of the consent agenda okay second second okay we have a motion and a second so if no one's going to pull anything from consent agenda then we will vote by name so rob robinson i lando uh kaiserai be a tennis eye all right so that passes okay thank you all right with that we go to the board workshop topic which i think most of you are here for and so we are looking at our educational programs budgets and supporting inclusive classroom development diane olsen whoa is is it on john okay now now it is good evening board thank you for having us here tonight to talk about inclusive special education and the budget surrounding special education we have a large group of people here to talk about specific programs within the district and so i'm going to hand most of this off over to my coordinator team so i'd like to introduce them all to you first i have dana feingold dana specialty area is curriculum intervention and development and implementation i have right behind me gina payton gina's specialty area as behavior supports pd and training and behavior then next to gina is damie trobridge damie specialty area is social emotional learning education related mental health services all to ed all of those areas of emotional supports and then last on my right is joanna main joanna's specialty area is professional development and also working with the elementary counselors and in the professional development she'll have some slides today it shows what we've done and where we're going in the professional development area so i'm gonna hand off to dana all right thank you good evening thank you for having us we're excited to share our special ed programs with you so this first slide um just talks about our education programs within special ed here in chico unified and anywhere from mild moderate all the way preschool to the adult program next slide and then these are the special education providers that provide services to all of our students on ieps next slide and then we added a slide for all the inclusion opportunities that tico unified provides our students we're lucky to have this many inclusion and we're looking to add more oh sorry next slide so um back in 2015 the cde they created a task force for special ed looking at how the future is going to be and having special ed not an adjunct in the school districts but really having one system and the recommendations that came out of that are creating universal design for learning the framework within school districts mtss multi-tier systems of supports really focusing on the academics the social emotional and and the p positive behavioral supports which chico unified is following right down this path it's fabulous to see and then early interventions for all students this slide shares about the sped responsibilities back in 2002 2003 chico unified did take over the special ed programs the mod severe special ed programs from the sofa and at that time we had a principal we had a vice principal we had a director and then a coordinator come up came along last year we took over our arms program and damie has done a fabulous job of creating an arms program we changed the name from e.d over to access and so this chart just kind of shows what each one of us do in the district next slide here's another slide that ranges from mild moderate to preschool to the adult program kind of another area of what we provide for our students and then as we get into services that we provide for our students on ieps we have speech therapists o i which is our orthopedically impaired teacher we have adaptive pe for our students occupational therapy and then we also have urms which is our educationally related mental health services which is one of those programs what we have in parentheses is the number of students that we have receiving those services and then on the next couple of slides we'll show you you can go to the next slide is starting with wilma vista and the amount of students that we have there currently is 263 many of those students are actually on campus some of them are on within head start but are served by a district special ed teacher and we have an adult program and then we also have speech only students that are served at mcmanus but they are on the loma site in our elementary we have 717 students 14 of our elementary students are on ieps and i won't go through each and every one of them but the first number shows the amount of students anywhere from our extensive needs support students to our speech only so just as an example chapman has 62 students on ieps 21 of their population next slide for junior high we're looking at 380 students 15 within the district and again it's broken down on each one of those slides the high school is 542 there's 13 of our students that have ieps and this is where we have our adult program included into this as well next slide okay and then we have a few additional programs we have the oak ridge online and we have forest ranch we serve students over there we support them and then we also have a few in private schools they're residential placements and i'm going to go ahead and let joanna take over this one so this slide shows the growth of our moderate to severe special education programs over the years and you can see although overall district enrollment has continued to be relatively steady our the number of students with moderate to severe disabilities has grown significantly over time especially in the preschool and elementary age ranges i'd like to introduce jacqueline krueger who will speak a little bit about special education budgets yes so as you can see there's a lot of programs that are offered at chico unified so our entire special ed budget is just under 30 million it's right now it's running about 29.6 million so we do get dollars funded to the district via the selfa which is the special education local plan area and those dollars i just want to remind you are allocated based on county-wide so butte county-wide ada so there is no direct correlation between the funding and the number of students identified with ieps but it also means that we could be a district that let's say is increasing in enrollment but county-wide enrollment in ada is going down then the total dollars available would be going down we do have real quick going back we do have about a million dollars in local funds part of that is the erm's dollars that um we're just alluded to that we took back and then we go back to a couple other districts so our contribution from the general fund is just over 17 million so that puts it at 58 or 57.8 percent of the program is funded with unrestricted general fund dollars um from a reference perspective statewide it's about 60 percent so we're right there with the rest of the districts in the state jacqueline i'm going to go back to a statistic that you quoted about the the selpa being a county-wide averaging for the ada do we know per pupil how much that's costing us because we are getting um you know a smaller percentage per capita so the base rate that each supple gets is approximately just over seven hundred dollars per per pupil so for every student that leaves butte county it's about seven hundred dollars in totality and then we get a percentage of that but if we're if we have more percentage-wise special education students than other districts and yet there's not an adjustment in the per student funding what kind of a hit are we taking so what happens is the total dollars available will decline because there's less enrollment right but if we are static and everyone else is decreasing or we're increasing everyone's decreasing our percentage of the pie gets bigger so we may get 52 percent of the pie now but if other districts are declining we may get 58 or 60 percent of the pie ah but the pie itself may go down slightly gotcha yeah okay so two pieces i wanted to hone in on for the current year we have some new funding coming to the district um we alluded to earns educationally related mental health services this was something that um the selper provided to chico unified we took that program back in the current year we get just over 600 000 which covers a halftime coordinator and five clinicians and then additionally in the current state adopted budget we'll get an additional 600 000 for early intervention preschool services so supplemental services for our littles who are with special needs oh yes so one of the comments that was made at a last board meeting was related to co-teaching and the impact that that would have on our students so diane and i met and we looked at the secondary mild mod program and right now we account for 75 inclusion in order to hit the state mandate we need 80 percent so um we would need an additional seven and a half fte in order to make that program work so 750 770 000 roughly in order to incorporate that and that would be a local choice here at the districts there wouldn't be additional selfie dollars to fund that and that and that's secondary only yes secondary nine through twelve no seven uh six through twelve six through twelve junior high and high school so i'd like to ask uh diana um in the chart where we see our enrollment going down somewhat but the in number or the level of the special needs students increasing do we have some context in which our parents getting more aware of their children's potential issues that affect school or teachers picking them up early or somebody's waving a magic wand and going that kid's one of them and you know could you refer me to slide number that you're looking at right there uh number 14.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
uh do i have a motion to amy yes vicky and stephanie i was saying i wasn't here oh that's right uh c yes and carol yes uh motion passes um number seven action needed items the first one we have is a recommendation to approve paula waterman as the food service director for craft caddy schools at a rate of 18.50 per hour effective march 28 2022.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
that's awesome i'm looking forward to seeing you again james [Music] 130 all right on your marks get set go one two three four [Music] um nice job hey james two to twenty counting by twos ready two four six uh eight ten um goods keep going you're almost there good eight eighteen and honey how high are you gonna go all right when you're ready i'm ready go ahead [Music] nicely done good job maybe next time you will all the way to 200.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i think there are a number of ways to elevate that you know hopefully the 96 at least then quarter squeeze it a little bit more to get as close to 100 as we possibly can okay and yes jeffy the core space oh uh the initial aspect we had a while back a little idea of having the walker's classroom as you're in that course basically fit after you drink in the hallway where hello it might be um or to locate that approach no i i'm okay but they take that you know in part from the width of the wall that separates the hallway and the classroom we did see that up in south windsor and i you know i had a little bit of repetition uh but you know all the feedback from the south winds or where they have that is that it's really possible if you've been in an elementary classroom and you see on the interior walls the the cubbies there take up a ton of space it's kind of like staring into the closet that you don't want to keep the door open on you know you see this mess all the time it's like you know my kids room um and so by bringing that around outside you free up a lot of space uh for things like white boards and things that engage kids and look good and the kids are able to close their stuff and lockers on the outside so uh i think ultimately we really like that idea and it adds space to the inside of the room we liked that a lot for the kids yeah [Music] yeah that was one thing repeatedly pointed out you know we went into two different buildings one of them had you know like this uh uh kind of almost called particleboard because down playing what it was but some sort of laminate on the wall that clearly was not as durable is the other building that we were in with tile and you know we're talking about the relative difference in price saves you lifetimes of repair and like yeah it's just wayne's cooking yeah the wayne coating versus the the tile and the tile was great it was easy to keep clean it just made a big difference so you know we learned some things from that process i think there's more to learn but uh we're trying at this point to squeeze as close to that 100 as we possibly can and still you know meet the needs of the kids and community because the last thing that any of us want you know our head handed to us we haven't built a building in 70 years and we go in 50 years and go in and build a building that's not now for the hall but we might be at least fit right for the number because we have we want it to be clean and looking durable a good value build can you just quickly remind us that what grade the lockers go upside class well they didn't have it at pre-k yeah yeah first or sixth so my question on that is what how's the classroom function so you're the first grader uh do they get up from their seat and go over to their behold during the day and the thing is that's maybe right so this i just want to add this you're still going to the bathrooms in the first place so for that kids are not leaving the classroom at