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[Applause] mark has been passionate about about space since childhood which is why he'll be majoring in astrophysics he hopes to one day earn his phd [Applause] studying civil engineering at tcnj is andrew salmon jr [Applause] andrew has also received a presidential scholarship from tcnj [Applause] next is samaya sumiel [Applause] samaya originally wanted to attend rutgers university but she absolutely crushed her instrumental audition for tcnj she will major in music education and hopes to work as a professional musician and music teacher [Applause] next up for tcnj is luani thomas [Applause] although she has an undeclared major she is thinking about the nursing program she is also really excited for the opportunity to make new friends in college [Applause] last but certainly not least we have jack woolforth jack loves science and after helping volunteer at the middle school this previous summer summer to help teach he found his collet calling in biology all right one last round of applause for all the seniors who are attending four-year colleges in new jersey [Applause] all right before we wrap things up there are a few other people who would like to offer some parting words of wisdom and encouragement yes of course [Applause] thank you [Applause] so okay so we had a lovely video with all these nice clips from all the teachers saying wonderful things we will get that video in front of you at some point in time it will probably not be in the next minute or two so here's what we'd like to do all right we missed an opportunity earlier on to get some wonderful group shots so i'm going to ask really quickly when you do some categories if i call your category please come up and gather at the front of the stage we're going to get one quick group photo and then we're going to be heading to the cafeteria in about five minutes for some last round of activities so first group up can we please get all of our students who are attending community college next year please come up to the front we're going to take one group shot let's do this real quickly please community college students to the front please okay you can mr hop in yeah go for it okay some can sit on the stage if you need to double up after this group we will do all students attending four-year colleges will be next all [Applause] [Music] [Applause] the last person [Applause] okay after you take your group photo please head directly to the cafeteria for some lovely activities our next group up at the front right here is four year colleges four year colleges to the front please for the group photo hbcus come up too you'll stay after for a smaller group shot as well so all four-year colleges up at the front please all four-year colleges [Applause] get on in there act like you like each other [Applause] oh [Applause] if you're attending an hbcu please stay otherwise head to the cafeteria [Applause] [Music] after hbcu's military will be next military will be next again after your photo head to the cafeteria we got some activity since we got some more food for you excellent let's get our folks entering the military please join mr schmiel for the photo military next category afterwards we'll do workforce and vote school workforce and vocational technical schools will be last [Music] [Applause] got one more coming there you go [Music] thank you and last but not least all of our students entering the workforce all of our students attending trade technical vocational programs please join mr schmiel for the group photo all right and everyone else should be heading to the cafeteria grabbing some free food doing some fun activities till the end of block 2.
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the meeting to order welcome everyone we'll start off with our roll call vote or i'm sorry lisa schumacher here tyson search here we have a quorum thank you if you join me in standing 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 right thank you like to welcome our visitors here this evening thank you for joining us on such a rainy nasty evening out there so and also everyone at home tuning in on youtube channel so thank you for your participation do we have any public comments this evening all right come on up if you would just state your name and you have three minutes if you were all 10 year olds i would be able to talk without a sprint amber haven a culture has been formed between board and staff that's created divides it's promoted the terms us and them rather than we however as we move forward and my hope is that it can be a collaborative effort we hope to leave the past behind us teachers don't want to be divided and we don't feel like the board would like that either last night at the retirement party at sunset overlook some of us observed that the board members president spoke to very few of the teachers and staff in attendance instead members of the board stood in a huddle and spoke among themselves staff members did not approach the board members to talk either the separation and divide between board and staff was evident teachers love to welcome people into our community and tell them that this is the best district around that they should move here and live here for the schools when looking for a house we would love to say use tammy mitchell hines she's on school board she's got our backs or if you're looking for a great venue or medium limo you know check out sugar springs or all about you use corey pharmacy great people great need insurance check out searches awesome family feeling connected to and supported by all of you guys would be a wonderful collaboration on both ends everyone in this room knows what happened to mr ackerman wasn't transparent and it didn't feel right but the teachers still haven't given up on building a relationship with the board we are here for it we want your collaboration but we want to make sure that the members of the board practice the values we instill in our kids and expect in our community a couple of months ago when i sat alongside all of you at this table and spoke with mrs huells about the good things happening at the middle school it felt as though it was the first time you'd heard most or all of these positive things the community needs you to show interest in the people teaching their children to show support when making decisions that affect their kids to know what's happening within the school walls i've brainstormed some ideas that could help mend the divide take a day off from your own job and invest a small amount of time to come into our schools stand in the halls between passing periods come on in for lunch duty get your substitute license and choose one of our schools to sub for today get to know us you have the opportunity to make small positive changes that will trickle down and show big support to the teachers you can redirect complaints in the grocery store by stating i hear you and i can help you but can you please email the board so we can discuss and follow proper procedures to resolve this you can speak with the teachers speak with the building administration and get to the root of a situation before making a decision that negatively and directly impacts a human life doing one some or all of these things could help bring our community back together a select few shouldn't be the only ones heard from the community every resident of columbia and every parent of a cusd 4 student has an equal and as important voice as their neighbor i stand here asking you to acknowledge what has divided some of us and to use your positions and actions to bring us back together the amber any other comments all right you know i believe correspondence is making this way around which brings us on to the consent agenda mr gray if you like to walk us through that please yeah you've got your um finances uh in is part of the reports i want to just call out that julie has been very diligent in trying to make sure everything gets um as we finish this budget we're going to talk about the budget hearing as we get the actual budget presented to you next month or presented today and then approved hopefully next month um we i think we've got everything paid for except for payroll and so there will be some little things coming in but what the budget you'll see tonight will be almost accurate except for we still have two more payrolls that'll need to be added on when we approve it next month so um it's just it's a monumental task i want to thank her for that as far as the personnel and things we've got a mr john heeg in the audience he's going to be the new math for seventh grade welcome we look forward to having you part of our family and i believe columbia roots and you graduated from columbia is that right fantastic 2012 always makes me feel old and start hearing when they graduate but that's okay um we have a few vacancies still listing our focus right now has been for staffing for next year um we'll talk more about cte we are starting to get some emails and people coming commenting as we've said more and more that we need we've got two our two cte people have now resigned and so if we don't find people for this program we can't staff the program you can get people that are in the workforce get a provisional certificate and those are where we're kind of hitting the bushes and we've gotten some phone calls um and so i'm i'm always optimistic but i just want you to be aware that that's a hard to fill position and we are trying very very hard to find someone of quality for that we are also um having issues with a sign language interpreter it's another hard to fill position it's kind of like i'm reliving the nurse situation where our our contract wasn't high enough as far their hourly rate seems like sign language interpreters can make more money doing their interpreting versus working in the school and so we're probably going to have to go to a purchase service for that um we've interviewed a couple of people and it's just our price point isn't there so next year when we do the negotiations that's something that we'll need to discuss and uh we are still looking for a guidance person or a social worker at the elementaries at the eagle view buildings but those are the three positions that we're still trying to fill i think everything else is staffed so without further ado the administration would recommend that you approve the consent agenda as presented questions discussions harry now i'd entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda as presented i'll make them go ahead tyson i'll make the motion all right text me the motion i'll second tammy second roll call please adam humpkin is absent tammy hines yes andrea corey yes greg meyer yes scott middleton lisa schumacher yes tyson search yes perfect unanimous motion passes item seven is our communications reports and presentations start off with the enrollment report which i believe is in the packet yeah i think we changed one person yeah perfect and our administrative reports uh start with our building report from parkville parkview excuse me welcome all right thank you uh i'm just gonna go through some uh some positive things happening at parkview here we've had in april students participated in a week-long coin war between grade levels just try to put a little competition into it uh students were to bring in spare change and we weren't really sure what to expect but uh students donate over 2130 dollars worth of coins in one week so um we were blown away by that we ended up donating the money to help the shelter animals at helping strays and the donations will help care for and find homes for animals at the shelter also we had we finally finished up our fundraiser rewards we had students that sold four boxes or more of chocolate this has been going on all year they got their limo ride and lunch so we had 91 students that sold four boxes or more at parkview and 40 at eagleview so in one day we had 131 students riding a limo and getting pizza for lunch so they took a little tour around columbia and then stopped off at the city park 130 some students in one limo must be a stretch hummer and we could fit 20 at a time um we had miss king was riding the whole time with the kids and just busting them back and forth so it was it was a success and i really enjoyed it so um today we finished up the wax museum fourth graders um researched a famous person in history memorized the speech with important facts and dressed as their historical person parents and students were able to visit the wax museum and click the button to hear the wax character come alive so if you've ever been to the wax museum it's a pretty cool experience and the kids really love it and it's pretty amazing to see all of the students be able to stand up and speak in front of adults people they don't know and all the students it's really a cool thing to see my memory popped up of my 21 year old doing the wax museum today on facebook it was just awesome that's awesome yeah um second grade students finished their ames web benchmark testing i think last week uh just talking to a few teachers it sounds like we had some big big gains this year from the start of the year to the end so that's that's i mean that's what you're you're excited about seeing is just seeing those students improve throughout the year third and fourth grade students finished up their map benchmark testing also and all those results are going to be sent home to parents tomorrow mrs vollmer's students have been taking orders from staff for coffee and muffins so they have the coffee crew is what they're calling the coffee crew provides students with opportunities for life skills life skills are best learned by doing the program provides students with the opportunities for personal growth social skills functional academics and so much more some recent skills they have implemented include counting mixed amounts of coins following multi-step directions communication skills taking turns and safety cleanliness in the kitchen this has been a big hit with parkview staff as i look forward to the weekly deliveries of coffee and muffins i'm i'm one of those people so it's pretty cool you get to fill out your uh the menu they come pick it up and then usually on fridays they make their their way around to make all their deliveries and you you pay them and they take it and they take it back and count it and um it's kind of lifted everybody's spirits around school it's really a cool cool thing to see um some negative news field day uh with all the rain we got today we're going to cancel field day tomorrow now we're going to reschedule for uh monday next week so i'll be sending an email out to parents here once the board meeting gets over with and give them that news also one more thing dear day next wednesday third grader is going to participate in deer day which is drop everything and read students will have one special person visit and share with them their love for reading with nice weather the hope is students are going to be able to go outside and read with their special person all right i'm going to veer away from parkview for just a minute and talk some cea stuff with you um cea has a new executive board that took over on may 1st it's a nice mixture of veteran cea leaders and who know the ropes and some new voices in there to be heard i think they're going to lead ca into great things in the future and i personally cannot wait to see kind of what they accomplish uh we also are we're we also worked on some new bylaws it turns out our bylaws have not been overhauled in quite some time so we've always tweaked language here and there but um but a complete overhaul has long been overdue so uh new practices of electronic voting and virtual meetings it was time so a very proud of carly atwell tammy fultz myself who kind of took uh took those bylaws and made them brought them into the 22nd 20 the 20 to the 2020s um the other thing is um mentor teachers i currently see usd4 teachers who mentor new teachers do not receive any compensation however mentoring a new teacher is kind of a huge responsibility it's very time consuming and it's that mentor's teacher job to be sure that the teacher has success and this weighs heavily on that mentor teacher's shoulders as a profession we don't like to fail we don't like to be told that we didn't accomplish the task so being a mentor teacher carries that same need to succeed during the past legislative session our legislators passed a budget that consisted of several