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um all four of our k4s met growth and all four of our k-4s were higher than bench benchmark three was higher than benchmark one um when we look at our middle schools you can see that um none of our middle schools met that expected growth a couple of them were close or two-thirds of the way there um and they had a range of um between 24 to um 43 so their range was a little bit lower than the the reading differentials when we look at our title and non-title schools you can see that we had 52 points of expected growth when we look up at the top the first couple of title schools two of the six title schools met expected growth and five of the six non-title schools met expected growth in math um their range of scores goes from um 27 or i'm sorry 20 to 35 for title and um 42 to 67 for non-title and i'm going to turn it back over to kathy who's going to talk about programs that support the debt so we're not going to spend a lot of time on the the tears because but we thought that it was important to be sure that everyone has a common understanding of the tears because we all have we just want to to be sure that we lay that groundwork just like we would do in the classroom so for in the multi-tier system of support you have tier one which is in a nutshell that is your your classroom instruction you are working on grade level standards with all of your students when you're looking at tier two it is that small group instruction designed for students who are not understanding perhaps the concept that you just taught so it can be a quick reteach or when we're doing walk to read or march to math when we're doing that tier two we may be having different teachers teach different skills in order to be sure that we're filling those gaps and then tier three is that more intensive intervention it's for students who are two to three grade levels behind and so they're really looking at filling in those those gaps and once again because they're two to three grade levels behind they are working to build those foundational skills to get the students up to grade level standards and then with the response to intervention that's where we're really looking at have have these tiers worked if they haven't what are we doing to support them so that's all a part of the multi-tier system of support once again just want to lay that that framework for what those tiers are so we have a common vocabulary and as i mentioned before when we look at the trends and patterns in our integrated action plan we sometimes determine that there is a need for human resources because although we can have intervention programs the programs aren't the most important component in the classroom it's always going to be the teacher the teacher is the most important individual in the education of a student we do have these supports so for the tier 3 reading and math interventionists they are providing that instruction as i shared their typically two to three grade levels behind at some of our title schools who determined that they needed to have this type of a position we have a family outreach specialist and so their main focus is helping the families navigate the educational system so it's more of that academic piece how do i get into schoology how can you know how can i check a child my child's grades for high school how do i help them fill out their um fafsa application and so that's those are just a few of the things that our family outreach specialists do we also have some of our schools that have instructional assistants and so they provide that support in that tier two and that tier three intervention and then we have school data improvement specialists at our k-8 title schools and what they do is their main purpose is to provide that data to leadership into teachers so actionable items so they can take action steps that will create better opportunities for students to meet grade level standards so how do i take the data that i have determine what it is that my children need and then create action steps from there and then these are our title these are the specific intervention programs that once again going back to that school improvement process it's always about making those better and the very best decisions that we can for our children we have achieved 3000 reading and dysart high school is they're different because they have achieved 3000 reading and they're using it in a supplementary manner in ela social studies and science it is a great way to give students the reading passages at their own lexile level and it aligns to grade level standards and teachers can choose what passages to assign to students for tier two we have actively learn and that is for literacy and achieve three thousand math and then for tier three you can see that for our k-8s we have a chi 3000 literacy and we have achieved 3000 math the beauty of having these programs is that we also have an implementation manager who is provides professional development ongoing professional development which as all of you know is very very important to continue it's not just one time that i'm getting information on the system on and how to utilize this resource it's going to be that continuous professional development we also excuse me evaluate the effectiveness and you know is is the program along with you know um with the implementation is it really doing what we say that we want it to do and that starts at the campus level with the site administrators what the beauty of having that implementation manager is that the administrators can schedule the time when it works for them with their schedules and they can determine do i want someone to model do i want them to talk about the data from the system during prep connects they have they have the ability to schedule that themselves but then we also have that district support so we attend those meetings um and listen to what it is that the program is doing or not doing what do we need to do how can we assist so we attend those meetings as well when when we're able to and then once again you know for our new teachers training begins before school we try to have that um that training when we have our three days back and then throughout the school year and once again it can be on mondays it can be during prep connects it can be whenever the site administration determines that it's going to be best for their teachers and their school site and then here are just some of the specific programs that are supported with title funding we have avid at the following schools leader in me is at our as at riverview we have positive behavior intervention supports at our at the schools that are listed five of our schools are 21st century schools and that is a before and after school program we also have kinder experience and that's for our students who are in title 1 schools and it gets students accustomed to school when we have when we um asked teachers to reflect on how the kinder experience went with their children who have not ever for some of them who've not ever been in school they have said that it was really great and then they could see how impactful it was that first day that first week of school i'm not sure how many of you have ever been in kindergarten classrooms on the first day of school you have lots of runners and you have lots of criers so um i remember um starting when i started at el mirage they're like we're going to have you at kindergarten today i'm like well i we need you at kindergarten today no problem because i was an instructional coach at the time and so i knew that i needed to support in those classrooms but this kinder experience gets them accustomed to school and that's just a way that we provide that transition from preschool to school age so and then here are some of the district supports that we have myself we have our directors of curriculum and instruction we have miss hartjen our literacy coordinator adriel grieshaber and our content specialist we participate in their leadership meetings we have different data meetings with them and whether that's on monday pd or during prep connects we also work with them on lesson planning we conduct classroom walkthroughs and we provide that feedback sometimes having that outside of your school set of eyes will give you a different can help give a different perspective and then we also have a master schedule review i'm not sure what the background of everybody is in maybe trying if you've ever had to build a schedule before but if you don't have all the pieces aligned just right then it doesn't it doesn't work and you can't get the supports in that you that you need so that is something that we definitely have been looking at very closely and helping our schools understand how to schedule and then there was also a larger professional development provided by a vendor like an outside consultant to help our schools as well we're very excited this year we have an eli tenorant teacher and she is able to go to two campuses that have our highest english learner populations and so what she does is she provides that targeted english development and whenever i see her her children are talking she's working with the teachers she's supporting the things that are happening in the mainstream classroom but she and then from her perspective she's working on that english language development if you remember like i said if they can't hear the word then they can't say it if they can't say it they can't read it so that's why that oral language development especially with our english learners is very important as well and then we have our one of our federal project specialists she provides walk-throughs and she goes to our intervention classes she walks with our school data improvement specialist and she provides feedback on what they're doing how they're implementing the program etc so and we have been planning next steps as i spoke about before in the very beginning um we may have different populations of students who need different resources so we're constantly looking for resources that will meet students needs as i alluded to before is we need some of those things to be age agnostic you would not we have a program that's called smarty ants it's a part of the achieve 3000 interventions for our k3 students and but it's very it's very k3 it is you you would not want to put that in front of a high school student even though they're the same skills so we're constantly looking for things that are age-appropriate but also meet their needs so some of those things that we're implementing next year and working with our ess department on are tier three reading interventions reading mastery corrective reading and read to achieve i personally when i was a classroom teacher utilized corrective reading it made a huge impact on the skills that my students needed and this when we have this this entire range of programs that are going to meet our students needs we're very excited about being able to share this new tier three intervention program with our interventionists we're also looking at high low cost resources not high cost resources low cost resources hegerty and once again it's designed to address the phonological awareness skills but for those students who are in fourth fifth sixth seventh eighth grade which typically if you're in school in you know k3 and you've been able to be a part of our educational system you would have had by the third grade however we do know especially with our english learner populations that some chil they come to us later on in their educational career and we need to address those those um those needs and then once again i've already shared with you about the master scheduling so we're looking at that and the intervention schedule and also looking at that data to ensure that correct grade levels and students are being scheduled because we want to be sure that the students who need the intervention are the ones who are receiving it and are receiving it correctly so with that does anybody have any questions i'm sure you do miss pritchard i saw you writing furiously yes i appreciate the time you took to put this together though and i do have i do have some questions and thoughts and i know that this was kind of like an introductory item and we'll talk more during our study session that we have next month about it but um if if this will also help staff prepare for that first of all just to clarify on your first slide how are you how are you defining professional household and so that is that is a good question this so we have done ruby pain research and professional development excuse me we haven't done the research she did so what we're doing is we're utilizing what their definition is traditionally a professional household is um a parent who has a college education i can get a more specific definition for you no i assumed that i was assuming that's probably what it meant but i didn't want to assume i i didn't know if there was anything more to that um so in your research then or the research that you were pulling from they're attributing that to a reason as to why children are may struggle academically and that that piece of it for me um i struggle with only because and i'm saying these i'm saying these comments to in general even so please don't take them as a criticism to your presentation at all or anything they're just general whoever can help again for that next study session to help fill in some of these blanks i'd appreciate it but that um unless i'm not understanding correctly that bothers me a little because i feel like or i can stipulate to the fact that children that come from maybe lower socioeconomic homes don't necessarily have the same experiences like you had talked about museums things like that that might have a high cost associated with them but i don't i always get a little bit uncomfortable or frustrated when there's ever um whenever anyone were to hint that maybe that's and you said it's not an excuse but i'm going to use that word because it's for the lack of time and ease i'm going to say i don't want excuses to be made as to why then those students can't learn or or grow academically because i don't feel like that has anything to do with their capacity to learn especially now if those parents were homeschooling perhaps i could see if those parents maybe didn't have the education to then teach their children maybe i could get that but if if these children are in our schools and they're surrounded by highly educated highly skilled staff and teachers that we have then i feel like that's an excuse i don't want to lean on you know your the word if i could is that what you had said is true there are there's not um they do have the capacity to learn so as an ex when i worked at the department of education i worked in the office of english language acquisition it was eas at the time but my supervisor was bilingual and she says they're language deficient it's not that they can't learn so your point is well taken it is we just wanted to present that it is that language development and so sometimes teachers at title schools they have to let their children talk more but give them that rich academic vocabulary so they will start to use that terminology so once again yes not an excuse and i and and definitely understand they absolutely have the capacity to learn and that's one of the things in our integrated action plan and on our comprehensive needs assessment is that there are high expectations for all learners and i think so sorry just as an example of that um you've heard me present for dysart high school before in the past and you we've watched it's time and it's time and and these interventions in these programs our students would come in with low algebra three four scores but by the time we get to our arms are low algebra 1-2 scores but for several years in a row by the time they got to algebra 3-4 we were at an above district average so it is that time and those really intentional interventions that do make up that opportunity but there is there are gaps that we have to fill out and and we have to make sure that we're giving them those opportunities to recover that learning and so um it was really just to kind of give that example of um a common reality of what what happens in the differences of you know you if you asked what what was your summer like for the two kids like a student at canyon ridge and a student at homerage that's going to be a very different or could be a very different um summer experience of life life experiences that went along with that and that that creates that schema because if i ask you um to tell me about disney world and you've been and experienced it you have a whole schema in your head you can pull for me tons of things you've done if i have a student who's never seen it and the only reference they have is mickey mouse they have nothing to tell me and that's where all of this language and everything builds off of is their life experiences so i'm from chicago i lived in snow if you grew up here and you've never been up to flagstaff and i asked you to tell me about snow you don't know it you can't tell me anything about it except for what you've heard versus me who lived in chicago and has the wind and the snow and the blizzards and the drifts i have different life experiences that build my schema and my understanding of language and and all of those types of things so when our kids get a reading passage on a state test and it talks about a blizzard and they grow up in the desert that's all of our kids like how many of our kids have been up in in flagstaff in a blizzard if they have to read about it and they don't have a life reference that's just a disadvantage for them in that thing because they don't have the context for learning related to it right i get that but like even as you just said that wouldn't necessarily have to do with socioeconomic status that could be someone who's just never lived in slow snow so i would just prefer that as a district we don't we don't reference the fact or try to correlate that someone's lack of income has anything to do with their capacity to learn or why maybe they are not doing as well academically because although like i said if it's if it were up to the parents to have to teach their children that would be one thing but but i know and i was just thinking about your presentation last time we look at dysart high school okay there that's title right yep look how high look how much they have grown same kids same area and when i said what's the difference well they really dive into their data every week you know so again capacity to learn they can't has nothing to do with i mean my parent i mean as far as perfect example of professional home neither one of my parents graduated college and i'm a master's prepared professional with the above average iq has nothing to do with my parents being a professional in a professional household so kids can do i don't want us to give up on children based on their socioeconomic status i get what you're saying that they may not have that trip to disney world or they may not know what snow is but when they're in our schools i want i don't want people to look at them as already at a disadvantage and not as able to learn just because of the house they go home to at night absolutely so that that's that's one piece of it for me um yes i'm sorry if i could just comment on that um and i think what um you've heard is a very strong statement that nobody's questioning their capacity to learn but the [Music] the place that they come to us whether whatever life experience that they've had nobody's saying that they can't learn or that um that they won't learn or that they're at an incapacitated place in their learning position it's just that they are in a different position and it's that they are at the disadvantage we know that all students can learn there's no excuses all students can learn the variable could be time the variable could be the resources to get everybody on the same plane so where everybody has the same finish line which is graduation i think we kind of couldn't even look beyond that and say success in life but the the finish line is the same but the starting point is different and it doesn't mean that they can't finish the line we want and we know everybody can cross that finish line but we know that some will need additional supports and resources to cross that line well i think that's that's what it's about is whatever differences exist it's meeting each student where they are so i get that and it should never be a one-size-fits-all approach to education i get that kids learn differently and there's going to be a light bulb going off for one kid that didn't work for the other and it's our job to find out what that is and meet them where they are so they can get to that finish line and it can look different it doesn't have to be the same it's just getting them there and again dysart high school has tapped into the secret they and they they've proven that these kids can still excel and achieve and make the growth and i always cringe when i see and i know of parents that just because they have an el mirage zip code they're already feeling like well i'm at a disadvantage i have to take my child to a surprise school which even like for high schools for example just thinking of one example shadow ridge amazing place to be who you know who wouldn't love to go to shadow ridge but you know what then they're happy but then what about the kids who don't have parents that can drive them across town to shadow ridge or one of the other high schools and they have they they're at the school that they're at and they rely on us to be able to get them to that finish line in the way that works for them so so that's where and like you're showing the growth and i appreciate that you put it in that same format as you did when you did the presentation because it's easy to understand and compare what you're saying with what the growth is but when we look at proficiency why why are why is there such a discrepancy with with uh proficiency like even with some freedom traditional at 62.75 proficient but then you look at thompson at 14.35 i mean the proficiency rate is just so vastly different for a lot of these that um that's where i'd like to see i want to see you mentioned you talked about actively learn and achieve 3000 do we have evidence to show that these programs are effective because if we it's been and i'll only say a decade because that's all i can really speak to as far as being this involved in a school district but our title schools have historically struggled so as any we can say we have all these programs in here but have we taken the time to look to say are these evidence-based programs that are showing results yes and we do have that data and so there as we talked about variables with children there are variables in [Music] if that program is going to work so sometimes you get general type data what we need what we do with interventions is because students sometimes are two to three grade levels behind is how are they growing in interventions has their lexile increased and so we do look at that lexile growth and so that helps us know that that program is effective for that student so lexile like the read 180 program so that i i don't i'm not familiar with how read 180 tests but the lexile is you need to in order to read like a manual you need to read at a 1600 lexile or something like that so it's different lexile levels for different grade levels so and some of our students have made tremendous growth in in achieve 3000 because they get to work at their lexile level and then that helps them to increase their lexile level because you know with vygotsky they're not at their zone you know they're at their zone of proximal development they're not at their frustration level where they are not able to to read and comprehend but achieve 3000 focuses a lot on the the reading comprehension aspect and for like my example with say because when i taught fifth grade i had a little girl she didn't know her letter names and sounds that program would not have been what she needed she needed something else i had because she wasn't making any progress on her dibbles progress monitoring she needed a different program and so she would have been put in like a reading mastery program which is where it's focusing on those letter names and sounds that phonics that phonemic awareness so she wouldn't have she may not have shown some lexile growth because she wasn't using the chief 3000 she was using a different program but she was getting what she needed so then she could engage in those comprehension activities that were on achieve 3000.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
thank you and for the next item on the superintendent's report update goal three fiscal responsibility planning for growth talent acquisition this one is specifically about planning for growth and now that we have the microphone fired up mr john spang is gonna speak to the update thank you very much can you hear me so goal three is the fiscal responsibility goal and we had a brief update earlier in the fall we've continued to make progress in that area so a couple of things you know that the overarching goal was to make the budget process efficient transparent and equitable distribution of resources and for that the budget process is this year was revamped it's more efficient now principals entered their budgets online directly from their offices and our resources uh have many have been shifted from beaver brook into the schools and into the locations for the principles but they were distributed they might remember on an equitable equitable basis a per pupil basis you can find that you remember in our in our budget book it's on pages 24 and 25 we gave same amount per pupil to each of the elementary schools a different amount for people but the same in each of the three middle schools and a slightly higher amount to our high school per pupil a couple other things we have taken a close look at our grants and align those in terms of the positions that are in grants versus the general budget and it's much more coherent now than it has been in our along with our our budget process the principles next year they actually started this year can make their purchase requests online by putting a requisition on your whole process goes digitally and it's much faster a lot of the paperwork has been eliminated as well so the software's work great a couple other areas of the goal the multi-year budget remember seeing that for the first time last year we repeated that again this year and discussed that with the ad hoc committee of the city council on education as we did i i sensed there was a consensus with the fiscal challenges coming up everyone agreed we need to carefully plan each year as we go forward there's a piece in the goal about engaging with city officials to evaluate our financial and school facility needs certainly the agreement to purchase the hardest property it does have very exciting next month there will be a referendum vote on bonding for that purchase that's encouraging in the meantime in terms we also meet with the mayor's office and the city finance director on a weekly basis every tuesday afternoon to talk about the carpet budget and the current budget up so we're having regular communications with them um and then finally our our administrative reorganization uh is complete meaning uh the positions are filled now people are working in place and i think we're very poised to meet the challenges that lie ahead with the with the reorganization and the talent that we've been able to put in those positions that's that's the update thank you john i will just add to that i had an opportunity to join the mayor's office yesterday as part of a press conference in pucker the press conference was on behalf of house bill this bill is an effort to accelerate the accelerate the ecs grant funding this would bring the necessary funding to address the achievement gap challenges that we've had most importantly address the financial cliff that we've been talking about these last couple of years as as a recipient of the american relief i'm i'm cautiously optimistic i feel like there is significant momentum to support the acceleration of the ecs funding i certainly don't have the crystal ball to tell you that this is definitely coming but i can tell you there was significant advocacy yesterday at the press conference there was representation from caps some of the larger urban districts waterbury new haven danbury new britain the mayor from hartford was there advocating for the acceleration of the grant it was a coalition of clergy from the state of connecticut students advocating for acceleration of the funding so i feel like in many ways the voices in danbury were heard yesterday at the capitol and hopefully the governor will hear them soon as well i would also just like to take this opportunity to thank the mayor's office for their partnership in this work and in the effort to try to push for the acceleration in funding but also thank our legislative partners who kind of co-sponsor this bill in an effort to accelerate the funding so stay in the meantime stay tuned i'm hoping to hear more in the next week or two and hopefully we'll have some good news to share so i just wanted to provide that update for the board as well and last but not least in terms of updates just wanted to remind the board the last page of our agenda under future meetings and dates to remember we have a meeting tomorrow evening a board workshop with mr dr john ramos from the department of education and leadership to revisit our strategic plan talk about the superintendent goals board goals and how the three can complement each other to help to continue to competition forward so just so you know there will be food and a light dinner and refreshments will be served so if you don't have an opportunity to get home first there will be some food and data provided and of course the meeting will be opened up to the public so just send them that note certainly there are questions so thank question i can have an action is there an extra copy of that uh laying around that i can uh yes we can get you worst case scenario i think you're going to need any other questions for our superintendent moving along or chairperson's report i don't have much but um there is an updated committee list hopefully at your place um several vacancies there that just fill the open slots there and so those will be um they're already on the website they'll be um in the minutes uh for this meeting as well um [Music] can i just punctuate one thing about the community oh sure just kind of incoming attractions um we are going to be running multiple administrator interview panels in the coming month or so um so we probably will take just about everybody that's listed on this um in groups of two um so just a heads up and and we'll reach out from my office to go ahead and schedule those of you who have volunteered for those committees for the interview panels and also with respect to negotiations the teachers negotiations will start this summer um it would be nice to have one more representative from the board event on that committee and there will be two non-teaching or exempt i'm sorry non-certified negotiating teams running this summer spring summer so imminently um and that will be for custodians and preparers and tutors so if i could have a total of four people for the um non-certified companies that would be great as well okay great um if anyone's interested in that please either reach out to me or to reach out to him oh i'm sorry except i've kind of got some feedback on this is this better i'm sorry so we're looking for we have a few names for negotiations over the summer um it looks like we need about three more yes so um if anyone's available over the summer we have uh teachers coming up paras and custodians you have to do and and kim i don't know if you have like a general time frame for each of those but um well both of the non-certified contracts expire on july 1.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
once we received the drop grant in 2016 our dream became a sustain our our dream to become sustainable blossomed over the years this dream grew into a collaboration of teachers students faculty and community the dream of growing catella into a green sustainable school has taken many years but we are not done our plan is to continue to create new programs and opportunities to embrace and empower this whole student and to inspire the green sustainably aware global citizen of tomorrow thank you for this recognition california green ribbon you've been very kind and very wonderful it is an honor and great inspiration to keep our dream growing and to give us hope for tomorrow and beyond our students our future through this our sustainability program in catella we are truly embracing evolving empowering our students for olympus tomorrow we are catella thank you [Applause] thank you catella high school next we have merced union high school district in merced county merced union high school district focuses on conservation and preparation in preparing its students for green careers in 2016 merced union high school district's green technology and energy conservation cte students collaborated with the california conservation corps to perform energy audits on all district campuses with the information the students successfully lobbied this district board to install parking area solar panels for each school under a power purchase agreement with no upfront cost to the district prior to the pandemic school gardens provided cafeterias with fresh fruits and vegetables and fresh eggs raised by future farmers of america students during the pandemic the district donated approximately 800 pounds of harvested produce to rescue missions and food banks to help those in need currently [Laughter] personnel from multiple departments around the district are collaborating on a green that school project supporting the development of a school in africa kenya's doraja academy the team is using the u.s department of education green ribbon schools application as a template to guide their work i'd like to invite them up to say a few words [Applause] i'd like to thank the department of education for recognizing the work that our students and staff are doing and all of the innovative practices that are moving forward in our district there's no one day that i can point to where all of a sudden we said hey we're going to be a green district that didn't happen what we did was we empowered and supported our staff and our students to move forward with innovative ideas and they rose to the challenge our district directors stepped up and we now have farm to table which does a spotlight on locally produced goods we are now moving to a new transportation facility which will have the infrastructure to have our first electric vehicles added to our fleet and three weeks ago we had our flip the switch so all seven of our campuses now are pull are powered by solar power so as our diesel fuel bill went up this year a hundred thousand dollars our electric bill did not go up at all because we now have a flat rate for 20 years that is done by sustainable clean energy [Applause] our district and board stepped up and we now have a two-year cte requirement and pathway requirement for graduation seven of our 14 pathways are sustainable and econo ecologically based and we also have an agreement with uc merced where any student in our district who meets the requirements for entrance to the university of california system has automatic entry into the uc merced i knew that when we get the odds [Applause] our sites and our students have stepped up as well and we do have a wide variety of activities and clubs that take place we do have we did have five of the top 10 state finalists in the energy schools energy challenge with yosemite high school having a four-year winning streak in first place we were smart enough to figure out who was doing that and we tapped him to coordinate and publicize the efforts of all of the activities and things that were going on on our campus and that would be mr jeff rivera and i'm glad and happy to have him with us today and he's going to say a word or two about some of the student activities [Applause] it's an honor to work for merced union high school district where they not only lead with what you just heard about with solar and making sure that our kids get into college that want to get into college but they also support our students activities one of the ones was the energy competition that you just talked about not only were they competing against the state but the most fun thing was is to compete against each other in our campuses it's a non-athletical event and a lot of times emphasis is put on your sports and not on your green and that's one thing that's great about working for mercedes school district is that we are pushing the envelope for every green avenue possible another thing that the district does and a lot of time doesn't get a lot of emphasis is mental health we have the nurtured heart approach where students have mental health anytime they need it on our campuses but also at nighttime we allow parents or the ability for parents to log on to our zoo meetings so parents can learn about the nurtured heart heart approach and have help at home so that's uh just a couple things that are so great about our district that we're working on mental health health we're pushing the envelope green activities and also being able to join with other green schools and promote what you're doing here all these great things and i thank mr wyman for allowing me to come to these activities because i still what you guys are doing and i offer you opportunity to see what we're doing so that we way we can become a greater greener community so thank you [Applause] thank you merced union high school district [Music] next is susun valley k-8 school in fairfield sioux soon unified school district susan valley school enriches its educational program with agriscience on its two acre farm a full-time agriscience teacher designs and coordinates agriscience lessons and project-based learning activities to engage students in caring for all aspects of the school's garden the school combines food nutrition and physical health education in a partnership between the agri-science teacher and the physical education team teachers link what students are growing and eating in the garden with health education focused on nutrition and movement sixth grade students designed and currently maintain two 2500 gallon cistern rain harvester systems that function with solar and wind energy in addition all campus landscape is xeriscaped and site irrigation uses targeted drip systems allowing for specific areas to be watered while maximizing water conservation and absorb absorption in 2019 susan valley school built an 8 000 square foot library office staff workspace and innovation lab complex using state-of-the-art materials and systems with an emphasis on plumbing insulation natural lighting natural colors and views that allow the building's occupants to connect with the surrounding landscape in 2021 the complex received the outstanding project award from the learning by design awards of excellence i'd like to invite them up to say a few words [Applause] hello good morning on behalf of sassoon valley k-8 school and the fairfield sassoon unified school district thank you for recognizing our efforts to create a campus and school community focused on environmental sustainability and education sassoon valley is located in a unique and robust multi-generation farming community it begins as a very small k-8 school with less than 200 students 11 years ago throughout the years the district saw value in expanding the school so more students could experience the rural feel of sassoon valley elementary with the expansion came the strong commitment to fully embrace the agroscience theme every student and staff member is dedicated to learning innovative and responsible ways so as to better serve our environment in the future growing up my mother was a teacher and my father was a farmer i learned at a very early early age that we have the responsibility to teach sustainability to our children to nurture the earth is to nurture our future our staff students and entire community embrace that responsibility and this award reflects their hard work with me is our agriscience specialty teacher heather morodio our administrative assistant kristen seguin and our district project and energy manager marina romero who all contributed to attaining our green ribbon status i want to express sincere apprecia appreciation to all of the sassoon valley staff members our parents and our students who take pride in the endeavor and for being part of the sassoon valley dragon team we know this is a model that can be replicated and will be positively and will positively impact the lives of others i also want to express my gratitude to the susson valley farmers and residents who advocate for their unique and beautiful agricultural landscape thank you little side note um susun valley school reached out to the california department of education me and my team to review their application which i urge any school district or school that is applying for the green ribbon to do you can always reach out to our team to review your application your scores and give you some tips and guidance on how to reapply the green ribbon schools award is a journey it's not a one-and-done and you're not competing against anyone else but yourself as you grow this wasn't in my notes but it's really an excellent opportunity to showcase that schools that start this mission start it and reapply every year and it's it's acceptable and kind of expected this is an ongoing journey so please reach out to us if you have questions we'd like to review your application in the future i'd like to invite dr ron reynolds executive director of the california associate of pride association of private school organizations to share the accomplishments of this year's private school california green ribbon school green achiever and u.s department of education green ribbon school please help me inviting ron reynolds up to the stage thank you george so i'm the private school guy who's never attended a single day of private school in his entire life and as an exclusive graduate of california's public schools from first grade through grad school at ucla i think i have standing to offer the congratulations of the state's private school community to all of our public school green achievers public schools and districts and all of the public schools and districts that are being recognized as california green ribbon schools thank you thank you so much wonderful achievement but as executive director of the california association of private school organizations it's my distinct pleasure to call up representatives of saint martin of tours academy please come forward st martin of tours academy is a catholic elementary school serving 220 students in kindergarten through eighth grade from across san diego county school-wide learning expectations promote global awareness concern for social justice responsiveness to needs within the community and respect for all god's creatures in 2015 sma became the first catholic elementary school in the nation to be declared a fair trade school offering events and curriculum related to fair trade practices and replacing products on campus for global sustainability st martin's academy performs among the top 25 percent of similar buildings nationwide based on energy star portfolio manager benchmarking sma invested in a rooftop solar system designed to supply all energy required for the school's operations and participates in net energy metering that exports surplus clean energy to the grid sma also installed high energy performance windows a water filtration system and air purification systems landscaping on the school campus was replaced with drought tolerant native plants and rocks reducing water consumption grounds feature bios whales reuse tree trunk stump seeding rain barrels and downspouts that direct rain water to fruit trees and the organic garden that k-5 classes maintain students engage in stem activities that explore the environment climate change sustainability and ecosystems they demonstrate their acquisition of subject matter material by engaging in real world challenges on topics such as agriculture ocean life life cycles building models and water usage eighth grade students participated in a regional sea perch challenge an underwater robotics program that teaches students how to build an underwater remotely operated vehicle in partnership with the city of la mesa and their local waste hauler st martin's academy composts food and yard waste and students clean up local beaches twice a year congratulations to st martin's of tours academy principal jennifer miller as well as to ann pacheco who has played an instrumental role in shepherding the school along its path to its gre designation in each of the last three years and i'd like to call you over to say a few words [Applause] congratulations thank you thank you ron and george like my name is jennifer miller i'm the proud principal of st martin of tours academy in la mesa and i am very happy here to be here today and i really appreciate the warm welcome dr hernandez your asb rotc cheer squad i don't know if you guys saw the jazz band but if you didn't you missed out it was really an amazing warm welcome so our green ribbon work has inspired the st martin academy community our academy was actually declared a fair trade elementary school in 2015 through a fair trade campaigns and a grassroots organization that inspires the change that affects our global community we learned that we can make an impact for people in developing countries by switching out some of the products that have fair trade labels fair trade principles include fair wages good working conditions environmentalists and sustainable and ensures that there is no force to child labor or human trafficking involved children are required to be in school and the premium is paid back to the workers so they can invest into their communities our school has purchased fair trade soccer balls from senda athletics we choose to wear fair trade organic cotton shirts for events from hey now and we use equal exchange as our fundraiser for chocolates coffee and tea all of these u.s companies protect our environment and the people who work for them students learn that the supply chain and about the supply chain and how it affects fast fashion the fair trade club that we have on campus has created their own catalog with malia designs which is a company that repurposes bags into beautiful long lasting accessories we had a student represent our fair trade campaign national conference in chicago and in philadelphia and our school has joined this movement with over 350 schools 550 cities and 880 universities in the united states and our own city of la mesa became a fair trade city in 2012.