all staying there under this vision of the teacher but in terms of not going to cuddle in the classroom going outside it works wonderfully because all the boys and all the things you want to show your friends stay in the cubby and in the classroom you have all of your your pencil box comes with you where you have the common supplies you have everything that you need to learn in the classroom go get your jacket go get your lunch as a class while we all come to us okay so you might have a couple different tantrums but and we have that in high school too really reviewing how they're located because what happens is you have some excellent electricity classroom if you're not careful they can push out where next thing you know one classroom has got to walk away around a corner you want to be proximal so that's going to be very important a challenge in the design of yeah full height double height that that that's that's the thing architectural blend was very angular and neater so you go down the hallway and it would do a 15 degree speak the school that had that again i think it's better for maintenance and efficiency keep a straight line um and that would help a locker think too so these are the lessons we learned through the process and that's why we feel really good about the end specs and opportunity to kind of close that gap between where we are and 100 now we're never going to get to 100 on on north end because of unless we do legislate because we have that birth three which is not at all reversible but i think we can do some some significant ground there for the pre-k uh with the request just um this is kind of like the blind man feeling the elephant and i'm just looking at these states and helped me here before maybe this will answer it but we're talking about once we get an architect in they're going to be able to that our tech will be able to utilize the space in ways that we can't even imagine but right now you know i can i can't imagine these schools what they look like and we're trying to sell this can persuade community this is what we need i know so we're getting final approval of the proposed referendum on may 10th and authorization for schematics um will we have a design of sorts that we can say this is what we think it looks like it's going to look like body time referendum comes around and then you know as we find this space what's that going to do the price that we've already authorized for referendum so i think you can probably best address both those questions i mean i i don't know that we'll have a design uh an architectural design i don't think we would have yet if we save money we save money yeah um so that's always a question and and just about every uh we work with um because again what is it going to look like and so there's there's pros and cons to this um the pros are you're going to get a concept of okay what it'll look like and do we want to do a floor plan right the the kind of the the hinge here the difficult part with it is the state of connecticut says anything private defending authorization referendum is an eligible cost that's what we've been bold and nothing's been uh if you want to spend you can send that money so that's the first point the second one that we've been told the rules kind of the threshold what we've always been told is all services after referendum you have to go back out so if you hire an architect to do these renderings or floor plans you can't necessarily keep that architect on board that's what we've been told now whether that changed or not but you have a backup for for those services ownership services all these servers have to go back out so you can hire someone do these renderings you can get a whole different firm that comes in and says we have a different idea you say here's a floor plan we want use this but it gets a little bit difficult different firmly so we may have a little bit of different idea a little bit different vision and um but you'll hire a new architect so it's not like you say we're gonna have an architect we're gonna come on board and continue with that point and build upon what you sold the other part is and in every district's different um we have this new uh new fairfield that was landed on board early some early renderings and some sketches and they sold the concepts um new architects came in on the interviews had totally different ideas they loved those ideas a different location um different look to it and some members of the community came out and said we want that we didn't buy that are we building this and so we still want with the new concept but when you're selling you know you have to be i think be careful hey listen here's an idea of what it could look like i mean we have pictures of brand new schools we can show you what they might look like i can bring them up right now in south windsor school so it might look like here's just the video but a new school will look like but the arrangement here could totally change it so there's pros and cons to doing that the good part we can see it i'd rather tell you hey here's the actual schools that were built it could look like this but your aesthetics right so your aesthetics you know let's think about you guys um i would imagine being a more traditional brick and mortar type of town you know traditional little times like that at least you know driving around town um some architects are more modernistic green screens like glass that's more modernistic if you if you had that run and so folks that echo referendum i don't want to look at the building so it's a it's a very fine line i think you walk with it and uh it may be advantageous it might be the opposite so um those are there's a couple of the new ones we're not we're not really against but the fact is we're going to find another protect um and go offer real services adwords i hope that's a long one did i apologize but so congrats to any new architect you could get this thing right you certainly could um you know for it so thank you thank you about that it's a trade and we've seen both ways and some have gone out very successfully with and they've they've kept the architect but you know um you'd have to go out just like if you do i'd recommend a sloshing process if we advertise that you know these services are not eligible hey can we keep them on board maybe they might play ball but they don't direct their announcements or something 20 minutes ago i'm sorry patiently just uh yeah that's okay so the spacing just to kind of again um this is your program that this is pretty much what you have in the back of in the very back of your so what you're seeing here is the list of spaces program spaces this is on the back page of the center yes on our back page the grapher um just all the program spaces that then ed and marlene all you guys have been working on so far and what we do is so everything kind of adds up we have we call the program area and that's just the spaces this year it doesn't include recorder outside here it's just this medium so this is not just that everyone knows yeah so this is about six to three thousand seven five is the same number at the bottom of the martin recorders your bathrooms your mechanical spaces uh and any other we call on the sun spaces there might be some additional storage actually when you call for it and they call for that your lobby your best deals all those areas um we would call it more factor to account for those these 1.43 that's equivalent to a 70 efficiency they call it architectural terms and this 9144 that we see that's the number that we're comparing to your space standard you know what that is it's the it's the measurement the billionaires the inside face of the walls it's on the outside face it's this inside face right here that we're measuring that's what the space standard is is referring to so we compare everything you want to compare outside right when we do the budget it just goes for a fee it's 96 000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
okay i'm open up 4 30 of everybody yes yes for me 4 30 work for everyone else yes yes all right we shall make it work all right um great so we got that down then the other one uh the late main meeting will will have to be figured should we square away the late maybe dale would you be comfortable uh firming up a date and knowing that your your your team's gonna have that uh data information information available sure um all right any potential dates so now this we're talking about the meeting i'm sorry i'm trying to catch up and to make sure that i dale you had mentioned a week prior you'd be able to have those uh results incorrect um yes if it could be the um it's not a great week but if it could be the um beginning of june um june 1st 2nd 1st or 2nd that would be i think most the strongest potential of having those results but it's a wednesday do you guys want to go for a wednesday what about the second what about june 2nd that works for me no 4 30 yes what time 4 30 works yeah it worked for me at 4 30.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
you did some polling we weren't the ones who did it but you did some polling back in 2019 i went back and looked at that polling and the initial ballot test for that poll uh was right if you just was 57 so the good news is we're about four points above in this poll at the start from where you were in that poll back in 2019 so you're a little higher right which is great this slide shows how the support levels vary across your feeder districts there on the left as well as the sort of area of residents the main cities and then everything else off to the right and so what you find is there is some variation uh support at that initial ballot test was strongest among voters who are within the magnolia school district right followed by centralia and anaheim then cyprus and then savannah actually checked in the lowest so it ranged across the feeder districts from a low of 47 among savannah to a high of 74 percent among voters in magnolia when you look at it sort of by city though it's not as variable um off to the right three of the four areas had 62 percent support and then cyprus checked in at about 54 now obviously the price tag for a bond like this can matter to a voter right the level of support you can expect for a bond measure will depend in part on where you set that tax rate the higher the tax rate is set all the things being equal the lower the level of support you can usually expect and so one of the goals of this survey was to make it really clear that bonds mean taxes just in case they didn't catch that in that 75 words we're going to make sure they understand that bonds mean taxes and secondly we're going to test how sensitive they are to different tax rates or tax implications of this bond that could be part of this bond if when you place on the ballot and so in this first slide here what we did is we tested three different tax rates uh that could be associated with the bond thirty dollars per 100 000 of assessed valuation at the top followed by twenty four dollars and then nineteen dollars per 100 000 uh assessed valuation at the bottom and what you see is there's some tax rate sensitivity here when you kind of put the blinders on a voter and you focus their attention on the tax rate right you get some drop off and support at the 30 dollar rate uh we had 43 percent 24 dollars it's 45 percent when you get to 19 dollars it jumps up to 52 percent now one of the things we also know about this question though is it tends to be a very conservative read on voter support for your proposal partly because we're putting the blinders on them and we're not talking about the things you're going to do with the money we're just talking about what it's going to cost them and secondly we also know that not every voter knows what assessed valuation means right so when you say thirty dollars per 100 thousand assessed valuation they don't they don't necessarily know what that means if they know what assessed valuation means they tend to sometimes overestimate what the av is for their property and the nature of the question requires that you do math right 30 dollars per 100 000 assessed valuation not everybody's good at doing that and so i point that out because we know that there are some voters that when you convey this tax rate they don't know what it means they know you're talking about price and they hedge right they say no and not sure and so we also come at it another way which is we say all right let me put another way if you knew that this measure would cost the typical homeowner about 94 dollars per year that's the left column would you vote yes or no the ninety four dollars per year is the thirty dollar per one hundred thousand assessed valuation tax rate multiplied times the median assessed value for a residential property in your district so it's what that median property owner would pay per year and so what we find is that when you go ahead and do the math and you give them the annual total for what this is going to be for the typical owner you get a better reaction at the 30 tax rate per 100 000 of assessed valuation we had 43 percent when you do the math firm and tell them it's 94 a year we jump up to right to the right column is the same exercise only here we're taking that 19 per one hundred thousand assessed valuation tax rate multiplying time the median av for a residential property you get fifty nine dollars per year and at fifty nine