increases one of which increased the educator mentoring amount to 7.5 million dollars since our budget since our mentor teachers currently decide do not receive any compensation and the budget with the budget increase earmarked some dollars for them i wanted to possibly suggest and remind you that the board can add stipend positions to our contract the during that's not in the negotiation window and the one thing that will have to be negotiated would be the compensation part but as negotiation chairperson for this current contract i can tell you i can get my team together this summer and we could discuss stipending um adding a stipend for mentor teachers so that this program could be in place for the ball [Music] thank you perfect and our assistant superintendent report sure um so i'm gonna jump on a couple of things that carla and mr dugan talked about um so our e end of the year benchmark testing um i have seen some preliminary results some um different graphs that have been going around i'm working on kind of compiling it all together we have a few students in a couple of buildings that are still finishing up taking those assessments um but i am blown away by the amount of growth that our students have done over the this year um i think when you see and i'll have that information for you at the next meeting but to see the growth that our students made from the start of this year till now is unbelievable and i think that is directly related to one our students being excited to be back in school we're not in hybrid we're not on remote learning um they're back in school where they love to be and they thrive um and they've put in the work but it also is the dedication of our teachers because there was a lot of gaps that were there when our students went through this pandemic and so they have worked exceptionally hard to get those up so i am very excited to have that data and do a lot of celebrating of the teachers but also with the teachers at the start of next year and then to continue to see that growth of what we can get um another thing like carla had mentioned about the new teacher so i'm looking forward to spending the summer revamping our new teacher mentor program um you know i i came in in the the start of this last year and was given the information and being brand new and the new mentor meeting was happening three weeks after i started in the position i kind of just went with what we had um but i have been fortunate enough to be part of a consortium at the state level for the state of illinois that is working with new teachers and so we have developed quite a bit of programming for those teachers utilizing being able to collaborate through online meetings and different things and having on-demand meetings but also in person in different kind of cohorts throughout the state so i'm really excited to roll that into part of our program like mr grody pointed out earlier with the cte we've been spending a lot of time this is a program that has continued to build our students from the program went and competed at skillsusa and placed first and are now going to atlanta to compete at the national level and that speaks again to our students dedication but also our program and so that is something that we are passionate about doing we have you know done the traditional when you have job posting or job openings you post the positions right um didn't get a whole lot we were all getting nervous um so we've been reaching out to community colleges around looking for people been reaching out to members of the chamber of commerce that have businesses in the trades that might have people that are recently retired or looking to retire that might be interested so um that is something that we're passionate about trying to do um and i will say that the staff has joined on board trying to get those positions filled we've had several teachers contact us asking for more information about how can we get this out does this look right can we get this poster say amber's one of them that's been really pushing and trying to help us get that out there and that's again what it takes is a collaborative effort by the community to be able to continue to support that so looking forward to that um i kind of wanted to highlight this month our girls on the run program um eagle or a parkview and middle school both had a girls on the run program that has been running this spring um and the girls meet twice a week they do a lot of learning about themselves about empowering themselves making positive choices it's a phenomenal program and then they also get the exercise in there they train for a 5k and the 5k was just held this last saturday in forest park it was phenomenal um to be a part of it to see the excitement even the girls who in practice were like we gotta run today um and we saw all kinds of things were so excited once they got to that race and do it and again that's another program that's not possible without our staff and our teachers that give up their time to do those programs um and so i was fortunate enough that middle school adopted me this year and let me join that with them and get to see it firsthand with them so i appreciate that and then the last thing i just want to point out was i think i don't know if everyone knows but on sunday night this week scott horner and scott germain are being inducted into the st louis metropolitan football coaches hall of fame and so there is they are being recognized at a banquet this sunday night um and it's a you know kind of a huge huge accomplishment for them and and also a nod to the program and getting colombia's name out there so i just wanted to congratulate both of those gentlemen on on this honor that they're getting that's all i have great thank you very much all right now to the big dog report i don't know about the big dog but uh i've got a uh good news this morning um we got an email from the regional office of education stating that the shield testers are saying we need to return all of our supplies and materials for the shield testing that was the program that allowed us to collect spit and check for covid in my mind that is the last nail in the coffin of covid because the state's basically saying that next year we're going to start the school year without having to be tested or anything so um i'm i'm thrilled about that this is my end of my second year here in columbia and in many ways it feels like it was my first year i went down and i i walked around and it took me a while before i realized that the sheet of paper that had their name on it the little red dot i needed to push to get the kid to talk to me but i did that at the wax museum and i am incredibly impressed with what they were able to do and so it's just it's neat to be able to see those things and although i've been here two years we're just getting back into a lot of um that stuff and so it's good uh we are gearing up and starting to make reservations for the joint annual convention that is the weekend before thanksgiving for board members um it's in chicago it is probably the best pd for you all with that said i am also looking at the school board governance recognition it's an application that you need to do and what i'd like to do is work with the board president i haven't talked to you yet about this but i'm throwing it out there so that we'll both be committed it's going through and doing an application no no pressure at all but it's an application that would um do kind of a self-evaluation of the board and it'll get us back into the visioning and missioning that we started and then kind of covered his he hit us and we we moved away from and what not um i think miss haven brings up some really good points about the collaboration and that is the culture that we want to have and i see it i see a glass that's more than half full so um it has to do with all the wonderful things and and whatnot but it's really now that the excuse of covid is behind us watching and seeing everything's just really refreshing and so with that um make sure that you tell miss kimberly if you're going to be able to attend in chicago because we need to get our reservations soon thank you very much we've gone to our items for action the first one is the approval of the hmh intro math curriculum yeah and alyssa can answer any questions or concerns but she went through a process with the kindergarten through eighth grade math teachers and the recommendation is to improve the hmh into math series do you have anything you want to add to that no i just if you have any questions because i think a lot of it was hopefully you could see the process we went through and and how seriously the committee took this and really wanted to do what's best for our kids questions comments concerns would it be like to make a motion to approve the hms info maths curriculum i said intro before the old glasses help a lot any opposed any abstentions perfect next item of reaction is our approval to extend the terms of the misvic property casualty pool this is a yearly action item and every year we extend for three years with the understanding that we could go out to bid in after one year we're not locked into the three years but we'd have to notify them before december and quite honestly we'd also have to go out to bid before december in order to change that so my recommendation is that we stay with the ms vic property casualty pool a little inside information we had a committee scott myself mr grody and that was a year ago yeah we did look at this pretty extensively and we did send out their bids and i think consensus was pretty clear that this vic was it was our way so i don't uh nothing i think has changed since that time so yeah but this has been looked at pretty heavily so i just want to pay that know that anybody like to make any discussion i'm sorry we'd like to make a motion to approve to extend the term of the misfit property casualty pool i'll make that motion thanks scott their second second protection second uh roll call please tammy hines yes andrea corey yes craig meyer yes scott middlecam hi lisa schumacher yes tyson search all right good morning passing down and seeing we did that now it's time to appoint our misfit property and casualty pool board members and um the administration would recommend that we continue that the superintendent chris grody is the ms vic property casualty pool board member representing columbia usd4 i would i would recommend that we um also add alyssa alyssa smith smith as the alternate great answer any discussion do you give that a listen sure [Laughter] we put you on the spot i know i know a feeling maybe like to make a motion to approve mr grody for our miss vic pool board member and alyssa as our alternate i'll make that motion thank you andrew your second second lisa seconds all in favor aye all right ain't opposed any abstentions mr carey next item is the approval to extend the terms of the misfit employee benefits pool yeah the missouri um mississippi valley mississippi valley insurance consortium that's what it is thank you uh they do you should know that yeah us educators and are in acronyms you it it gets confusing um anyway but ms vic does our employee benefits as well we do both our property casualty and our employees staying with them on one side the recommendation is to stay with them with the employees that's the one that we really looked at and any cost savings wouldn't be guaranteed over long terms and really when you change people's employee health benefits you want to see a substantial savings we've had very minimal increases in our insurance coming from other districts where we've seen larger ones i'd say we stay with mizvik there are discussions comments would anybody like to make a motion to extend the term of the misfit employee benefit pool i'll make that motion thank you scott wait a second i'll second okay seconds roll call please andrea corey yes greg meyer yes scott middle camp lisa schumacher yes tyson search tammy hines yes and we're down to the point a misfit employee benefits pool board member and again the recommendation would be for the superintendent chris brody to be the board member with alyssa smith assistant superintendent as the alternative alternate alternate that too that yeah alternate is the term discussions comments questions maybe you like to make that motion i'll make that motion thank you andrew give her a second one second lisa seconds all in favor aye aye aye aye aye any opposed any abstentions perfect our next item is this episode public hearing date and time to attend the 2021-2022 school budget yeah and what we've normally done is had it at the regularly scheduled board meeting uh the next month however upon looking at it a budget needs to be on display for 30 days counting today and counting the june 16th which is the regularly scheduled board meeting that's 29 days so we can either have the board meeting on friday we could have the board meeting on the 16th and then have a special board meeting on friday or we could do move it all to next week thursday which would be the fourth thursday this is why when you do the original budget we always have that one month off without the amended budget we just i don't know why we missed it but i apologize last year we had our um may meeting on a wednesday to give us that extra day so um anyway so what is the flavor of the board we need to change our board meeting next month or we can keep the board meeting and have a special board meeting for the hearing understand also you're going to be i'm out next week the week after the week after oh you're out the week of the 20th yes and well that kind of sums up what we're not doing not having it a week later right so well we could also i mean we can do that we can do the um and we can do the uh budget hearing a week later if we wanted to as i was kind of thinking we proceeded with our board members scheduled and we have a special board meeting i think we could muddle through i know we could have without chris kimberly maybe but i think we could handle that so the the the the hearing in the budget would be on the fourth thursday 23rd of june i believe so and our regular schedule board meetings on the 16th we could do that that way we keep everything moving smoothly and so special board meeting june [Music] 23rd 23rd so the recommendation would be to have the um the public hearing and the budget hearing for the amended budget on june 23rd at 7 00 p.m and followed by him not followed by anything just be the right way board regular schedule board meeting the week before per okay yeah i mean we i'd say we move at all but without chris right exactly and kim gone you have any other ideas are we good with that one all right you need to vote on that budget hearing then so that we can get that posted would it be like to make a motion to conduct a budget hearing on june 23rd 7 27 p.m at 7 p.m thank you yeah all right motion second that scott second and roll call please greg yes scott middleton hi mr schumacher yes tyson search tammy hines andrea corey yes that works out we will miss you guys though i just want to know won't be the same without you all right next item is the approval for the first reading of press issue 109.
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and then right um before we start uh tonight's meeting at the brown county uh school board on may 19 2020 um please stand and pledge allegiance as [Music] one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice okay i call this the water at 6 34 are there any modifications to the agenda thank at this you we recognize wizards and comments from the audience on any topic not already on the agenda okay no one signed in for that and with that we have our first presentation um mr austin and ileana cox were not able to be here this evening so there will not be a presentation let me yeah are you going to present i mean i can talk about it sure okay i don't know that i have anything to present but um i can tell you about it iliana cox is one of my amazing art students she's a senior this year she um well she entered into this contest for the international violin competition and the international violin competition is kind of known as the olympics of the violin it brings worldwide recognition to indianapolis and it started in 1982 to um kind of mix together music and art and all that and so one of the components of it is a juried exhibition of student artwork and um this year there were 21 000 submissions in grades 1 through 12.