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well when we look at whether or not these programs are effective do you look at them specific to our students or just in general because then at what point how often do you look to see whether or not these these particular programs could be great for maybe kids on the east coast or the southern part of our country whatever but do they work for us and how often do we how often do we keep a program and monitor before we're like you know what this isn't doing it we need to look at a different program for this population at the school great question with the implementation manager and achieve 000 which is now they brought then bought out by mcgraw-hill we have a great team that supports our schools i meet with them once a month we discuss how students are progressing in the program are they making lexile gains they take the it's called the level set they take it twice per year so that shows really how they've grown from the beginning to the end of the year but it's looking at are they being able to engage with the program have there been like smaller changes within are they scoring 75 or higher on each of the passages that they're asked to read so we we work with that implementation manager what's going to be really great this year is because it's mcgraw-hill and the programs that i were on the last slide with the reading mastery corrective reading and read to achieve because those are mcgraw-hill and achieve 3000 was acquired by them she will be able to support all of those programs in all of our schools and so there will be an even greater um support yes support and presence where that professional development will be even more ongoing because she will be here in a larger capacity than she was this year because of the service that we pay for so when we look at as i explained before with the school improvement process and to your what you had asked are we reviewing absolutely what is it that we need we need that continuous professional development we know that there are some other things that we need for our tier three students that that um some of our programs are not are perhaps are not meeting so we're we're constantly making sure that our interventionists have that professional development so they understand my student isn't doing this well this is the program that they need because if you try to put them in this other one it's not going to meet the need that they have so what would you say the two of you what would you say is your best guess as to to explain the the lower proficiency when it comes to our title schools like why why are we where we are in regard to that and our lack of progress in again raising that proficiency level what do you think the answer is what's the reason the reason or the end like for me that's two things like there's okay yeah yeah the answer would be like the solution but you know the reason like why are we still struggling with proficiency in our title schools i think there's a couple things and i you know it's hard i don't want to say pandemic but we haven't had a couple good years of consistent testing so i think we will have better understanding because for example we've only implemented achieve a couple years and we've only tested once since we've started implementing it school-wide so we don't even have good longitudinal data to say this program's really working i have the data to show that my kids when i was at dysart made several years growth of black cell levels in their reading but i don't have multiple years of data to say these are the kids who never used it and these are the kids who did in state testing but aside from that they're like pandemic that's two years but our title schools have been struggling for more than two years so that's why i'm saying in general what would you say is is the reason i think it's still work we have gaps to still recover i think we are getting much better about like kathy said really knowing that master schedule and making sure that they're not missing oh sorry not missing tier one instruction time to get tier two or tier three supports um so that i'm not missing at grade level standards to go be pulled for you know my the ones that they're trying to recover that are my fifth and sixth grade standards so really being intentional i think schools are doing a much better job about that um i think for this year part of it has been attendance kids are still not engaging in school on a daily basis like we would love them to and i don't think that's a title issue i think that's an across-the-board issue i think we have attendance issues um i think in terms of other um proficiency type things is just really making sure we're motivating kids um to to take the test um seriously and we see that um particularly as the the higher the grade the harder it is to get the kids um sixth seventh and eighth grade lower kids do things because they love their teacher and they want to make their teacher proud our upper grades sometimes that's a struggle and it's really that goes back to making those relationships and connecting with kids teachers who have really strong relationships with their students the students want to make that teacher proud and they want to perform and we need to make sure that teachers are using that to to get kids to say hey i need you to show us what you learned you need to be really proud of what we've done this year and getting them to realize that although it is a test that really helps us say look how much you've learned this year and be proud of what you've done and so i think that's really an opportunity for us to continue to get kids to show us what they know because i i don't necessarily agree that these reflect with all of our title one students know okay and i i think that that is an underestimate of how they're actually performing because our unit test that we give on a regular basis show us otherwise thank you does anyone else have any questions on slide i'm not on on slide number nine i had to do the overview of the multi-tiered system um with so we have tier one we have tier two and we have tier three do we have anything that shows um [Music] oh like a particular school is doing exceptionally well there eighty percent of the school is like tier one um or we have um one school is more tier two than anything i mean do we have anything that shows i know it's a weird question you mean like that shows the number of students who are in tier two instruction and the number of students are in tier three yeah well so the way that that we work with the tiers is that all of our students are in tier one there may be some students who need some small group instruction but all of our students when it's because it's built into the master schedule they all go to tier two so if we're all fifth graders we're all going to different teachers we're all getting tier two we're getting what we need though so you may need a different skill than i do so i don't think that we have exactly what you're looking for okay i i know it was a weird question i was listening to some of the things that you were actually saying about that and something just sparked off into my head and i don't know why um we have these many programs and yes historically there have been not only dice art schools but title one schools in general it's it is what it is um there isn't a silver bullet in order to make these you know the scores go up or anything um what do you think that this el intinarant teacher is going to really bring um i mean what what resources were we providing before this teacher came on so that is a great question so the state model is that we have for our english learners we have targeted and explicit instruction which is 60 minutes just with els all day long or i mean for one hour not all day long sorry for one hour integrated is then done for the remainder of the day you do have to provide integrated instruction at least 60 minutes in the day so the beauty of teaching so i'm gonna go back to what i know fifth grade teacher so when i would have my students and say we were doing a unit on weather so i could i would teach my grade level standards my arizona academic standards and then i would have my elp standards english language proficiency standards excuse me english language proficiency standards as my support for my english learners and then what i would do is then i would pull a small group of my english learners to provide them some explicit english language development where now my english language proficiency standard is what's driving my instruction but i'm still using that same content standard so i basically just flip-flopped so if they don't and so they flip-flop the standard so it's the same two standards but one is the main driver in the integrated where it's all the children together and then when it's just the english learners it's the english language proficiency standard that's driving my instruction so i'm focused more on that english language development piece during that time okay so the the teacher will provide that they in the the gen ed classroom will will provide that if they don't have our eli tenor teacher and once again she's just one person so she gets to be at two schools what she gets to do however is she gets to talk to the fifth grade teacher oh you're doing a unit on weather you want them to be able to write a paragraph so then when they come to me i need to support them i need to scaffold for them because i'm seeing yeah they can't write paragraphs which is what my teachers have said because they don't know how to write a complete sentence yet so i'm going to provide that that english language development to get them where they can t write a paragraph so she's just pulling out and doing the targeted piece so when she's not there the teachers are expected to do both the targeted and the integrated instruction and so we're doing a lot of professional development with our language acquisition mentors we have a we're actually doing some strategic planning tomorrow with wested they have um el and ess dr uh montano and i are working together on how we can ensure that and that while these strategies are good for all they're imperative for our english learners and our students with disabilities so um so we are working to ensure that everyone has those high expectations for all of our children so okay all right thank you you're welcome i have a question um i just kind of wanted to clarify um you said that when students are coming to school from these you know from the professional and non-professional households you said the main difference is language deficiency is that correct i i don't use the term deficiency but they have their gaps in their learning so they may they have less words that they've heard when throughout their experience and that's why with first things first birth to five they talk about the the parents being their child's best teacher and we want to talk to them about how do you talk to your children and so you kind of narrate those things and give them more of that language so they do have those experiences and they do hear those words so i look at things from what children bring look at their strengths so they there are gaps but i wouldn't say they're deficient they're not deficient and to and to determine the data for this language gap uh we're using dibbles in kindergarten or in every single grade in the elementary right but it doesn't determine like a language gap so it is a diagnostic assessment that looks at reading so when there's a very different process for identifying children who are english learners when families enroll their children if they answer um other than english on to any three questions then they're then they're identified and we by law we are required to assess them with the azella placement test which would determine if they're an english learner or not that sometimes could determine like a true language gap like if they don't have english as a first language but there i wouldn't say that it's necessarily the dibbles would identify like a language gap they're looking at that phonics piece so how do we determine which students have that language gap and so therefore might need a little bit more because i kind of i understand the the verbiage that you used and i kind of shared miss pritchard's concern about just categorizing people based off of their socioeconomic status or based off of their parents because we've got parents who've got college degrees who don't talk to their children they sit them in front of a tv because they're working all the time we've also got parents in low-income households who maybe they're low-income because one parent works and one parent has chosen to stay home and so that low-income parent may say more to their children in one day than that college educated parent so you know i guess i just want to i want to know how is there a way where we identify which students have that language gap so i think first i'm going to address your the the research that we shared is large-scale research we are certainly not saying that students who come from low-income families don't have any of these experiences or the students who come from high-income families have all of these it is just research that shows that over large amounts of things the amount of words that are heard between those is just an example of the difference in the experiences students come to school with which is why there are programs in place like title 1 that prevent or provide all of these additional resources to ensure that over the course of time students are able to fill those gaps and have the exact same level of understanding and mastery of standards of students um in non-title schools the whole purpose of that title one piece the dibbles is used district-wide as our reading assessment or read um phonemic awareness and readiness assessment it's not just used at title 1 schools it's done district-wide and then all of those assessments the letter recognition is just one piece of it all of those then drive all of the the 95 core phonics instruction that our teachers use in their core instruction and in their tier two instruction so that dibble screener that's done beginning of the year middle of the year and the end of the year and then they progress monitor with that is how they determine who needs those assistance and then they regularly use the 95 percent um assessments to say maybe i'm working on blends and i'm i'm not as you guys know i'm not a k3 person but maybe i'm working on blends and i still haven't mastered blends so i'm i'm in tier 2 for blending my letters where this student over here is working on their consonant vowel consonant patterns sorry so it is all very geared towards what skills the students have in that phonemic awareness phonological awareness and making sure that they're all moving through those um skills and are ready to read by the time they are moving through did that answer your question um sort of maybe we can just take a little bit deeper dive next week in our study session good thank you um i just wanted to share um i too struggled a little bit with the verbiage the verbiage choice in the presentation just around the parents and the working professional piece but i appreciate your your explanation of that and i think i'm understanding the intent a little bit more now miss chapman mentioned language gap but i think you're really i mean what's in writing anyway you're really talking about a vocabulary gap right and in the example that you provided about the parent saying no to the cookie um i mean i guess i would argue how many times did that child ask for a cookie you know i mean it's an everyday thing that is true yes you know we get tired of explaining ourselves sometimes so it's just sometimes it is a simple no um but also you know under the i had some notes here under the next steps um let me get to that that was on the last slide um and the first bullet it starts with with better data we make better decisions we've been tracking data for quite some time so how how can we make the data better so and so i think one of the best pieces that's going to help us is with our new assessment system we're not only the one that we're transitioning to for the next one we are going to be able to um have it all within one platform right now we pull things out send them out to campuses um there's not as much information this is going to have everything in one place standards they'll be able to look at how kids and subgroups are performing so i'll be able to immediately filter to my el students and say this is the standards that my el students are struggling with this is the standards that my ess students all of that is going to be within this new assessment platform and is going to be able to give teachers right in front of them without having to go to infinite campus and then go okay here's my ess you know like and then have to transfer it to an excel spreadsheet it's all going to be in one place and so we're going to be able to do things quicker and more efficiently and be able to then meet the needs of students faster and perhaps a clarification would be a better understanding of data but sometimes too people will look at data and think that it's telling the story but they really have to drill down deeper and so that's what i mean by better data is that am i really looking at it at the level that i need to do i have a good understanding of what it's telling me what's the story of my data and then how do i take that and then create action steps for that specific child using the programs that are going to meet their needs so um and i know that our title schools i mean one title school is going to be vastly different from another title school whereas one you have you know maybe a majority of english language learners and you might have just a handful at another school so the culture the needs everything are going to be different so do you ever receive feedback that maybe those programs existing programs within those title schools maybe that maybe there needs to be a change there and how is that being looked at addressed that is a great question so when we first started with achieve 3 000 so i will tell you categorically people love achieve 3000 literacy because it has the level set it gets them at the level that they need and so when we have different programs and they if if they're not meeting the needs we definitely look at those i talk to schools all the time in terms of okay this one neat program isn't meeting our needs okay how are they different what is it that you would like to look at and so we definitely do and we have those conversations on the slide that talks about the school improvement process that is a part of how we how we collaboratively as as as schools and as district support look at are the programs meeting our needs what is it that we need what should we do and providing some of that more specific professional development you know this this program isn't meeting the needs of my children because they're not here yet i have to have my children here an example i went to i had visited kingswood the the interventionist had she was getting ready for her next group she said i have the student in achieve 3000.