dollars per year we have fifty eight percent support so all of this information tells us one that your voters are somewhat tax rate sensitive right as a lot of voters are and b it kind of plays into our recommendations about where we think the comfort zone is in terms of a tax rate right where we think that if you choose a particular tax rate you can expect that you're going to have support of 55 or above and i have some recommendations on that towards the end okay so we at this point in the poll we ask a couple questions related to the quality of education the first is a question that asks them simply how would they rate the quality of education provided at your local high school right so we're asking them to think about their local high school and what you find is um it's a bit of a mixed bag you had 36 percent who said excellent or good you have 26 percent who said fair you had who said uh poor or very poor and then you have another 20 or so who are unsure prefer not to answer the question what we have when you look at this by the way um by sub-geographies what you find is that the percent excellent or good was much higher among residents in the centralia school district area as well as cyprus so the those folks have a higher opinion of the quality of education their local high schools than the folks in the other feeder districts same basic question only this time we asked them to rate the quality of education provided in anaheim high school district overall and you get a very similar pattern here right you have about 37 percent who say excellent or good 27 percent fair so in the aggregate there's not a huge difference between how they're viewing their local high school and how they're viewing uh the district overall one thing i will point out though is you know we do also find that in typically if a voter is so disconnected from the district that they can't answer the question right they don't know whether the quality of education is excellent good fair poor or very poor in the district that tends to be a voter that all of things being equal is a little more of a challenge to see their way to a yes vote on a bond because they don't know anything about the district that's going to be sort of overseeing the funds and so that becomes a communication opportunity is to try and get some of those voters in that gray slice right help them understand the good work that you do right in advance of them being asked to vote on a particular bond measure okay so we then move on in the survey to what we call the projects and improvements section and the goal here is really two-fold one is we are now going to start to educate this these respondents more about what your bond will accomplish up to this point we only had the 75-word initial ballot test where we could describe what the bond would do and you're pretty constrained in what you can say here we get to unpack your bond into all of these various projects and improvements and in that way we're giving a much better idea about what the bond's about the other thing it allows us to do is understand of all the things you're thinking about spending the money on right how do voters feel about these projects and which of these rise to the top in terms of being their priorities probably the biggest thing that jumps off the page to me about these results is everything we tested was popular right there wasn't a single project that we tested where you didn't have 75 percent or more of your likely voters say that they favor spending some of the bond proceeds on those items but at the top of the list we we actually see kind of a combination of projects that we often see being the priorities for voters when it comes to school bonds and it's a mix of on the one hand that top project upgrading your older schools so they meet current health codes building safety codes proper ada access right number two there is providing modern classrooms labs and technology needed to support high quality instruction in math science engineering and technology so that's your stem related facility improvements and then the third one there is basic repairs to roofs plumbing electrical right sort of and so when you look at the combination of things that are up top there it's really bringing your older facilities up to new school standards stem and career tech right those were the the sort of three silos of improvements that tended to be the things that voters cared the most about now um if you as a board choose to place a measure on that upcoming november ballot there's going to be an election cycle right and during that election cycle there will be a lot of discussion and debate in the community about this proposal you're going to have advocates of this bond go out and talk to their neighbors and friends and explain why it's needed and why they should vote yes and you might also get some opponents who step up and say you know this is a bad idea we shouldn't be doing this and here's why for this to be a reliable gauge of the feasibility of a bond measure we need to simulate that discussion and debate in the space of the poll so we have a good understanding not only of where your voters were today which was that initial ballot test but what happens after they are exposed to positive arguments right and what happens should you get some opposition and so we do this first by conveying a series of positive arguments that you see here on the slide and the nature of the question is pretty simple it says supporters of the measure say blank and do you think this is a very convincing somewhat convincing or not at all convincing reason to support the measure as you can see on the slide we've a lot of the positive arguments get traction right they they they are viewed by by voters as being either very or somewhat convincing reason to support the proposal at the top of the list though is kind of a history lesson for them in terms of you know the condition of some of your facilities so most of the schools were built more than 60 years ago when asbestos and lead pipes were used during construction we need to remove these hazardous materials from our schools that was the number one and the second is an equity argument that our students deserve to have the same educational opportunities as others in the region and by fixing our older schools and upgrading our classrooms and structural technology this bond will help improve the quality of education in our local schools so some good strong positive arguments and so the question at this point is where are your voters now right they we had that initial ballot test we then got to talk about tax rates which tends to be a bit of a wet blanket right on support for these measures but we've had a chance to come back talk in more detail about the projects that could be funded we got to convey positive arguments and so we circle back with the interim ballot test and we present that same 75 word statement and say now that you've heard a bit more where you stand and the results you see here so we tick up about a point so we're now at 62 percent we're sitting seven points above that 55 threshold that you need for passage and then in the poll we test the negatives the idea behind the negatives is to simulate a situation where you have kind of a vocal opposition group that's out there and messaging to voters various reasons as to why they may not want to support this proposal it's important that we do this in the poll because we want to pressure test the respondent's support for your proposal so we understand should you get opposition how much damage could that do to support for your proposal so we convey a series of of opposition arguments the number one which probably shouldn't surprise anybody is this idea that now is just not a good time to be raising taxes right local businesses and residents have been hit hard by the pandemic in inflation now is a terrible time to be raising taxes right so we convey these negative arguments but the real question is what happens right and that's what we see here so on the final ballot test after we convey those series of negative arguments we see that it cools us down a little bit in terms of support we're down about four points from where we were at the interim ballot test but we are still landing three points above that 55 threshold that you need to be successful right so even with the opposition arguments you're still above water so what does all this mean i've got a couple slides on this and then happy to pause and see if there's any polling related questions so i'm going to circle back first to that overarching question i mentioned at the outset as one of the main primary purposes of these poll which is to answer that question of is it feasible right if you as a board choose to place this bond on the november ballot does it have a reasonable chance of success the answer that question is yes provided that you have careful planning and structuring of this bond and you execute on that plan right some positive things that we see in the poll and the reason why i think you've got a winnable measure here is you know we saw that voters ranked improving the quality of education in local public schools is among the top two issues facing the community we had solid natural support for this proposal with nothing more than the 75 word ballot statement to go off of we had 61 percent of voters say that they would support this proposal that's six points above that 55 threshold you need to be successful when we tested those projects every one of the uses that you were considering for these bond proceeds was popular right we had 75 percent or more of respondents for every single item say that they would favor using some of the bonds proceeds on those projects the positive arguments we tested resonated right they they gave voters they found them compelling and more reasons to support this proposal and importantly at each point in the poll where we check back in and we say now that you've heard a bit more where do you stand every one of those ballot tests was above 55 and that's even after we tested negatives right so those are the kind of patterns that i want to see in place to come to the conclusion that yes you've got a path that can get you from where you are today to where you need to be to have a good shot at being successful on election day that said the poll also did point out a few challenges right one of those is tax rate sensitivity right we saw at some of those higher tax rates we tested that we were kind of well below that 55 percent threshold that we would need to be successful so we need to be mindful about that um we did see that the negative arguments got a bit of traction right that cooled down support by about four points so that is something to consider and then thirdly there's these unknowns right um you look between now and election day we don't know where the pandemic's going right right now it seems to be going pretty well but we could get a surge again you could wind up with back to mass mandates and things like that and the drama that comes with with the politics of the pandemic there's inflation out there right now and what's happening with that is it going to continue is it going to get worse is it going to get better and then we have this international conflict that is obviously impacting supply chains and other and other costs and so you know we want to be thoughtful about that as well so with that in mind um you know there's a few observations and recommendations so just to reiterate i think you do have a measure that is winnable here right you do have feasibility that said it's important to keep in mind that a poll like this is a snapshot in time it's not a crystal ball looking forward to election day right what happens on election day isn't dictated about where your poll says today it's dictated by everything that happens from this point forward right and so i mentioned that mainly because um it's a reminder that we need to be making smart decisions about the bond and what it is you put in front of voters and you got to put the work in right and by that i mean the communication side of things and so few recommendations on that note price tag this is probably the most difficult and sort of thorny question to have to answer as part of these bond proposals because the higher you make that tax rate the more revenue you have to do the facility improvements that you need right but the higher you make that tax rate the more risk you take on in terms of the bond not being successful when i look at these poll results i think that you know you're going to want to keep it in voters comfort zone and at this point i'm thinking that's probably right around that twenty dollars per hundred thousand assessed valuation price tag right so thirty dollars is your prop thirty nine max twenty 20 is a step down from there that seemed to be about where that comfort zone was with your voters in terms of your uh priorities um i think that's the other thing that this measure makes clear is that you know like a lot of other areas they're interested in you bringing your older facilities up to new school standards they want to see improvements related to stem right and careertech is obviously a big draw as well so you're going to want to make sure that that those items become sort of central features of this bond proposal and then finally you know this poll was really kind of the it's not the law it's not the last step in your communications it's really the first step right from this point forward if you're inclined to move forward the bond i think you need to start to ramp up the communications so that you can make sure that voters out there understand your facility needs they understand the bond proposal that you're putting in front of them you can start to build some consensus around the need for that bond proposal and then ultimately you will need an independent campaign that's not district funded it's privately funded to carry things forward once the board chooses to place a measure on a ballot so let me pause there i've done a lot fast talking see if there's any questions related to the poll there are a couple more slides in terms of next steps that charles heath from tbwbh props and measures will speak to but let me see if you have any poll related items first any questions maybe for keith what are we getting um on the last uh two bonds we went out with uh per hundred thousand yeah great great great question okay so just uh by way of reminder uh we have measure z from 2002 that was 132 million and we have measure h from 2014 and that was 249 million so our tax rates were actually doing quite well when it comes to our our tax rates um so measure z and again the maximum that to mention is 30 so that's kind of our benchmark um on measure z our current tax rate is 17.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