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champions for cg sound system downtowns were also named the grand champion and that is such an incredible accomplishment for these kids they work super super hard i'm sure if you've been to a show you know that and you can see that and we really believe in providing our students with an exceptional youth education experience here at finra high school and i think that these kids could all attest to the fact that the past four years they've got to they have gotten to um to do that and so we're just very happy for them and for their futures but also for the things that they've gotten to do while members of center high school so thank you to them and thank you and i want to get some big accolades to jen and jared who's not here and i suspect he's at grad school come on i mean jared do a fantastic job with the kids they give the kids certain chances to perform in places that most kids don't they perform with the grand old opry they've been to orlando a couple times but they finally made it over the top they'd be caramel but jared and the entire choir parent organization and everybody you know gives the opportunity these kids to go out and perform and do the things like they did in orlando and kudos to you and jared for bringing home some trophies this year one announcement before we get started uh mr russell is with us via zoom tonight so that's why i keep moving this around if you guys are wondering so um he's with us he had some family issues he had to take care of out of state so it's an exciting night he didn't want to miss it we do this every year around may and celebrating all the accomplishments of students at the high school and staff as well so okay next thing on the agenda is to adopt the agenda mr president i move that we adopt the agenda as presented mostly been made and seconded to drop the agenda all in favor say aye aye anyone oppose motion passes point of clarification tonight too it'll be a 4-0 vote yes mr russell won't be voting next on the agenda will be the uh for dr henderson for recognition and presentations good evening and thank you to the board and dr arkanov for inviting us here to celebrate some of the successes that we've had at the school this year we have a wide variety of students who have found great success in the areas that they are most passionate about and have chosen to pursue at the high school so i will name off some folks but i'll also invite some instructors that are here up this evening to tell you a little bit about the competitions that they competed in many of you are familiar with the national merit scholarship contest students take the psat nmsqt which is the psat with the national merit qualifying portion associated with that and we were fortunate to have five brilliant minds qualify as national merit scholars this year and there are a few of them that are in the audience here this evening that we want to recognize karina oza if you guys will kind of come up to the front once we read your names that'd be great kailyn spitler stephen reeves prakar saxena and john brooks i think john might not be here tonight so these individuals distinguish themselves by reaching a selection index on the psat nmsqt that advanced them in the competition for national merit scholarships and they have all been named as national merit scholars so we're incredibly proud of the work that they've put in lots of late nights studying lots of things that they gave up in order to be here and and be representing the school corporation in this capacity so congratulations to you all very proud you guys can go ahead and have a seat unable to be with us this evening brooks bowers is one of our business teachers and he always is very passionate about having students participate in bpa contests officially formed in 1966 as the office education association business professionals of america has a strong history as a student organization that contributes to the preparation of global professionals through the advancement of leadership citizenship academic and technological skills for students at the middle secondary and post-secondary levels we had two students who earned distinguished honors at the bpa contest this year and i don't believe either one of them were able to be with us this evening but dominic burke and mahindra mandala both earned distinguished honors at the bpa contest this year so very proud of those students as well next up i'm going to invite frank workman if he is here in the audience this evening frank if you'll come up and join me we have students that participate in skillsusa contests frank happens to be actually an instructor over at c9 and frank is in the carpentry program and he had a group of students participate in skills usa so frank if you want to introduce the kids that are here with you we certainly appreciate all the work that you do with our students over at c9 and frank did not know that he was going to be up here talking to all of you i knew i was coming but i didn't have anything prepared come on up here guys real quick sam neil was the leader of the pack and vincent schneiders was the brick and nathaniel actually competed but with a different group but he is filling in for vincent and andrew coyne was also here with them and another student from greenwood high school xander warden so they're going to kind of trade places in atlanta they go to atlanta for a week and they will compete in a two-day competition which will be carpentry so framing siding brick work plumbing electrical and they're under a lot of pressure to get it done they they did a good job in two-day competition at the state level and they walked away with the gold medal they did a very good job very proud of you congratulations thank you very much also competing in skillsusa contest this year chef greer is here this evening and she brought some students along who competed in culinary contests so i'll invite chef greer up to introduce those students to you as well good evening i'm very honored to recognize the three top ten bakers in the state of indiana um e vallejo grayson roberts and emily boyer i'm a big fan of skills usa i've been a cte educator for over five years i've seen growth arcs and students and i'm i've had first place winners i'm going to atlanta to judge a high school coach at the college level as well and my post-secondary people are competing but i have to say it's great to have top finishers but i believe in integrity and integrity of the human spirit and these three girls saw a fellow competitor from another school breakdown and it was our kids that came around and lifted this student up to continue to finish i don't care that we didn't get a first place finish but in my heart these three showed integrity respect and honor to another human being to finish out the competition so we're ready for next year right very good thank you congratulations and following the national anthem you already heard mrs dice describe the the success that our choir program has had and we have five of our uh wonderful students here this evening representing the choir program we're incredibly proud of the hard work that they did and what they accomplished this year as well um next up jackie fowler is here this evening on behalf of the art department to talk about a couple of students that won some gold key and silver key awards so jackie turn it over to you are you moving this over to this hello i'm jackie fowler i'm one of the teachers at the high school i want to say though for rick jones he is not with us here tonight but we should be proud and honor him too rick is retiring this year he has been an educator at center grove for 36 years he was my teacher too and i wouldn't be standing here if it wasn't for him so i just want to say thank you to rick and all he's done for our department i also want to thank the board and our school for just the support of the visual arts it just isn't seen at other schools quite like it is and we are building an amazing art wing and i just want to thank the school board for their support and that and it's just going to be a beautiful beautiful place of course when we do something we do it well at center grove and that isn't going to stop with what we're doing with the art wing so it'll be up and running hopefully for next year but we're very excited and so thank you for your support tonight we have two artists that are with us but in scholastics we have a competition that we compete regionally with and so we have three winners um two of them are here tonight so we were going to show their artwork up on to the screen um we have sam landreth here are you here sam and we have steven reeves come on up all right um up on the screen right now this is stephen's drawing that he was able to win a key with and advancing forward this is a photo student of mine who's unable to be with us tonight but this is cole heiser and we have also our winner here with sam landreth so we have some scholastic winners so thank you for your support again [Applause] thank you congratulations up next lisa paratus here this evening as a representative of our red alert robotics club to talk a little bit about the success that they had this year and to introduce some students that she brought along lisa sir good evening i am very proud of our team this year and i won't get through this without crying so i'm just telling y'all that right now if you know me that just that's the way it goes um we had a great year we we did win the most awards we've ever won as a team with how many medals kids five medals this year um we advanced we won at state we won locally we went to worlds we made world finalists which has never been done uh by red alerts we're the only team in indiana that made it toward finalists i'm competing the kids will tell you who we all competed against um but i i could not be more proud of this team and what they've accomplished and we had 50 kids who i almost brought them all tonight and put them in the back but i thought that might overwhelm me a little um we might get trouble the fire marshal or something so we didn't but i do have our captains with us tonight so i'd like to introduce them and have them come up you guys want to come on up and believe it or not they you know for robot nerds they're good at talking too so i'm going to let them do most of the talking because the red alert is all about the kids all of our programs are student-led even our camps hopefully some of you are coming to our camps this summer all student-led so um everything we do is student-focused and student-led the kids are giving we're bribing no i mean we're giving the school board and yours is coming to school next week um they're each getting worlds medals as well as state medals the same medals that the team got as well as some goodies so i'm gonna start um you want to introduce yourself your role in the team and just go for it go ahead my name is going to talk a little bit about our season so like she mentioned we have gotten five awards this season so it's been a really great season for us so uh we started off at columbus where we won that event with the robot and we also won chairman's which is the most prestigious and the highest you can win it's about your community outreach and all that fun stuff um the second event we won engineering inspiration award which is the second highest award that you can win um you can only win one award in tournament once so that was the best that we had done and um we won chairmans for the entire state as well which advanced us to worlds and uh there we also got finalists in our division which there are over 450 teams there from lots of different countries and it was a really amazing experience we also had some really good community outreach this season we have our special education and fine motor sensory kind of motor boards that we have implemented into the development of the schools here at um sugar grove elementary um we also have um several books that we've written and illustrated and we have um that uh business rocket service and the perfect playground which was new this year so um we're really proud of our outreach and our success this season and we really want to thank our community and the school board for their support [Applause] i may or may not be sending stacey and dr arkanoff like 1am waitress what yeah they might have heard that and we we do appreciate everybody's support and doctor your patience bless you um everybody in in numerous i know several of you came to see us off came to state um the police department gave us a police escort which the kids that was probably the coolest thing they did because they had a police escort onto 37 life was really good for the 50 teenagers but thank you all for your support we appreciate it so and we've already started our new season so we're rocking and rolling thank you you can put a lot into it and we really appreciate it without you thank you absolutely okay last uh but certainly not least i'm going to invite andrea t van up andrea is one of the instructors at the high school in our engineering and biomedical biomedical biomedical program and um her students participated in the samsung solve for tomorrow contest and so she's going to introduce some kids and talk to you a little bit about that okay good evening i'm andrea teagan i run the biomedical science program at summer grove high school and i always throw out a challenge to my kiddos and this year i have six young ladies i call them the girls of stem that came to meet that challenge um the competition is to essentially identify a need in the community that needs to be solved um and using stem to solve that problem um so these kiddos took it head on um in one state and then they went on to nationals and they were in the top 10 of the national competition they actually went out to new york city and competed on a gigantic stage which i would have had the stage fight for these kids and like a champ so i would like to introduce you to anonymou olaji hope mander paige merrill maddie sims shirley zing and shelby walker who could not be with us tonight and the girls are going to tell you just a little bit about their project okay so our project was to help with distracted driving and so we came up with the device that fits on your dashboard it has a camera that has output sound and bluetooth so it connects to an app on your phone that will track your eye movement and detect when you are looking outside of the given parameters and then when it detects that it'll send a signal to the camera to be to bring the driver's eyes back up to the road so yeah i'm very glad that i have a unique group of kiddos uh they all presented last night at a white coat ceremony um and beyond that project they had additional projects and an internship so these kids earned it all um and i can't wait to see what they accomplish next as they move off to their collegiate years will this be something they can continue to pursue like in college and those kinds of things or um um [Laughter] what was really cool is the first year we made it to nationals we were about a week from going to new york city and the world shutdown what was really cool is once you get to the national level you become an alumni of samsung so one of our alumni mentors was actually there the one of the young ladies that never got to get to new york got to be with us and she got some mentors through that program they are now all part of the alumni network and three of those girls are working the same time some are doing some summer internships one's a purdue ambassador so a lot of good things happening so as you can see a wide array of accomplishments in lots of different programming that we offer and we are fortunate to