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so we try to get those you know ratified done kind of at least early fall if we can um to have the the payments retro with their rna so that's one that i would like to start kind of imminently but we'll probably go through the fall both of them i'm optimistic won't be particularly long probably three or four sessions okay okay great anything else on the committee lists and again the committee list is has been updated to include our newest board members it's been updated on the website and it'll be in the minute for this meeting two of my favorite committees so i will need that book [Music] so many sponsors um and one other thing we were invited to the parents seat as the parents supporting educational excellence graduation which is happening on next tuesday may 3rd at 6 pm at hatter's park if you'd all like to attend they'd love to have some board members there they'll be providing dinner and just celebrating their their graduation from that course i don't know how how long of a course that is but sometimes that's at 6 00 pm it's parents supporting educational excellence what what day what day is it tuesday evening tuesday may 3rd at 6 00 p.m at hatteras park excuse me is the invitation coming to uh the board members or just through the chair just through the chair i can forward the email to you from dr mead if you'd like and that's all that i have are there any other um or communications questions quick question um june 15th for high school graduation correct what about the middle school and ace so we're holding tuesday june 14th for the ace graduation it's not confirmed yet okay we're holding monday the 13th for the middle school graduations plural break last year and we're still going back and forth we're going to do the same exact thing last year we had all the graduations on at the airport high school in the football field for the purpose of social distancing right and so we're fine trying to finalize that now assessing the cost et cetera and see if it's feasible to continue through a football field if not we'll have them back at the middle schools we should have that answer by next week well he said yeah he used to be in was in the high school all three middle schools inside the auditorium right okay so in the field yet it might be and now for the main graduate high school graduation it's open question i think there was it's one it's going to be one day not two days yes no no no tickets everybody bring everybody type of thing i'm not sure how we've handled the ticket situation before i don't i don't there was there was this was there every amount of tickets or maybe i'm making something else last year was two sessions yes oh two sessions yeah the the stands really weren't folks there's only half that's right yeah yeah yeah okay but i don't know if there was a limitation on the number of tickets before yeah yeah yeah someone i wanted parents had mentioned that they might be doing tickets so i wanted to clear it up green chocolate the curriculum meeting in the night i will be that one coaching baseball okay i'll email you just while i was thinking about it i just want to bring about a couple things john as far as the budget is concerned i just want to publicly thank the folks that came out both to the april meeting where the weather was introduced as well as the public hearing where we had a lot of support for fully funding the education budget that the board approved we have one more opportunity and that's the main meeting it's may 3rd at 7 30 in city council chambers on the third floor you'll there'll be a public participation section at the beginning of that and if you are there you can speak out in support of the schools and focused on the budget so i just want to make sure folks are aware of that um and then the other thing is that uh this referendum is coming up um it's it's going to require 15 of neighboring voters to go to the polls in order for this referendum to be successfully passed um so i would encourage everybody um you know if you make a note of that right it's june 7th um you're going to be at your typical polling locations which will be open from 6am to 80 pm and again it's really important that we get that vote out because if we don't get enough people going that it serves a purpose to us we're going to lose the opportunity we have right now to secure a location that is great not only for the career academy planning but also potentially future schools because that's the whole campus area so to that end i did want to ask a couple questions if i could of kim um we're uh i'm hoping to call community relations meeting shortly um to see what we can do to help uh facilitate getting information out of the public about the career academy and that project as well as the referendum and i'm in looking for some guidance from you i guess as far as what is appropriate i know that we cannot use public funds you know in support of you know a particular vote but we can put information out there about the project and about the referendum so i guess i'm looking for some guidance from you about what would be appropriate here so um i think we um shared with you there's some really good there's a piece of paper that comes from the state election commission as well as some narrative from you know we often rely on attorney muni's book to give us some guidance and i think you've got your finger on exactly what i would be most concerned about just as counsel to the board which is the expenditure of funds in ways that sometimes you don't think about like it may be you know sending a flyer home in a backpack or it might be paying for coffee or bagels or refreshments at an event so those kinds of things where there would be any public funds spent um cannot be spent in the interest of advancing the purposes of the referendum so advocating one way or the other um but short of that i mean you are all elected representatives who are out you know advocating for the best possible outcomes that may include facilities or acquiring facilities and so it's something that obviously as elected officials you know you're out there advocating for the passage but i think what the guidance tells us is to use care about um using funds or things that you may not think of as being funds dedicated to such a purpose okay um so just a couple of questions when i read that material what i understood is that we could send home a notice uh with students for example that uh specified the date of the referendum and where you know what the revenue is um so i hope that that might be something we could look according but also in terms of putting together some informational sessions if it's not being posted by the administration or the board specifically can administration and board members still participate in those conversations and you know is the is the line the same if they're just there um you know in their personal capacity yeah um i think it depends you know i i i think it's we we get into the kind of slippery slope area i think from my perspective as long as you are drawing that bright line about funding that i'm less concerned about that um i think you know when you go to a public forum in a location that may be a board building i think that's okay um but again i think you know providing anything on which you are spending funds in addition is where i would draw the line so certainly your personal opinion even your opinion as an advocate for your district or from your constituents is certainly appropriate and as you pointed out the informational piece about here's where you can go to vote here's what the issues are here's what the ballot will look like those things are all appropriate because you're sharing information about the process but you're not advocating for passage or or objecting to the passage of the referendum does that make sense yeah that makes sense thank you and as i read the same guidance that came and shared i think i need further clarification because my understanding is we can't use public funds to even share that information so i'm not confident we can make copies and use public funds to push out the information so i'd like to get clarification on something it's mundane is that before we commit to do it so i just just want to make that statement right so can the people of the like the people used to do through ptos like can his principal get it to the pto to share information not send send stuff back get backpacks but send it to the pto to email this and then they could go ahead and advocate for it through the pto or citywide or each individual school so i'm i'm smiling rough as i'm hearing your question some of the guys that came and said there's actually a line in there about ptos that actually can't leverage the third party example pto um so i just feel like we just need some clarification on these things sit down yeah just make sure yeah it occurs to me as you're talking it probably makes sense for us to attach those couple of pieces that that i shared with the both of you um maybe for circulation to the whole group so that they can take a look because i think it's one of those topics that it's just good to have it in your head you know it's good to kind of review the guidance pto not being a pta being distinct from a pta ptas can lobby because they're a private corporation ptos are part of our schools right but here's here's another thought email is free so there's no expenditure of funds if we're sending the other thing is i'd be really careful about if you're going to invent spending even your own money public money is is what kim just said spending your own money like if you brought coffee and donuts to an event arguably it's an expenditure in favor of a referenda question and it may need to be reported to sec as an expenditure of funds in support of a ballot questionnaire referendum so just be really careful about even spending your own money i think there are people who make their whole careers on these kinds of things expenditure like if you brought coffee donuts probably is it may not be a reportable expense but there's gonna be a number at which sec is going to be interested in how much we're spending even even as individuals it's set on the individual level you can spend up to a thousand dollars without without reporting but keep your receipts because even when you don't have a reporting requirement sec does require you to keep your receipts in case they ever want to on it so the school can't tell anybody to go out and vote for something that helps the school no we can't right no you can't send it out so what is our expectation that the city will be pushing this forward i i assume there'll be some sort of city discussion because it is a referendum so will the city be creating um simple social media pieces that we can i'm not sure the city of danbury can expand to public funds in favor of a referendum well they have to allow the voters to know that there's a referendum how much time and effort they will possibly be expanding coordinated with our time and effort so that we can replicate and replicate revenue so bridget i can tell you the city did reach out to my office to schedule some type of strategic meetings on how to approach this i will be at that meeting with kim so that we could make sure we have our council if necessary the city will have their counsel at the meeting so that we can just talk about logistics the city reached out to me over the break and then we talked about it again on monday afternoon tuesday yesterday when i was can we can we utilize those electronic boards that we have at this high school and the city hall can we use those to advocate for referendum or just you have to state just the dates and times location i would say the electronic boards could only state the basic information that there is a referendum on such and such a date if you go around see like the signs that say vote yes on number or whatever blah blah blah where they where they come from just getting back in the swing thanksgiving i don't want to use the gavel but so uh mr russo did you have something i deferred to okay joe did you have something else all right are we all set on that mr chris cooper um tomorrow we're having a workshop and i know that the superintendent evaluation committee has met and i'm hoping after we meet tomorrow i would like to set up a superintendent evaluation committee uh before the next board meeting if it's uh okay with the chair okay i don't have no date but after tomorrow meeting you know i don't want to postpone this or you know have some type of direction as to where we need to move as a committee because we did submit the committee did submit uh six board goals and we can look at those goals and tomorrow also look at the superintendent goes and move forward okay is that okay that's that works you're running out of dates though before next meeting so so we might be able to do it maybe an hour before the record okay yeah you know yeah we'll work i'll work with you soon okay sounds good any other board comments updates questions what time is it tomorrow's at six o'clock [Applause] and there will be refreshments so i'm hungry fruit no veggies this time okay with that emotion to adjourn so sir moved by kate excited by al all those in favor [Music]
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it's very rewarding that this movement is even growing stronger now with los angeles becoming the largest fair trade city in north america in 2020 and san luis obispo in 2021 there are seven other cities in california that also have this distinction so changing our products to environmentally green products and making purchases from companies that are environmentally sustainable and who take care of people through the supply chain gives us our staff our students a unique opportunity to make a difference so our hope is to inspire you and other schools to consider fair trade as a way to impact our world along with ribbon when you are considering your purchases and in closing i want to thank my administrative assistant ann pacheco without her this wouldn't be our focus she has really been um you know the one person that has been our cheerleader here on campus and grown in research so i really appreciate you and and all of our teachers that couldn't be here today as well as our students thank you thank you to all our green ribbon green achievers as you know the california green ribbon schools program also offers gold silver and bronze level awards to schools districts and county offices that demonstrates a substantial progress working towards the three pillars we would like to take time now to honor these folks at these levels we'll call up honorees by their award levels please send your team up for a photo when your name is called i will begin with the silver level honorees there we go bellamente monterey i'm sorry bellamente montessori academy vista unified school district captain these first two are not here today but we would like to honor them captain leland f norton elementary school san bernardino city unified school district [Applause] dr ernest garcia elementary school rialto unified school district [Applause] eisenhower senior high school rialto unified school district [Applause] jefferson elementary school carlsbad unified school district [Applause] they're not here today but we wish them the best jp kelly elementary school rialto unified school district [Applause] minor oaks elementary school ojai unified school district [Applause] nancy r cardiac elementary school rialto unified school district [Applause] parkview elementary school wai nimi elementary school district [Applause] santa cruz county office of education in santa cruz county [Applause] twin rivers charter in southern and sutter county [Applause] okay [Applause] now on to our bronze level honorees dr edward fitzgerald elementary school rialto unified school district [Applause] fulton and aylesbury academy of arts and engineering lancaster elementary school district [Applause] henry elementary vapa school in rialto unified school district [Applause] ugh [Applause] raymond temple elementary school centralia elementary school district [Applause] it's [Applause] san mateo union high school district in san mateo county [Applause] congratulations on all to all of you on this wonderful achievement congratulations to all of our 2022 california green ribbon school honorees what an incredible morning it's been um i just want to take a moment to thank you all for all the work you do and to really give a um a sincere thank you from me and personally to allow me into you know your worlds through your applications and um you know i wake up every day very honored to be a part of this and i can only imagine the amount of pride you take to be at this work in your communities you're not only doing this work to help your students build healthy habits but you're systematically changing the world's collective environmental consciousness one community at a time a global movement by very local change now as we conclude the ceremony the challenge before you is to continue and grow these sustainable practices you have done the hardest part assessing yourself for your strengths and areas of need and growth now it's time to look forward to your next steps by continuing your sustainability efforts you not only make the world a better place for your students and families but for other schools too your examples educate them about the possibilities of going green please remember to connect and share your practices with others our social media platforms are a great way to connect on twitter and instagram at california green ribbon schools and on facebook at california green ribbon schools in may we will begin to spotlight campaign featuring your accomplishments on all of our social media accounts wherever you are in your journey these spotlights are a great way to gain inspiration to help you build and grow your practice i urge you to look for ideas and connect with other honorees i get the opportunity to connect with all of you i'm very lucky these social media accounts and platforms are a great way for you to continue the conversation beyond today's ceremony the green california green ribbon schools award holds space for the awesome commitment of local champions in every form teacher parent principal superintendent facilities manager student and community partner it takes all those people to make green school part of your culture to live the values and maintain the practices that will withstand economics of economic up and down turnover new leadership even a global pandemic but we believe more than ever that each of you being honored today will show us how to meet these moments with creativity ingenuity and care we are so proud of you and you should be proud of yourself one more round of applause for all of our honorees today [Applause] thank you honorees and guests for joining us this concludes our awards ceremony now i'd like to pass the mic to christine garcia to lead us on the catella school tour [Applause] good morning i'm christine garcia i'm the five seas coach here at catella high school before we go out for the school tour i'd like to first thank our auhsd public information officer john baltista for providing the live streaming of the ceremony [Applause] so that all of the students and staff here at catella across the aohsd district as well as all california honoree schools present or not to be able to be part of the ceremony with us thank you john i'd also like to thank catellas jrotc asb cheer jazz band and all the students that will be participating in the tour students if you could stand up for a minute to be recognized [Applause] we want to thank our students for sharing with you their 21st century skills as communicators collaborators critical thinkers that are driven by their creativity and most of all their civic leadership that drives them to stand up and take action without our students none of this would be possible so thank you students very much [Applause] so for our tour if you would like uh take a look at your name badge you have an icon on it either a redwood poppy or a butterfly that's going to represent your tour group and the good news is our culinary pathway classes have prepared some food for you on one of the stops of the tour so if you are have a redwood icon you'll be starting the tour at the east exit and your tour guides are ready for you the poppies will be starting on the west exit of the theater and they are ready for you and our butterflies will be starting at the front entrance of the theater which is actually the back of the theater and you guys get to have the food first so if you could please join your tour group and we will get on with the tour thank you very much
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i have this student doing some 95 comprehension and i have this student doing read to succeed so we have different programs she knew her children and that's also what i mean too by better data when you know your children and know what it is that they need then she knew this child can work on this this child is this program is going to meet their needs and this is going to meet their needs but they were all different they were in the same intervention group so we do provide that we want our interventionists because they're the experts especially i mean at tier three they need to know the best what it is that their children need and what programs are going to meet those needs and i will tell you math doesn't have quite as many resources as reading we're constantly on the lookout for reading and we just our inter math interventionist on monday reviewed some of the existing um programs that we have available to us to determine are should we get some other intervention program so we constantly have those conversations and with our school data improvement specialists about those things and they bring the feedback back from their school and we have conversations with principals about what intervention programs they want so a long answer to yes we look at those and we always make sure that we're getting what what's going to best meet the needs of the children madam president um i'd like to thank the board for having this conversation i think this is one of the best conversations the board has had in a long time as you are diving deep into the needs of the students and i i appreciate your your very important questions this conversation is repeating itself all over the state and all over the country and we're not a bubble in dysert the network of title one directors across arizona are are very engaged in these same conversations and to your question ms densmore as i look at the third bullet they're reviewing other resources these are ideas that other schools might have hegarty as i was visiting two schools today are starting to use that and are seeing great results as the conversations are had at these in these networks they're shared at local state and national conferences where other directors such as mrs hill get the information able to bring back the information it is a continuous effort every year we get a new batch of kids from all different ranks styles backgrounds histories and every year we we restart the clock for for the the batch of kids on it's not something you can just check off and say we've solved the title one problem there is mountains of research about the relationship between poverty and achievement that is again and again again not an excuse it's a reality that there is direct correlation just like there's direct correlation with language eol with special needs there's different categories of students with different needs gifted has different needs than general education so as we look at every student individually and what their needs are we're committed to making sure that those needs are met and that the resources are made available to them and it is an ongoing continuous process to find a better way and to do it for the benefit of the students so that they are on par with their peers when they cross that finish line that they have the same opportunities of success when they leave our district anybody else thank you very much for your time i appreciate it thank you next we move to information discussion item g2 information on the district's paper performance plan for eligible certificated staff 301 monies dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintellis cabinet and guests uh i'm going to go over the agenda item tonight with three separate areas so which employees first how they're evaluated for 301 and then how are they qualified or how it was decided so first the eligibility piece so all teachers including high school lead teachers and academic intervention specialists they are 301 eligible so all teachers high school lead teacher academic intervention or academic sorry intervention specialists they are paid out of 301 monies okay that's an important piece the following positions are also 301 eligible but they're paid out of 301 equivalent which is out of our m o money those positions are curriculum specialists which includes the cte curriculum specialist our dean of students ess specialists our high school guidance counselors our school data improvement specialists any teachers on special assignment we we may have which we currently do not have and teaching and learning specialists so our tls is the following positions are not eligible for 301 under our plan athletic trainers audiologists behavior coaches family outreach specialists federal project specialists nurses ots pts and slps behavior analysts social workers school counselor mental health support and school psychologists though that group is not eligible for 301 and that is governing board approved the last time you approved that was on june uh june 9 2021 um it gets approved every year it hasn't come to you yet in this form because if you remember last week uh we had to decide on which one of the three plans so i can't put it into the writing piece until we identified the plan so it is coming to you soon so those pieces are also note classified employees and administrators are not eligible for 301 monies in this district okay so that kind of solves which employees so i'll stop there and ask any questions before i go too much further any any questions on which employees can you repeat those lists i think number one was all the first people who received 301 is all teachers interventionists high school and high school lead teacher academic intervention specialists and all teachers that comes out of the 301 pool okay high school lead teachers okay um high school teachers and then can you go over that second list the the 301 equivalent sure curriculum specialists dean of students ess specialists guidance counselors for high school okay hold on guidance counselors high school okay school data improvement specialists and teaching and learning specialists we've also had listed on this list we don't have any but teacher on special assignment ptosis that are included on that list too okay thank you okay could we get this email to us later certainly and it will be coming up to you in a board meeting too this entire written packet i just couldn't do it before because we didn't know which one so i could do both if you would like thank you yes okay how are they evaluated so how are they evaluated pay for performance um all those people i mentioned that are eligible are evaluated the same way for 2122 school year which is paid in 2223 okay so we're dealing about the one that was for under this year there have student achievement at 30 percent and you may recall this from last week the festivities classifications at 40 percent school letter grades are at 10 percent and the fact hours and attendance was 20 percent all of those people are evaluated in those four areas for 301 money and is the same so student achievement and you either belong to a school or you do not belong to a school if you belong to a school as an employee you use the school data if you belong to a district for instance to the district there's an average a district average that's used okay so i and that's way making that way easy amy runs all that information and it's much more complicated than that effectiveness classifications are built on 65 percent on their evals 20 on student achievement and 15 percent on ccri school letter grades are pretty self-explanatory so again under the plan that the governing board approved it's abc dnf does not receive any money a gets a hundred percent or an increase from the prior year gets a hundred percent a b gets ninety and c gets eighty percent fact hours if you remember from last year is attendance so four or less days or 15 hours that they get on the campus that they have to volunteer for fact hours so everybody that i mentioned that's eligible for that is evaluated on those criteria so um our curriculum specialists are they evaluated do they get any value an employee evaluation yes okay and then our dean of students ess specialists all of these people the data improvement specialists they each have their own individual evaluations that is correct meaning a different format because that was one question they have different rubrics for their positions yes that is correct teacher evaluation is obviously a teacher evaluation on the format so the other ones that were mentioned they have a different format of evaluation they don't use a teacher rubric for jobs that they do they have a rubric that fits their position did that change recently no how many years would you say that's been the case since i've been here um maybe somebody can help me out that's been here a little bit longer but i've been here three years so that's been in place when i was here unless i'm unless i'm misunderstanding the question or unless we're talking about two different things i know that there were there were really some some staff in related services that were evaluated on the same rubric that teachers were evaluated on madam president i'm trying to make sure that i don't misunderstand the question as well i if we're talking about the evaluation system um or are we talking about how 301 determinations are evaluated well they're core related right or no there are there are components dr croto has outlined some of the components with 301 there are similar instruments that are used for evaluation with various positions off the top of my head i can't tell you exactly which ones are consistent but if the question is related to the evaluation of how it's determined which indicators qualify for 301 money i believe that's what i'm hearing is that correct or i just want to make sure that i understand the question question i see i see that's one piece of it but then in general that just when they were talking about evaluations i just want to clarify just evaluation in general are there it sounds like there's different evaluations for different positions rather than are there ever situations where non-teachers are evaluated based on a certificated teacher rubric i'll refer back to dr croto with the evaluation question specifically without going into the detail because i don't have that i can look specifically i know that each position has their own instrument so it's outlined as their own instrument whether the instrument models the teacher rubric i'd have to go back and get those that's okay we can just do a separate item for that that would make it easier go ahead sorry no no thank you that that was kind of what i was i was wondering too just to make sure that everyone was evaluated based on their own rubric and for their 301 money and not somebody else's so thank you that was that helps that question okay and then qualified the qualified portion of this there there's some history in this document and i'll email you and bring to the governing board so december 11 2001 started this journey with um with pay for performance and that's when the governing board the dysart governing board officially adopted the pay for performance goes all the way back to 2001.
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in 2007 and 8 that's when the dysart governing board [Music] talked about adding or i did add a committee of administrators and dea representatives to go over the plan each year and make modifications that is still in place today so that is from 2007 2008 um that's when that took place and and we have met in in my three years here we have met every year to discuss any changes the changes that you saw last week that came from the committee and brought to you for approval so that still is in place uh they're qualified to be paid under our arizona states on the statutes 15 977.
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that's what authorizes us to pay out of 301 monies the committee decides decided back some time probably 20 2007 2008 who were they're going to use the m o monies to pay the 301 equivalent and so that's how those pieces were decided and that's how they continue to be decided it's a discussion with the committee and obviously the governing board has final approval of that but the law clearly states who and who cannot be part of the 301 monies that is allocated for them so with that that's kind of the overview of the three pieces i will be glad to answer any questions or any clarification you need with that and hopefully i've answered your questions and not i'll be glad to research some more um yes this helps i think what i might do is just ask for a separate agenda item just based on the evaluation just to get a better understanding that way we have a better clear picture in our head for the evaluation piece but 301 money is very specific to who can receive and the state funds right that is correct we are just paying the 301 equivalent out of mno correct okay thank you i just wanted to make sure i understood those two any other questions thank you very much next we'll move to action discussion item h1 financial and compliance audit for the fiscal year ended june 30th 2021 dr callis thank you madam president members of the board of members of cabinet mr hicks will introduce this item good evening madam president members of the governing board superintendent dr kellis colleagues and community members it's my pleasure to introduce our presenters for this agenda item tonight um and i will appreciate uh dr croto earlier mentioned i know you guys didn't hear it he really did think the whole crowd was here for our audit presentation so i appreciate his enthusiasm for audit and finance um it was for the students we're okay with that we do understand that i first would like to thank our business and accounting team our student information team and everybody that does such an amazing job and all the additional people there's hundreds of people that actually participate in our audit and i'd especially like to thank miss francie wolfe bauman they do a great job of preparing training and supporting all aspects of the audit we know that accuracy counts and so do people we have some amazing people and so i will hand this off to our extremely talented director of finance ms marie del spidel and the brilliant miss uh jennifer shields the audit partner firm with heinfeld meech i will add one personal note i know it has been bantered around with people that are nerds and like this stuff i would ask that we do a voice voice vote at the end um to be covered by all statutes so the acceptance of this presentation please do it by voice and there you go madam president members of the board dr kellis members of cabinet thanks for allowing me the opportunity to go over the audit results and um there's a a few professional audit standards well more than a few if there's a lot of them but one of them in particular requires um two-way communication between the auditor and the district or the oddity in this case so that's what i've prepared for you so just real quickly as mr hicks mentioned we are your external auditors heinfeld meech and the district goes through a request for proposal process and last year for fiscal the fiscal 21 audit that was actually the first year of a potentially five-year contract that was awarded so that was our first year um you have the timeline of the audit up there so you can see that we start the audit usually in the spring time frame and then we wrapped up with the audit report of the financial statements back in november of 2021 and although we're already in april again you might wonder why you're just now hearing from us it's because the financial statement opinion was issued back in november but there are other related reports that get issued and so bringing all of the reports to you for one roll call vote is a little more um maybe palatable and time time efficient if you will so um with that these are the different audit reports that were issued there's the communication to governance which is what we'll cover tonight there's the annual comprehensive financial report single audit reporting package and then of course the uniform system of financial records compliance questionnaire so i'll go over the scope of the audit services quickly basically what we are contracted to do is to perform an audit in accordance with all of the auditing standards that are listed up on the screen as well as to complete the compliance questionnaire for the uniform system of financial records which is put out by the office of the auditor general so in terms of our responsibilities and the responsibilities of management just like to point out that the um the responsibility for fraud ultimately rests with the board and management for you know implementing controls to deter fraud detect fraud if it's to occur at the district so all of that remains your responsibility that is not our responsibility our responsibility is to design audit procedures such that if there is a material fraud that the audit procedures would detect anomalies and you know we would do other investigation accordingly our responsibilities in particular is to essentially opine on the financial statements so that's that's ultimately what we do is design tests so that we can look at those remembering that of course it is not a 100 you know of all transactions you know entered into by the district we definitely use sampling or else we would never leave because you process far more transactions than what we're able to look at in a cost-effective manner in terms of the financial statements you can see there's a few different estimates that are significant that affect the district the most notable ones being the usage of capital assets so things you recognize their expense over the life of the asset like a building you know vehicles equipment things like that then the district also has the employee benefit trust right that um where you cover your employees and their dependents health insurance and so there are claims that are associated with you know covering their um their medical medical expenses if you will so those are um there are estimates with respect to those and then of course um estimates with the actuarial assumptions that are related to the pension plan so those are the most significant things where there are not concrete numbers and we design additional tests and plans to deal with the estimates in the actual audit itself we are pleased to report that we did not have any audit adjustments that were required to be reported to you we do go through a process of proposing conversion journal entries that's part of the non-audit services that we provide which is the actual compilation of the financial statements itself from underlying accounting data here at the district um so those conversion entries are reviewed and approved by management prior to the issuance of the financial statements we also assist with the preparation of the what's called the cfa or the schedule of expenditures of federal awards and the related data collection form which those are what's required related to your federal audit other communications that are required include whether or not there were any disagreements between us as auditors and management of the district related to financial reporting or other um you know implementation of audit accounting standards rather there were none of those to report management did provide the required representations at the end of the audit and just as a note as your external independent auditors we are required to be independent of management and we go through a series of processes every year to ensure that not only myself but all of our team members that work on the audit are in fact independent and meet all of our relevant ethical requirements so in terms of the financial statements there's a few page numbers if you wanted it's um very big it's you know over like 150 pages so i put some highlighted page up there the only thing i'll point out is page 22 which is the independent auditor's report that's what i'm responsible for the district received what we call an unmodified opinion also known as a clean opinion which means that we did not have any material misstatements or anything that we noted through the audit so essentially the best that you can do with respect to the single audit reporting package page 10 includes what's the schedule of findings and question costs so as you know the district is a recipient of a lot of federal money in the fiscal 21 audit there was over 38 million dollars of federal dollars expended so the programs that we tested that were related to that 38 million dollars are those four programs that are listed up on the screen i feel like one of those is an error i don't think we looked at the child in adult food care program i apologize we looked at your coronavirus relief fund the education stabilization funds and special education there were no deficiencies or material weaknesses and internal controls that were required to be reported however there was one deficiency related to one of the federal programs that we tested and that was related to the special education program and it was a payroll item and then lastly the uniform system of financial records the compliance questionnaire so as i mentioned that's the compliance questionnaire that the auditor general's office puts out and it includes a lot of different areas and so as mr hicks mentions you know thank you to everybody involved in the audit this includes people that are out at your school sites as well um not just the finance office but you can see um that there's a few of the i think there's like 25 different areas that we look at um but we did have a few minor instances of non-compliance but nothing that rose to any significance and then just lastly um want to thank also from me management and staff for being incredibly helpful and during the audit it's no easy feat they have to take time out of their day like their daily duties in order to gather a lot of information and answer a lot of questions from my team so thank you to them and then also just as a heads up there's a very big accounting standard that's coming down for next fiscal year well the fiscal year that you're currently in but the next audit which um will significantly change um lease reporting so um you know ms spydell and mr hicks are probably very aware of what's coming but um there will be some differences in in just accounting standards that we apply and with that i will turn it over to ms spidel thank you ms shields so as ms shields mentioned um we'll review now the sections here with our instances of non-compliance so we have the uniform system of financial records and so if you're familiar with that it's about a 400 page manual that we are required to follow it outlines just the minimum internal controls that as a district we are required to have in place any policies procedures as well that we need to have in place as a school district in the areas of accounting here's just a few areas noted accounting financial reporting student attendance reporting et cetera so there's about 20 different compliance areas in that overall manual and so what the arizona auditor general then does is while we're required to follow all of those they extract certain requirements from that manual itself and they have then designed the usfr compliance questionnaire which is the document that the auditors then come in and review to what level and what degree of compliance we follow as a district and so the process over that test work is the auditors make selections in that usfr questionnaire document that you've been provided there's a sample size of how many transactions they reviewed any areas of non-compliance they may have noted and so overall they then rotate to different school sites on a different different years and or review departments uh transactions and so they use that data to determine our level of compliance so just a reminder materiality is not a consideration with this and so really ultimately they determine whether it's a yes or no answer based on their audited selections and their review upon our processes and our compliance so on this slide you'll see the different questions there is a total of 175 questions on that usfr questionnaire and out of those 175 we had five instances where it was a no answer but ultimately we had a 97.14 compliance rating as a school district and so um those areas we can review on the next few slides so this particular one was in the area of expenditures and one of the requirements in the usfr is to ensure that goods and services are received prior to making payment on those unfortunately when um when we did review this we noted that there had been a um a service that had been provided and so upon receiving a service that had not been provided prior to paying for those services and so it was of concern when we learned of it and so we wanted to be sure we addressed it quickly and so we worked with that department we ensured we received that refund from the vendor we worked with the arizona department of education to be sure we appropriately accounted for those records and that everything was in line with with them on their end and so ultimately as a district we did not end up overpaying for these services everything had been corrected and so we've again reviewed that doc that process as you see in this section here we um we note the corrective action that's been taken and then also we look to those previous five years just as a comparison to see is it a pervasive issue is it something that we have to address as a training issue was it a clerical issue it just generally helps us to identify what's the root cause of that and then really work with the various departments to identify how can we correct it moving forward so that's as it related to expenditures these next areas or items are related to student attendance reporting um and so as you know especially in student attendance reporting there's many transactions that touch many different um hands out at our school sites and so this is truly one of the most decentralized processes that we have where we have various registrars and attendance clerks and everyone who is ultimately handling these complex transactions and so while we do have a great student information system team that does do monthly trainings and reviews with their school sites do internal audits there are going to be potentially instances of non-compliance and that's what we noted on here and so um we did note that there were four different areas some of those you'll see have been repeat areas and so it's something we want to continue to focus on but we did um note that it was a complex year we kind of look back at this being fiscal year 2021 and we think back to where were we july 1st of 2020 which is when a lot of these items were gathered from that school year and truly that school year we started off with students doing remote learning and then they came back in person and then some may have continued to stay on an online learning platform we had staff that would have typically been performing these duties may have been out and so it was definitely a far more challenging year in an already complex environment but regardless we do still want to continue to focus on this we want to take a look at what these results are and then really hone in on those opportunities to continue training our staff and so i know our student information systems team has been working diligently on identifying what are these areas that we can continue to focus on and the final item was related to the special education cluster program it was a time and effort documentation that is requirement for federal programs that you maintain time and effort if a person spends 100 of their time on a program you complete a semi-annual report unfortunately in this particular instance this employee had ultimately ended up being 60 of their time so rather than a semi-annual it should have a monthly time and effort log and so we've addressed that and are working with our hr department to make sure anytime there's a change in that cost objective we're apprised of that to make sure we complete the appropriate time and effort documentation so those are the items oh right sure shut that off um so if you happen to answer any questions if you have any anyone have any questions i just want to say um great to see you again miss shields um and i know heinfeel and mich does a an awesome job and we're not the only district that has issues with attendance or as far as to find a district that has a hundred percent on attendance you're not going to find it you're just not going to but yes we continue with training each year just to make sure that things run smoothly and quite honestly miss spidel you're right it was a very wonky year and to actually try to get something with the attendance to even get close was going to be an interesting thing especially for students that they withdrew or they did not withdraw and they were still on the rolls and so yes i appreciate all the work that both of you have been doing thank you any other questions now overall a great job i mean to be 97 point something percent um is amazing um and i i wish the attendance wouldn't pop up all the time i know we always talk about that the attendance piece of it it seems we're pretty consistent of having um dings in our attendance area but um you know i know we're going to keep working on it definitely it is and it is effort i know mr hicks may alluded to that um as far as just it's it's a lot that's out there at every school site and so really to be a 97 percent it really speaks volumes to the work that really our school staff our department staff everyone that's out there touching all of these transactions ensures that things are appropriately recorded and so it is i think a testament just kind of want to get the kudos to everyone that's out there working daily to make sure these are accurate and so we get to present the information to you but really they're doing so much of this the volume of this work thank you so much appreciate it thank you okay um so per mr hick's request we'll go ahead and do a voice vote um i move that the governing board accept the financial audit and compliance questionnaire from heinfield meech and company certified public accounts for the fiscal year ended june 30th 2021.