okay so this slide right here doesn't really reflect the enrollment with this um in the general population what this reflex is that we had students in programs that were served by the county in the past and this was prior to 2002 okay as a district we started taking programs back and running them ourselves that way we have more local control over them we can hire the people and so what this shows is that as we took those programs back it increased the number of programs we had and then we were serving more students on our campuses rather than maybe sending them to butte county however the other piece of your question is how is special education increasing the number of students versus general ed yes in the past it's been very as general ed has increased i'm sorry the special ed has increased commensurately it's been pretty even since covid and i'm even going i'm even going to go back to um prior to covet i'm going to go back to the dam experience and i'm going to go back to the fire and not just the campfire but also the santa rosa fires the redding fires the greenville fires every time one of those events have happened we've opened [Music] red cross shelters here in chico and what we have found in the special education area is that a lot of families that don't have the resources or were very maybe had unstable homes stayed here and many of those families have students with higher needs okay and so there has been a path impact because of those things the other thing i would like to say is that i've had a lot of families just recently very severe need students moving in and a lot of times they come to my office first and their comment is we have heard such great things no one else has services you have services and we are spreading the word so there is there is a little bit of word spreading going around that we do have programs that can meet very special needs for our students well i'm not going to argue with that um diane did i hear you say that we give some kids back to the county my mind playing tricks on me that was in the past so programs the selpa and butte county part of their role is to create what are called regional programs that serve the needs of students and it kind of goes to eileen's question is the money goes to all the small districts the small districts can't run those programs and so it used to be a long time ago before 2002 we would have the county provide those services and then we'd get billed back quite significantly for those so by bringing the programs back there's no bill back week control costs we control who we hire in the programs so we no longer send a large number of students to programs that are not run by chief of unified there will still be students that might get referred to high level very intensive programs that we don't have the resources to run here but the num right now we have four students in out of district placement yeah so um so this kind of goes back to the graph that just showed mod severe trends um but then also before that there were the slides that kind of broke it down to elementary junior high and high school which is all iups and so i guess my question that came up was just seeing that this is a snapshot i'm assuming that high school currently is at 13 students with ieps and elementary is 14 and junior high is that's current is is my understanding is that is that reflective of a trend or um are we seeing less students less percentage of students at the high school levels with ieps generally year to year or is it kind of like anything else where it follows the same trend so we would expect to see higher numbers in the next few years because there's a higher percentage of the junior high level right now great question so how special education and services to students with disabilities work is that it is the role of special education teachers and programs to give students the skills to self-advocate to self-regulate to implement their own accommodations just like i know that i cannot see you without my glasses so on my own i will put on my glasses so i can see you better our job and you'll hear from a lot of people what they do in programs to teach students to do these on their own so ultimately our job is to exit students that's why typically high school numbers are lower we and i'm going to say our speech program in particular does a great job of exiting students as they get older and older so that's one of their strengths and so high schools tend to be higher the trend we're seeing right now is a huge growth in preschool these are mod severe students so students with the highest disability needs [Music] being identified and referred to our program so preschool is really shooting up right now because of that do we have i guess i would be curious and this is probably kind of outside the scope of this current presentation but i'd be curious to know at that when it does dip at the high school level the number of um you know relative number of students who have um you know exited the program versus exited the district um and is there is there any kind of concern that at the high school level is it is is everything still you know are all the accommodations being met as the student is is going up or are any students leaving the district for any particular reasons once they leave the high school to reach the high school level you're going to see some data coming up that really talks about our graduation rates ctes and and the involvement of students in um and our dropout rates yeah and you're going to see that students aren't leaving the district cool i think i think it would just be it's probably just um nice to see the the number of students who are coming in at the high school level and then exiting the program because they have met there right and it is the dashboard it is dashboard items so we do run our graduation rates and you will see that on here thank you that is a perfect segue for um tim carras our director of assessment and accountability is going to talk about some of the data good evening the most of the data that i'm going to share tonight has been shared with our lcap community groups that have come to give input on the lcap so a lot of this is really the same data but just focused down on our special education population in comparison to our all to all of our students so what you're looking at here is regarding elementary literacy growth and in both cases in all cases of charts of this type in this presentation the blue bar indicates the most recent data and the black line indicates what we're comparing to so in this case the blue line in both of these charts indicates 2122 data its current data compared to current to data from last year both of these are measuring student growth from the baseline measure that's taken in august to the trimester 2 measure that's taken in february the first chart is focused on our k2 students and it's looking at phonics score growth between the two years really what we wanted to do here is look at how are we recovering from students you know being out of in-person instruction for a significant part of the last couple years and what we see in our k2 phonics scores is we see as we would expect you know this is this is a great celebration that we're doing better but we should expect to do a lot better with with the kids in in person all day we see all students making a significant amount of growth compared to last year as well as students with disabilities on the second line what are these numbers on the bottom of the chart there that is the point growth that we would expect so uh one phonics skill is is one point and there's 22 points total there is 91.
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do i have a motion to approve this item i do okay carol you want a second okay uh any discussion on this all right hearing none uh all right item number two is recommendation to increase the brown county school's pre-school tuition fee from 25 a day to 27 a day effective next year august 10 2022.
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you think all right excellent thanks james what do you think of everything you've learned this year um the twos are kind of hard [Music] and the yeah nothing now nothing else how are the five so the eyes are right yeah what about reading has your reading changed this year yes i know how to right now it's beautiful you know right now it's beautiful could you write when the school year started no it was messy but now your handwriting is gorgeous excellent and what about like your words or your stories were you telling stories at the beginning of the year uh no no but can you give me an example of a story you've written this year you've read that one yeah and have do you write stories also yeah wow would you write your stories about great life the story of your life wow that's so excellent so what do you think about watching all these videos of yourself um it's good because i never think um i've never seen myself doing videos really myself you showed me to watch my all my videos and then it's amazing what's amazing my video down here is track segments abc you've learned a lot this year yeah what are you most proud of learning this year um the most proud audition is why [Music] do you have any goals for the end of the year is there something that you haven't learned yet that you're working on yes what is that i um don't know how to do still i'm like writing words that is math oh like word problems so you're still working on that so maybe we'll talk again at the end of the year and you can show me how much better you are at word problems excellent thanks for talking to me bella there's a big word for that do you know what the word is persistence because [Music] and now what what list words can you read five four three [Music] um [Music] what's that do you try to make all this all of this the second thing is good for you you're so persistent i know that you will stick to it until you got it maybe we can make a video of that for me this year i have been using the video portfolios during conferences and it's been a great way to communicate student progress with families i've received a lot of great feedback about the videos and it's been a great way to keep our conversations focused on the child and not about the numbers or the data all right making the video portfolios has been such a rewarding experience for my students [Music] and it's easy to forget like where they started so we'll look back at these videos we're like wow look at where you started like oh i forgot like weren't able to do that or they see that they want to move to them [Music] so um we have a long way to go but the seeds have all been planted and we have the tools that we need the resources the knowledge and the will to nurture these seeds into even greater um learning and self-navigation for students so i don't know um mr mr capone do you want to say anything you don't have to um no we're just so happy we're new to the district um do you want the middle here sure do you want to come up do you mind coming up here oh god he's the educator mr phone we want to get it on record here so um yeah my wife and i we're very excited we're uh we're new to the dish we uh we moved back in and uh moved in in july and you know we were just talking a little bit prior and we just met you as well and um we weren't really sure we were going to move and we we ended up getting into brookfield and the housing market was crazy and uh you know we were fighting different houses back and forth and uh we ended up getting to brookfield and the number one thing and this isn't just uh preaching to the choir type of thing but the number one thing that's made us happy is the school district ms natalino has been great you know james loves it every single day he comes home excited there's no um pushing and pulling in the progress that we saw on there granted his own you know he's counting the numbers but like the handwriting and everything that's come way up and you can't document that in a seven minute