live in a community and and live in a district and our students are fortunate to attend schools in a district that is able to provide these kinds of opportunities for our students to pursue their passions and and be rewarded for their hard work and their perseverance so we're really proud of everything that they've all done so and you guys don't have to stay for the rest of the board thank you come on i would i would like just to thank lisa thank you very much um and i also want to point out frank warman from c9 i don't know if he left yet no he uh he he does a lot of great things at c9 for these kids um he dedicates a lot of time and he comes all over our board meetings and he just does a wonderful job mentoring these young young men and women that kind of do his carpentry thing and last but not least i i want to give a special shout out to chef greer um i i've never met you before but i've heard your name through from administrators from teachers from students and most importantly my own daughter um she loves you to death everybody talks so highly of you and i don't even know how you got my daughter to come to this board meeting because she's never come to a board meeting um so please plant your roots in center grove and we love you here and uh we love all of you but i just i i can't praise you guys enough so thank you very much every one of you [Applause] we'll give just a minute for the room to clear okay next on the agenda would be public comments and i think we had one sign up right that's correct yep mr collins and you signed up to discuss [Applause] 2022 2023 textbook rental fees unfortunately jack russell's not here so you guys will i guess just have to afford it too so just um when you get up to talk just share your name and address and group if you're affiliated with one try to stay on the topic of textbook rental fees and just try to limit it to three minutes if you would and just address all your comments to the board president thank you my name is william collins i live 3865 new battle lane and uh sorry for the deception i'm not going to speak about uh textbooks and according to todd rokita and the parent bill of rights i don't have to the only reason i put textbook rental fees is because if i didn't i would have never been recognized this has been a problem we've had all year and it started with uh jack russell and it's been continued with the current school board president what i'm actually going to speak about is earlier this school year a male center grove student in the segment all in favor say hi hi anyone opposed motion passes next on the agenda is action items uh 7.1 dr arkanov thank you this evening there we go thanks this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the preliminary approval of the of a 10 28 hearing for the high school and sugar grove am i in the right one yeah sure grow face too thank you um and dr gabriel will provide you with some additional information a little bit out of order on me sorry thank you and i just want to comment that um as normal if you have any difficult questions we have jeff clock and bush from barnes and thornburg who's our bond council here to answer those and i'll take the easy ones this this item is um a request to have the board uh do a an approval for us to call a 1028 hearing in july so there's a long resolution there um a lot of whereases i just want to point out a couple of the of the critical things that are included on page three section one basically says that a need exists for this project to expand the high school and to complete the renovation of sugar grove i'm just going to kind of jump through the important points on page 4 at the top section 5 says that you are authorizing the building corporation to sell and deliver bonds totaling 30 million 350 000 for these two projects together and then section nine at the bottom of page four uh the key part of that section is that president of the board is hereby authorized to call hearing on july 21st 2022 that's our regular board meeting for that evening so that is those are the the key points in in this resolution and we're asking the board for approval of this resolution this evening any questions or anything no need to motion mr president and i move that we approve the motion for the preliminary approval of the 1028 hearing for the high school in sugar grove elementary motion has been made a segment all in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed motion passes thank you 7.2 thank you mr edward this evening i'm making a recommendation that the board approved the sale of refunding bonds and dr gabriel will provide you with some additional information so this is an item that we haven't done anything like this in quite a long time refunding is just another word for refinancing so just like if you refinance your home and expect to lower the payments that's what we're trying to do here the bonds involved in this request were for the building of maple grove elementary school they were sold in 2004 and in fact they were refinanced once before in 2013.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
[Music] so [Music] so [Music] thank you [Music] good evening and welcome to the induction ceremony for the class of 2022 and 2023 i'm lauren enochson co-advisor of the national honor society this is marcia vieira my co-advisor we want to welcome everyone tonight and personally congratulate all of you on your child's achievement you must be very proud before we hand over the meeting to our outgoing presidents we want to introduce this year's board and thank them for their very successful year could you please stand in acknowledgment this year we had two co-presidents randy medeiros randy [Applause] [Music] [Applause] randy will be attending lynn university where she will be majoring in cyber security kailyn rotowski kalyn will be attending umass amherst which will be majoring in informatics in the fall gabriella santos our vice president gabby will be attending roger williams university and she'll be majoring in mechanical engineering we have two secretaries grace rose grace will be attending the university of new england where she will be majoring in medical biology nicole [Applause] nicole sylvain will be attending umass amherst where she'll be majoring in biology and our co-treasurer robert august [Applause] robert will be attending bristol community college where he will be majoring in psychology and minoring in restaurant management in addition to their involvement in the national honor society as well as other various sports and club activities they have maintained a gpa that has kept them in the top 20 percent of their class they have done an exceptionally fine job this year and we loved working with them we wish all six of you the best of luck in your future endeavors could we have a round of applause for all their efforts their hard work [Applause] their hard work and their commitment to helping others we'd also like to thank the five members of the faculty council whose main responsibilities are to review all of the applications to the national honor society they are dr peter bangs of the science department miss lilly chamberlain of the world languages department miss patricia flitter of the math department ms debra august of the math department and mr will higgins of the english department thank you for your service to the national honor society i will now call randy medeiros and kaelin rutowski to the podium to conduct the rest of the ceremony good evening would everyone please rise for the pledge of allegiance and the singing of the star spangled banner 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 would now like to introduce lauren lima who is a member of the dartmouth high theatre company and the dhs acapella group harmonix to sing the star-spangled banner would you please remain standing so [Music] oh [Music] oh say can you see by the dawn's early light what so proudly we held at the twilight's glass gleaming whose brought stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight for the reports [Music] gave proof through the night that our flag was still there oh say does that star spangled then yet wave for the land of the free and the home of the brave [Applause] [Music] please be seated thank you my name is randy medeiros and i am co-president of this year's national honor society welcome to our honor society induction ceremony being inducted into the national honor society is one of the greatest honors a studer can achieve at dartmouth high school since membership represents the highest level of excellence in school it carries with it the responsibility of setting an example for other members of the student body the students who are being inducted this evening have demonstrated through their academics and social contributions the qualities that the national honors society stands for scholarship leadership character and service good evening my name is caitlin rickowski co-president of this year's national honor society the qualities of scholarship leadership character and service truly exemplify every member of the national honor society this year our members showed their utmost dedication to service in and around their community whether it was assisting the elementary schools and math programs cleaning our school campus or even volunteering at the zoo each and every one of these students could be seen around dartmouth and surrounding areas making a difference one act at a time when it wasn't an individual pursuit our chapter took part in many group efforts to support our chosen charity of the year prevent child abuse america we held restaurant fundraisers at establishments like my place in bittersweet farm early in the school year where a percentage of the proceeds went directly to our charity during february in light of valentine's day we sold and delivered carnations to students and faculty in dartmouth high school one of our most successful fundraisers was the volleyball tournament which we were able to bring back after two years of code restrictions with a 19 team bracket bake sale and raffle all in one night we were able to raise over 2 000 and provide an inclusive competition for all dartmouth public school members outside of raising money we showed our gratitude to the for the faculty at dartmouth high school during the holiday season every member hand drill cards and assembled goody bags for teachers and staff they adore most recently we held a car wash this past weekend raising money for a different cause switching gears we were able to raise 1090 dollars for the international rescue committee in support of refugees of ukraine i am proud that i was able to serve as president for this group of individuals dedicated to not only scholarship but compassion within their communities without this outstanding group of members officers and our advisors we would not have been able to accomplish all that we did this year please join me in welcoming ms lassie to the stage [Applause] okay hello everyone i am miss lassie a member of the english department here so i feel very privileged to be here tonight speaking to a group of students that i have watched become such wonderful humans i've had so many of you in class and i could not be more excited to share tonight with you celebrating your accomplishments when i told someone outside of dhs that i was doing the speech tonight they replied oh that club for all the smart kids and yes you are all smart kids your gpa is part of why you're here tonight but that is all it is apart a piece a fraction of what makes someone worthy of being a member of national honor society the number is not what we are celebrating tonight that is what you did not who you are you are not a number tonight we are not celebrating your gpa but the bits of your character that pushed you to succeed academically all of you here tonight gave up something maybe something small that you didn't really even miss or maybe it was something bigger you chose to push through the late nights and study you chose to put aside your phone and practice maybe you lost sleep maybe you skipped a party but you made the choice to push yourself to achieve to keep as many doors open to your future as possible those choices reveal your depth of character and that is what we celebrate tonight i can tell you when you leave dhs and then pop back in to visit i won't remember your best test grade or your gpa i'll remember the moments in class when the classroom melts away and we're just a room filled with human beings laughing together i might remember your great sense of fashion maybe it was how you gave up your seat at lunch and then casually stood for the rest of your meal it'll be the little things the glimpses into who you really are that i will remember those generous kind passionate silly sassy and yes smart individuals are worth recognizing you're worth honoring not because you are perfect in my opinion there's no such thing as perfect i mean i'm close but i like to enjoy the weird quirks that you bring to class the things that make you and i'm asking you tonight to be kind to those people forgive yourself for your mistakes enjoy being wrong stop being your own harshest critic would you ever be as severe on a friend or a family member as you are in yourself you are teenagers and yes we want you to be able to stand on your own two feet but i know adults that struggle to do that it's okay to not be okay all the time you do not need to be perfect it's okay to need help and ask for it it's okay to take care of yourself first these last few years have taught me a lot of things one of the biggest takeaways is that i cannot possibly help others or offer anything of substance if i do not take care of myself if i'm not kind to myself so treasure all the odd and unique things that make you you that is what has pushed you to be here that is who we acknowledge tonight i want to thank you for selecting me as this year's speaker i'm honored and humbled inductees i am so so proud of you be kind to others be kinder to yourself and congratulations [Applause] [Music] thank you miss lassie at this time we'd like to present you with a small token of our appreciation it now gives me great pleasure to present mr ross tebow principal of the dartmouth high school [Applause] we would like to thank mr tebow for his support of the national honor society and wish him the best in his future endeavors good evening nhs inductees superintendent gifford mrs vieira mrs enixon members of the faculty family and friends before i address tonight's inductees i would like to thank the national honor society advisors the faculty council faculty members members of the administrative team as well and perhaps most especially parents and family members nights like tonight are only possible when all the stakeholders in a school community come together toward a common goal which is the success of our young people tonight it's a great privilege for me to be able to speak to our inductees as a former member and president of the national honor society this is an organization and more importantly most importantly the pillars upon which it is built scholarship leadership service and character are so important and hold a special place in my heart and have served as a north star that has guided me throughout my life yet while i have tried to align my actions to these values throughout my life i know there are times when i have failed to do so and it has taken me years to realize that that is okay much like miss lassie just spoke about it is okay to fail from time to time we all do and we all will what is much more important is that you not accept or excuse away your failure but that you learn from it this not perfection is the true mark of a