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second question made by tracy sarah sinkbell seconded by don densmore i motion carries thank you next we move to action discussion item 2 recommendation to approve notice of reasonable assurance to substitute employees language for the 2022-2023 school year dr kalas thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet dr croto will introduce this item thank you dr kellis madam president members of the board superintendent kellis cabinet guests tonight i bring to you language for the the letters of reasonable assurance that we issue two substitute employees um and would like you to approve that language so we can issue them the substitute it's important to know the groups as substitute employees are hourly classified substitutes exempt classified substitutes and exempt administrative substitutes these are not substitute teachers they work for esi these are classified or administrative substitutes that come in and fill in for our schools so maybe a secretary is out and we need a secretary to cover our administrators out we have an administrator come in and cover so this language we issue to them it's not a contract binding but as language to tell them we would like them back we would like all the substitutes we can back and we need them back so we issue them this letter of insurance it's also been approved by our attorney um and present that to you and i'll take any questions any questions from the board nope i move the board approved the notice of reasonable assurance to substitute language for eligible substitute employees for the 2022-2023 school year second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by dawn dunsmore motion carries extreme action discussion three recommendation for authorization to issue notification of reasonable assurance to substitute employees for the 2022-2023 school year dr kalas thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet having just approved the language of the assurance reasonable assurance administration now requests permission to issue these issuances of notification any questions i'll entertain a motion i know to approve the issuance of notification of reasonable assurance to eligible substitute employees for the 2022-2023 school year second motion made by joe grant seconded by tracy searsingbell motion carries next we move to action discussion h4 recommendation to approve revisions to the 2021 2022 and 2022-2023 governing board meeting schedules and the 2022-2023 policy monitoring cycle dr kellis thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet at the last regular governing board meeting the board voted to approve revisions to the board meeting date to thursdays starting june 1st and as such the calendars that are presented to you for approval include starting this june with the board meeting occurring on june 9th thursday instead of june 8th there's also that completes this academic year and then the board is presented with an additional calendar for the next academic year 2022-2023 which moves all of the regularly scheduled board meetings to thursday there's also the request of the board that additional board meetings be added when possible and you can see the four additional board meetings have been added throughout the year um when possible you can see the the dates typically that are added coincide with fall break spring break or months that have five weeks and then on the last calendar that needs to be approved the board has previously approved the policy monitoring document which is a schedule of each board meeting when policies will be brought forward for monitoring those were previously scheduled for wednesdays and the dates have been changed to coincide with the recommended calendars that are presented for your approval thank you starting with the 2021-2022 calendar do we feel like there's still one meeting in june i i actually don't have a preference either way as far as if we add a second meeting in june other than the fact we do have five thursdays in june i know like i said when we get to the second calendar i i've said before i think a district this large we should not have just one meeting a month during the regular school year where obviously there's not as much going on in the summer i think that's an opportunity for the board to board an administration to do some work but that's just me i'm only one of five so i don't i don't i just want to throw that out there as far as if we want to use the summer months to add a second meeting date which would then have pertain to the 2021-2022 calendar with june 2022 does anybody have a preference either way i don't mind i'm sorry i don't mind having a second meeting in june of this year just depends on how everyone else feels about it well i guess in in years past when we've had june meetings and sometimes we've had a second june meeting that's because we possibly have needed something with the finance department as far as getting something approved do we have business that we need to work on for a second meeting in june in years past we haven't didn't we have to call a special meeting last year that was in july oh that was july and that's usually if like a five minute meeting well or is just again in regard to board development or study sessions or district planning things like that there may not be things to approve but just things to process and that's what i was thinking but like i said i'm fine either way whatever the majority of the board wants to do with that i we can always do what we've done in in other situations where if something's coming up or we find that there's a lot of requests for specific topics we can just schedule it as needed during the summer like whatever the board wants to do so i'm okay with one meeting in jail because then you have to revise the 23 calendar because there's only one meeting in june for that one as well well yeah we're gonna we have to look at that i'm just look starting with the 2021-2022 right now so okay i'm fine with either way i'm i'm also fine with just having one meeting in june and then if we need to we can always schedule another meeting yeah that sounds good okay and the 2022-2023 when i look at months like november oh let's do it again so i guess it's really well november and december i mean there would be room to move to like november of course i guess that would be back-to-back meetings maybe december 1st and 15th rather than just having one in december would be an option madam president yes i didn't know if louise was saying something so that little bird was whispering in my ear we've been advised previously by legal counsel that in order to be most transparent with our community that we be consistent with our meeting dates and when you switch around sometimes the community gets confused on what there's a board meeting or not so by sticking with either the first and third or the second and fourth it's very consistent if the board wishes to switch a month from the second fourth to the first and third obviously that can be done but just a little extra information for your consideration and to clarify i wouldn't oh there was no agenda involved in trying to be misleading or anything with community i i know like for myself i always check the calendar if there's a meeting i want to go to um and it would just be you know certainly i could understand the point if it were a boundary change meeting and then people count on it on a certain day and then we decide to do a boundary change meeting on an off day but if it's just to accommodate the business of the district during a month that is a holiday um that's the only thing i was thinking was just to make sure we have plenty of time to get the board's business done and the district's business done but certainly just as we do we can always add meetings which we've done in the past so it was just a discussion the only one i had um concerns with for the 2022-2023 school year is november 9th being switched to november 10th with veterans day being the following friday that might be cumbersome just to some people because that's a three-day weekend well i guess that should have been thought of last week before not last week last meeting before we actually voted to change from wednesdays to thursdays that's a perfect example of conflict in the november meeting in case people want to go out of town oh well it's it's a national holiday and um we're not well we are open but um but it's always on the 11th but it's not always on a thursday right but we've had other things before so i just know that we've changed calendars you know mid-year many times including for columbus day which was completely eliminated that's gone madam president i would add as well just on that specific day that ms densmore referenced varsity football games will be played on that thursday night and not friday [Laughter] not that that matters but just so that you're aware that important stuff now that that involves um a lot of people with band athletes cheerleaders palmies etc just for that one date right yeah i think we can't have it both ways unfortunately if dr scalise is saying we need to keep it consistent and if we change it off of a thursday then it's going to cause a problem in the community then we either mean it 100 or we don't mean it 100 and we'd switch it up but if we're going to switch up november then there's no harm in switching up other dates so i don't i don't care because i feel like if people want to you know if they're if they know that they're going to come to a board meeting they're going to check to make sure okay it's on the 10th or they're going to check the calendar and see when it is but i think that's kind of an unfair thing because when you look at october um we're doing the first thursday in october which is inconsistent with every other month right well we could say the same thing for november because of veterans day and thanksgiving we could switch that week and be inconsistent with what's expected of the community and make a notice so i i don't see an issue with the thursday just maybe moving the one date in november just my opinion which day are you recommending moving it to either the 3rd or 17th are you talking about moving the date or adding a date moving that's a heavy holiday month for people okay i'm just clarifying for myself because i feel like we threw out a couple of different ideas we threw out the idea of maybe having a second meeting having a meeting on the 3rd and the 17th possibly or are you just are we just talking about moving the meeting up on the 10th to a different week when i mentioned move adding having a second meeting like when i was looking at november and december i caught myself november if we move it up if we add two like we move it to the third and the 17th the third is basically the very next week after the previous meeting so yeah so i think if anything if there was going to be any movement for november it would make more sense to move it to the 17th agreed okay so we're just talking about moving pushing it back a week and not adding a second meeting is that right for november yeah just to clarify is if if there was going to be a switch in that in that month that's what i would think would make the most sense but you know does anybody have any other um i'm assuming nobody wants two meetings in december so i'm not even going to say that anybody else have any questions or comments about either the calendar or the policy monitoring cycle i just have a question for our wonderful and amazing administrative assistant to the governing board um i i just want to clarify when we did this back in february you secured the boardroom correct for all of our board meetings so now with changing the calendar we you have now had to move that reservation to the new thursdays so were groups because anybody can reserve the boardroom okay so were groups um did they reserve the boardroom on thursdays that is correct and there were several meetings that had to be moved okay i but i swapped them out and said here's your options so i gave them options because even though we have now moved it to thursdays um the board meetings take precedence in this room and so i just don't want anybody to look at the board um saying that they keep changing their minds on where to move stuff i mean we have other groups here and here that use this room not just us but board meetings yes they do take precedence i just don't want to be looked unfavorably in other departments eyes that's the one thing i just want is there ever a time when dr kellis or any other administrators have asked to move meeting dates or add to calendars and it's caused a problem okay i'll entertain a motion i moved to approve the revisions to the 2021 2020 20 2022 and 2022 2023 governing board meeting schedules and the 2022-2023 policy monitoring cycle as presented with the exception of november of two being moved to november 17th second motion made by don dunsmore seconded by christine pritchard motion carries next we move to action discussion five discussion and action to set a date for an executive session for the superintendent's year-end evaluation dr kalas thank you madam president members of the board and members of cabinet each year the board has the opportunity to provide an end-of-year evaluation for the superintendent it is proposed that this be achieved on the regularly scheduled board meeting on may 25th we'll be all done with graduation and the end of the year stuff hopefully and you won't be in town on the ninth is that right dr kellis that madam president that is correct does anyone um have any concern with the 25th okay then i move the governing board set an executive session for the superintendent's year-end evaluation on may 25th 2022. motion made by christine pritchard seconded by joe grant motion carries next we move for requests for future agenda items how many items to request i do um i would like a an information item regarding k-4 schools for their fourth grade promotions anyone else i would like to request an item on employee evaluations information and just to be clear because if mine matches what you're asking then i won't ask for a second one okay all right um i my question is is i i would just like information on how each classification um is evaluated with their rubrics each like uh employee group yes each employee group so like um an ess specialist what their evaluation looks like as opposed to a tls or a curriculum specialist so the differentiation of each evaluation and this might fit into it too but i know for me i was also thinking we know we have the teacher evaluation rubric but so instructional versus non-instructional that would be easier too yes anybody else all right next we have an executive session um call for an executive session pursuant to ars section 38-431.03 a3 and a4 for the purpose of receiving legal advice from and providing direction to the attorney for the public body regarding resolution of special education due process complaint captioned as 22c dp-026-ade pursuant to ars 38-431.03 a 3 and a 4 to receive legal advice from and provide direction to the attorney for the public body regarding the superintendent's contract of employment and pursuant to ars 38-431.03 a3 to get legal advice from the attorney for the public body regarding governing board policy 2.21 2.12 and contracting slash use of private counsel so i move that we adjourn for executive session to have a second second choker made by christian pritchard seconded by joe grant motion carries our joint executive moving to action discussion items continued uh k1 possible action to provide direction to the attorney for the public body as discussed in executive session i will move that the attorney act as directed in executive session second motion made by crystal chapman seconded by christine pritchard it doesn't want to go let's try that motion carries next we move to k2 approval of settlement agreement to resolve special education due process complaint filed as 22c dp-026-a-d-e dr kalas madam president this was discussed in executive session and is available for the board to vote on ask i moved to the board approve the settlement agreement to resolve a special education due process complaint filed as 22 c d and authorize the district's director of exceptional student services to execute any further documentation as necessary second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by don dunsmore motion carries can i change my vote on the first one am i allowed to do that no no i thought we were going in order so we're going on the order of the agenda we're moving to adjournment now i move the board adjourn the meeting second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by crystal schaffen i was trying to get in so fast no it's taking this time oh well i'm sorry so you're going to vote no on the other thing motion carries
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you have a what that is an app is that an amanita mushroom on your google all right you all i am going to call it into order it's 704 and uh this is the april 2022 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor in effect to social to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covert 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similar to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities which will be at the beginning and end of the meeting please call 1-888-788-0099 and meeting enter the meeting id which i'm going to say is i'm going to say those both again just to be sure it's the phone number is 888-788-0099 the meeting id is 989-2851-1637 the information is also published on the agenda in the public notice section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at www.a2gov.org watch w-a-t-c-h-c-t-n uh that introduction i will ask julie to read the land heritage statement certainly i acknowledge that the land of the city and our of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including ottawa ojibwe and botawami and wyandot peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807 knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals thank you julie and now would you read the roll call please commissioner needham people say things out loud right because i can't see you so absent okay uh commissioner dish here and commissioner graham i'm here and council member commissioner griswold here commissioner callaward here uh and i know chair brown is absent correct correct and vice chair mitchell president in ann arbor and commissioner vandenbrook here commissioner oriole i believe she will be absent had a message from her uh commissioner zhang also absent commissioner k randall you're in ann arbor commissioner marcin i'm here in ann arbor and commissioner gruber you're in ann arbor and commissioner nedrich and commissioner juno you're in ann arbor that's good i have no idea if that's a quorum i'm going to assume it is it is good we need we need at least eight yep thank you very much all right um so now i would like to um move to approve as for a motion to approve the agenda uh kathy griswald and second by chris graham um and i will now ask for a motion to approve our minutes from the march 24th meeting i think it was shannon gibrandall and a second reply commissioner juno thank you um all right so here we are we are um at a point for the public comment which isn't on the agenda that's a oh no i'm sorry we got the minutes we got yes here we are public comments um for a public comment that's nice um this is an opportunity for persons to speak for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter the meeting id of 989-2851-1637 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that have raised their hand one by one by using the last three digits of their phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you'll hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to applied area and mute any television or background noise so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments thank you julie do you have any other promise i do not see anybody having called in yeah okay well then um i think that we should move on and i'd love to hear um you as the next presenter on the sustainable energy utility well pleased to have you with us today absolutely and we'll close that okay so uh for those of you who don't know me i'm julie roth i'm senior energy analyst at the office of sustainability and innovations i was signed up to present the sdu to you this evening and uh galen is on the kitchen so i somehow got to do the whole thing which is like i said my first time doing this so thank you for bearing with me and um i'm going to go ahead and share my screen all right and we will [Music] there we go okay can you see my slides yes excellent we're good okay so i'm really excited to be here this evening um to uh be able to present uh the amber sustainability sustainable energy utility to you i want to provide a brief overview of what an scu is how it could operate in ann arbor and what our next steps are and there will be time for questions when we're done and i welcome them so um as a background i know many of you know this but for the public watching as well ann arbor has set an ambitious goal of achieving zero climate pollution by the year 2030.