video we see that every night you know credit to my wife you know i'm kind of like the fun guy that does the wrestling she works with him every night you know uh and uh you know james comes home and you know he's really proud of himself like he really believes in himself now and his handwriting is beautiful like he said in the video and uh he's excited about uh he's very honest kid and um you know we just want to thank you all and you know senator and mrs diamond we've had conversations about our future son coming into the district next year and um yeah i mean it really has been a joyful experience for my wife and i and our family and um we can't speak any highly more highly about brookfield thank you welcome to brookfield so thank you thank you appreciate it that's our presentation does anyone have any questions or anything i was just going to ask is it share how is it shared out with parents or is it or you're not at that stage yet um they've been doing them using their conferences primarily and then at the end of the year jackie i think we could send them the link right because they're all jackie is the mastermind behind all the technology but they're all in google slides so they'll each get their slide deck that they can i think it's a good tool too yeah i would imagine that some parents don't show up for conferences so you can send that home yes so there's lots of them feel good lots of benefits and we're very fortunate again it wouldn't have been possible i can't speak enough highly enough about the teachers oh we can speak and watch it again um about the teachers and really the collaboration between heidi and michelle and jackie has been really great to see so thank you so much and it's just important i want to reiterate it's it's a testament to mrs diamond's leadership and our faculty and the the work they put in their creativity but also you the voice you heard on there is mrs whiting and jackie's over there are technology integration specialists and she's had a tremendous impact on the district and she's just doing an incredible job so we're uh we couldn't be more pleased thank you joy yep okay student representative report ben all right so first of all today was the last day of quarter three um for the high school and quarter four starts tomorrow um spring break is coming up starting next friday through sunday april 24th and sat makeups will take place on tuesday april 26 through thursday april 28th and then i'll skip this one because it's a big one that i want to come back to and um so the musical grease took place wednesday wednesday march 23rd to sunday march 27th and that was their first production in three years so it was very successful and a lot of people were happy to come out and see it um national honor society continues to plan their annual 5k for mother's day we've hit a record high in donations this year from sponsoring businesses and that's great by record high i mean like doubled last year so that was crazy um and peer counseling is content is trying to plan for the return of saint baldrick's which got stopped with kovid and then with athletics i'm not going to talk about today but in general the boys volleyball team has been very successful and at least getting the program going and in a matter of two weeks of not even some kids not even playing volleyball before we're now a very well working team and much of that comes credit to coach will and jv coach chuck so just want to put that out there and then going back to diversity day which happened on friday april 1st for vhs i have a quick statement i want to read so on april 1st the students of the human rights club and the diversity club organized and facilitated the first diversity day at brookfield high school the goal of the day was to highlight the diversity of our own community and the ways that our students contribute to making the bhs community unique students and faculty were encouraged to create presentations that would highlight aspects of their identity that bring diversity to our school community student and faculty presentations focused on the upcoming holiday of ramadan and the impact of an individual can have on supporting refugees in addition to highlighting the diversity of the bhs community the goal of diversity today was to expand student knowledge of the internment of japanese cemeteries in the town of brookfield refugees and rights of farm workers and all the presentations were well attended by students and their teachers so that was a nice day to kind of since it was already an early dismissal so it was a way to take advantage of it and get a lot of keynote speakers in that the students really benefit from so great any questions given any questions thank you thank you for the updates okay written correspondence chris rink wrote regarding board meetings carrie swift wrote regarding electric school buses and monique matthews wrote regarding the special ed director hey approval board minutes i'll move the board approve the minutes from the regular meeting on march 16th [Music] okay it's been moved and seconded any questions all right hearing none all in favor all right okay anonymously approved all right next up superintendent's rep update okay thank you mrs greenstein um so i um actually on my superintendent report troy we talked earlier where to put this i forgot it's on my superintendent report right here our first uh item i wanted to introduce to the board mrs amy d nicola hickman who will be our new special education director and we're really excited to have her her here she is here with her husband dan and her daughter mia and me is probably not happy that i'm introducing her um but uh we're glad they're here with us and um uh mrs d nicola hickman will be starting with us on may 2nd she comes to us from greenwich with a great deal of experience pre-k through 12 and post high school originally started out as a special education teacher and um is really a highly quiet qualified person that we're really excited to have joining us in replacing mrs wygonic and um amy would you like to come up and just say hello to everybody it'd be great to have you say a few words and any board members if you have any welcoming questions you might want to ask her come on up amy make sure that hello everyone hello welcome everyone uh first i wanted to say thank you for such an amazing warm welcome everyone has been uh so pleasant um to me it has made me feel so wonderful i wanted to thank everyone for that i am really excited to be coming here to such a collaborative team i've heard such a great things about the group that works here in central office and so i am very excited about that i can't wait to start the work with this group i am um thrilled to be in doing that and um to be coming here to brookfield i am excited to be uh working with families here and excited to hear from you what it is your goals are for the group here and what you are thinking the department should be moving forward with so my door is open please come and visit me and let me know what it is that you think we should be moving forward with because i'm i'm here for you and i'm here for the children in brookfield you know amy i'm glad you said you're here and ready to do the work because we've got plenty for you yeah we're ready enjoy i didn't know if any of the board members might have a question welcome you know welcome to the brookfield community thank you and we hope and i'm sure you'll be welcome open arms bye thank you so much we're excited to have you on board thank you thank you welcome amy all right well we're really excited about that and again mrs d nicola hickman will be starting on may 2nd um i think she has a day scheduled with mrs wygonick for transition um next week they're going to be working together in person in districts it'll be great to have her up here next week um i in in regards to the special education director position um it's really important for me just to uh thank the faculty and administrators that were on the committee uh some of them are here with us um in helping uh through the selection process thank dr ruby for facilitating the process a lot of work that goes into hiring anyone whether we start at the building level with faculty and paraprofessionals or custodial uh all the way up through administration and uh involving mrs bhutto who was also on the committee thank you um i think that was your first one now that you're on the board right so um hope you're involved with another one with us that'll be great great to have you there um the other update i have is assistant superintendent hiring update our first round interviews are going to be on april 14th so that's next thursday we have a good number of candidates for the position and so we'll be running through the first round again i want to thank and advance those folks who are helping organize and serve on the committee specifically mrs farias who's here with us tonight and mr belanda they will be on the committee and also facilitating that process um next week as we begin things so we're really just pleased with everybody's participation leadership and contribution to very important positions here in the district odyssey of the mind while we haven't heard much about odyssey of the mind with the pandemic the last couple of years the kids from all the teams persevered this year thanks to mrs almeida's leadership our whiskaner team headed up by coach uh d'allesandros uh her team uh from whiskenier is going to worlds in iowa and that'll be may 25th to 29th so we have another group going we're really excited about that and uh mrs almeida is already filling out the paperwork for the lawn chicken fundraiser so if anybody's remembering that that's coming out so get ready get your pocketbooks open um so we're really excited for the kids with om and we'll keep you posted on what's going on there i know ben had mentioned it before um and we've talked about it but uh greece the musical uh we it was the first musical we've had since 2019 it was absolutely amazing cast crew the musicians all that music from greece was live played by our students it was just absolutely amazing can't thank governor of uh mrs lam mr lam and dola and mr st george enough as well as governor rel for joining us on opening night so it was really a special night a rowdy boisterous and fun crowd was there and we had a great time so um again very proud in in the first one in a couple of years so a lot of good spirit there uh another staffing update uh two of our beloved staff members have had some great accomplishments first of all our accounting supervisor mrs reynolds received her bachelor's degree this past month and so we had a little celebration at the office we're really proud of her and mrs kim and holly is now dr holly she defended her dissertation last week and so we couldn't be more proud of her so i wanted to make sure i mentioned that to the board i know you're proud as well quick update on strategic planning and then i'm actually going to invite eric up to the podium about the technology committee and how it functions under strategic planning and some of the things we're going to be thinking about one of my charges in working with the board committee which is consists of bob and debbie it was to reach out to parents i've reached out to the center huckleberry and wisconier pto leads they're looking for parents that might be willing to be recommended forward for participation and i've talked with carrie at the harry todd with the high school booster club uh and she's uh determining uh and asking around is who can who can participate might be willing to to share their time with us so we're really excited about that the principals are gathering up their school representatives may 24th we'll have a formation meeting just an hour meeting sit down with our consultant talk a little bit about direction and then we have a i think it's a august 18th actual kickoff meeting planned uh late in the summer so we're really really getting excited about that under that um are a number of things with strategic planning but one big one is getting our technology committee back up and running again the pandemic we mentioned that a number of times it's slowed us all down around the nation and around the world and eric's got a couple of big things coming up he'll talk about future ready and some of the tasks ahead for the committee and for him and also tied in a little bit to candlewood lake and getting ready for the new school so eric if you come up and share a little bit about what's going on sure good evening everyone so uh so yeah as dr burrell mentioned um we are looking to reconvene and bring back the technology committee that slowly got started just before the pandemic and obviously came to a screeching halt with all the other priorities that needed to take place um the the committee was formed with the purpose of providing support to the work of the district curriculum in regards to technology integration and support um and to support the overall strategic plan that dr burrell is talking about and we will talk about and that planning committee is actually convening soon um the committee is also going to be um coming back to um address regular technology needs goals concerns that happen in the district on a daily basis um it's open to everybody in the district to join um and so we what i hope to get is uh um a real um group of just different um stakeholders in the district um