national honor society inductee so while i congratulate each of you tonight on gaining admission to the national honor society i also challenge each of you to truly embrace the four pillars of the national honor society and to make those pillars your north star free from the fear of falling short in fact to help you embrace this mindset and to honor our keynote speaker miss lassie who as she noted teaches english i thought i might share a brief but excellent poem that really articulates this sentiment much more eloquently than i ever could the poem is the man in the glass originally published in 1934 by dale wimbrose senior when you get what you want in your struggle for self and the world makes you king for a day just go to the mirror and ask yourself and see what that man has to say look at yourself and see what that man has to say for it isn't your father or mother or wife whose judgment upon you must pass the fellow whose verdict counts most in your life is the one staring back from the glass he's the fellow to please never mind the rest for he's with you clear to the end and you've passed your most difficult dangerous test if the man in the glass is your friend you may fool the whole world on the pathway of years and get pats on the back as you pass but your final reward will be heartache and tears if you've cheated the man in the glass congratulations to each of tonight's inductees and may the man in the glass be always your friend [Applause] i'm sorry now we would like to begin the candle lighting service knowledge is at the core of everything we do in our lives it is from the candle of knowledge that we draw the inspiration for other aspects of our lives as the minister ralph w stockman said the larger the island of knowledge the longer the shoreline of wonder the light of this candle illuminates the future i will now light the candle of knowledge this year's officers of the national of the national honor society will now light the candles which represent the four pillars of the national honor society randy will represent scholarship rj will represent service grace will represent leadership and nicole will represent character one of the core principles of the honor society scholarship serves as a foundation of of the society as it is one of the primary criteria for initial selection into the organization as well as the requisite standard its members must uphold in order to maintain membership scholarship is representative of the intrinsic value each member of the honors society must value in their higher pursuit of academic excellence as nelson mandela once said education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world i will now light the candle of scholarship so a core principle of the honor society service refers to actions done for or on behalf of others without any compensation provided to the individual performing the actions members of the organization must be selfless in action selfless and thought and selfless in nature for service to others makes one pure in heart and exhibits an outward showing of everything the honor society stands for as mahatma gandhi once said the best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others i will now light the candle of service leadership signifies a position of being in charge showing guidance or directing a group of individuals or an organization leadership showcases the qualities for which members of the honor society must strive to uphold in their daily responsibilities and throughout the many communities which today belong as american author john c maxwell once said a leader is one who knows the way goes the way and shows the way i will now light the candle of leadership so perhaps the most overlooked yet most intrinsically significant principle the honor society requires that all members represent the organization as persons of character through demonstration of integrity respect responsibility fairness compassion and citizenship as long-time ucla basketball coach john wooden once said be more concerned with your character than your reputation because your character is what you really are while your reputation is merely what others think you are i will now light the candle of character at this time we will begin the induction ceremony would you please hold your applause until all inductees have received their cards and pins so sean allen kelsey almeida aidan amaral avery amaral mia rose amaral ryan p eruda [Music] alexia ash [Music] lauren agusa rishibala [Music] marisa p barnhart [Music] matthew j borges [Music] cameron cabral [Music] courtney cabral [Music] phoenix campbell [Music] luke matthew canef [Music] serena joy carnes [Music] aidan t carrero ali chester [Music] ryan t cleveland [Music] alexandra kojikaru [Music] logan korea [Music] eleonora joan cody [Music] eva crane [Music] nina kunya [Music] emily daggett [Music] jessica daggett [Music] summer daniels [Music] sophia diaz angelina l dimideiras ducharme [Music] austin cole edgecombe john paul emile [Music] megan emman [Music] julia farias [Music] isabel farah [Music] amber ferreira [Music] evan ferreira bronson killian [Music] nadia [Music] ella gibson [Music] sophia giosa [Music] piper harrison [Music] eva hopps [Music] jillian hughes [Music] erin jaspero caroline j kelly [Music] jake lancaster [Music] isabelle levoy [Music] reagan avery laconte [Music] kevin leong [Music] hannah lima [Music] lauren m lima [Music] kevin lynn [Music] avery lee mcgregor [Music] schaefer marcovici [Music] sean r martin [Music] brendan mcgowan [Music] braden medeiros [Music] aiden medeiros argued [Music] brendan mellow [Music] morgan mellow [Music] benjamin moniz [Music] evan moniz conor murphy [Music] lexi bella nicolosi sarah nunes [Music] anna oliveira [Music] gabriela pereira rosanias pereira [Music] madison pine holly and raposa [Music] hannah m rosa [Music] olivia santos [Music] autumn lisanero [Music] emma catherine smuller [Music] colin [Music] souza grace by me lauren sullivan [Music] erin thatcher [Music] madden l walsquitz [Music] taylor wood [Music] amanda alzader abby zuber [Music] uh with the newly inducted members of the national honor society please stand so we will now recite the national honor society oath with the inductees please stand please repeat after me i pledge myself to uphold the high purpose [Music] of the national honor society to which i have been elected i will be true to the principles for which it stands i will be loyal all times to my school and women maintain and encourage [Music] high standards of character scholarship leadership and service would all new members now please extinguish their candles [Applause] [Music] [Applause] would all new members now please take the pin and pin it into your rope this is so cold so congratulations to you and may you find continued success in all that you do maybe please have a round of applause for our new national honor society members thank you [Applause] it now gives me great pleasure to present dr bonnie gifford superintendent of the dartmouth public schools it is both an honor and a privilege to have her address the newly inducted honor society members thank you thank you thank you and of course i want to say good evening even though i'm last it's the end of the evening but uh once again i'll like to thank the national honor society faculty council and the high school administration for the great efforts to create this ceremony and celebration for our students on behalf of the central office administration team i'm pleased to be able to offer congratulations to the current and soon to be although tonight members of the national honor society as tonight's speakers have stated you're being inducted because you embody the four pillars of the national honor society your achievements in character have been noticed and your teachers have made sure that you receive appropriate recognition as an honor society member you are expected to lead and support others you're also expected to engage in community service a community service project requires you to think about others it encourages you in the words of american rabbi and author harold kushner do things for people not because of who they are or what they do in return but because of who you are i'm grateful that one of the purposes of the national honor society is to get young people involved in helping others the sensation you receive when you give cannot be overstated you come away with a full heart knowing you have made someone's life easier as you recited the honor society pledge tonight i hope that you were able to reflect upon serving others and how giving to others helps you unleash release the full value of who you really are i think we are we can agree tonight that our world is need of heal of healing we need hope and as i said healing as a leader i hope you continue your good work beyond tonight's ceremony pledge to be the person who does things for others because of who you are a leader a helper a caregiver be inspirational be exceptional and most importantly and i think miss lassie said this numerous times be kind mr rogers who you may not remember television person told us once when i was a boy and i would see scary things in the news my mother would say to me look for the helpers you will always find people who are helping and i hope you will all become helpers finally i feel compelled to leave you with the powerful words spoken by anne frank how wonderful it is that nobody need wait a single moment to improve the world congratulations and best wishes for continued success [Applause] at this point the students in the national honor society would like to thank our advisors ms enixon and miss vieira for all their help we would also like to thank dartmouth high faculty staff and administrators for all the support they have given us this would not have been possible without them i would now like to call up our advisor mrs vieira good evening everybody and i hope i don't cry i wanted to take a few minutes to say thank you to honor my co-advisor lauren nixon as some of you may know she's supposed to be on maternity leave but she has been on the phone with me every single day as she's trying to feed her little girl liliana she's been up with me during the day and at night and she's been doing so much and it's during her maternity leave and i would like to say that you exemplify what the national honor society is by leadership and character in your service so i would like to say thank you we all would like to thank you for all your hard work [Applause] for the girl [Applause] i would now like to call up rj august hello um as you've heard tonight my name is rj august and i am the treasurer for the nhs class of 2022.
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call this meeting to order 633 will start as usual with the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all uh welcome everybody this evening i'd like to turn things over to the superintendent for tonight's celebration of excellence thank you very much it's an exciting night of honorees tonight so we're going to start with our bolton center school scholar leaders and our first scholar leader this evening is sophia bakshon so she sophia is a quiet leader who is always willing to try her best do the right thing and help others in need she is truly a role model to her peers and is esteemed by her teachers her dedication to her academics has earned her high honors distinctions throughout her middle school career as well as award recognition for her writing and for her achievement in social studies she is one of those students who can always be dependent on to work diligently whether it be in a small group setting or individually sophie has been a member of the bcs book club since sixth grade she always comes prepared to club meetings with thoughtful questions and comments about each book to help facilitate the club's discussions outside of the school setting sophia is a member of the coventry crew rowing team sophia is very well deserving of the cast scholar leader award and like to say congratulations to sophia and her family sophia would you like to say anything thank you you're welcome congratulations and our next scholar leader this evening from bolton center school is grace osborne grace is an absolute standout both in and out of the classroom she is always willing to participate and puts in extra work to always do her best she has a natural desire for pushing herself academically and improving her work as a result of her hard work and academic prowess grace has earned high honors in every middle school trimester in her time at bolton center school not only does she go above and beyond in each and every class but she also is involved in many extracurricular activities grace was on student council and is currently part of the tennis team guitar club and the yearbook committee grace can also be seen leaving the school announcements in the morning outside of school she competes in gymnastics and has been part of a youth group in eighth grade she has demonstrated her desire to help others in the community around her by helping run a food drive within the school based on her service through this project along with her desire and capacity to learn grace is also a well deserving candidate of the cast scholar leader award grace congratulations to you and to your family well deserved anyways would you like to say anything thank you you're welcome congratulations and now on to some big announcements as well this evening for bolton high school it gives me great pleasure and it is my honor to introduce the 2022 bolton high school valedictorian samantha sondeck um i am not sure samantha has joined us yet uh in typica in typical bolton high school fashion um our kids do lots of things and there was a softball game and the fact that i don't see sam here makes me wonder if the game isn't over yet so i know our other recipient is here why don't we move on to her and maybe sam will get here okay sounds good and honestly if sam doesn't join us in time for this part i'm pretty sure the board would be fine with me talking about her once she gets here right all right so now it gives me great pleasure and it is my honor to introduce the 2022 bolton high school salutatorian taylor michaud taylor has involved herself in different aspects of bolton high school over the course of her time here she has served as co-captain of the cross-country team and has participated in indoor and outdoor track as well she has participated in national honor society spanish club the book club and his friend how are you good thanks uh mrs denunzio could you please mute yourself thank you um taylor has participated in national honor society spanish club book club and has competed in the american rocketry challenge since 2017.
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the as i said the the town council acted um at their meeting which was held on um let's see april 26th the um appropriation for the board of ed was a budget of 80 million 664 the board had previously approved the budget of 81 million 114 420 so the reduction of 450 000 that needs to be made at this time the recommendation to the finance committee which has forward that recommendation on to the full board this evening there is a worksheet in the packet but there were the reductions would come out of our major account categories 300 of the 450 would be coming out of teacher salaries and the justification for that is pretty straightforward we anticipated seven teacher retirements and for each teacher retirement that would reduce our salary expense from the what was budgeted by 40 000 plus we have one teacher resignation which we believe when we hire to replace that teacher it'll take us down another 20 000.