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okay [Music] everyone and thank you for joining us for our board meeting this evening and um there has been adequate notice of this evening provided by the board of education january 13th 2022 with a co-star setting for the date time and place for this meeting similar notice has been posted in the town hall the brielle school website and the rural clerk has here right now to the republic is [Music] yes [Music] yes and so this evening we have um presentations we were going to have on the show [Music] and so now we have the brielle proposed budget for 2003. it's the first time ever a school teacher here brielle has been nominated by the chamber to be the brielle person of the year and last night this quarter their board meetings tonight so that we can celebrate her success over 100 people last night you know cheryl uh laughed and cried her family and friends were all there board members were there and it was just a really nice night uh to honor and um a well-deserving honor um here's a woman who came here in 1999 she talked for two years in great came here in 99 has done so many things we're going to have a special program for here i think i'd like to try to convince her to come to the next board meeting because she has done so much she was a student here she's worked here for 20 years she's done so much for a community community she's an emt they even mentioned the number of calls that she's [Music] call now i don't know how you do that so those of us who have interrupted sleep on a normal work night uh you know the next day you could feel groggy and what really um [Music] came to the um golf club and um welcomed her they all handed her a pink flower they were all dressed up like they were going to the prom and you know she was shocked that the kids came in and did that um mckenzie and miss vaughn uh did for her as they created a video for her and uh i went to their class today they sent special songs from her so it was a really nice night um sheldon hated today off because yesterday was a long day and so was last night and so i said don't worry i want to get you here because this school community wants to recognize it and so i know this board knows what a wonderful job cheryl has done and i want to recognize her again you know she's shy about things like that so uh tonight uh this is my 15th presentation on school and uh a little history on the school of legends show those of you who might recognize this there was a time that we presented a budget and then the community voted and sometimes some of those years were not so nice to us many years back i have board members still sitting on the board who remember a time where um we lost a lot of programs you know the budget was defeated we lost a lot of programs uh it was it was tough times and where we are today compared to where we are then is light years and even this budget um we joke and say pre-pandemic and the kind of staffing school districts have and where we are today kind of gets us caught up to the districts that were standing um so the kind of coaches and services that they have in the building so i think it's a great smart budget a lot of work went into this i can't do this without our board our committees our teachers administration and so um the other thing that people don't realize with the budget like real is a small district there's only one little elementary school and what they don't realize and if you don't realize this um our children that come to maxwell high school we pay as a community their tuition and that high school we collectively have close to 50 to 60 percent of the student population so most students at maxwell high school live in brielle or live there's a cost to that in a budget there's also a cost in transportation we have children sharing the board we have uh six children accepted to locational schools mechanical vocational schools five of which are top of the nation and so they're great schools here in mountain county vocational schools we pay for their transportation so all that's included in the budget so when people answer those questions i think information is powerful so i just want you to have that i want to thank our board of education for all their uh work uh here here serving our communities and doing what they know is the right thing and keeping children first and having the focus of what is best for our kids in the budget when we create a budget we look at what our district goals are our current conditions are built in what are some of the key issues that are pressing us in the classroom the budget is all about everybody that has input into ensuring that our children get the best education possible and so the support of the school administration's teachers instead his parents his pto our head foundation um our right to partner our police department everyone cares about the education of our children and what i did on the outside having communication with these stakeholders making decisions based on our needs working together to make sure our students are safe here in school and so some of the key financial issues that we have this year is uh special education students as i said that are attending other funds other places some of them go to private schools some of the public schools and plus their transportation our health care costs for our staff is nine percent this year the tax levy in new jersey is capped at two percent and this year the budget we are not going to go 2 we are below the 2 cap every year we've always gone to the capital madison high school tuition has gone up because their numbers are going down in high school and you understand their numbers go down the cost goes up so the increase to 76.93 is due to the fact that they're they're they're losing students and even in the elementary school the superintendents of the elementary schools that said to membership high school we met recently and we see the same thing happening um throughout the semi district that we're seeing enrollment you know going down it's expensive to live right here along the coast and so we're seeing that drop from home and so our budgetary initiatives are continuing to replace laptops provost it was our one-to-one initiative it's very important to us and so you know these technology equipment um doesn't last as long as you wish they would last because they are very costly we have fun we're going to be purchasing textbooks uh to improve our leadership program our math our social studies for aid our health curriculum pay and digital nursing continuing giving training to our teachers for um google training or getting their google certificate and continuing the training of integrating that technology in the classroom and ensuring that we are implementing a 21st century life and career readiness skills in our classrooms our goals are always to improve student achievement enhancing our school community partnerships and finally looking for funding opportunities and resources um our blazer academy which was started five years ago um and you've seen it but when it started five years ago it only started for moving into the first grade level it has now grown that we offer a place of happiness in the summer for children going into the first grade league uh this year six of our eighth graders have been accepted as i said to um vocational schools here in hong kong a lot of the schools i've said in top 10 new jersey um looking to always improve our literacy math technology social studies continuing to enhance our professional development teachers um i've always used this part of the board if we keep our teachers green and learning it's improving what's happening in the classroom and then you see those results of it for the students the students benefited as long as the teacher stays on the card a website enhancements you may have noticed that we did that this year almost continuing to improve our website we used to call it honeywell now it's called has been nothing but you know and that was on that whole cost was donated by our bef and our pto uh and i believe that was that no taxpayer dollars all the money raised by that and i think our son is probably one of the finest here on campus and uh continuing to have 21st century classroom upgrades in our classroom whether it's on flexible seating um technology that's in the room those are the things that we want to see this year's eighth grade class has 72 students okay so i'm not going to see sevens we are not going to see 72 students for a while unless i don't know you're just not going to say i haven't i just don't think we're going to see 72 students for a long while but you can see our numbers uh right now as low as 45 in the kindergarten and it's time for 64 uh a per year but in this community those are the class sizes people live here and they live here for many reasons but the number one reason is um each they move here because of the school it's you know one of the best schools up in new jersey our class sizes are reasonable our teacher instruction is second to none and so when you maintain class sizes like that um we're doing uh what we need to do for our kids the other thing that uh you need to know is that at almost every grade level we have a special education teacher working in a classroom with teachers so when those class sizes look like that sometimes you have children go to a resource room where you have two teachers working in a classroom and working in small groups we get a lot of information we have um so our student program participated for a while all our math classes are all double periods eight minutes long in greek and that matters um we have our reach program there allows an excellent challenges this year if you have 30 million children an outreach program when is something you do this year that you want to do next year do it once a day it's what i need and what we do is utilize our staff our interventionists um and other professionals and the class on the classroom teachers and we break our kids out into smaller groups so that they can get what they need so something enrichment some need basic skills some may be effective reinforcement until you break our place into smalling what this love is working on right now and what we will work on this summer our master schedule drives instruction it drives it it's the heartbeat of the school and what we want to look at is how we can increase our written instruction um every grade level that knows everything and so these are some of the wonderful things that we're doing to make sure that um uh professional development uh i believe you should know that in many districts this is the place where they come because you can't and sometimes they might just cut it back for a year for several years um we have a board of education that we need that our teachers need to be getting the most professional developments but it's not just going out for professional development we have relationships that we have professional consultants coming in with meeting with our teachers so it's not only through learning communities and that's teachers meetings with teachers on their second grade level and administration talking about best practices and sharing great ideas that they're using in their classroom team level grade level uh meetings that we do uh math teacher training with math teachers like arts teachers of the other parades technology workshops and training gcn is a web-based training program that teachers do online it's a very qualification program that they use back and it's an online training that's courses that teachers are required to take it's mainly in the united states new jersey and google for education so maintaining our school facility like you know the local cedar like look at this floor look at the building the condition of the building uh you know the one thing i hear and i sometimes i'm guilty that we take it for granted that we work in such a beautiful building but when you're in it every day you kind of think this is how everyone lives and this is what all schools look like um i assure you it's not even in some of your top performing schools i we have replacing desks painting classrooms that we have on a schedule so if you go into our classrooms you can see you know freshly painted rooms that even three years ago they still refreshed our floors you know our studios were here last week during the spring break our floors are cleaned up our building is just so clean and so we believe that a great facility keeping it clean maintaining our building everything is led lighting now teachers have um led lighting in their classrooms in our parking lot so it's just so important to us to keep our school looking fresh we predict what our future goals on one of the big effective services right now we do have some of these in our group and we know that at one point we're gonna have to replace our food you know so there's that like that the board talks about and so there's money in the budget uh moving forward so that we meet our strategic plan keeping this going a great place and not putting any additional costs on people's communities we still have hvac limits that need to be replaced and remembered ago always adding cameras to our building we've got excellent job cameras outside this building cameras inside the building yes there's a camera on this right now in several locations in this room but and our cameras are hooked up to our police department so um we're in a very very uh safe place because of that relationship our safety and security uh we have a sharing with a real um tap counsel and so we share the cost we have a food that's in our building every day from 7 30 in the morning until 3 30 in the afternoon um the cameras that i mentioned and all safety and security measures uh we have a constant dialogue with our police department to make sure that we're um keeping our building safe and that we have that communications [Music] um that 816 000.
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[Music] do [Music] you [Music] i would like to call this meeting of the eastern township board of education to order pursuant to the open public meetings act adequate public notice has been given by the secretary of the eastern township board of education in the following manner posting written notice on the official bulletin board at the board of education office emailing written notice to the burlington county times and the courier post filing written notice with the municipal clerk of eastern township may i have a roll call please mrs cappello here mrs everhart here mr fizzicaro mr canton here mrs noel here mr lancelotta here miss lee here mr megan here mrs ryan here we have a quorum okay at this time i will ask for a motion to go into executive session and a motion to approve items 2.1 through 2.4 whereas in njsa 10-4-12 allows for a public body to go into closed session during public meeting and whereas the board of education of eastern township has deemed it necessary to go into closed session to discuss certain matters which are exempted from the public and whereas the regular meeting of the board of of the board of education will reconvene following the end of the closed session at approximately 7 pm now therefore be it resolved that the board of education will go into session for the following reasons as outlined in njsa 10-4-12 items 2.2 through 2.4 do i have a motion i'll make the motion miss noel a second mr canthan thank you roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes commission carries thank you we'll see you at seven o'clock [Music] so [Music] so [Music] um [Music] so [Music] foreign [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] do [Music] so [Music] so [Music] do so do [Music] so [Music] resume the meeting of the eastern township board of education would you all please rise for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all at this time i'm going to ask board member trish everhart to read the mission statement thank you madam president the mission of the eshim township school district is to promote excellence in an environment that engages students in meaningful learning experiences in partnership with students dedicated staff families and community the district provides a strong educational foundation that will empower our students to achieve their unique potential embrace self-directed lifelong learning develop the skills necessary for appropriate risk-taking and responsible decision-making respect themselves and others problem-solve individually and collaboratively and become contributing members of a diverse global society thank you mrs everhart now we're going to go to public comment just in case anyone is not aware we have two public comments sections the first public comment section is for what is on the agenda and the second public comment which happens later in the evening is for anything that you wish to discuss the meeting will now be open to the public referencing agenda items only however if your questions pertain to student or personnel items or negotiations we ask that you see the superintendent after the meeting since we do not discuss these matters in public we ask that you you limit your comments to three minutes per person it's also crucial please for you to give us your name and address before you speak up and also limit your comments to one time per public comment section is there anyone who would like to speak on agenda items only please come to the microphone but this doesn't look like it's hello hello my name is kristen sinclair i'm the attorney for the child advocate coalition llc i've checked the website and i couldn't find the agenda my address is 89 christopher mill road medford new jersey but i assume that tonight you'll be discussing the new curriculum standards that have been put into place for 2022.
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[Music] and i'm pretty sure um 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 i first want to welcome everybody and just remind everybody that we are live streaming the board meeting tonight um so welcome also those who are joining us um via the web so the first thing on the agenda is that i want to ask if there's anyone here to speak on anything that is not on the agenda i didn't have anyone sign in i just want to make sure okay hearing none um we'll move on to consent agenda items a motion by earl do i have a second second by travis any discussion all of those in favor 500 debbie next we'll move on to community non-agenda items stronger together recognition yep we are ready so um tonight we're going to have some presentations by our fabulous coaches about what they're doing with mtss intervention in our buildings and also also what's been going on with pbl and stem in our district so we asked them here to do those presentations but strategically also we wanted to recognize them so we thought we'd get them here and they were captive audience and they would come and get their awards these are like our untrump heroes that never like to be like called out so we wanted to make sure that we did that while they were here tonight we really want to thank them for being the backbone to our district they have just done a fabulous job in all of our buildings and there's no job they haven't done they've been filling in they also work with kids and they really the reason why we're able to advance what's going on with our kids with interventions and mtss and make up that gap is because of this crew they're just phenomenal so i wanted to call them up and thank them for their help with all of our kids and staff so morgan like it's [Applause] thank you so much thank you and then if you will go around of course it's like it's like [Applause] tammy bates [Applause] thank you so much thank you congratulations karen field thank you so much melissa patterson [Applause] thank you congratulations [Applause] she's out of state she's out today and then last but not least our district coach who i've had the pleasure of seeing some of the things that she's put together truly phenomenal i'm so appreciative she's here helping us jen lehman [Applause] [Music] [Laughter] you never see me smile thank you congratulations so this presentation they actually um gave a version of for all of our new beginning teachers this year which is about 50 in number to help them understand our mtss system district-wide and they did such a phenomenal job with it that i asked if they'd recreate it and come here and share because i thought it was a great job of summarizing what we're currently doing with mtss to support kids in need throughout the district so amber and melissa were willing to stand up and do a presentation so i thank them so much for that actually do you want to see them do you want me to click yeah all right well thank you for having us here this evening um again we are talking about mtss and mtss is really something when we met with indiana university and working with udl and pbl we were looking at our district's strategic goals i think those are on the next slide and looking at our district our current strategic goals of keeping kids in school educating the whole child and improving the academic achievement and growth we realize that mtss is kind of the thread that holds all of that together and something that is at the core of what we as coaches do is that mtss platform and that process and we're using mtss to not only close that gap that we saw with covid but also to progress our students and make sure that they are ensuring their growth and their success and their enjoyment and love of learning in school so we have mtss stands for multi-tiered systems of support and we use this visual a lot with parents to help explain what this looks like and a visual representation so at the bottom of this triangle which is the bigger part this is our tier one instruction so all students receive tier one instruction um and the students who are just getting tier one are the least likely to need academic intervention but all of our students are getting this the coaches really support tier one instruction by going in and working with teachers on professional development and modeling lessons in their classrooms and really pushing and kind of observing and working with our teachers in tier two we work with students in small groups either supporting teachers in their classroom with intervention ideas or sometimes polling students who are lagging behind their peers they're just a little bit behind they need that extra push and that extra bump in that small group instruction then if you move on up we have tier three instruction and that's usually done by one of the coaches or one of our title one staff or an instructional paraprofessional and that is an intense individualized instruction these students are behind their peers usually one grade level or more and we provide a systematic structure of intervention to ensure the students growth all right so at the elementary level we and actually this is something that this particular flow chart is what we use throughout the corporation um but we will get into a little bit specifically what's elementary what's middle school what's high school so mtss i think i kind of talked about this a little bit whenever we did the zipio presentation so the top would be tier one so this this is any for any teacher or staff member who's looking at a student trying to figure out how can i best help the student and this is a really good way for them to ask themselves questions look at data and figure out where to go so they either are using some of the strategies that are linked on those light bulbs because that is a hyper a hyperdoc so they can actually click out and get strategies anything for tier one because you can still do interventions in tier one and then um if you have a student who's still falling behind we're gonna move them to tier two and i would like to point out that there's always a group of stakeholders making these decisions it's not just the teacher it's not just the code sure the admin we've got parents involved we've got our assistants involved there's just a whole group of us that meet i would say at least every four weeks about these kiddos so um always making those decisions as a team so then once we make those decisions if we have a student that needs to go to tier two then we talk about as a team what are the interventions we have available what does a student need and let's get them in the schedule so then down the line a few weeks later once we've collected some more data and that's another point that we figure out as a team what are we going to collect as data points then we come back they're either staying in tier two maybe they've cut up they've already closed those gaps we can put it back to tier one or we move them to tier three same thing when they get to tier three we can either bump them back to tier two if they need that or we can actually dismiss them or we may go to um sped testing so um but that's the flowchart that kind of guides us on those decisions one thing that was really interesting when we first presented to our new teachers i think we all did that individually at our buildings we talked about this at the beginning of the year to our new teachers and they kind of understood it they got the picture but then when we presented at the end of the year they were it was the feedback was incredible they were like i get it now i see the big picture when you're a new teacher coming in you might get those processes and know what you're doing but until they've lived it until they've put kids through those processes see how it works um it was really interesting on that feedback and it was nice to know that it is working and they see that the teachers understand that this process does work so this is a form that the coaches will receive if a teacher is needing help with a particular student this is sort of our call to action so we'll schedule a data meeting we'll contact parents um sometimes the parents prefer us to just inform them over the phone sometimes they'll want to come in and be a part of that um but always everyone's invited and this is the request for assistance so this is when the teacher kind of fills in these are the things i've been doing already um this is what the student's struggling with this is the contacts that i've made with parents already and so we kind of have that to start off with once we receive that then we move on to more processes so this is a tier 2 form so this is where as a team we talk about what is billy's goal and what are we going to track for that so the data point on this particular example are his spelling tests so we track those we always set those goals we list the interventions and then we come back together and we talk about the changes we always make notes on them but that's a great way for if we ever do have to move toward some type of testing we've got tons of data and we've got tons of narratives that we can go back and look at to see what all we've done with this kiddo and one thing to add with this is this is an area where students can take ownership a lot of our teachers will talk about their data and especially in tier two for those kids that need just that little bit of a boost with their students so the students can kind of monitor their own goals and they have feedback that's pretty instantaneous about how they're doing yeah okay yeah that's fine okay so then if we move on to tier three um we have this form that we fill out um and it's sort of a continuing document we we are constantly updating it on the bottom you can't really see that on here but we update all the data we can we track their attendance we check their grades we track their assessment scores um their reading levels and always are making notes every time we meet this is what we've talked about we're going to change this intervention and again i just want to emphasize parents are always one of the most well the most important part of that group of stakeholders so we always are encouraging them to to be involved in that decision making so one of the important things that when we're looking at mtss not only at the elementary level we want to make sure that that flow is streamlined to the middle school and into the high school because we want to ensure that our students are not only set up for success at the elementary level but when we graduate them from sixth grade that you know rug isn't kind of just left underneath of them so we wanted to look at what does it look like at the middle school and i know karen presented last time but just to reiterate in tier one they do their subject area core instruction again with all students they also their teachers support students who are struggling with individual assignments and then karen showed you some really good data with their data tracker last time then in tier 2 and tier 3 they have math language arts as well as other subject areas they have that referral form just like elementary a student can attend the remediation room teachers fill out their skills assignments and they're constantly tracked for what skills need to be addressed whether it's in a small group or one-on-one so very similar very consistent process with what we're doing at the elementary level they also track you know their students that show the lack of process and progress and they offer extra things that they can do with them they also have the impact room which is another level of that tier 2 and tier 3 support so then from the middle school up to the high school they also have mtss that they can support there again tier one everyone is getting that core instruction and i personally know with having two students at the high school currently how much of time that they offer for kids to come in who need support before school after school during their lunch so i appreciate that as a parent one of the things that is is really pressed on their teachers if a student is struggling after you have offered support to get into contact with their counselor their counselor is kind of their go-to person to figure out where they need to go in the next steps of that process so this has listed some of their tier two and tier three opportunities they have incorporated the srt time different labs the counselors do check in pride time i know my my personal students have used that quite a bit they talk about i'll get that caught up during time the students are encouraged again to check their grades and meet with their teachers they have different labs that they do some alternative ed and they also have the credit recovery and impact program as well at the high school any questions [Applause] so next up we have a brief walkthrough of a new stem pbl website and this is going on our district website in fact it's already there um jyn's gonna share that out i'd like to kind of give a little bit of background this year our staff have been so committed and working so hard to move forward engaging classroom strategies and they're doing that through stem and pbl and hands-on activities remember we had a grant from the state for seventy five thousand dollars for stem acceleration and that has helped fund a lot of that as well as some of our s r funding the goals that this year we've been working on to give you a brief update was to get foundational stem and pbl training for all of our certified staff by the end of the year and i'm excited to say that we're going to have that completed by the end of this school year and then be we have a process in place to catch up new teachers who come to us in the fall that was through staff dedication and jen's hard work and a partnership with five star we had a goal to have stem labs in all eight schools by the end of the school year the middle school has built out a fantastic space i hope to have them come and present share some of the things that they're doing all six elementaries have their stem area and they have equitable products and all of those like 3d lab printers and the high schools in the process of researching and designing their space to match their new grad pathways so hoping to get that in place for next year for them and then all of the schools have been working to evaluate their stems certification readiness and how they feel about stem certification which is a big deal in the state of indiana so they've been working on that all year long and currently they will take a survey in may and we have how all of our everyone felt and what they knew about stem and pbl in september and then we'll have may data so we're able to compare where we've moved along and what we still want to work on and then finally adding engineering design challenging to the elementary and all of our elementary classrooms k-6 this year did a state vet state vetted curriculum called eie engineering is elementary within the classroom and uh covered all the engineering standards this year so a lot of big lofty goals and a lot of progress made that's due completely to the hard work of our staff in our classrooms being willing to try some new and innovative approaches to engage our kids so on our stem district committee we have representatives from the schools parents community members one of the things they mentioned that was eye-opening to jen and i when we heard it was that's fantastic that's fantastic i wish we knew more about that i wish that was shared out more i wish everyone was aware and so the response to that was an idea to create a stem pbl focused website for the district so that's what this is but we have a direct link to it on our main jcsc.org webpage and to start out we did an all call to teachers and we we were just trying to hope we get like two people weren't we that would send us pictures of kids said would you please send us pictures of pbl and stem projects in the classroom and we had over 50 teachers respond with pictures of um lessons and things going on so there's a prize yes we did prizes never hurt anyone so those are embedded throughout and at that point i'm going to kind of hush and let jen share all of the stuff that is going on for stem and pbl in jennings county some pretty exciting things so the original thought of the website was just for staff only we originally thought let's get everything together so that we have staff we have information here and as we created it and it just kept evolving we realized this has information that our parents could use to this um really kind of gives the picture of everything that we're doing and it's still a work in progress um so we're still adding to it but we have our homepage here but our um we divided it up into elementary and secondary so on the elementary page this is um it does take a little bit to load when it's we have carousels that go all the way down of like 20 pictures in each photo carousel of our adorable elementary kids doing all kinds of different stem projects so the first page is just um just a celebration of all the cool things that were happening in our classrooms so um then we have the curriculum that our our teachers have been doing this year or have the opportunity to do next year one of the new things that we've been introducing this year that's optional is picture perfect stem and so putting all of this in one place so i presented in all of the buildings but one and that one didn't have to be rescheduled and so the teachers have had this information presented to them by me but we also wanted to put it here so that if we had a new teacher if we had someone that was absent when i presented everything that they would need for contributing stem this year we have this program was written by two elementary teachers from the cincinnati area three of us actually did training with them for four weeks in february and march and so there's a video explaining what it is there's actually a 30 minute webinar and then um there's a standards alignment here and a link out to a tablet and then this is the lessons i chose a lesson with help from input from teachers at every building at the grade levels and we purchased the supplies and the books for them all to teach a lesson and made it completely optional but the teachers have absolutely loved it um they have jumped on this they've been sending me videos pictures they have um we just had a third grade teacher this week take the third grade line and just ran with it and has amazing um how would you call it like a slideshow to go with it it's just fabulous um but i linked in for them their supplies what they have and again we've told them it's completely optional this is another tool in your toolbox so um and they love it and they can they can especially tell it was written by teachers for them um one of the things that came to light in one of the many meetings that we have with um the leadership teams in each building on the stem team is that um our stem what was happening in our stem lab maybe wasn't so transparent to the teachers and it wasn't on purpose we just maybe weren't sharing as well as we thought we were what they were doing there so the idea came that we would just actually post the curriculum for them and it's actually been shared with the principals already and the curriculum committee and the stem lab contacts but we're posting the curriculum here and so this just links right out to what they're going to be doing already for next year for the whole year and even the lesson plans that i created for the lab leaders are actually linked in there so you could link look at that click on the link and see exactly what lesson the lab leaders are going to be teaching and then one of the curriculums that we use in the stem lab is curiosity machine from technovation so there's information on that as well that can be clipped out then as nicki mentioned we had this big lofty goal this year and our teachers did it and they did it well and it maybe was not painless but a lot was definitely learned from it i think our teachers grew we all did we learned from it so um engineering standards are probably the most difficult to teach when we're talking about stem you know the s the t the m those things can be easily incorporated into your lessons but it's a little bit harder to figure out how am i going to teach the engineering part this curriculum covered those engineering and process standards for every grade level every standard so that's why it was so good um but the tutorial videos that we went through why we chose eie um the design process posters that i made them and even a link out to the educator resources all that is in one place coding we use code.org at the elementary level so we have the standards the indiana standard alignment that takes the computer science standards and crosswalks them to come.org we have the um this is a tutorial that i made for teachers on how to access lesson plans on code.org we have the course descriptions and then this is for next year i've already put in and i have um downloaded and then uploaded all of their course lessons their handouts and then we walked through how long it would take them to how many lessons and how many hours did it take them to teach those standards in their classroom and so that's all linked here for the teachers to access and then the final thing that elementary has is our science curriculum science fusion um many teachers maybe were not aware that it had stem lessons built into it and so this is an example of a fourth grade stem lesson that's built in and then we also had tutorials put in here that we had done when we first had this when we adopted this and so it has information on how to access the online teachers edition how to access the read-aloud all of that information is there for teachers in one place then the secondary tab we have the same thing as the elementary we have the first page has photo carousels and we have uh this is a video that they have for their mouse trap race cars we have project lead the way has their own page for the middle school and the high school there's information that links out to that page and then also each one of these links out to the courses that are offered at the schools so we have two courses offered at the middle school and then the courses that are offered at the high school is here and then the website for project lead the way is embedded black cat racing has its own page and i reached out to these um teachers and asked them if they could give me a blurb send me information and so it's still a work in progress we still have information stuff coming in and then um they have a robotics class at the high school and um she was very adamant she sent me a video and she was very adamant that i label her pictures so everyone would know what they are and so we have that the um graduation pathways this is a presentation that um i can't remember any good stuff stephanie did and so we just linked in her slideshow but we've asked them if one of them would mind um doing a video of a screencast and walking through with their voice and i just talked to them about that this week and they agreed to do that so we'll update that when they have and then tevin um for the culinary arts he gave me a blurb but he really wanted his new pictures on there so they're coming to put the new pictures and a project that they're doing then we have two more main pages um that link out we have our employability skills which um we have these posters that are printable we actually have the actual posters which are really nice and really big and we're going to give them we have 450 we have enough to give every staff member these posters next year and then we um put in their grade level standards their standard bands for the employability skills and then finally we have a page for our community partnerships which that is continually being updated as this website is being shared with teachers i just got uh received an email last night from a teacher that said um we have this we have this community partner at our school can you add them and i'll make sure can you send me the logo so i think we will up as we get more we'll update them but as more of our teachers become aware they'll give us more information so um yeah so it's going live to our teachers through teachers readings and stuff starting this week and kind of excited yeah that's it these are the things we've been collecting all year long and you can see that jim's phenomenal putting together a website and collecting that all into one place if any community member would like to see that our parents if they go to our main website you click on the left hand main page the word stem and the link to this website is right there and available so many thanks to all the teachers whose work went into this to jen for presenting it making the website and we're really excited about what's happening with stem and pbl in jennings county schools [Applause] see heroes thank you thanks ladies so i know that that's a lot of work and um so i would just challenge anybody who's in the room or anybody who's listening online or watching online um that you go to our website our jennings county school corporation website and share the link for this we need to be bragging and sharing all the great things that our schools are doing and what's happening in our community we don't do that nearly enough so i challenge you to do that i challenge all the school board members to do that um old business under programs bringing for approval student handbooks for elementary middle school and high school for the 22-23 school year asking for approval motion by travis do i have a second second second by pat is there any discussion no all those in favor next under professional staff yes bringing josh land to add an extended year on the current supplemental contract to extend through 22-23 and christy sigler also extend a co-chair for 22-23 asking for approval motion motion by earl do we have a second second by susan any discussion all those in favor of new business right so i have several policies i'm bringing to you as a first reason so if there's any questions comments that you might need prior to the second reading just let me know okay so this is first reading so no vote tonight make sure you review those um and then down under programs yeah so uh curtis and livers is our uh special education database that we use to do our tor lists um and also check some of the state reports that we're putting in through data exchange there were a few errors so so it's really important that we have our backup database as well so asking permission to continue using um the coder program for special education so mentioned by pat do we have a second second travis any discussion all those in favor um under professional staff recommendations yes i'd like to recommend kristin yawn for the graham creek elementary sped teaching position for next school year recommending tim poor be named as the director of transportation for this year and there is a typo there it should be 65 000 as his as his um salary and then recommending catherine rappa for the sand creek elementary teacher position asking for approval on those positions do we have a motion with that one correction motion by susan do we have a second second by earl any discussion all those in favor um then down under support staff recommendations yes recommending cara allen move from a floater cook position to a full-time cook position at the high school jerry blyton will be medical support for our golf and track participants as needed faith heath is going to be a tech intern for the summer abigail kincaid will be a cna in the classroom at jennings county high school carmen kapiski is going to be a tech intern for the summer ian sawyer will be a tech intern for the summer brady shepherd will be a tech intern for the summer james bailey smith is a new tech for jennings county schools and gabe wilson would like to be a volunteer wrestling coach asking for approval do we have a motion motion by susan is there a second second path um any discussion did uh did she read the name kane the cook i didn't that was struck through that structure thank you um and then the only other discussion i have is it looks like maybe there was an autocorrect should be cna institute yeah so just make sure that that's corrected in the day for the minutes yeah um any additional discussion all those in favor 50.