you know i need teachers administrators pair educators secretaries um some of the uh some of the it folks join as well um and so it's a nice uh variety of group members um the first big project of the group and we're really excited about this is actually working with the state of connecticut um in the future ready schools connecticut cohort future ready schools is a framework dedicated to student-centered learning and a framework built around integrating technology into curriculum and a commitment to do so whether it be from infrastructure to data privacy to student privacy to professional development and and also a whole commitment to leadership it's a really top-down approach you can't have students committed to using technology in the classroom if your leadership is not committed to the same thing and so it really involves everybody in the idea of continuing to integrate technology into the classroom and what a great opportunity to come off the heels of a time where we're doing remote learning and we're using digital learning more than ever we can really ride this wave and use this momentum to keep technology as part of um of the classroom um so um what the other thing that we're looking to do and i can go on for a very long time about what the future ready framework is and i'll have much more to follow as we get uh get into it uh but we just recently signed up with the state uh we'll find out soon what other districts are doing this with us we're going to be able to actually work with other districts and other teams throughout the state to help us and them develop their technology plans and then be able to update those as time goes on we're also looking forward to this concept and idea helping us as we start to purchase and look for ways that we're going to use technology at candlewood lake elementary school and so there's a lot of factors that are going to go into this and we're very excited to to get a team together work with the state and and and get a good solid technology plan good support for the new school and the other two schools as well um as we work with the strategic planning committee on that that's great eric thank you very much really appreciate that if anybody has any questions about it now or or in the future feel free to reach out anytime great anything thanks eric thanks for the leadership appreciate it all right so it's a a bit of a longer uh uh superintendent report than than usual um i have a little section here you know with only meeting once this month that i wanted to make sure uh some of the highlights uh that i wanted to bring forward were communicated with not only the board but for the public to to know about and um under wellness i talk about i have all three schools uh listed there the bhs diversity day was something i was going to talk about but ben took care of that and mr bolando wasn't able to be with us uh tonight so i wanted to invite um first up from huckleberry uh uh dr pepsoski talk just a little bit about the heart of huckleberry and something he's doing with uh with student wellness and recognition as well as staff wellness and recognition and then after that i'll invite mr renda up to talk about neurodiversity day which we all recognized but they celebrated a little bit differently at the middle school so dr p thank you very much dr barrow one thing i do want to say is the return to normal is such a wonderful awesome site and you know realizing my normal is not the normal of the majority of my students their normal is classroom they're normal as masks their normal is you know we can't play in big groups so just to highlight a couple of things dr bro now that we're back to a little bit of normal visits frequently he went into a math class as they were doing fractions so of course fractions i'm there i go right to pizza because that's the classic food for fractions and if we have eight pieces of pizza eight over eight is one and four before is one and the kids are like dr pio had us a pizza doctor bro said i'll tell you what in two weeks if i hear back from mrs morgan that you've done wonderful things you're mastering your fractions i'm going to come in with pizzas and go to his word april 1st dr brill visited with pizzas yes i went to the classroom before in dr p fashion and let them know that the pizza restaurant was closed and they would be getting salads instead and just before they attacked me dr will came in with this pizza that was awesome great fools that was fun along those lines of normal i mean our book fair was live we had parents and students walking around the buildings it was so awesome in huckleberry where the kids beaming holding their parents hands taken to the classrooms i mean it's been two years since since parents have been in the building so again what's normal to me is is not normal to them so it was awesome awesome uh fourth grade revolutionary war project and just and i i'll stop because i know it's not a spotlight on huckleberry but fourth graders dressed up as revolutionary warfighters and they sat around a table and other classes and grade levels ah grade levels got to mix with other great levels and second grade got to learn from fourth grade and they walked up and dr grill saw the museum they hit the button and the revolutionary war figure would come to life so if it was betsy ross she would come to life and talk about how she you know created the flag and her idea process so just awesome awesome things happening one thing that i'm really proud of we're doing the hearts of huckleberry award and you know when you talk about normal it gives us the opportunity to see kids in all different aspects and teachers and actually recognizing kids and other faculty members for what we should say is going above and beyond showing your pause practice kindness act responsibly work hard show respect and so we give these heart a huckleberry awards and since we've started the program 140 kids have been recognized by stupid faculty members as well as other faculty members just an example this young lady in fourth grade twice at recess aubry went to check on classmates who were sitting alone and asked if they were okay and wanted to play and just things like that that we can now recognize our students and it's just so powerful to me uh so that's you know essentially we're getting there we're getting back to what what i see as normal and it's just this wonderful place and i have to say digital portfolios [Music] i want my second grade teachers to have those next year what an awesome introduction to the first graders coming in that to watch these these digital portfolios the kids that they're going to be getting so i pulled jackie whiting on her way out and i said is this something she goes oh yeah we're gonna do that so that's it thank you dave great things happen at huckleberry we're happy thank you all and thanks for the heart of huckleberry appreciate that thank you and he was rotten with that april fools joke to the kids they don't love my humor mr renda mr renda worked with the students uh he and his faculty and the uh on kaleidoscope day and uh appreciation and tolerance and acceptance and um let's talk a little bit about the presentation for neurodiversity okay good evening i'm dean randa the proud principal of wisconnair middle school mr pepsoski you forgot that line um our day was kaleidoscope day the students uh came up with this day to talk about and what they came up with we tried to if you don't know it autism acceptance month is in april so we wanted to find a way to kind of celebrate that and what we came up with is as you can see the slides in front of you talking about neurodiversity letting talking to students about how everyone thinks and learns and processes information obviously in a different way and everyone's you know people have their brains are wired differently and they have their own unique way of thinking and experiencing the world really with middle school kids of all of you know the middle school level they try you got to be cool and when you're a little out of the box sometimes that doesn't always you know some lend itself to uh you know people think our students thinking that's cool so this was something i think when the student council and uh talked about it with our advisors we thought this was something great to to move forward um there we go of course we talked about respecting differences talked a little bit about neurodiversity again about recognizing and respecting this in the ways that we do learn again the brains how they're wired and also we tried to get students to understand that things that maybe we find easy other people may struggle with and obviously the things that maybe are tough for us or our challenges other people uh are very are very good at those things so we want to make sure to point that out then we talked about uh with students you know different ways of thinking learning interacting and some of the labels that come along with that they may have heard about adhd autism dyslexia tourette syndrome so again we're trying to get them to understand um this about understanding of the way that we all learn differently and doesn't mean that just because you know someone maybe um have one of these labels isn't really smart because we know that that's totally not true what can we do to help this is the big part right here what can we do to help acknowledging people's strengths and talents sadly these students can be teased and bullied for the for this for the differences that they have so we really wanted to have our students help our students to understand that that we try to we should recognize those things and go out of our way and when i hear dr p say that you know a student was was noticed for going out of their way to because other students were sitting by themselves this that's what these types of things i think really start to make a difference and um making someone's day by being tolerant understanding and kind and i know myself and miss gordon uh definitely mr gordon we talked to the students about our job is to pick pick each other up find the good in people and when we do those things they're going to feel good about themselves and at the same time it's going to make us feel good so we really tried to to hit that home and then that day april 1st was kaleidoscope day where as many colors as possible to celebrate neurodiversity i do want to say that we had a fundraiser called pack the piggies [Applause] this was the money that was donated for this we use to support families united in newtown which is a place that provides individuals with special needs and their families social opportunities in a caring environment so we raised over two thousand dollars for this the whole idea behind pack the piggies was um that they had to use money to support they could support their grade level or they could sabotage the other grade level and let me tell you those students found a lot of excitement in sabotaging the other grade level oh yes pennies in dollars with the green we called it were they would that would be the positives the negatives would be silver coins so i swear to you the last day we had um we didn't have lunch that day so during the week we had the the water bottle big water bottle containers in the lunchroom the last day i swear in the morning i came in and there were kids with like things of um with filled with coins i mean they must have taken their their home savings or something and they came in and i get because i was in my office and i heard an airport the coins into the bottles to uh to do but i really want to thank uh jessica reese uh kayla ryan and christy trotta they're our student council and our ruler crew advisors for putting the slides together and then counting every day to keep the students very interested so every day they had to make sure they counted and counted rights because then i had to post who was winning and of course the next day as soon as they knew who was winning that was the group that they were going to sabotage so um it was again it was a fun way to raise money for a good cause and i think the students um really enjoyed that part of it so any questions comments i did enjoy sabotaging something else you know you're a middle school kid you got someone actually said to me should we not do sabotage that doesn't they want to do penny wars like i don't know if i want to say penny wars right now and they came up with pack the piggies said good i like that pit little piggy noses on each one um but i tell you when we said sabotage yeah so whatever they find excitement it raised money for a good cause that's fantastic thank you thank you thank you thanks appreciate it dean how about a round of applause for all of our principals and the work they're doing it's amazing at schools and i believe i don't know if we said it i think both huckleberry and center on last friday uh wore tie-dye in recognition of the day so um just spirit all around really great thank you thanks everybody um last two items the first one is a capital referendum that was voted on a week or two ago it will be on may 17th in anticipation of the town meeting this may 3rd to vote to have the operational budget referendum on may 17th and i know joy indoor rosa will talk a little bit about that during the finance committee report but i just wanted to update everybody on that uh the last piece is on uh april 27th the week we get back from the april break um we will be