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there we go hello yes okay thank you so much um for the opportunity to update you all on some things that are happening at cheshire high school but before we get into treasure high school i thought that it was only fair to update you all on our final amount that we raised for the leukemia and lymphoma society so i'm very very pleased to say that our team rams remedy volume 3 has raised over 12 000 dollars to go towards blood cancer research yes awesome um and i had the honor of receiving the 2022 citizenship award um for demonstrating you know getting our school community involved so that was a big honor and then in total all of the teams across the um greater connecticut region raised over 119 000 that goes towards the leukemia and lymphoma society so i knew that as soon as i got those numbers i had to tell you all because it was something that i'm so very grateful to have been a part of and thank you everyone for your support um in that activity that i took part in um so today we actually had our high school leadership conference that was hosted by mr lee and his peer health class they planned this leadership conference for mostly 11th graders who have been identified as leaders in their schools and would have a great potential being leaders as next year as they would be rising seniors so 200 students in total attended this leadership conference 100 were from cheshire 25 were from amity high school 25 were from terryville high school and 50 students were from berlin high school so we had a great turnout and a lot of people got involved we had two amazing panelists that were able to talk to the students alyssa taglia is actually a 2011 chs grad who is now a news anchor for channel 8 news and runs her own non-profit um so it kind of demonstrated to the students the importance of community service and coming back and giving back to your community um and and what success looks like in all different aspects then we had mike papale who is also the president of a non-profit organization called in a heartbeat so he's from allingford connecticut and in high school he was one of the best high school basketball players in the state but at 18 he was diagnosed with a heart problem which caused his heart attack and they credited his survival to the use of an aed and others who stepped forward to perform um cardiac arrest you know respiration and everything with the aed so he started this non-profit organization that buys aeds and actually gives them to different communities um which is so awesome and was truly inspirational for all of those students to hear about so that was a great great thing to have on our panel and so the purpose of this entire leadership conference was to create an opportunity for students to get a better understanding of what leadership means and and how it looks not always necessarily being the one speaking out but what a silent leader looks like as well and it created a connection between leadership community service and engaging with the school community which is awesome to know that as we go on to our paths next year that we're going to have some awesome seniors to take on that role at chs and then the next thing that we're planning on may 31st is our b1 day so this is a day that the school community has no classes at chs but we build empathy compassion and understanding across all grades through the beginning of the day being a half of the great half of the school splits into a video section creating created by an amazing video committee that has been you know working hard to show what it really means to be a ram and then by a panel committee that um is taking a teacher and a student from each grade to share out how they overcame adversity with at least one community member in cheshire so that's a kind of a great way to show that we we always have someone to go to no matter what especially coming out of these past couple of years because be one day has actually been something that has been happening since 2000 um but we haven't been able to have it for the last two years because of covid so the seniors are actually the only grade that got to experience it our freshman year so if we didn't do it this year then it wouldn't really have that resurgence so the whole theme this year is kind of we're passing down that ram pride to the younger grades and showing them what that really means to be part of our chs community um so it will be absolutely amazing and then in the afternoon session that's when we have our fun and our kind of release from that emotional rollercoaster of the morning where we have our activities and games and one of those activities is a volleyball tournament hosted by the young republicans where the winning team the teams being clubs or different just groups of friends are donating money to whatever organization or charity that of of their choice so that is something to really look forward to so now i'll hand it over to rowan hello everybody um just going to mirror a lot of the things annabelle said to start it's lovely to be back here in front of you guys again and an opportunity to just kind of give you guys a summation of a few of the things as we wrap up this school year because it starts coming fast now um and lots of different exciting events coming up um so one of these events that's kind of part of both the school but also the community at large is the traveling vietnam wall that's arriving in bartlett park on june 1st which there's going to be an opening ceremony for the entire chs community um in the morning of june 2nd and that program is really impressive there's all sorts of different parts of the community and especially throughout chs that are taking part in it there's remarks from the vietnam veterans and members of brave um and then also performances by the chs honors choir and the chs band and so it's really a great opportunity for a lot of different parts of chs to come together for this kind of really monumental event and all students additionally as part of that will have the opportunity to actually go and see the wall which is a really amazing opportunity that we get um from an athletics perspective as all of our spring sports start to enter kind of the final phases of their seasons um almost all of them have started league playoffs either this week or next week and those will kind of continue onwards and state playoffs will start at the beginning of june um and so we have a lot of very successful teams throughout the high school and so it's always exciting walking around the halls talking to people on different sports teams and different part um different ways committed to them just helping because it's really always a great supportive community cheshire also had 25 future student leaders which were able to attend the cic leadership and sportsmanship conference and cheshire was also one of 20 schools to receive a ciac michael's cup award for sportsmanship participation and leadership um and again on the theme of athletics cheshire has also been elected to host the boys lacrosse semi-final state tournament contest in june um so lots of exciting athletic events as well um and finally we just wanted to kind of give a few different summation events of all of the other things that are happening that we don't have time to kind of go into fully um because like we said there are so many different things going on at this point um we have the senior movie night coming up this friday i believe um and which is a chance for seniors to attend a movie night outside on a senior walk um it's like a a projector to enjoy the movie with friends and snacks a fundraiser but it's just a really great chance kind of it's been such a weird four years throughout it all that this is kind of a really nice chance for a lot of us to get together and kind of celebrate what we've had these past four years we also have senior picnic coming up on monday um it's at holiday hill and again it's a really fun event for all of us to kind of just get together and kind of celebrate this past year and the four years we've gone through we have senior fun day um where seniors are able to spend outside on the walk doing all sorts of different fun activities we also had prom just a few weeks ago last week it was last weekend last weekend i'm losing track of time but um truly it was just a great night i think animal can also detest it it was so much fun it was so great to be back with everybody um we also have award ceremonies coming up we have honor cords um and then graduation which is a weird thing to be talking about uh because the past four years have gone really fast but we're excited to be there and so yeah does anybody have any questions i just have a comment because we haven't seen you rowan since uh since chicago went on i just want to say how much i enjoyed watching you on stage and you did a great job as did all of your your horse i could just update one point with respect to that leadership conference today this was the 10 year anniversary of our leadership conference and it was pretty special uh and as such we had a special video guest performance or welcome i should say from uh general james mcconville he's the united states army chief of staff uh so you know the highest ranking us army officer in the land as well as laura a potter the deputy chief of chief of staff for the us army and beside the fact that she is was the commanding general and formerly the commandant of the us army intelligence center of excellence uh in arizona what also makes her special and some would argue maybe even more so than this is that she also attended norton elementary school back in the day um so it's it's great to see students who have attended our schools reach such incredible heights and they had a special welcome message for all the students today which was kind of neat i figured i'd pass that on thanks you guys for your report i was just wondering what is in the future for you both um i okay i am going to be going to marist college next year um i'm gonna be majoring in biomedical sciences on the honors pre-med track um so i'm i'm very very excited um and i'm going off to brandeis university to study probably psychology but also probably a lot of other things knowing myself [Music] congratulations thank you okay uh seeing no other uh questions um walt dam's a great town i went to bentley so it's a really fun place nine miles outside of boston so it's really great he may be spending more time in the library than you did though that's very possible hola thank you for the great report and um you are free of your duties for this evening so if you don't go too far we have acknowledgements oh okay hang around for a few more minutes um okay uh dr solon sure at this point we want to recognize some special students with the cabe student leadership awards so mr woods if you want to come up as i mentioned uh from the deus there that this is an opportunity to recognize some special students in our community and i think this is particularly meaningful award because the connecticut association of boards of education send us these awards and give us the opportunity to define leaders in our community identify and celebrate leaders in our community and which you know and of itself is pretty special but in this case students help i identify who these leaders are that we select their peers which is so incredibly meaningful the outline criteria uh for selection is those who are willing to take on challenges those who have the capability to make difficult decisions in tough circumstances who demonstrate concern for others and the ability to work with others who demonstrate diplomacy and the ability to deeply understand an issue and comment things from different perspectives and ultimately the capacity to honor commitments and so from dodd middle school we have a special letter of recognition from elizabeth brown the president of cabe and the executive director bob raider our recipients this evening i'll read those after leadership is quality is hard to define but remains critical to our society cabe has developed criteria that help to define leadership your principal received a list of these criteria and was asked to name dodd middle school students who met them your principal and more importantly your school community considers you such a school leader we are pleased to present you together with other student leaders across connecticut with our 26th annual cabe student leadership award you should take pride in the recognition bestowed upon you we encourage you to continue to think and act like a leader congratulations and all the best in your future endeavors please welcome from dodd middle school nora de chico and cameron paul [Applause] [Laughter] where do you want to take the photo here with the flowers in the background we'll wait congratulations guys if you want to shake hands with the board membership [Applause] yeah sure and i think it's really exciting to have the opportunity to recognize both our middle school leaders and our high school leaders on the same night because our what our middle school leaders do you know having had the benefit of being the principal at dodd middle school for four years and assistant principal for three years before that i have a pretty understanding of you know this this blossoming leadership and you know the the this morning at the leadership conference i was able to share that last week i had the benefit of attending three days worth of conferences at harvard really focused on on leadership hearing from some of the you know preeminent leaders in our country and people who coach you know some of the the top leaders in our country around leadership and it really for me after those three days boiled down to two key fundamentals of leadership one is about relationships demonstrating caring for those around you empathy understanding and you heard some of those traits bleed through in caves definition but importantly the other component the other takeaway is that leadership is not some you know unachievable goal of the few it's not about charisma it's not about courage or bravery or something like that well those things are nice leadership is about action leadership is about what you do every day which allows you know leadership to be available to all of us but our students have demonstrated certainly in front of their peers and in our treasure community those actions the the the selflessness the you know consideration of others the support being there for people that is really outstanding that is unique to demonstrate that sort of consistency and concern and action on a daily basis and what that looks like in middle school is incredible and at the high school level uh there's just nothing short of outrageous you know when you hear about raising twelve thousand dollars for the leukemia lymphoma lymphoma society excuse me um that's incredible that's that i mean that's literally you know life-changing for people you know i mean going back years ago recruiting rowan to be an actor in some goofy skit that miss solano and i did to play you know somebody from the 1920s to for a video that we did you know his actions i'll be there not even a thought and even though he was i think a freshman at the time maybe a sophomore entering his sophomore year it was you know he i'm sure it was hard to say oh yeah i'm gonna go hang out with the superintendent assistant superintendent and i'm gonna dress like a goof and you know on video but he did it anyway leadership through your actions is so meaningful and i'm so excited to be able to honor not only our middle school students but our high school students tonight and so the the cabe leadership award for cheshire high school goes to rowan scassilotti and annabelle kalin congratulations guys [Applause] [Laughter] uh okay make sure you guys shake hands with the board action um so this next recognition is also pretty personally meaningful for me having had the opportunity to work with this person for four years at cheshire high school and get to know how selfless they were and how they were constantly focused on doing what's best for the students in in cheshire high school often at great inconvenience but never voiced the complaint and was just a real pleasure to work with and we're glad that even though he's retired from his teaching job he still works with our kids and has that positive influence on our students and our community so i for a special introduction and acknowledgement i'd like to invite uh our athletic director steve trafone to the podium please thank you dr solin it's a grip of members of the board a couple weeks ago i had the honor of introducing you to our hall of fame uh volleyball coach subavon and that evening our girls golf coach john williams was being introduced at the connecticut high school coaches association banquet so he was unable to make that but he's here tonight i pulled him off the links and we got him uh so um i'm proud to introduce john uh williams this evening a little bit about john as uh dr solon said uh john served as a tech ed teacher for us for 20 years before retiring in 2018 he remained as our golf coach he's been coaching our girls golf for 17 years and has continued with