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to understand how to achieve that goal it's important to understand where our climate pollution comes from locally 40 percent of our community-wide pollution or greenhouse gas emissions come from building electricity use and nearly two-thirds come from building electricity use plus natural gas that we use to heat and cool our buildings so that's two-thirds of our emissions coming from our buildings electricity and gas given this reality we know that solutions to reducing local climate pollution necessitate finding pathways to clean our electricity grid and support the transition away from fossil gas that we use to heat and cool to clean electricity this is a big task see here we go sorry about that okay so here is um dte's fuel mix right now um in 2020 and you can see that we're still heavily reliant on coal with dte um we have some nuclear power and a bunch of gas and an seu a potential seu if we are electrifying a good portion of our grid with solar could substantially change that grid mix so as we look for ways to improve the reliability and energy mix of our energy supply it's important to understand the landscape in michigan ann arbor has what is known as a pre-foot act franchise which means that dte has the right in perpetuity to provide power to the city um if you want to know more about the foot act i know a lot about it and why we ended up this way but this is where we are we have a uh in perpetuity um contract with dte but um foot act franchise franchises which we are are not exclusive and the michigan constitution does protect the right of cities and villages to create their own municipal utility and this can be done in one of two ways either you can via a taking which is a legal term which is a condemnation and buyout of an incumbent utility and they're all their infrastructure or via the creation of a supplemental utility and to date every community that has started their own municipal utility within michigan with the last one being zealand which was originally formed in 1902 did so by starting utility from scratch when service was not widespread like it is now and you can imagine why standing up a full set of poles and wires to directly compete with current polls and wires owned by the incumbent utility is expensive as is buying out their infrastructure through condemnation which means you acquire infrastructure that is often in poor condition which is what we have now um but what if we created a complementary community owned energy utility that provides electricity from local solar and battery storage systems installed on homes and businesses in our community what if that community owned utility provided 100 clean reliable locally built and affordable electricity built right here in our community this utility would give residents a choice for where they procure their energy a choice that we can't have today we don't have today and this parallel utility would not duplicate the traditional grid with all of its vulnerabilities but instead of focusing on long-distance um uh long-distance um trend uh what is the word i'm looking for transmission thank you to uh of power from distant power plants this utility would focus on local generation here in our footprint generating clean reliable and affordable power right now so this is what the city of ann arbor is looking to do by the creation of a sustainable energy utility as envisioned an seu would focus first on generating local clean energy energy that would feed directly into our homes and our businesses and our places of worship and community centers this clean energy would be paired with storage to help improve energy reliability and offered in conjunction with deep energy waste reduction programs that help our residents lower their energy cost and their energy usage all while improving the comfort of their homes the concept of an seu is grounded in choice providing ann arbor it's another way to procure a large portion of their energy one that's coming from clean local reliable and resilient sources the seo would enable a lot more people to get the benefit of solar by directly paying for installation on residential and business roofs carports and via ground mounted systems residents wouldn't be the owner of that solar system the public or the seo would own it residents would subscribe to purchase their energy at a rate that is based on costs and seu operational needs from the system on their or their neighbor's roof if all the residents power needs are met the excess generation from the solar system on their property flows into a battery system this means that residents could still have power if the big traditional grid goes down this is already possible today additionally the seo would not be limited by current utility restrictions that constrain the solar system sizes and the amount of solar allowed on the grid for example the one percent cap that we're getting very very close to hitting instead the se would seek to maximize solar installations leveraging all viable sunny roof space over time individual solar systems would be connected through a series of micro grant not dte's big grid the scu could also offer a series of robust energy waste reduction programs helping people lower energy demand and improve comfort these services will be available to anyone that participates in the seu kind of like current energy waste reduction offerings are available through our incumbent utility however we could offer a slew of additional opt-in services that individuals can use to improve comfort reduce bills and save energy these additional offerings can be financed through on-bill finance through on-bill finance the seo is able to pay the upfront cost of improvements for you such as energy efficiency or electrification upgrades and then the residents pay back the costs through their utility bills this allows the costs of the improvements to stay with the home as opposed to the resident and helps reduce the initial upfront cost needed to make these improvements this makes these types of investments much more accessible to all residents especially low-income individuals and renters individuals historically omitted from most utility programs the seo will also provide support for beneficial electrification ensuring we have safer more comfortable and cleaner homes and businesses and eventually offer community solar programs so that individuals without viable solar access can still reap the benefits of clean energy i know that was a lot to digest but let me reiterate the core of an scu an seu is a community owned utility that focuses on generating local clean reliable energy fast it's about leveraging existing technologies and practices such as solar and storage to reduce emissions quickly while improving reliability it's about ensuring that all anarborites have access to solutions to improve comfort reduce bills and reap the benefits the clean energy economy the seu as i mentioned before is about generating locally owned reliable clean affordable energy because we are generating it locally we don't need a large and vulnerable distribution network this also means we don't have to worry about buying a lot of poles and wires or about extreme weather events knocking the seu supplied power out instead we can focus on generating clean reliable local energy fast and reducing climate pollution rapidly so to close out i'd like to share a few examples of how the scu would work this isn't meant to be all inclusive but some examples for how some of the concepts that we've discussed could work in practice so let's start with the example of a homeowner or business owner who has good solar potential but doesn't have the capital or ability to install solar on their roof on their own in this case the individual would subscribe or enroll in the seo as a supplemental utility to dte the seo would work with that homeowner to conduct a needs assessment identifying potential energy waste reduction and electrification opportunities selected opportunities would be implemented and the homeowner would have the option of financing those through the seu's on bill finance program the se would strive to create a financing package where the electric bill is the same or ideally less than what is currently paid once those are paid off the residence reaps the full benefit of the improvements concurrent with the above the seo installs solar on their roof the resident pays their energy bill as they always have paying per kilowatt hour of usage generated from the on-site solar system any additional power they draw from dte is paid directly to dte in this way the resident has two bills the seu bill for the energy energy generated from the on-site solar system and then to dte for power drawn from the grid in this example a resident or business is interested in energy waste reduction and beneficial electrification offerings but cannot install solar perhaps because of beautiful trees that block solar excess or 50 000 dormers on their roof in this case the individual would receive an on-site assessment to identify energy waste reduction and beneficial electrification opportunities the individual would choose which options to move forward with and would have the option of financing them through the seo's on bill financing mechanism the individual could also register to to join the micro or nano grid thereby sharing power with residents that have better solar potential on their roofs once a critical number of neighbors sign up for the seu this individual would receive two energy bills one for the portion of improvements financed via on bill finance through the seu and the other one for the energy that they pull from dte third example is a resident who already owns their own solar on their home or business in this case the resident could still take advantage of all the energy waste reduction and beneficial electrification support offered through the sdu and leverage on bill financing to pay for those improvements like everybody else this resident could also enroll for an seu owned battery if they don't currently have one the resident can also enroll in the seo and sell their excess power to the sau so that it can be distributed through the local micro and nano grids are shared with their neighbors the rates for energy being sold to the seu still need to be determined but the intent is to get as close to net metering as possible in this way the resident is helping to provide power to the seo and to their neighbors fourth example is for a multi-family rental in this case the seo would work closely with landlords or property owners and tenants to customize solutions that meet individual needs rental units are eligible for all seu offerings energy waste reduction solar and storage installation beneficial electrification and eventually being tied to the local microgrid the city's work on green leases paired with on-bill financing tools offered through the seo help ensure the cost of the improvements again stay with the building and allow the cost of improvements to be spread over a longer period of time offering the opportunity for immediate health safety and comfort improvements at reasonable costs final example is of community solar in some cases individuals will not have access to on-site renewable energy generation in these cases off-site solar will be installed in common areas like parking lots or school rooftops or parks or other shared places individuals can subscribe to take a portion of this energy to help power their life and business in this way anyone in the community can participate in scu even if they don't own their own home or don't have viable solar potential on site individuals that subscribe to the community solar offering they kill pay per kilowatt hour of usage directly to the seo and pay dte for any power that they use from that utility these are just a few examples of how the proposed seou would work and to find out more we have a website at a2gov.org a2scu if you are interested in seeing the city move forward with an seu please register your interest by taking there's a short five question survey um located at that website and if you have any additional questions after this evening about the scu we are answering them every single day and you can send them into sustainability a2gov.org thank you for letting me share a little bit about the proposed ann arbor seu a clean reliable locally built and affordable way to power our community and that's what i got thanks julie i see a question from chris vandenbrook well that's just a wonderful presentation and i just love it um the whole concept i love but of course there's always some questions right so the seu would help finance the installation of solar panels and so on where does that money come from is this involving a new tax or how do we it sounds like this is going to be expensive um where where where's that come from and how close are you to realizing this financial structure great great question commissioner um so obviously this is going to require upfront costs to any any utility infrastructure would require upfront cost eventually the seo pays for itself just like any utility rate payers pay rates and that funds the operations of the utility but we need upfront costs to start so where that would come from we're actively pursuing the possibility of big doe funding because it fits very well into some of the very large infrastructure funding that's coming out of the biden administration um but it's probably going to be stacked funding right we're going to look at maybe we are bonding we are going to look at all you know any amount of grant funding that we can get at state or federal levels we have the climate millage coming up in november which could help fund some of the upfront costs of the infrastructure um and philanthropic funds so you name it um we're gonna and then one of the nice things about the seo is that if we have a small amount of funding we can start small and do a few neighborhoods right and if we have a large amount of funding to start up then we can go big and fast so great question thank you um shannon i've got two questions one is that um we put solar on our house and we're very disappointed to see that um we only get 65 cents on the dollar when we um our excess goes back to dte and if we had done it a year before it would have been 100 so like wow we missed that boat so i know you haven't set the rate but do you anticipate that it would be higher than what it is for dte which just seems kind of crazy to me so i'm just wondering if you that's a great question yeah great question commissioner i am in the exact same boat as you i missed out on true net metering so dte used to reimburse solar in a structure called net metering and what that meant was that when you have excess generation on your roof that that you're not using at that moment it has to go somewhere and where it goes is out into the grid and dte used to pay you full retail price for that because it was just flowing over to your neighbor who used it and they were charging them full retail for it so it was a one to one but they successfully lobbied and changed that and now are paying something like half of retail rate for what you generate and then your neighbor pays them the full rate um and i understand having to pay something for use of the grid i think that makes sense but it was a pretty dramatic drop in um in the reimbursement for your what you've um invested in on your roof so yes the idea and we're we have to work on rates and part of working on what our rates would be and rate design would would be how many people are interested in joining because obviously there are um uh you know the larger scale is going to push rates down right so um the office is working on that but the hope is that it's closer to net metering that it's it's certainly what dte would pay but hopefully decidedly better than what dte pays and we just have to kind of look at it and see happily you know on the one hand we have to invest in infrastructure on the other hand we don't have to um make investors money because we would not be an investor owned utility we would be a government a municipal utility great question yeah that's helpful um the other thing is that um i'm sure that other commissioners have heard about this whole idea of municipalization too with energy and um i'm just wondering if from your perspective you could give us a kind of pity list of pros and cons between those two different approaches yeah fantastic question so um what shannon's talking about is that so the office of sustainability has proposed this um sustainable energy utility which is a parallel utility to dtes as a way to meet our um very aggressive and fast carbon neutrality goals in the city um and at the same time that we were kind of coming up with this and and investigating these possibilities there was um a group in the public that was very committed and interested in full municipalization a takeover of dte's infrastructure so those are the two it can get kind of confusing because we're talking about two utilities uh one which would be a full takeover of dte's current infrastructure that we would just then own and one is this parallel or supplemental utility that we're proposing so there are definite pros and cons to both um i would say that one of the biggest pros to full municipalization is that um that you know you own it and you don't have to have um for some people not having dte uh provide energy anymore and we'd be able to make all of the decisions about all of our energy um is definitely a positive and the seu means that we are still we have the seu as our primary eventually utility and dte continues to provide supplemental power um so that's a pro of full municipalization we know that municipal utilities full municipal utilities that it currently exists do better than investor-owned utilities we know that they tend to be more affordable they tend to have less downtime when grid grids go out they come up more quickly because they're owned by the public and they don't have investors that that's not their primary goal is to their primary goal is to provide electricity there are downsides to trying to fully municipalize which involve according to the experts that we've talked to a very lengthy process of acquisition that likely involves up to 10 years battling it out in courts um in regards to essentially we have this legal right according to our constitution to do this but we also have to pay for it and what we think it's worth and what gte thinks it's worth are probably pretty far apart in addition we're not just buying their infrastructure we're buying their monopoly whatever that is worth we're buying their stranded assets we're buying um we're you know we're buying a lot and if we're successful which we're not always some some there's nobody that's done this in the last hundred years in michigan there are states like in florida there was a community that did this successfully and we've all heard about boulder who did it who has was not successful in municipalizing after 10 years of trying to trying to do it battle it out so even if we were successful then we've missed our goals because it's after 2030 most likely and we haven't even started to decarbonize now we just own what we have which is exactly the infrastructure that we see and now we have to modernize it we have to um update it we have to do load management we have to figure out how to decarbonize and shut down coal plants we have to do all the things that we're now just starting to do and because the office of sustainability has been tasked with carbon neutrality by 2030 by our city council that was there you know they declared a climate emergency this is what they told us to do we don't think full that going that route is gonna get us there um because it's too slow and it's very expensive um so i think there's other pros and cons but oh and i guess the other pro of the seo in this respect is its resilience it's a redundancy right um so now when the grid goes down the grid goes down there's nothing you can do about it and if we own the grid the grid goes down the grid goes down and we still have to it's the same thing whereas the seo i think of it really as sort of like the grid of the future where you have little micro grids and you don't have these big huge long transmission um poles and wires so that if the big grid goes down your microgrid can continue to support you there are going to be battery storage um associated with all of the solar that we that we install does that make sense yeah that's great thank you yeah thanks for the question um commissioner colivort just the question builds right off with us we were talking about with resiliency so i wonder if you could speak to that a little bit more particularly between the seu and the mini municipalization as i'm looking at the website with the graphics here it looks like it's a redundant system i think i hear you describing that as in a positive way but would the municipal system also carry that same redundancy and as anybody looked at kind of the efficiency of that approach you mean let me make sure i understand your question are you saying are you asking if we fully municipalize would that redundancy still exist well if we fully municipalize then from i believe that our efforts and our bandwidth would be on that on getting the infrastructure that currently exists and so then we'd have what we have but we'd own it so um i think there is theoretically a way that we can be doing the seu now and you know starting the seu and then a conversation about full municipalization can continue if the feasibility study that's been commissioned um finds that that's a good way to go i don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive there are bandwidth questions and money questions but um is that is that kind of what you were getting at yes i guess so back to the seu is it is is it a dual system or is the seu utilizing the dte infrastructure excellent question from the graphic yeah thank you so much for trying for clarifying that the seo will have nothing to do with dt's infrastructure because there's no way that dte would allow us to so dt is not going to be thrilled most likely with us providing our own power because we're taking business away from dte right but dte has an exclusive franchise so they must supply power and continue to supply power to ann arbor so essentially if you and i we're neighbors and edie we're neighbors and we eat we were all enrolled in the seo we had solar on the parts of our three respective sunny roofs that could host it and we had battery storage and we micro gridded our three homes that would all be occurring underneath dte's grid it wouldn't ever flow back into dte's grid because as soon as we produce power and it flows into dte's grid then we're interconnected and we're using the grid and then we are um on like the current system i have solar my excess solar flows back into dte's grid and goes to my neighbor but um i have no control of it after that and i'm paying or and dte is paying me low rates for it i don't have a battery right now so that means that if my if the grid goes out my solar gets shut down too i don't have any backup resilience but with a battery you do so our little micro grid if the dte's grid goes down in a storm we would continue to be able to use our solar and our battery storage to keep the lights on thank you and just one other yes yes and very helpful and kind of leads into my last comment and this may be out of scope but maybe not um thinking about the seu and the uh energy security that as i'm understanding it it's going to provide um i think there's an opportunity in terms of the marketing and the communication around this as maybe it's a cheaper way to do it than all the generators that are popping up all over the place on my street there was been one generator there will soon be five just on our block and just the money people are pouring into those for you know it's basically the security it's it's you know on my street it's generally older folks that are worried about power being out and either health concerns related to that etc so i don't know that that is an angle that uh the city is exploring but i think trying to get ahead of mass generalization uh would be a good thing you're absolutely right it's one of the things that most excites me about the seo because um because it builds in that resilience and that backup power automatically for um for the folks enrolled in it and it's um it's a clean way to provide backup power as opposed to loud gas generators or propane generators or you know burning things right how much of those things cost five thousand dollars at least exactly and the and the beautiful thing i hope you caught it in the presentation but in order to have seu owned solar on your roof you're not paying upfront cost for that you're just paying for the energy it delivers commissioner marcin [Music] hi thanks for the presentation very interesting um i i think it's it's interesting in um the notion of a parallel um generation and transmission system even if it is micro micro transmission but um i'm [Music] i'm interested i'm kind of curious like how we're going to build support for this within the community because when i hear of a parallel system in redundancy i think well now you have two systems that need to be maintained so inevitably the costs are going to be more for that um and as a homeowner um managing two different electrical bills or like power bills um adds more complication in my life um and then and then sort of related to that is that if dte is still in the area and they're still running a um utility in in ann arbor um but if they're if we start you you know homeowners start using less electricity from dte but they still have the same infrastructure that they need to maintain aren't they just going to turn around and raise raise their rates because they still have to pay you know for the infrastructure that they have with less consumption and so how are we going to address that such good questions really really good questions um i might take the last one first then you may have to remind me of the first ones but uh oh yeah the first ones okay i'll remember the redundancy part of it it's another utility for sure and it's another bill because dte if we were if we were able to work with and cooperate with dte we could you know combine a bill we could do this with them but um there hasn't been appetite for that so um it is two bills and that is a downside um we already have multiple utilities we're used to getting our water bill and our you know storm water and our electricity and our gas and so it's it's another one so the idea like you said is that you'd be using much less of dte's energy and and more of the seu and our hope as we design our rates is that bills are either even or come down not that they're going to go up that's that's part of you know that's part of what we're looking at in in terms of costs um as far as the bigger picture question about dte so dte is already raising rates over and over and over again based on whatever it is that they have decided that that they need to continue to raise rates there's a it's an interesting uh situation with dte and consumers energy they have um a legal i'm not a lawyer and i don't fully understand the legal structure of what they have but they have a guarantee to their their investors the investors that own the utility to give back a certain rate of return so they are constantly coming to the mpsc which is the michigan public service commission to request increased rates so that their investors can get more and more increased that same level of return that they're guaranteed this is an awkward situation the mpsc is the regulatory agency for the big investor owned utilities but they have been limited in their ability i guess to curtail those um costs going up and up and up so i guess my answer to that would be they're already going up and up and up and also ann arbor is only a relatively small portion of dte's large territory um the mpsc would have to agree to any rate increases and they're not going to just you know give them rate increased um rates because in other words dte can't just decide ann arbor's um using less energy we need to increase rates without the mpsc doing a full and you know study and investigation of that if this process makes cte um want to work harder to provide clean energy faster then that would be a good thing if dte cleaned up their whole grid and got us to you know full renewable energy by 2030 then that would be good but they're not and we simply have limited number of choices on how to make it happen for ann arbor so the eventuality of what will happen it's a good question will gte will other communities follow which i hope um will dte get smaller will dte have to change the way that they are viewing procurement of energy and become more of a grid management system than a burning of things um yeah those are those are good questions and i don't know i don't know if i answered all of your thoughts will homeowners have a choice uh whether or not they need they need to consume energy from the seu absolutely it's a hundred percent opt-in it'll be opt-in yep it's an opt-in you do not have to you can stick with dte if you're happy there or you want to just watch and wait and see how other people do i think mostly it's from a cost perspective like if you know you feel like it's going to be more costly so it should be less costly our hope is same or less that is the way the rates are being designed but interestingly the survey that we have on the website right now asks three questions would you be interested in joining the seo as described if it provided cheaper energy yes or no would you be interested if the energy was the same cost is what you're currently paying and then would you be interested if the energy was up to 10 percent more because we want to know that and interestingly the majority of people are checking all of those that they would be interested in more people are checking the first two also interesting is we had people and and the results are not all done there's like over a thousand people who have responded so far we're hoping for several thousand but um there's another um area of the survey that is asking people to rank what is most important about their energy system cost is in there reliability resilience 100 clean locally generated all of these different thing uh principles and the number one so far in the thousand i can't see what percentages because i can't see the back end of it yet but is 100 clean and renewable number two right now is reliable number three is resilient number four is cost and then it kind of goes from there so our community is telling us what's important to them as well but it is very important from an equity and justice standpoint that we keep the costs low because we cannot with a clean energy transition that we are looking at having it being with whether we like it or not we cannot burden those who are most energy burdened already um and that's why we like this proposal because it gives us control over that rita i see you talking but you are i'm just gonna yeah i did meet myself sorry i think we should move forward to the next questions thanks um commissioner just a real quickie i know you're scrambling to construct a organizational structure and get financing and all that if you look in your crystal ball you could spit out a date when you might be able to rule out a part of the program and get this whole thing on the road holy cow you're putting me on the spot so some of this is up to council i'm looking at the two council members here but essentially what we've been tasked with right now in the office of sustainability is to do what we're doing this public outreach this meeting the survey that's online we sent out postcards we're trying to garner community interest and see if there is appetite for this and at the same time um we've we're issuing an rfp to look at both full municipalization as well as sort of what we call an options analysis so we're getting a third party to take a look at what we're what we're proposing um so those things have to be done then at some point it comes back to council and council uh once we are done with our sort of rate analysis and our public engagement process which we're doing right now council will decide what to do with that they could pass an ordinance to have us go ahead and get started with it and like i said before we can start small or we can start big depending on our funding um you know i don't have a crystal ball i would love to see something being built in the first half of 2023 but that's just me please don't write that down [Laughter] thank you sure and uh commissioner graham you went away or oh there you are but you're on mute sorry um so micro grid i'm interested in the technology a little bit here to understand it um i don't have a house that's oriented good pointed well for solar panels and i certainly have trees um and i certainly understand zoning permit prohibits me from putting panels on the ground does this mean that if i wanted to really genuinely participate in this i would need to orchestrate my neighbors to get them to install solar panels where the sun orientation is good and there aren't trees and then we connect each other with wires exactly it's sorry and that's what you're calling a microgrid so i'm and will we be able to use edison's poles or do we have to install completely new infrastructure how how does this technically work in my little neighborhood yep so there's two ways that you could participate one is if you have a neighbor or neighbors with big sunny