wearing purple to celebrate the children of military families and we're looking forward to that um it's actually a really nice state department of ed initiative and so we're going to participate in that principles already know so we'll be getting the word out on that and as you can see a lot of positivity a lot of kindness a lot of joy getting back to normal and we're really excited about what's happening so i don't know if anybody has any questions but that's my report no all right thank you okay thank you okay consent agenda no no sorry subcommittee reports finance all right so last we met was march 15th um the let's see i don't know if you see it in here but in the um finance report um you'll see that we well actually the last time i reported i had said that we were starting to look our surplus was getting smaller and smaller and we that we would likely end with a death deficit and as of now our projected deficit is around five thousand but we are likely that it will likely grow as the um as the year progresses a lot of that is due to the cost of substitutes still running very high and additionally the cost for health benefits there's a lot more employees that took benefits and the demographics of those who did families versus single people has changed so we are going to be over budget in that item due to that estimation being slightly off so uh as you know you had you've gotten an email that ken has implemented a spending freeze and the count the accounts that that will likely affect are textbooks instructional supplies and extended duty for curriculum work on the plus side looking at our revenue so one item that is actually in our favor slightly is that we are actually getting a slightly more in the excess cost grant usually we budget that around 75 percent of our excess cost for special education and it came in at about 82 percent so that puts us still over budget but slightly less so um in addition to that uh we got word that we will likely be able to be reimbursed more from fema potentially 100 percent reimbursement on our coveted costs that were incurred between march uh 2020 and december 31st of last year so all the shields barriers cleaning monitors things like that that we that we had incurred those costs so those funds are actually flow directly to the town of brookfield and then to us so marsha and ken are working together to find out how best that will happen emerging issues this is going to probably affect that deficit as i was mentioning but um special education continues to be something that is a volatile situation we may see more out placements we may see some students that are outplaced moving out of districts so there's just a lot of ebb and flow in special education right now so that's contributing a lot to the to the deficit unfortunately we did talk about capital budgets although we hear a lot of those updates during the facilities uh report so we don't need to go over those again we did talk about the 2223 budget but we had actually reported on that during our budget update at the last meeting so as you know we can safely reduce the budget by about fifty thousand dollars um so that was what we had talked about at our last meeting and uh yeah i believe that was pretty much it so any questions do we want to mention the town meeting oh sure yeah uh town meeting is may so we had the thursday may 3rd yep may 3rd for the referendum to set the referendum date on the 17th may 17th and at that town meeting it's not just a convening to set the referendum date there's another yet another presentation about the town budget and the board of education budgets as part of the way the town charter is constructed they have to have these meetings okay any questions for rosa [Music] okay so policy communications debbie okay we met on march 16th and really in terms of policy most of our discussion was focused on the title ix policy that is in your packet tonight for a first read we just wanted to get some more background and information from dr brill and mrs wygonic on that policy so they clarified it it was very straightforward once we had that discussion and then we were able to move on to new business we talked about a new policy a transgender policy that really deals with classification of students [Music] who opt to maybe change their status and we decided in that conversation that we would approach our attorney dan murphy for an opinion letter on that to help us really craft that policy so we are awaiting that and we will discuss it more at our next meeting and then the rest of the meeting was really spent on the budget flyer i had brought a draft of the new budget flyer to the meeting and dr brill provided me with good feedback and the rest of the committee provided some input so we will review a final draft of that at our next meeting and that was pretty much it okay questions for debbie [Music] okay hearing consent agenda i will move that the board approve the items on the consent agenda which are new hires resignations and the february financials okay spins motion and seconded all in favor joy can you just take a minute sure absolutely i'd like to um the proud principal of center school who was just up there mrs diamond um who has been with the district as the huckleberry principal and center center school principal most recently for 13 years she's a beautiful person and has been an incredible contributor to this community we're all sad to see her go but also very happy for her and her family um mrd as we like to call her has supported hundreds of families and in turn thousands of students during her 13 years with brookfield i know the center school staff is still reeling at this time um we're certainly working on a replacement plan um but as you saw tonight her intelligence her tone her kindness her expertise her professionalism her preparation is all something to be admired um and it's been enjoyed by me for seven years now and i thank you for that mary rose and i also is believe it or not we'll miss your attention to detail um that we often tease mary rose about how detailed oriented she is and it's fantastic because it keeps us all on point and honest and she won't let us run over a sail over a waterfall she'll keep us from doing that paying attention to all those details but uh mary rose i just i can't thank you enough and i know we've got a we've got a glide path out of here until june 30th so we'll be doing a lot of this with you but uh i certainly don't mean to embarrass you but i wanted to make sure you were acknowledged and thanked publicly for everything you have done for this community and i don't know i saw on the video it said um mrs diamond a principal with with a vision i saw that in the credits i thought that's uh spoke volumes you always you always seem to have a vision which is so important in a leader you know it's been my um my very distinct pleasure to be here for 13 years i'm sorry i get very emotional but um it's it's just been an honor to be at both schools and um i can't say enough wonderful things about the staff they work so hard and the families are so supportive and it's just really been a great opportunity for me to learn and um become [Music] the the educator that i've been able to become by being here with with all of you and um having that kind of support so from central office and from the board and from my colleagues and from the families and students mostly the students probably they are they are certainly our best teachers um it's just been a real pleasure and an honor and i'm grateful for everything so thank you very much i just want to say one last thing i'm really going to miss your you know calm and nurturing demeanor it really was very much admired and i know you were admired at center school very much an so amazing place i wish you all the best in your new and your new endeavors thanks mary rose i just also wanted to say um sorry i'm not gonna let you go take it while you can get it i have um had the pleasure of working with you for a long time as a pto member and as a community collaborator between the library and center school but um your biggest impact was with my family so we will miss you and we thank you for all you've done i'll miss you as well i i still i still can vividly see in my head open house whatever day that was i think i don't know christopher was in fourth grade maybe and the boy scouts were in the back of the gym and all of a sudden i said and mr smith in the back and and he's like who are you talking oh no it was mr brooks i just so now i call him mr smith whenever i see him but i just you know one of those things but i just yes you're it's just been lovely the families are i i've had most of your children not the pleasure yet sorry i'm gonna miss each other but um but it's they just are they're a joy so thank you very much thank you thank you [Music] okay next up on the agenda new business discussion of impossible action upon recommendations of the superintendent of schools concerning the institution of teacher non-renewals pursuant to connecticut general statute section 10-151 okay i will move that pursuant to connecticut general statute section 10-151 the brookfield board of education non-renew the teaching contract of all non-tenured teachers at the end of the 2021-2022 school year as recommended by the superintendent and further move that the superintendent be directed to communicate this action of the board in writing to all non-tenured teachers and that the superintendent be authorized to respond on behalf of the board to any request for a hearing if required by law or for other data which may be forthcoming from the teacher and or his her representative pursuant to applicable provisions of connecticut general statutes section 10-151 and that the superintendent be directed that any response to a request for a hearing if a hearing is required by law indicate that such hearing is to be before the board or at the board's discretion a subcommittee of the board second okay and seconded all in favor hi hi hi okay joey can i say a little something sure i think it's very important for the community um and our faculty to know that this is this is right at the top is one of the most loathsome tasks that the superintendent and the board have to engage in at this time of year during the budget process when we don't have a budget yet the tenure law indicates that that we refer to 10 151 that the uh faculty must be notified prior to may 1st so as a function of the calendar and and not having a budget hearing uh certainly earlier than may 1st um there's no town budget there's no there's no uh education budget at this time there are some 70 teachers that are non-tenured in our district out of our 400 plus employees having been here now for seven years along with my partner dr ruby we have brought in all the teachers that are in year seven or less of their careers we've brought them in this is very personal we get to bring them in we are train them work directly with our principals and the rest of our faculty teacher leaders and other administrative team members to help develop them and create that joyous environment we've all seen so i it's important for me not only to explain this to the board as a reminder it's an annual um task that that almost all districts have to engage in based on uh tenure law as a prudent financial matter that we have to do um it's important for the faculty know and message to them uh on whole that we've been in communication with the teacher union on this they understand the the the situation and the timing and we hope if we get enough people out to support the budget then we will have a budget on may 17th and on may 18th i would be able to rescind the letters that i'll have to send uh after the board's action so it's going to be a difficult month it's scary for some people um they get nervous it produces a lot of anxiety and we understand that and none of us want to engage in this but um we're with them all the way and um we just need to get through the budget process and that's the most important thing and then we can have uh all of our teachers feeling good about things back offer them contracts for next year and be ready to go thank you joy okay next up in the agenda the title nine policy i'll move that the board approve policy number 4000 5145.44 title nine for first reading as recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee second okay i'll turn it off to deb yep explain so um this is a lengthy policy there's a lot of detail in here which is why we wanted to get some more input from dr barrel and mrs wygonic at our last meeting but really it's pretty straightforward it's just a lot of legal legalese but it really deals with sexual harassment and um making sure that students and employees are in an environment that is free of sexual harassment um making sure that there are clear definitions of sexual harassment and that it's well known and very clear how people are to report instances of sexual harassment so there's a lot of definitions in here and we identified the policy identifies where to go to make a report how to file a complaint and then how the district handles it so again this is a mandated policy and this has been this is one that we did not have correct john correct we did not have this so this is coming to us uh from cabe deb one of the things that's important a few things important to know while we didn't formally have this policy and that's part of