that a little bit about john under that leadership uh he he took a team that was young and just starting off and has now really built it into a perennial powerhouse in the state and in the league uh their contenders every year in both league and state play and it's grown we've had more girls come out for our girls golf team than ever before and not only have we had an increase in enrollment but some of the best scoffers in the state have come from cheshire high school on the girls golf side so uh it's it's really took john's uh i give him all the credit for that one thing john did too is girls golf is still young in the state there's not a as many teams as we have boys john was a instrumental incorporating the southern connecticut conference girls league uh for golf so now we we have a a place where our girls can compete for a league championship and in 2021 john's team won that championship um so and probably a little thing about john is just the other day john earned his 200th win as golf coach with his team so allow me to present john williams our girls golf coach who was named the connecticut high school coaches association girls coach of the year john [Applause] thank you this [Applause] congratulations coach williams um i guess um moving on uh we'll uh we'll go to the audience section of the evening so i'll ask anyone who has uh any public comment on any uh matters pressing uh dealing with the board of education to come up and speak sing none uh well um someone could be moving in from the gallery no okay all right thank you um we'll move along to the consent calendar and uh we have a grants resolution um [Music] cheshire board of education approves the consent calendar as presented is there a uh a second second i saw anne's hand i know sound travels faster but well sometimes no not ever that's okay and second all right thank you i'm not gonna fight you over it if you really want um is there any discussion on the motion and go ahead so is this the only item on the consent calendar i believe so trying to find a copy of it okay thanks yeah okay i'll wait is there any question on the cons on the con the consent calendar motion no okay great all in favor post all right unanimous uh unanimous vote thank you okay we'll uh move on to committee reports and uh this is ham i'll move over to curriculum all right thank you um we had a curriculum meeting on may 10th the items we we went over were the world language cheshire curriculum council review and we heard presentation by archer bronco kristen haas katie oporoski and tina oconee um and so they just gave us an executive summary of um of the council's work uh we went over the mission statement which you've got in your notes i'll briefly read it the world language program promotes linguistic and cultural proficiency and literacy while cultivating a lifelong appreciation and enthusiasm for languages and the cultures they reflect the world language program consistently implements interdisciplinary learning strat learning strategies and actively cultivates global citizenship the world language program is in grades 6 through 12 and students have um are able to take a spanish french german latin and italian in cheshire high school and some of the key goals of the presentation of the group was just to continue to focus on curriculum revision and development use of the language in realistic settings and reformatting midterms and finals to adopt a more performance-based approach so i would really encourage everybody to watch the minutes of the meeting because we had a very good discussion about where language should be going the language instruction should be going in cheshire public schools you know the possibility of expansion in an ideal world and i think we'll probably be going back to address some of the questions that were raised but it was um it was a very good very good um back and forth with with the team and the committee um and then kevin hanlon shared the um um lis links assessment which is given to all english lang english learners in january february and early march um this is the first time we had this uh test since 2020 and plea i would like you all to make uh note of the numbers we have increased in these two years from 51 english language learners to a hundred and one and um one quarter of the students who took the of the students taking the test demonstrated an overall proficient level of english on the las links of the students who took the assessment in cheshire last year the vast majority did score growth in points and or moved up in the proficiency level and parents were notified of the results in their children's status in the in the program um so we will at the next lesson have um an overview of the s.a.t performance at the high school for the 11th graders so new business we um heard about a new um textbook that is part it is being recommended by the uh in accord accordance with um dual enrollment correspondence the title is financial accounting 18th edition by williams bettner and carcelo um we have made a um we will move this it's it's available for a review like right now and we will uh um pending the uh completion of the review period and other than that it was a quiet meeting oh that's my any questions yes so this is actually just a follow-up because i did receive some word about this dual enrollment course is this the state has something about not allowing dual enrollment anymore especially with if you can just clarify it's been a little yeah that's the state actually in the last the minute of this session passed a law that prohibits dual instruction meaning that like synchronous teaching is what might i've heard more about um really shocking to be honest that they did that uh a law prohibiting it not even like you know under any circumstances no carb outs no nothing so even you know we don't even go to a teacher and ask hey would this be here even though a lot of times the teacher would encourage it so you know it's kind of a headstretcher but not having to do with dual enrollment where we it's kind of got meanings of enrollment because the dual enrollment as we see it is um a treasure high school course with college credit so like really college experience through uconn or we partnered with nagatok valley as well so that's the overview on i just wanted so it doesn't impact us because it it has ties with um trunks's and yukon and you know post our teachers are teaching the class to the students in person there's nothing remote about it no hybrid but because they have it articulated with tungsten our students then get credit for it at cheshire high school and through and through the community college yeah yeah so so just understand what you're saying is that synchronous learning is now illegal so yeah so that all of like all those wonderful all that wonderful equipment that we have in our classrooms we can't use that to for virtual learning anymore not for virtual not for not for synchronous which is again shocking this was no no talk of this whatsoever feathered in at the 11th hour um i don't know where it came from i think it's called a rat in hartford then um then uh yeah so the the video equipment without the audio equipment you still have the benefit of the audio in the room um which is really where the value is but it's uh the it was shocking to hear that there was also again another 11th hour law that indicated that teachers should have a three minute uninterrupted required to have a 30 minute uninterrupted lunch the uninterrupted part is not problematic the contract that we have with the teachers union has a 25 minute lunch so now we have to find a way to adjust all of our schedules with no notice you know i mean no contract the contract implications there so that goes into effect uh for next year so maybe there's hope uh there's always an inevitable special session perhaps yeah bring that to the attention of our legislators yeah legislators would be kind of stunned on that but the potential i mean there is yes a way but i i would be more stunned to see that than i am to see this before kova do we have um the synchronous learning option um yeah i mean we it wasn't outlawed certainly and you know when we went to covid we leveraged that uh opportunity for kids but we we had the ability prior to covid for teachers too yeah i think ability versus uh certainly we had the ability did we ever do that no i you know i don't think we really even thought about it we didn't have people out a lot for 10 days at a cliff or whatever and so you know that was one of the innovations i think that came out of kovid that was you know probably beneficial yeah certainly i mean during covet it was a lifesaver for a lot of kids i i thought in the in the high school the um where the principal's office used to be there's a room right at the top of the steps the second set of steps going up yeah i thought that that actually had been used for synchronous learning in the past not necessarily every year but i i was almost positive it had been used at times for that that would predate my tenure as principle which i mean yeah so there's a difference between distance learning and synchronous learning with distance learning you know i might be teaching from hill house in in anders case two students all over the place including other places but not live instruction with kids in front of me at hill house only remote if you're doing both if you have kids in front of you and remote that is the part that's outlawed okay that strikes me as absurd and i know you have nothing to do with it but this is really ridiculous that somebody even divided without any discussion in the first place so was this too to um preclude any um abuse of the contract for teachers or was it to get at the problem that we had during covid of um kids who just went missing i i mean if it's a ladder i get it um i do i mean i think it is draconian now you can't just outlaw a method which apparently you can but um but um there are a lot of things that went into that that implementer bill that have got many of us steamed and scratching our heads but but at the same time i mean there was in some of those in some schools i mean there were just entire swaths of kids who who went but so yeah any answer i give you faith would be entirely speculative given the fact that there was zero conversation on the topic so i i'm not sure what the rationale was and and honestly the 30-minute uninterrupted lunch i don't necessarily have a problem with the timing of it i have a significant problem with you know with you know that for us to be able to implement that in august there are busing implications potentially there are contractual implications potentially there's not much of a runway to to fix that but um certainly scheduling implications of some sort you know lunch staff you know it's uh it's a real wrinkle but no discussion on that either any other questions i i just want to say it just really limits our opportunity you know i'll give an example we wanted to expand our world language um to our kids and they can take you know chinese and in other schools and now we can't do that okay so that limits the opportunity and like dr solomon said it impacts our schedule even if by five minutes you still there's issues transition already the limit schedule now you've just made it worse so i just didn't want this to also stretch to our you know relationship with um chunks is in uconn and so on absolutely okay um thank you mrs sam uh we'll move on to finance um and i will um begin by handing over the meeting to mr maciana thank you mr grippo good evening everyone the board members do have the financial report as of april 30th in their packages and i will summarize the board's budget this year was adjusted at 78 million 500 through april 30th we've expended or encumbered 94.3 percent we are on track for a year-end close on june 30th that i do not foresee any issues balancing the budget so with that being said there is a lot of activity that goes on in april may and and june to get to uh you know a zero budget line and we're you know doing that in earnest and you know part of what we do at this time of the year is we look at you know what are the remaining needs what are the remaining funds we encumber for you know purchases and expenditures and maintenance projects so that's that's all moving along pretty well we do meet every two weeks just so the board knows internally you know with dr solon ms solano um you know and our other you know accounting staff just to look at each of the line items open purchase orders the grants and make sure that we are allocating money appropriately the only other thing that i i'll add which i've added in the past is you know we have four hundred thousand dollars four hundred thirty nine thousand of esther tube grant funding that's being used this year and we have eight hundred ninety eight thousand of our passer funding that'll be available for the following two fiscal years so you know we will be able to make good use you know of those proceeds and so you know the point is we we still have you know those balances intact for the next two years so that will help us with any kind of learning loss or counseling or guidance or other needs that students have you know related to the pandemic and other items and hopefully you know we don't have to allocate any of that funding like we have this year and in prior years for you know health and safety needs around the pandemic so really that's the high-level summary of the budget we're tracking well and june 30th is the final board of ed meeting at 7 30 a.m to balance the budget so look forward to that one every year not the 7 30 a.m part though um just a question there um on the on the line item uh budget section uh is this reflecting the proposed changes um no okay so this is before proposed changes right well this is your the proposed changes are for next year's is that your question yeah we'll get to that oh boy okay um i've got it mr gripper don't worry continue on please okay i'll if it's okay i would like to do the medical benefits update next and then we'll talk about next year's budget again the board members do have in their package the update uh for medical benefits as of april 30th claims for the month of april were a million ninety seven thousand nine seventy down a bit from march but certainly above the you know the budget that we had um if there's some good news in this month's report it's that if you if you have the report handy stop loss reimbursement for large claims increased by 335 000 this month so on a year-to-date basis you know because of the large claims that are underlying our claims trend we've received 705 000 in stop-loss reimbursements because of that increase of 335 000 this month we actually increased our reserve balance by 63 189 dollars so even though we exceeded the expected claims that stop loss reimbursement help buoy and increase the reserve fund balance so that's the good news on that of course we do pay a premium for that stop-loss insurance and um just anecdotally and related to this this morning the board of ct prime met to discuss and approve a renewal of next year's rates for loss and our premiums are increasing 20 percent expected 15 but i believe as i explained at the last board meeting the overall claims pool for the nine-member communities is running very high this year the um will pay out about 125 percent of collected premiums so you know we'll collect about seven million dollars in in premiums i'm gonna pay somewhere close to eight million dollars in claims overall for the pool so the insurer that issued the insurance is basically going to be taking a loss this year last year they had a very nice game even though cheshire didn't contribute to that game last year so um the stop-loss insurance premium is factored into next year's budget we just have to make an adjustment because it's 20 instead of 15 percent but cheshire's claims related to the ct prime pool this year um we were the the worst runner in the last couple of years we are not this year so some of the insurers are doing worse and in related conversation around that at our board meeting this morning you know one of the consultants that we use did explain that the trend you know across many of the you know medical benefit self-insured pools this year is running very high claims are high whether or not it's you know directly related to covert no one knows for sure but the speculation is that it is related to covid so um you know that's that's kind of the long and short of where we are for our medical claims this month and what we're looking at for our stop loss for next year and you know again the fact that we've been with ct prime for the last five years has helped us had we not been in ct prime our premiums would be a lot higher than they are today in fact the last three years running we've um collected reimbursements you know at you know basically 40 more than we paid in as premiums so again that's one of the benefits of being in a in a pool where you know the members are actually managing the premiums so again and it's kind of like bittersweet news but um i think overall considering our claims have been so high we we got a decent renewal and we've got two months left in in the medical benefits here so you know we hope that um claims you know still subside but we have no way of knowing any questions on medical benefits sorry about that i think we've run out of questions about medical benefits well as we as we close you know the month of april i i should add that we have 1.41 months of claims reserve week the reserve balance stands at 1.27 million dollars so you know that's that's not a terrible place to end this is kind of perennial or in every meeting but okay so is anyone looking to see if are we um actually experiencing more people getting sick hurt whatever or is the cost of delivering that medical care well it's a combination of but is it a combination of both of those items but clearly our experience you know this year and and the the prior two we have seen an extraordinarily high number of claims above 25 000 not necessarily hitting the stop loss limit of