roofs then and we can start or let's say you live next to a school or or nearby an area that we could put a large larger array then you can connect directly to that array and that's the micro grid with battery shared battery storage and the wires that would connect you and your neighbor and the battery depends very much on the location of of the individual site but we own the right of ways we could be burying very short lines that connect two houses that are neighbors you know you don't need a big pole and wire outside if you're close to your neighbor and you're sharing energy you can bury it pretty easily and and where the batteries would go initially in the initial stages we need to get solar and batteries out there so that we start building some density before or we can start micro gridding so that's the initial stages but eventually we also can see shared battery storage in larger battery closets almost like utility you know you have utility boxes in places well these could be shared batteries as well and we own the right of ways because we are the city so we can put some of the infrastructure there um and yeah and then the other way is if you don't have neighbors or your entire neighborhood is deeply shaded and there simply isn't then you can subscribe to true community solar because right now in michigan we are not allowed to have true community owned solar um because that's the way it is in michigan you have to participate do it with your utility so in other words we could take a um a big school or we could take a big car port or a park or some unused land and build a community you know i don't know several megawatts of solar energy and then you could subscribe to get your um your uh electricity from that you know helped it to sort of help fund that and then that's that's sort of what community solar is you wouldn't be into wired that would be an account exactly exactly you'd be cleaning something but not necessarily electrons that float into your house in that case so the capital expense you say the s eu would install the equipment for my little neighborhood is the capital expense to do that included in the bill that would come to me the bill that would come to you would be for the energy and then eventually it would pay off the capital expense that the city incurred so yes it is it has to be that's yeah you're paying for the whole thing you're paying for the infrastructure and also the operational costs the staff just like you pay your current water utilities you're paying now for all the infrastructure for your water utilities you're paying for the whole treatment plant and all the staff and all but the depreciation is 25 years and it goes with the property not the owner right it goes right okay yep very interesting yeah thank you commissioner yeah thank you i just wanted to you know someone asked the comparison between the two and from um being a part of a lot of these meetings on the energy commission i guess i just wanted to highlight i think from my perspective some of the things that really stood out is again that that operation for the microgrids and the resilience that's there as compared with the municipal utility um and really that being so important to future energy systems and yet not something that we could easily achieve on through the traditional muni route um i think the energy efficiency piece as well which we didn't discuss in a lot of detail today but the scu plan it's also quite interesting in that it provides a lot of options for reducing energy waste and building electrification and a lot of other aspects that are also outside the scope of a traditional municipalization effort um so i guess i just wanted to highlight those two as well thank you so much for highlighting those we don't talk a lot about that but they're just as important very important so what this to flush it out a little bit for you um let's say uh council member dish has a drafty old west side home i have no idea where you live but let's just pretend and uh this drafty old west side home would really take ten thousand dollars to get good insulation and air sealing in there and to in order to reduce how much energy she's actually using and let's say that council member does not have an extra ten thousand dollars lying around that is earmarked for this purpose um so what on bill financing can do is help by spreading that payment out over a very long period of time because we're not a bank and we don't need a four-year term we could have a 20-year term we can just set the terms right and pay it off over a very long period of time so that council member dishes energy savings that she's now paying less for her energy because her house is well sealed and the heat isn't just floating around outside now it's staying in her house so that her bill savings can possibly hopefully be close to the payment that she's making over time for the insulation that she did and at the same time her house is much more comfortable um so we can do this through on bill financing and then if council member dish does all this work and then two years later get decides to take a job in hawaii and when she sells her house the the stay with the meter so the next person who buys the house enjoys the updates that council member dish made and then and the more comfortable and energy efficient home and they continue to pay off the bill paid just like uh just like council member dish was i should have picked someone with a shorter name than councilmember did have picked joe so um the on bill financing is really exciting and and we can incentivize electrification and dte does not in fact the way that the current investor owned utilities are they are not allowed and i'm not entirely clear on who's disallowing it but they are not allowed to incentivize fuel switching which means going from gas to electricity they don't so for example dte gives rebates for let's say if you replace your gas furnace that's 85 efficient with a really new nice fancy gas furnace you'll get rebates from dte which is great but if you get a 400 percent efficient complicated but electric uh heat pumps are over 100 efficient they won't give you any rebate for that because it's fuel switching from gas to electricity this is crazy making for those of us who are trying to electrify our buildings because we can't keep burning things because the more that we burn things for our energy that the climate is well we all know so we can incentivize fuel switching if we are an seu because we own it we can do whatever we want which i like i hope that that fleshed that out a little bit thank you for that opportunity commissioners you know um councilmember griswold yeah i i really appreciate the enthusiasm i do have a few questions about technology and i mentioned that when we were at the university of michigan and the rapid changes in technology and i'm old enough to remember when the smallest computer was the size of a refrigerator and i don't mean a dorm refrigerator so things keep changing and so if you have a house with um that's totally electrified and two electric vehicles are you going to have any excess electricity to share and i'm thinking the the least expensive model would be to use all of your electricity or store it in your car batteries for later i realize we have to address equity issues through grants and and other means if we do that uh but i i hope that whatever plan we roll out that we get some engineering professors automotive engineering professors to collaborate and look for at least five years out because we're going to roll this out over time and so how do we uh make sure that whatever we're doing is out is not um outdated before we even get it implemented you know so uh really good question oh go ahead keep going we know that severe weather events are going to become more frequent frequent so also how do we address solar panels on roofs and their stability and i i don't know the answer to that maybe they're very very stable um so anyway i'm just looking forward to this and the last thing i'll say is i built up a passive solar house in 1983 my furnace didn't run today and it was 75 degrees but i didn't open the windows because i wanted to save that heat for tonight so i i hope we we look at all the different approaches so and and look at it over time and look at technology so thank you those are great comments um council member really good comments so one of the nice things about this is that it it's a little bit more flexible right dte look at dte and how inflexible it is we have this massive infrastructure changing that updating it to something that looks towards the future is really really hard whereas as we deploy these um solar and storage and micro grid technologies as the technology improves we just employ improved technology um it it allows for more flexibility i think as things grow there are microgrids all over the place now i mean they exist they're successfully operating in industrial settings in hospital settings in residential settings this isn't a new concept to micro grids um onville financing exists right weatherization and electrification exists what doesn't exist in the way that we're suggesting it is marrying all these things together into a utility that is municipal so it's not we're not totally reinventing the wheel and just coming up with this these there are excellent examples of all of the pieces of this working in holland michigan for example does a beautiful on build financing program and we meet with these other cities um to talk about what they like about what they're doing what they don't like about what they're doing what they wish they had done differently so that we're trying to learn but you are right we are going to have to hire engineers there is no doubt about that and i am not an engineer and as terms of your question about vulnerability with severe weather events you're right we know they're increasing we feel it already they're only going to get worse which is kind of terrifying um solar panels are probably some of the most resilient um technology uh they they're really really stable if a tree falls on your house your solar panel will be damaged there's no doubt about that but wind can't lift them hail doesn't hurt them you know i suppose if your house is crushed your solar panels are crushed but other than that it's a pretty it's a pretty resilient structure and if there was damage or if a battery went out or an inverter went out because these things will happen you know technology fails the number of folks that it affects is very small and then the seu which is a full service utility and will be deployed to go fix anything that is problematic is now dealing with a very small number of people who have an outage as opposed to an entire city like we see now so great questions i love this this is fun i can stay here all night i won't sorry uh yes um i think i would like to be the last right now because we do have another agenda item that i'd like us to spend some time on um but i really appreciate this um i do want to bring up something that is uh it has to do with the bigger picture of dte and the fact that they are currently using many fossil fuels and have a plan to continue until 2050.
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um second needs to fund balance um appropriation this year of 519 thousand and then we also get federal aids that's 100 of our where our revenues come from from the school this is the year-over-year revenue comparison um so the statement increase is what's going to have to be about the same for um for the last three years now um about the same increase last three years back the references have 180 000 increase and this is due to category special ed because there's been an increased number of specialized states um the increase in a surplus decrease in surplus is fluctuating from media is really dependent upon how much fundamentals we have left from the previous from the previous water and it also includes like reserves that are going to be using reserves or not and the partners will hear overused reserves are not in the last school year the tuition interest is very concerned as the name of my part will be earning a lot more interest in this next year for the next year budget because we have um a large capital expenditure as soon as opening up a new banking camp and now we have saved about 2.6 million capital expenditure so we'll earn a lot more money than the interest rates and that is one though your budget um the total operating budget um is increased only about two thousand dollars this year you know the cash between the 2021-22 school year it increased about 550 thousand dollars so undergraduate very significant once we were the prior couple of years but prior to increasing mainly um surplus from the priors coming here and extraordinary being the state overwhelmed it 90 that year so we got more money than we have any other year and federal grants activities so right now that 220 222 000 um does not include the arp brand they're still talking about it so i couldn't put into the budget until it was approved so that should if we get that approved that would increase our our federal grants by about five hundred thousand dollars excellent um this is supposed to show that florida has little control over most of the budget you've seen in the law that salaries and benefits reduction problems have a budget tuition transportation and other services that um students said afterwards that make up that 39 of the budget utilities insurance four percent and the other uh and as well as advocates for special ed students um alternative high schools and elementary school and also transportation for all those students um the budgets um supports approximately 740 students uh prepaid in 12th grade and for special ed age students up to age 21.
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no no the curriculum is standards for 2021 2022 is not on the agenda for tonight but you're more than will welcome to come back the second public comment can you speak on it what is the agenda tonight that's not available online it is on it is available online at eve shim.khm.us i'm on the website and it's not there it's under board of education agenda and minutes under the thing would you like to give me one item on the agenda and then i'll talk on sure personnel finance and operation it we personnel it is not our duty to give you something on the agenda it has to be a specific item on the agenda a specific thing that the board is discussing so please sit down and come back for the second public comment thank you no personnel i'm here yes please excuse me first amendment i'm here to ask superintendent smith and principal roman man if you can't follow the rules that we're asking if you can't follow the rules everyone else is asked to follow we're going to have to ask you to leave so please sit down and come back and raise your voice to me like well you're not listening we've asked you to come back at the second public comment and we'd be more than happy to hear what you have to say but we're talking about agenda items only and you have nothing specific to say on the agenda these are the rules well there are specific you can come back ma'am there are specific things under personnel if you go back and look on your tablet or your phone you'll see the agenda clearly stated on our yfshim township website thank you these are your representatives anyone else like to speak please state your name address hi my name is annette mansell my address is 25 jarrett court marlton new jersey zero eight zero five three okay okay um like i said i'm an aunt mansell i'm here tonight because i am being terminated from by position as attendance clerk and legit aide at marlton middle school this termination is due to the executive order 253 which requires unvaccinated teachers and staff to test for covid on a weekly basis eo253 is still being fully enforced even though all other mandates have been lifted this order was placed on the grounds that the vaccine can prevent individuals from getting and spreading the virus data from the cdc and the biden administration shows this is simply not true based on the data it seems everyone who walks through the doors of the schools should be tested after bringing this attention after bringing this to the attention of the principal and the superintendent i was told that quote testing everyone would be a tremendous challenge and managing that testing would increase burdens on staff who were stretched then already this proves that this is not about a health crisis anymore but simply about funding and to further prove that point when funding wasn't available for testing the week of march 28 the district lifted this requirement of testing on march 14 and the 21st i submitted negative results from the fda emergency use authorized test sent out by the emergence by the biden administration these tests were sent with the intent for keeping staff and students in schools they also fall within the guidelines of the e0253 paragraph three of the order states that we are required to submit proof of a test either antigen or molecular with eua by the food and drug administration these results on these dates were accepted with no questions asked but but i have since been told that they will no longer be permitted my question to you tonight is why i was told this district has quote no remorse for following this order these tests fall in line with the eo so why not accept them and who exactly are making is making these decisions why can't the same person or persons who allowed the week off from testing agree that these tests will be accepted instead you are choosing to lose good reliable staff that these kids rely on we understand the choice we made and have complied since october when this order was placed we have no other choice but to comply we have taken personal time to drive to test sites wait in long lines we have used the vault testing site through zoom we have even tested twice in a week when the lab didn't return our results at this point why not make things a little easier for the staff members i'm here tonight for two reasons one to be a voice for those staff members who can't afford to lose their jobs over the ceo and two regardless of how i personally feel about this executive order i have complied since day one i want it to be clear and on the record that i am not abandoning my position nor am i resigning i am being fired not for not testing but because you are refusing to accept the test results i'm submitting to you thank you is there anyone that else wishes to speak come on up to the microphone state your name and address please hello my name is eric simkin i'm a resident of voorhees township i'd like to speak about agenda item 9.5 under 20 usc 1232h protection of pupil rights amendment from 1976 gives parents and members of the community the rights to review every piece of curriculum including lesson plans uh lessons uh teacher training materials and i'd ask that 9.5 be stayed until parents of this community have had a chance to thank you all i'm sorry to interrupt but i just wanted to let you know that 9.5 is the resolution to approve 9.1 9.2 9.3 and 9.4 and your item it doesn't fall under those three those three categories so um i would really love to hear what you have to say but could you wait till the end of the publicly you just heard it and then policy zero one six three under the public comments there's no requirement for a person to give their home address just the name the town that they live in and whether or not they're representing any groups so thank you very much and i'll talk to you again soon thank you [Applause] anyone else wish to speak okay seeing none we are going to close this portion of the meeting there will be another public comment section at the end so at this point we're going to move forward with item six annual appointments and approvals items six point one through six point one three can i please have a motion miss knowle a second miss capela any questions or comments from the board okay seeing none roll call please mrs cappello yes yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries at this point we're going to move forward with the approval of minutes i need a motion to approve item 7.1 and 7.2 do i have a motion miss everhart thank you a second mr canthan any questions or comments from the board okay roll call please mr agency mrs capalo yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs noll abstain mr lanzalotta yes miss lee yes mr megan abstain this is ryan yes mission carries thank you at this point we're going to move to item 8 superintendent's report and administrative items do i have a motion to approve items 8.1 through 8.7 miss noel thank you ms capela thank you um before we get into questions and comments i'm going to give dr smith the floor thank you thank you mrs ryan schools are reflections of communities this truth was on spectacular display in this very room the dimension cafeteria this past monday at the dimacey multicultural night celebration finding common ground in the differences that enrich us celebrating and supporting each other for those differences respecting each other for who we are makes a great community makes great schools i thank all the families and staff who are involved in organizing and showcasing the songs dances displays cuisines and much more and i thank the board members who came as well that is who we are as a district community at our best another example of our community at its best is the upcoming all-in disabilities awareness night on may 9th from 5 30 to 7 30 pm at the marlin field house on main street this district event is a collaboration with our ebesham township police department i'd like to thank our special services department in particular for their work to put this event together our goal is to promote awareness and foster an inclusive environment supporting all individuals to meet their potential as valued members of our community and as this is the third time we've tried to pull this off and the first time indoors i think there's extra excitement then shortly following that on friday may 13th is our district movie night at savage field showing encanto this movie night is co-sponsored by the eve sham education foundation and all our ptas and pto and it's really exciting to see that collaboration between those amazing volunteer organizations that work to support all our kids gates open at 6 30 pm the movie starts at dusk food and beverages will be available at the field for purchase all proceeds will go directly to our ptas so it's a win for everybody and again this is who we are as a district community at our best and one more promo because it's that we're that we got that much going on is our district is also glad to be supporting the ukrainian relief drive going on right now through may 21st which was organized by an etsd family the lukanovich's whose multiple generations of that family have taught in our district everyone is encouraged to drop off supplies at our schools up through friday may 20th each school has a collection bin in the main office area the supplies will go to the ukrainian american relief committee and be transported to ukraine the supplies needed include medical supplies hygiene items baby formula linens and more the drive will culminate on saturday may 21st when these items can be dropped at the martin middle school parking lot from 9am to 11 30 a.m and the goal is to fill a truck my update tomorrow will include more info about that so if you could please spread the word about all these great happenings and lastly as there is some misinformation on social media wrong on so many levels i'd like to share a few important reminders our schools are safe we follow our protocols in coordination with eve sham police as appropriate chief miller and i maintain close communication and the board does not discuss any individual student matters in public thank you mrs ryan you're out of order you are out of order ma'am man you are out of order [Music] the board will now take a recess [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] we're going to take a recess until you all can behave like adults [Music] the meeting of the board of education are there any questions from the board referring to the superintendent's report seeing none roll call please service shinty mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs noll yes mr lancelata yes miss late yes mr meagan yes mr mrs ryan yes mission carries thank you moving to item nine curriculum and instruction i would like a motion to approve items 9.1 through 9.4 do i have a motion miss everhart thank you second miss noel thank you any questions or comments regarding curriculum and instruction from the board a question for the curriculum committee or mrs mcgulick and and anish last year you talked about the summer learning academy and that was through the esser funding so i'm glad that we're going to continue that this summer and also there is the summer book club that is new can anyone talk to me about that um yes i'd be happy to so uh with esser funds we wanted to make sure as we did last year that we have now any returning back to incoming kindergarten and then all the way up through incoming eighth graders will have some type of support we also looked at um adding the additional program using our library media specialists so that we could have kids we're still working through like the details in terms of depending on interest there probably will be like a primary grade and then like an upper elementary where kids can sign up to come read a book come in work with the library media specials get other books and just have access to the library over the summer in addition to just trying to promote a love of reading so would that be at every school what are you thinking so right now we have two library media media specials who are going to facilitate that okay so again depending on interest we'll kind of modify and tailor what we're able to offer okay great thank you yup you're welcome any more board questions regarding curriculum and instruction okay seeing none i'm going to ask for a roll call please mr cynthia mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs knoll yes yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes mission carries moving to item 10 finance and operations i need a motion to approve items 10.1 through 10.12 can i have a motion mr canthan second by mr lanzalata any questions or comments pertaining to finance and operations from the board seeing none roll call please mr shinty mr cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr catherine yes mrs knoll yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries moving to item 11 personnel i need a motion to approve items 11.1 through 11.10 do i have a motion ms cappello second sec miss noel thank you any questions or comments uh pertaining to personnel from the board okay miss knowle and then mr lancelot and miss everhart okay i ju and i believe it's in here i want to congratulate mrs frye hello welcome i'm so happy that you'll be with us and thank you to all the rice parents and the right staff who gave input and helped to search for the best candidate and best of luck and we'll see you in september thank you a question for either dr smith or mr ashanti or possible finance committee the there are the names that were listed under the sort of uh sort of certificated uh reappointments um and there are certain names that are not on there um due to budgetary uh reasons uh do you see in the foreseeable future future possible ways of um getting those few members that were not on the appointee list appointed due to um you know influx of some kind of financial backing um thank you mr lanzelada so any any staff member who was we had to let go for reasons of economy basically you know a budgetary reduction in the number of positions um not for performance we you know that that's that's not something we do willingly at all you know we we would like to keep those folks but as we have talked about for so long the millions and millions of dollars in state aid loss that we've gone through as a district has put us in such a position where those reductions are necessary for now but to your question we would love to find ways to be able to um bring those people back either as you know through some other means or through be able to restore the position at some point we know we have a long road ahead this is year four of seven straight years of stadium reduction so you know you're five six seven still ahead so i wish i could say it would be soon but it would be difficult anything else mr lane's ladder okay miss everyone thank you very much i just wanted to also congratulate mrs fry welcome to the uh to the community bryce was my daughter's home school it's a great community as all of the schools are but you know welcome and uh good luck we'll see you in september okay well that seems like a perfect dr smith to say a little something about our new hire i would thank you mrs ryan so it's very exciting to be able to share a few a few words about mrs amanda frye who's sitting here and her husband sean is here as well and um so we and it was a very competitive very competitive um field of applicants and we are so excited about this outcome of the process to be able to have someone who um not just through the interview process but through the the breadth and depth of her experience and accomplishments both as a teacher and as an administrator in multiple districts is bringing like a tri-focal lens of ways to look at solutions and supports for kids and her most recent experience is in edgewater park as the current principal of magawan elementary school which is a pre-k to grade five school very similar in size to rice so um you know it will there's a familiarity there that she'll be able to bring and um you know the rice community we're thankful to all their input along the way through the we used a parent survey we used a staff survey and our interview committee had stakeholders from both the parent and staff communities of rice on it and i could go on and on but but miss fry i just would you like to say a few words because i don't people would rather hear from you hello oh there we go all right good evening everyone as dr smith mentioned my name is amanda frye and i am so excited and appreciative for this opportunity i first want to thank the board of education and all of the search committee who was a part of the process and their support along the way being a community member and being a parent in the district i know what amazing schools we have what great students and families and staff members that we have and i'm really excited to join the process mrs kam and i had the opportunity already we have a date on the calendar we're going to get together and begin that transition process i've also exchanged email with our pta president we're going to look at meet and greet opportunities and a chance to be able to jump right in meet the students meet our families and really get the year ready to kick off a one in a wonderful way in september so i just wanted to thank you again for the opportunity and just tell you how excited i am to join the eve sham township school district thank you okay moving to item 12 policy i would like a motion to approve items 12.1 and 12.2 no i'm sorry my bad it's okay any questions or comments regarding personnel sorry okay seeing none roll call please mr vicinity mrs cappella yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs noel yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes mission carries okay all right let's try this again moving to item 12 policy i need to i need a motion to approve items 12.1 and 12.2 can i have a motion please mr lanzalata second miss cappella thank you any questions or comments regarding policy seeing none roll call please mrs cappello yes mrs everhart yes mr canton yes mrs null yes mr lancelata yes miss lee yes mr megan yes mrs ryan yes motion carries thank you okay committee reports does any committee chair have a report they would like to share mr lanzalata chairman of policy i mean outreach sorry so a lot a lot going on a lot going on a lot going on in our in our community these days first of all just like to acknowledge and congratulate uh the mrc hall of fame inductees uh they're honored they are honored last month for years of service community service to our to our children uh congratulations to christine chrysler jan yoakam who's also a teacher in our district barry fitzgerald for town council there's again congratulations to our new police chief walt miller and there's also a new eastern connect app so you can receive up-to-date information and notifications on what's going on in eastern township you can download it on any android or apple device they asked to make sure that we you know tell everyone about that some things have already been said tonight by dr smith autism awareness color run at rice elementary the disabilities awareness night at the field house on may 14th there's also the mayor's wellness expo it's going to be held at eavesboro downs from 11 to 2.
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um under finances donations and we have one donation for tonight i asked for approval for the board to accept the jennings county community foundation gave 100 to nbe for an essay winner so asking the board to accept that donation so moved motion by path do i have a second second by susan any discussion all those in favor hunter resolution philip yes i'm asking for to approve a resolution to consider exploring the potential of purchasing real estate adjacent to our current school property on highway 50.