engaging with cave is to ensure that we're up to date on all of our policies uh we have we've we followed the law the title nine law so we most of the procedures that are outlined in here we follow almost uh to the letter frankly um there are regulations as well so the letters the sample letters and uh forms for filling out and so forth and we once the policy is approved by the board after second reading we'll bring that forward to administration it's also important to note that mrs wygonic worked with attorney murphy and he has done a series of trainings with the designated title ix representatives in each of the schools and that's happened over the winter so we're really in a good place even though the policy hasn't formally been adopted by the board we're in a very good place and and we'll get that adopted in the next month or two do you have a policy meeting on the 27th of april so do you want questions by april 20th or um i think you know we could probably do it the week of the meeting um like by the 25th that that'll get us through spring break week so by the 25th is fine i mean all policies are important but it seems like a really important one to make sure we look over and read and okay one question who is the title ix coordinator that is referenced in the policy the district the district title knight coordinator is the special education director okay they assume that role [Music] and that's always that's always been our case here okay so you said when dan murphy met he met with the building principles the either the building principles or their designee that is going to be the building level title ix uh coordinator for the building okay so we could we have direction directly at the school facility for staff and students [Music] any other questions okay so it's been second or motion and seconded so all in [Music] right favor okay next up old business policies new policy or so amy's going to combine all emotions into one single motion okay so i will move that the board approve policy number 3541.5 records and reports transportation for a final reading as recommended by the policy and community subcommittee communications subcommittee the first read was on march 2nd i will recommend that the board approve policy number 3542.22 food service personnel code of conduct for a final reading is recommended by the policy and communications subcommittee first read was on march 2nd and i will move that the board approve policy number 3542.41 food service school lunch service professional standards for a final reading as recommended by the policy and community communications subcommittee first reading was on march 2nd second okay it's been moving a second all in favor okay motion carries all right next up board of education's adopted 2022 2023 budget so just an action i'll turn it over to john and talk about the public hearing uh yeah so on april 29th last tuesday the 29th the board of finance presented the town budget which included one slide for the board of education uh dan divorces put that presentation on he did a great job thorough as can be uh joy and mike i think you were both there yeah it went well yeah it went really well the public comment was actually quite supportive there was clarifying questions from the public um so it was it was great to see and um we're really all of us are proud and i know ken can speak to this specifically too is the work the board ken myself marcia our town finance director uh the board of finance the board of selectmen all the work we've all done in collaboration for several years now um establish credibility and trust between all three elected boards and the work we're doing together it's it's it's really fantastic and i think when you step out of brookfield and you ask other elected officials or from different boards how things are going in their towns there's a lot of that tug and that push and pull um that could get negative in adversarial and we were there years ago you know it took some time to to build that up uh build the trust level up and um well by definition you know politics is negotiation over scarce resources there's only so much of the pie we all have diff there's various priorities in the community you have to you have to determine how are we going to spend spend our funds uh for our citizens we're really doing a tremendous job as all three boards together um and mr divorce has said mr divorces several times talked about the board of ed and the work they've done and we're quite appreciative so it went quite well also that was the presentation on the operating budget the other part of that evening was establishing and again i think i mentioned it earlier that may 17th is formally going to be the referendum for capital and then we talked earlier i think joy you might have mentioned may 3rd may 3rd there's a town hearing to talk about the budgets once again and at that meeting it it's highly likely that may 17th will be the chosen and um voted on uh referendum date for the operating budget so there's just a lot of process here that we have to go through but uh nothing else new to report no she's gonna say you know thank you again on the board of finance um it's really been a great working relationship and it's been very collaborative so yeah didn't have any questions for the board of ed and everything was positively received all right next up public comment but we don't have anybody that's speaking tonight so we'll move on to kendall woodlake elementary school building project okay i have a couple of a couple of updates nothing terribly exciting um except um that um so the the pouring of the concrete walls if you go there it it it's really starting to look a little bit more like the final product you see a lot of like the building in the foreground the administrative offices those walls are going up the the walls for the pre-k wing is going up so the pouring of concrete walls is still happening in some of those later areas but roofing which was what held us up for so long has now been installed on over half of the building and then in those parts where roofing has been installed framing mechanical the electrical rough-ins plumbing things like that that's all starting to take place in those areas of the building and just to remind you guys um may 17th so after you go vote we can walk through it so the nbc will host a walk through for us and the board of selectmen and the board of finance so that will be an exciting time for us definitely yeah and i think it's important to know rosa thank you um even when the elected boards have the opportunity to go on a supervised walk-through and i know mr cecco sent that email very detailed how you have to dress and everything else um it is a construction site it's extremely messy and it's dangerous and there are workers all over the place uh many times at all times a day so it's not we're just not at a point i'm excited to get in there i would love to bring some of the different faculty from fifth grade center huckleberry over for a visit it is in absolutely no condition for that kind of a visit at this time i would love to bring some parents through i mean there's there's just not there yet when we get there as soon as it's safe and we can have any even a virtual tour eric could fly a drone through the hallways whatever we can figure out to get people eyes on that giving you an idea eric giving you an idea uh maybe we'll bring logan maybe logan will be back for the summer maybe he can handle it uh but when we can get people in there we're certainly going to do that it's just it's construction's messy and dangerous and uh we don't want to be in the way of the workers we want them to have as much time as they can to get the work done um so we're looking forward to it i may be taking a uh walk through with paul putting on the jeans and boots and hard hat uh sometime next week so get in there soon it's very difficult for me to not get in there i can tell you that let me tell you that's all i have joy okay all right next up three main points okay um i think we'd like to mention again the center school spotlight yeah and i was thinking it'd be nice to give people some more information about mrs d nicola hickman and then i guess probably an update on the candlewood like elementary school project good [Music] there you go yes um at center school there is a virtual pto meeting next tuesday the 12th there is a spirit day community meeting and touch a truck on friday april 29th and miss diamond starting office hours on wednesdays and that will be from 11 to 12 a.m via zoom at huckleberry next week is spring into spring break spirit week at wisconsin virtual parent meeting for a support for raising um middle schoolers at 7 p.m that's via zoom friday is the end of the marking period the book fair is the week of april 25th and there's a field trip for the diversity coalition and the art club to the five points gallery in torrington on april 29th at brookfield high school the junior prom is friday april 29th at the amber room and all schools have no school next friday for good friday close for spring break the following week april 18th to the 23rd and wear purple for military children on wednesday april 27th that is all i have thank you amy okay uh next up is executive session anticipated i will move that the board enter into executive session for the purpose of discussing strategy and negotiations as it relates to collective bargaining unaffiliated salaries and attorney-client privileged communications second okay it's been moved and seconded all in favor aye aye okay motion carries all right the public broadcast session of our meeting has ended thank you for watching and we'll now adjourn [Music]
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that's the thickness of the exterior wall it ranges from four to six percent depending on the type of system you use but fascinating burp is so all the numbers that you've seen through sc and everywhere you'll show your calculation you'll see that five percent um orchard hill that we looked at the other day the program architect didn't put the five percent that equals the 1.2 million dollars of the budget we ended up cut out medically fragile on there really um so that's a that's a big factor so we take this and it's the number we're going to compare to the in the specific calculation so this sheet right here apologize there's a lot of cells here now i'll zoom in here this is a space this is a statutory calculator by the state um and all these numbers you see up here for the a certain range of enrollment you assign a certain footprint so that's a consolidation of of what you're seeing here and where you see the yellow that's the range we're going to so we're in that yellow range there we take those values we put them into here and we basically get an average square foot per pupil then we take and multiply that average times your enrollment so all right which is 129.144 multiply it by 61.
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okay i'm getting nods and yes unless somebody absolutely cannot make it now then we'll go ahead and firm that up and it's 4 30 on the second um all right and if uh you can send out reminders or outlook invites to the entire committee that way everybody locks in that would be appreciated with dr baugh yes all right um uh justin just um i i know we don't know for sure but uh are those gonna be about an hour 60 to 90 minutes or three hours or do we know any ideas um well we'll you know anything worth being said can be said quick and concise okay i don't think we need to spend three hours you know the data is what it is nobody's nobody should be messing around with it um and so the expectation is we'll hear it um and then we'll we'll deliberate uh obviously the thorough deliberation but then the expectations will either come with a recommendation yes no or no recommendation and then we'll proceed to it okay thank you okay so yeah we'll keep it short and sweet um all right so uh we should expect uh invites from dr bauer make sure that everybody's on the same page june 2nd is uh the late meeting or the the one before the board meeting and then uh can you remind me of the other one may 11th correct may 11th all right um all right so thank you for those uh the next steps i think they then in itself kind of allows us to come up with uh in essence making a sort of an action plan any further comments from uh dale dr bauer any members of the company all right yes seeing them then looking forward to seeing you all looking forward to seeing the results so if you have those ready by the may 11th meeting then uh please bring on over so we can you know let those kind of uh sink in and and let them guide uh the steps that this company is going to take having taking so if there's no further comments they haven't taken uh public comment earlier this item is done and we don't have to yeah i don't it doesn't seem like we're taking any formal action on this item because because the actions are what they are they're going to come back to us we'll leave it as this we've had a good uh dialogue and so with that said unless anybody wants to really stick around for another some more uh time then we're going to go ahead and uh we've adjourned okay sorry about that we've scheduled the next meetings on five item 5.01 so no further action for that so i'll go ahead and adjourn this meeting at 5 41.
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