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so how does that fit in with the scu and the hs0 goals of having 100 fossil fuel free or at least not zero um by 2030. how does that work thank you for asking that question it's a really good one and i there's so much to talk about and i just you know it's hard to know sort of which avenues to take it's an excellent question so um right now if our scu was as big as it could possibly be in other words we're using all the sunny space and even moderately sunny space on all the roofs in ann arbor this doesn't include things like carports and ground mounts because we can't really um model that so there's actually a little bit more available but if we used all the roof space we could generate almost all of our current energy use like 400 versus 440 i think something like that so we're a little bit short but we also know that we are going to be electrifying so our usage is going to go up of course we're also working on energy efficiency which brings us back down but with electrification especially of vehicles too we anticipate it's going to go up quite a bit so the seu alone wouldn't be enough to create all the clean energy so there's going to have to be off-site generation as well and so what that means is that we would be helping to build um clean energy wind maybe maybe solar to supply it to so the electrons wouldn't be coming to ann arbor homes right the electrons would be going somewhere else but it would be so it's rex because well renewable energy credits something like this but it would be new build it would be additional in other words we're not just trading on the market we're building new because that's part of the energy principles that the city council has um adopted which means speed is in there you know how fast can we do this and any new um new renewables on the grid must be additional not just kind of things that we're already going to be built that we're subscribing to that kind of thing and then that helps us meet our 2030 goal and then dte has a 20 50 goal apparently and hopefully they'll get quicker about that and they will continue to clean up so eventually our electrons will also be fully clean as dte cleans up but they're not fast enough they're not going fast enough so we're gonna have to do some off-site generation as well it does seem to me that there is a great potential for the muni and the su to work hand in hand in this way because the muni could be a source to be set up to source the funds the electrons from elsewhere um that's that's what i believe i'm not sure um but also i have another question about dte and that is the solar landfill how does that fit in with the scu yeah thank you who's the owner of that so right now dte is the owner of that the only way we could get it built was with dte as the owner so essentially what happened for those of you who don't know is the city intervened in the irp that dte um dte came with a a bunch of proposals we did not think that they were just and equitable or adequate and so we formally intervened in their irp and it went to mediation and in that mediation we got several things the city was successful we got a reduction in the cost of the migraine power program which is dte's renewable program which was is still in my opinion costly um but it's less than it was and we got this landfall solar project and the only way you know just like mediation of a divorce i suppose that you're gonna get you're not gonna get everything you want and what we got was dte will own it and and ann arbor will be the anchor tenant and what that means is that um the infrastructure is owned by dte we will never pay it off like if we owned it so that's the downside the upside is we also don't have to maintain it they do and it's on a landfill which is expensive and somewhat difficult land to build solar on it's um it's shifting and it's just it's more technically difficult so dte owns it they operate it we are the anchor tenant which means that if nobody subscribes to this community solar project then ann arbor will the city will offload all of it but we anticipate people will subscribe to that so it's another option but it won't be owned by the by the seo unless they ask you purchased it at some point right they wanted to sell it but i don't know that that would happen i don't know that's not in the current plan could ann arbor ostensibly use all of that energy oh yeah oh yeah absolutely it's only i forget how many megawatts it is are we at um at the mercy of dte's billing for that yeah i think it's going to be a program an offering like under the my green power program it is going to be at a premium and part of the reason it's going to be a premium meaning costs more just like their migraine power now is that we did go to out with competitive bids and we got a lot of bids and there was a lot of interest in helping to build that landfill solar but building on a landfill is not the cheapest way to build solar because it is more technically difficult and i can't explain all of why that is because i am not an engineer but landfills are one of the more expensive places to build solar on on the other hand it's a landfill and it's otherwise doing absolutely nothing other than being a landfill so it is a wasted space and a good place to use but the rates as they couldn't come in lower than um than like a migraine power kind of thing okay um i hope that everyone is feels um fairly well satisfied i think there can be many many many more questions that we could go over but i really feel like we should move on and i appreciate this discussion i feel like i've learned um thank you all for your time and listening i really appreciate it um but i think we should move on um we brought to council thanks again julie uh we brought you council tonight for just discussion um the city code so this is um something that's been a project for a long while and um i've been involved with it and i asked for some assistance from my colleagues chris graham and shannon gibb randall and a few others just to look this over um the chapter 40 is the management of trees and other vegetation in the city it's a city code that addresses mostly the property that is between your property line and the edge of the street um and so it is something that um i do think that what we've got in hand that has been largely um authored by chris uh is is a good model and i want to know first of all has have you all had a chance to look it over um and can we discuss tonight which i would very much like to do great let's do it um i did put together just a list of some things that to me i think are really important and i'll just say them out loud as opposed to showing on the screen i think we want to make sure that what we get out of this is something that supports our ecosystem services reduces our municipal water use um minimizes storm water runoff reduces turf grass ultimately or supports alternate vegetation in that particular property and supports but pedestrian vehicle safety those are really important things um it'll allow us to demonstrate care of vegetation that's different from traditional uh mode grass and it should when we get this done minimize the enforcement conflict points between a property owner and our city enforcement staff and provide education to the city so those are the things that i saw is really important um do i'll ask you all do you think that i should put this up on the screen for you to view do you want to just i see a nod okay here we go so julie help me please um and i'll get ready to show my screen oops recording in progress your screen oh my goodness uh all right here we go do you all see my screen okay um i will have to ask for assistance with anybody who has a question and but i do see that uh christian griswold has her hand up so let's go for it oh okay i just want to say that this is something that i have followed literally for two decades and i really appreciate all the work that has gone into this when it uh before it goes to council it's going to have to be reviewed by the administration especially the legal department and my experience with the new city attorney is that she is very thorough and so i i suspect that some of this is going to be in supporting documentation procedures not in the actual ordinance that doesn't make it any less important but i just wanted to explain that expectation because it's likely that the ordinance itself will be shorter and and there will be uh staff directions and procedures included so that's my comment kathy let me just ask you where does that documentation uh where is it stored and is it available to me it it would have to be an attachment to the ordnance somehow or on the um like the department web page be it community standards or maybe it would actually be indexed from a couple of departments i don't know exactly when i was on the school board we did a rewrite with a consultant of all of the policies and procedures for the school board and we had specific policies and then we had procedures that reference those policies so i i'm going to have to study this more unless someone on the commission understands what that structure is but it's definitely needed and previously chapter 40 actually had the paper copy of chapter 40 had a diagram of the sight distance triangle that was removed by the legal department more than a decade ago um so i would see things like those diagrams which are very very helpful being in some type of reference document that we would definitely want to have a link to from the actual ordinance i don't know shannon you're shaking your head is there anything like this already with policy with the planning documents i'm trying to remember that's what i was just trying to look up to see because one of the things first of all i really appreciate the work on this because i feel like it's in very good shape um and um i'm excited to see this happen um so thank you for all of your efforts on this um i uh i don't think we have diagrams but i could be wrong i would that's what i was trying to look up to see if it was easy for somebody to kind of type it in and get the diagrams because that's what you need to know if i live in a street that's 25 miles an hour what is it if i live in a street that's 35 miles an hour what is it and um and it's pretty straight forward for those different because it's all set up based on how like miles per hour and things like that so i think it would behoove us to have some simple diagrams that show something for your average homeowner to understand how tall it needs to be um because we only go up so high in this city and and very few residential uh uh driveways are on streets that go 45 miles an hour it's just not a lot of them um so uh it seems to me that we should have that in um in a kind of an online format that is because there are lots of things in the city where you can get the kind of pithy overview sheet that is a pdf that is available on the city's website and like it's whether it's like you know your fence permit or guidelines or things like that there's stuff there that is really straightforward that i feel like could be like a user-friendly way of being able to determine what your your your cone of vision needs to be and what that you know have some sort of simple diagram that shows that because i think that's what it references that which it needs to um but i think we need to make it easy for people to be able to do that so i think that that should live somewhere um i don't think it's in our orange book because that's really for engineers um not so much for homeowners and this would be more a kind of a homeowner thing right to my knowledge it's only in the orange book and when i tried to look it up the only way you could get access to the orange book was to pay 200 or go down to city hall exactly and so and a lot of the astro stuff too you have to pay for you know so i think that it would be helpful just to have a um like a page or two pdf that would demonstrate it for people that is something that is easy to get online okay great um is there any section of the draft here that anybody has any particular questions about uh i see yes john keller yeah a question i have it's on page 2 3 12.
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so some key financial issues um the advocacy tuition and related services transportation to continue costs continue to increase which uh the projected health care increase is nine percent this year measure was four percent of this year's common place substantially um [Music] the high school enrollment is continuing to increase so high school enrollment continues to increase while the enrollment here at the elementary school is on a detox so issues that's concerned to us because now we've paid more tuition from high school so nasa high school is regular tuition increase um as you can see they have 579 a student which is a three percent increase and we send 227 students there which is about 131 000 plus increase to us um that also across their lld program has increased 26 percent so now we have more students in that program so that's an increased cost to the district at 23 000 um i see that trying for the next two years at least so um the tuition and transportation of ad worship students or high school students represents about 39 percent of the entire budget this is another digital representation of where our expenses are so our salaries make up for about 39 percent are projected to increase europe here uh regular education and certifications on there so the regular education has increased there's actually a decrease of six to four thousand dollars increase is mostly represented in a [Music] as well as an increase in tuition reimbursement expenses um the building maintenance increase is due to meetings there's 150 thousand dollars from that item for the media center the administration is efficient um the administration is the addition of the curriculum supervisor um captain expenditure the combined is a decrease but it's we have the craziness in the industry's budget for capital expenditures which we did not use patreon building thinking and then we put that money back to the capital reserves and we're gonna that was we reserved that for the hpvc project and now it's gonna be covered by the um by grant money so we don't want to take that federal atomic [Music] um but i do anticipate the tax rate decreasing 0.7923 0.7923 um which will um which will reflect one percent increase in taxes please you see the benefits to our taxpayer and our community to our children to the school this is why we live here you invest in children i think it's the best investment anyone can make that's why we chose this town so i think it's important that you make that investment as you hear that your tax bill will not be going up as much and then we're providing you with great programs for our children our strong kindergarten moment still allows us to have receptions in the budget it most likely could be another special education teacher two more interventionists we talked about it at the last morning evening covet has its impact on our children and we're seeing a daily for those of you i see work in other school districts and no families have relatives that work in we did an excellent job but we do see that there are still issues for children socially emotionally and academically because there you go there's nothing so it's a fiscally responsible budget as i said in the beginning we continue to support uh support our extracurricular activities our academic programs our athletic programs and clubs we continue to keep up with security and safety in our building um working with the town to have a police officer in our building meeting the space state mandate that we cannot go up to two percent or below two percent and continue to look at your renovations as was mentioned our library needs some renovations and um that's going to happen in this function unity is strength where there's teamwork and collaboration lots of things can be achieved and you see that on a daily basis questions yes schools every school district gets one seat when every seat is taken they go back into the pool so sometimes and you see it often for us we have multiple kids sometimes going to communications we see it at last but in the other programs that's usually one student but we have a total right now there are uh six students 9th grade 12th grade that are in the notifications just running 301 is [Music] jersey how many are top of the nation and it was mostly vocational schools such as the high-tech allies um that made it into the top schools of new jersey but modern county had a significant number of [Music] yes so is there anyone with the public [Music] thank you chris for the presentation and for all of your work um so at this point on visitors business that if permitted to comment on agenda items only at this time and next correspondence [Music] representatives uh um resources joe we met uh actually two weeks ago um we spoke about adding a part-time guidance counselor in addition to two interventionists next year any this questions okay and uh the policy one's not here and community relations sarah we also didn't need this past month but uh [Music] which you know was like almost sold out every night it was such a great success it was just so nice to you know getting movie quality getting back to normal uh the play every child was a star in the play i want to say the co-star did an excellent job covering us when we got the paper uh right before the play that thursday uh the people section they had i believe it was twelve pictures of our play in the people's section [Music] want to mention it just happened on this past weekend a former graduate of brielle um as well as in denver and tom is a first grade teacher in our school um he's he plays golf um university here in new jersey he's been he's now at his final year there and his team made it to the back tournament uh in tuesday and uh he won he won the tournament last year but his goal this year was because his team has never won was to have the team win the tournament and uh the stepbrothers told me as they came around you know it's just like the masters the final day uh came around the last 12 she got very emotional like i can't believe this is the end of my son's time on his college university team and the team not only won but in boston denmark won in that tournament and so he visited our first monster straight class we'll put the picture up on the website but you know we'd like to highlight when children leave here and uh go on we still like to say the foundation is just like i said in the budget the foundation is so important we don't have a golf team so we don't get any credit but he was a caddy at the golf club and um we're just very proud that he brings that recognition to our community and he's a wonderful king today he's just a one-time name that's my report is the budget so thank you and tonight um under uh human resources on um kenzie queen is here so i want to talk about another great one alumni who's been working here she was a virtual teacher for first grade and we were total virtual and children were alive virtual she works as a um as you heard this in shocks room and i'm going to be asking the board tonight to approve her to um finish out a fifth grade uh the sarah jordan position and so she's here with her mom like i said when she came for her interview this time uh she brought her and it really touched mr sabian myself she remembered how much as a kindergartner she loved book and you know she's just a beautiful person her soul and her whole thing is just beautiful but she brought her picture and brought back you know her fifth grade she's like what would i look like and i went as a fifth grader you were just beautiful that book was so important to her and um she says i'm gonna make sure this year was now she's fifth grade working with him i run through back into the best bookmarking books that have ever been done before because mckenzie as an adult knows how that was so important for children so i'm going to fast forward [Music] it was nice to see to have our students back on stage and we're going back to some normalcy and it was a lot of fun uh the annual the teachers did a fantastic job um [Music] so it was nice to see all the action in the backstage and the teachers and all the involvement um even from the community we had um uh we had families and teachers from the community just come in and help out so so that was very nice and um so congratulations to austin so i'm so happy to hear you know he did really um and so but i do want to ask chris to share with us um you usually don't um so during the annie show the first night you weren't with us the first night a year old is there for opening night but i know that you're involved with the monmouth county superintendent that you never share this with the board members i know but so one of you let us why don't you share with the board what you were doing today okay um i'm very proud of the modern cat super texas association i'm on the executive board i'm on the pd committee and this year we wanted to do something different for our superintendents and so we hosted a retreat and uh it was at the ocean place at long range and it was a full day event it was you know breakfast lunch dinner and that's why i didn't make it back but uh our keynote speaker we were so lucky doris kearns goodwin she's a presidential historian her latest book was a leadership in turkey of times and so the superintendents we all enjoyed reading that book because that's how we went for the last few years in the turbulent times and but doris kearns uh was just one of the best speakers of you know i got so many emails and letters from super tenants who attended you know emergencies um that just said it was just such a wonderful day with her and then we did breakout sessions three of them for social emotional learning and how important it is as educational leaders that we understand our role in helping teachers to help kids uh achieve and find their successes and to deal with the social emotional things that everyone is going through we've seen a high turnover rate for teachers in the last two years extremely high and at the same time we're not seeing young people go into education so there is going to be a problem and so i don't want there's definitely not to be a problem the number of teachers that are leaving before because most teachers will teach 25 views and most teachers even longer but the stress that they've occurred during this time has just said enough so they're leaving uh here in new jersey at a rate that we've never seen before and then our own concern is the fact that we're not i guess what are we not doing to get young people to say education is a great thing to do and education is so important it's the foundation of our country and so there's great concern and part of the social emotional was helping the superintendents and leaders here in monarch county because um the leaders were allowed to plus one so they could bring their assistant and just the role that we have right now board meetings not like ours their board meetings are very tough and uh it's very challenging so it was a great day dr second district members were there and it was just a wonderful day for us so sorry i was the first night but uh it was well worth you know doing what we needed to do for the leadership thank you you didn't tell um [Music] so we're going to move on to action items we'll start with curriculum and programs curve thank you i'd like to look forward um do i explain because i'm here or doesn't matter i'm on the list yes and we'll move on to district operations okay district operations and we just um yes i would just like to make a comment that although it presents as only a 15 to 20 minute presentation tonight the board presentation the budget presentation i know firsthand of the hours of time it takes to put a budget together and i can certainly appreciate i think i speak for all trails taxpayers and appreciating the fact that you sought efficiencies and only increased our taxes by one percent and we could have gone to two in a time that i think every other expense in our household uh obligations and duties is way more than a one percent increase this year so thank you for those efforts and policy [Music] yes congratulations we'll move on congratulations human resources yes [Applause] and at this time we have visitors business visitors are permitted to comment on agenda and then yes it starts the day after 4th of july which is july 5th it runs every tuesday wednesday thursday for the month of july and how do students teach recommendations [Music] i know we we talked a few months ago um about i don't remember the title of the curriculum but it had to do with um sexual harassment gender identity and there was a lot of discussion about what the board's role and what we could do in something that was still mandated i've read since then that the governor has asked for a review of that could we just have an update on what that means for us as a school district and where it goes from here there's a legislation at the common academy where they've asked to that curriculum um through the legislators so my name is tomorrow we continue this love has been uh working with our healthy teachers to uh she has worked we've worked with many sending uh districts as well as we sent our teachers to millstone for many teachers from the different areas of here millstone attended and so we are working on the mama county curriculum consortium along with mlbsc the monument county defense services is planning additional workshops so everyone's going to be working together on this but more information will become tomorrow thank you helps uh laser academy and specific [Music] before and after school is that it does happen after school kids awesome or is it just before school right now best is mostly before school because we just don't get we don't get the children after school so we'll try again when we just don't get is it being offered uh for next year we're gonna we want to open it back to school but it's not offered for this year i have one more question regarding the social and emotional needs of our students at the last pto meeting we um said that this is the hardest year for years of being a leader as a principal um we are our parent group the cpac group is wondering what do you see um and how how is administrative administration intervening to help our staff uh well we've um this year we've had speakers come in and talk to the children about some of the things that are that we see in the classrooms not within the classrooms but outside the classroom lunch and recess um we've seen a regression for children's emotional well-being and i think they socially they were isolated and when you do that to children it's just doesn't you know it's hard and so we have always had for since soon after i got here i instituted a responsive classroom model that our teachers have been trained in but in the last few years i have some new teachers and teachers have left so we want to bring that retraining back for people that haven't had it but so the morning meeting is the k-8 it's not just k-3 where you see that elementary schools it's natural for children to sit on the blog and talk but we have baby morning meetings for all children and we want to strengthen that this agenda as a part-time guidance counselor starting next week to start reading in small groups i'm going to have her start at the top eighth grade work herself backwards because she has a lot of high school experiences so um and we're at that point now where especially with different red kids eighth graders moving out to high school there's a lot of anxiety that they feel now especially because we're at the end and uh i i think she's very capable of working with groups and we want every child group set up that every child gets you know to meet these small mothers so as much small group as we can our guidance counselor currently has an intern that's my counselor at heart work for tales of meeting with kids going into classrooms teaching lessons in classrooms from lifelines in seventh grade to you know lessons in on character in the younger grades so we're and bringing in like i said um america center to come in and work with kids by grade levels so there's more we can do we just secure um challenge day which um we haven't had it'll be an eighth grade program it's an 8th grade through 12th year program if you google challenge day we've had here i've shared with the board um members that attended the past we will be doing challenge day for our eighth graders uh in the month of june right on my head and it's a full day intense program for kids and if you really need to find out more you know and so uh we'll be doing that in june uh many fun activities you know the ptl has been excited about the pto in september not knowing where to be today we have the tech coming back and so special person's day outside field day field day they want to do a photo booth and a dunk tank a fun day for kids um the spring flight we usually do a circle dance we're going to do a spring fling for our kids it's a semi-formal sixth through eighth grade i know some parents are upset about a cinderella ball uh but you couldn't find a look a venue that would house 375 people so that's on hold local pizzas working towards getting that back for next year security um i think we did our wall to school day for autism awareness we appreciate your one quality question that i do have is how to generalize those skills as a parent at home when you have presenters come in where the guidance counselors are doing pushing lessons we had a meeting with mr savia and mrs jones and i did also bring this up with that meeting at that meeting um to talk about is there a way that administration can blast out an email to parents to give us a couple bullet points of those presenters our children such as bullying or in sportsmanship was the last topic so that when we're at dinner or in the car ride driving to a sport or after school activity that we can bring that subject up and connect with our students with things that are happening or connect with our children with things that are happening at school if you would take that into consideration um um we've had a partnership with the samaritan center for many years now they're um housed in that spawn and so they have people who kind of lost us come in and do workshops that we feel that hardship children need so they tailor because of my eighth-grade team using social media and they're building uh sportsmanship um whatever topic we ask and they can give it to us we schedule a date and get them in so that that you know is a cost that's free to us and um judy mccormick not shadow but she's been our maybe contact person and though i talked to the second graders with eighth grader they know judy and um they like the class that it's very usually 30 35 minute lessons that she comes in and does our children um she loves coming here because our kids are receptive and want to talk and to say what's on their mind with what happens in the classroom that happens at recess so it's a partnership that um i think i don't i i would say she's been coming here for at least seven years should we mention also how to be returned next yes for those of you who may not have heard if we haven't had zuma here for a while missoula is a company that comes here um they they send our pto sponsorship they come here there's two physicians that come here they're wonderful they travel the country they come here next monday and many child in kindergarten 8th grade want to go out for the missoula play can audition on monday and believe it or not they audition they're selected they're told their parts and every day after school monday through friday they practice right here in this room and on saturday we will have two performances three o'clock at seven o'clock it sounds mind-blowing like when our play takes months and months how do you do it in a week so we've never seen in the zulu production um you know encourage your children to try out and if you've never seen one and you want to know more and maybe your child might want to do it next year you know come to the show on uh next saturday next saturday three and seven but we get a lot of pictures you know we have so we have such a great time and it's a one-week commitment but so i think it's a lot you know because some nights it's like till 6 30 and so it's a big commitment to parents but the children benefit from making you know you know sportsmanship cooperation listening skills you know all the things that you work with you know drama teaches so much so that's it it's amazing sorry this is such a great challenge i'm sorry but i just wanted to you know what um leaders here who are discussing um you know it's really concerning to hear um and i hope that my property speaks for everybody in this board you know when we hear that our children there's been an increase in anxiety and depression and even hurting themselves those type of things like that it's very concerning and um so you know it's one of the things that it's top on our list uh you know and kurt and i we talked about this um kurt is the chair of curriculum and programs so um you know look like the parents to know that this is something that you take very seriously it's concerning to us and um i mean if if if children don't have their well-being in place their learning is not going to be really shitty and it's going to be very difficult to learn when you're sitting in the classroom and you're anxious and you know your mind's just not you're not focusing so that's very concerning but i have a lot of confidence in our team here and so that's something that a lot of those things we're going to be brainstorming we're going to be discussing and seeing what can we do what programs can we bring in in addition to everything that personally shared but also uh professional development and training for our teachers because we see more of this there is a memory so we want to make sure that our teachers are well trained and prepared to be able to handle these things and i also ask that parents if if you see or you notice that your child is going through something at home and um and i you know i trust you and i understand privacy and all that but if we could share let the teachers know so this way we know that something's going on with the child and we can prepare here at school um so if the teacher knows that the teacher could work with the guidance counselor and have something in place there are many things there are many things that can be done in the school to help our kids so um so i just ask that parents um be able to partner with your classroom teachers if you see if you're noticing a change in your child um we're here to help i mean the kids are in school for a really long part of the day so i just asked that parents share with your classroom teacher um just a follow-up clarification to that because i agree with you a thousand percent um so in the notes it has that mrs o'reilly has resigned uh and we've hired a part-time guidance counselor so is that a substitution of a whole time with a part-time or is the part-time and additional or can we talk about staffing please all right so the part-time is during the day and we hired two so right now we have one and i'm in the discussion stages right now on high school another position so miss o'reilly is still the guy she's going nowhere so in the meantime this is covering themselves all right so um so then we'll move on to payment of the bills on saturday at the firehouse if you're interested uh chiefer's karen yeah 13 years of age and older to operate a vote about coding safety yes it does that the board authorizes paid for the following april 22 bill's list and that the secretary is authorized to draw warrants of the treasurer in the total amount of one million six hundred forty thousand eight seven dollars and 87 cents thank yes so much executive session be it resolve that in accordance with the provisions of the open public meetings act the brielle board of education shall conduct a closed executive session pursuant to the personnel and legal exceptions prescribed by njsa 10 4 through 12.
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