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my oh gladys is tuning in if somebody else i don't know who the other person is that might be rich yep okay let me see let me check down here louise said this is kevin walton i am listening by yourself on item music festival here in danbury great thanks kevin thank you should we give him another minute mike yeah i know he was he was trying to hustle back home he was gonna cut it cut it close he was watching the gps tick down no problem any exciting guest speakers tonight bridget oh i don't i don't know oh here i'm starting luisa um we're just waiting no nothing you just used to say we're just gonna kind of catch up since we didn't have one last month i figured this was a good one to just kind of catch up on everything that's been going on and get some information out to us okay but uh joseph did tell me he saw you the other day al oh yes i saw him yesterday and he thought you perform oh he's going to take the bar fairly soon good for him yup yup it was the uh police memorial event and um i was playing taps no thank you for that al that's wonderful thank you for doing that very nice all right good okay i see we have rich on so let's call the meeting uh 602 welcome everybody to sites and facilities on may 19th um thank you to all my committee members for being here today and for the other board members that are here and thank you to our district uh sites um people for being here as well so i'm gonna um turn uh the meeting over to dr selig so we can start um with the items on our agenda and some uh information that's been going on in the district so floor is yours mike thank you thank you chairman um hi everybody so there's four items on the agenda today um and rich gelbert and i are going to sort of tag team these since they're varying levels of specificity and expertise so um first one is updates on the cardis site of the new danbury career academy uh i mean there's a couple things that happening over there with respect to the cafeteria and food services and i'll let rich tell you about the meeting he just had uh thank you mike um so the architect has had a consult their consultant food service consultant go through their inventory of course equipment and determine uh what salvage bowl and appropriate for uh you met with the two managers from sodexo and uh the architect to review the area um i think that exo is very happy with the existing conditions uh um there's the salad bar that they would love to see steve i think you know because we have to be concerned about uh to get the uh suitable amount of uh seating um i think i'm having a connection issue here did everybody hear me okay you cut in and out a little bit rich i'll just recap it so yeah so short version of it is that um they're concerned there's a salad bar there now which was you know part of the existing structure and in order to get the enough enough seating in there to accommodate the number of kids we may have to get rid of the salad bar and then there's some other other mitigating issues just with um with space and just you know workflow and all that kind of stuff so are you doing red she's still there i'm still here okay that's perfect so we're going to be meeting with the school lunch again to uh to you know come up with the menu mix so right now they have a nice pizza the oven um it was really set up pretty nice so uh sodexo is very excited about uh coming up with a good menu for the for the career academy yeah i hope the board offices get to go eat in there too so i'm looking forward to it as well um i'll take the second one just real quick we're going to be meeting with sta student transportation um to begin talking about buses expectations and needed bus routes we don't really know yet what what the ballpark number is um but of course the academy is going to be picking kids up from all across the city so we at least just want to get have a start conversations with them so we you know they know this is coming they have a sense of how many kids will be moving and how many buses they'll need and then we can start figuring out the routes so that meeting will be happening um i think it's next week great okay so that's about it for cardiff unless rich you got anything else for cardis yeah okay so the second one that's it i think we have some questions oh sure yeah just uh where do we stand for putting out the mass phone call on our call system advising people of the bond issue so um my understanding is we're not going to be able to do it um just because of the legality of uh using the school resources that was how we were guided by our general counsel um my understanding is the um cea is going to be taking the lead on promoting the issue cea did i hear that properly yes okay yeah we say the last time uh i don't remember which time we met that the city is that what you mean when you that the city was going to be sending out the informations we had you know some concerns that we were going to have an issue yeah i know the city's doing some of their own stuff i i know the the mayor was going to be doing an op-ed um but with respect to the phone banking i i don't know to what degree they were going to do that um there had been a request in a different committee that we use our our you know robocall auto dialer system on on um through uh parent square to do it and when i went back and checked with our general counsel they said advise best advice not do that yeah may i ask one more question sure how many how many students are we looking to accommodate in the uh cafeteria right i'm going back to rich do you know what we're going to do like three or four waves i i don't have that yes i can speak to that mike um i believe uh they plan on doing a total of four waves uh one for the middle school which would be about 400 and then splitting up the high school into three waves so somewhere around 350 360 per wave with a high school great thank you anybody else questions on cardis or granville no right way to get to granville okay so granville um we made a couple updates we've had um some concerns um for some time and miss cooper uh raised these um in a previous meeting uh just about the traffic and the sort of speed of the cars that we're going down the street so we've now stationed an additional safety advocate there um during pick-up and drop-off times to just sort of slow down the traffic uh and make sure the kids cross safely and then we've also got um we'll be starting tomorrow a slow school zone sign it's one of those yellow um diamond signs and it'll be on one of those orange and white um striped cones um and we'll take it out it's just our sign we'll take it out put it in the middle street um before drop off starts take it back inside and then bring it back out when um when pickup starts so and in the meanwhile you know we're hoping we'll still be able to to you know work with the city on getting a more permanent solution to this but in the meanwhile we've just um we've just taken the initiative to to sort it out ourselves okay great all right could i just say uh thank you today was the first day that i saw the walkway that was painted and it looked like all the appearance that was coming uh was using the walkway instead of getting out this car crossing here and the cars flying up there it really looks nice and i just want to say thank you thank you yeah i'm glad to hear that that's that's terrific yeah granville granville's always kind of uh i just i feel like there's never we can never do enough to keep granville greenville safe all right um there's no more question on granville we can move to the sort of long item here um summer repairs list and rich and i'll bounce this one back and forth um so the first one i'll start with is the high school gym um i'm sure many of you have seen it developed some humps over the last few months due to some flooding that we had uh back in the winter there we had a sprinkler pipe that broke in one of the elevators areas it ran down the elevator out the shaft and then into that lower gym area it damaged the ceiling of the wrestling room and then ran into the gym where it got under the wood floor and once that happened the floor started bubbling up and developed these as we call it it started to look a little bit more like a skate park than a basketball court so uh we we've done some initial repairs on it um to get it to lay flat but those repairs didn't last long because the issue is really with moisture that's now trapped in the floor and can't get out because of the seal that's over the wood so it just bubbles up in different areas depending on humidity and moisture and it now travels so these humps are not just stagnant they're actually traveling humps on the gym floor so uh we had to go and talk with kermah our insurance company and we met with a flooring uh repair company and then also to look at just all the the other damage and we're going to be putting together a claim um and we are we are very hopeful that we'll be able to um to do this with um with kerma um we we have a deductible of about 250 000 and my expectation is that the cost of these will exceed the deductible uh we're waiting on final estimates to come through uh but we think there's going to be um this week already and rich you can jump in because i know you just had a conversation with uh with the company where they're going to come in take a look at exactly what is underneath this floor we think it's the original floors which makes it 65 years old more and depending on what's underneath they may be able to repair it in um but it's we're sort of getting the sense that we may have to rip out the whole floor um give it the time to properly dry so that when the new floor is laid back down these bubbles don't keep popping up so we're hoping to learn more about that in the next few days um rich if there's anything i left out on that one um sure so from speaking to other facilities directors it can be a long process i spoke to another facilities director who had a similar issue and they had to do relief cuts in the floor sand the floor and on a weekly basis they would monitor it to to make sure that all the water uh was out of the floor um so i think our two options are at this point are one if if the floor isn't in that bad of a shape we would we could do a repair sand it dry it out or clear it repair any rotten wood and then refinish it which could just the repair could cost anywhere between 50 to 70 thousand um the replacement uh at this point we're estimating would be about two hundred thousand and then um mike mentioned a control board on the elevator uh that had to be replaced uh public buildings is replacing that 25 000 and then whatever the cost of repairing the weight room uh ceiling so we could very well be over that two hundred five fifty thousand dollar deductible uh daily and flooring came out um with kermit to look at the floor and they're gonna be coming out most likely tuesday monday or tuesday to do the initial cuts to open up the floor and investigate and they're going to continue to monitor it yeah we're hoping that if we get going with this right now so the gym's already been shut down uh if we get going with it right now we might be able to get it done and of course there's supply chain issues all these other mitigating circumstances but we're hopeful that we can have it done by the start of school if everything goes right so fingers crossed so the plan is to have the floor replaced completely we'll go with the recommendation right rich so if if they think they can do it with patchwork you know i i don't my sense from the conversation we had was that that's not gonna work because we've already done that once or twice and it just came back so yeah because it didn't look really it wasn't like little bumps it really looked yeah and like i said that moisture is traveled so even if they repair that section there's still moisture trapped in other parts of the gym floor so i i i don't know i'm not a flooring expert but my sense is it's probably going to be a complete okay we do do we know when it went about we might know for sure which do you think we'll know more in the next uh week and a half two weeks once uh daleen flooring opens up the floor and and can do an exploratory to to see you know what condition the floor is underneath okay great okay the next one on the list is ellsworth annex uh rich if you have any updates on that uh sure um everything is is uh running on time as far as the project the the latest struggles we've had were um actually the technology package uh this the the the server that were ordered from projects um aren't expected to be nation and and game planning with the construction services and our iot department and actually what iit is going to do they are going to free up a server from danbury high school get it installed at the ellsworth annex and we'll be we'll be able to use that until we get the uh the actual server in that's scheduled for the project um the the downside if we were able to do that you know that would affect quite a bit in the annex it would it would affect our security system comes our cameras internet for the school cameras and our voiceover ip system so i'm happy to say that we're going to overcome that obstacle right well we're looking forward to that one with central registration kind of being such an important part of the way we welcome families into the district i'm i'm thrilled that it's gonna be at this brand shiny new building it's really gonna be a great first impression that we make on new families coming in to register so i'm very excited about that um and everything having everything just in like a logical flow so you're not like running up and down the stairs and trying to you know all the stuff happening right now over it um in immaculate heart so um okay the next one is uh the danbury primary center in brookfield um just in case folks don't know we've been renting a school in brookfield for a preschool center and that is uh that lease is going to be terminated as of june 30th and we're going to be moving them um back into uh other schools around the district um all the teachers are planning to move out of there they're already starting to get packed we're optimistic that we'll be able to hit the june 30th deadline and uh by working with teachers riches guys are are going to be spending some time um loading that stuff out of there and getting it back to the classrooms around the campus so uh rich if there's anything i missed on that one that pretty much sums it up we're coming up with the game plan we have approximately 240 desks and chairs to to move we're starting to drop off moving boxes and tape for the teachers uh i estimate we're probably going to need about 250 to 300 boxes and uh we'll be starting off with moving south street first there's four classrooms that are going to south street uh four classrooms two stadley rough and then three classrooms to ellsworth madam chair go ahead bob question and with this latest coverage covet string god forbid that the numbers go up do we have a plan b can we go back to brookfield if if necessary or is that just not anticipated at all because things won't get to that point over that's a good question um well the lease is terminated um i i don't know if there's another tenant lined up um if there's not i suppose you know there's always a chance to return i i don't know um but we've we certainly didn't budget to keep um paying the rent on that place either so um i think that would be a pretty a pretty big maneuver if we decided to do it but to your point mr russo yeah if if we need to spread out you know plan b just just just asking yeah yeah thank you let's just hope the cove would never say stay don't don't go up yeah anybody else questions no okay okay um the next one uh is i'll talk about the g building a little bit at the high school um louise and i took a a a little tour of the g building yesterday to look at some of the um air flow concerns that were raised in our last board meeting and that we've we've you know kind of slowly been learning about um so we went and uh you know we were we saw that the air conditioning had been repaired some of the rooms we were in uh were had very cool air in them um and we would learn today from uh from the folks at the city that the air handlers uh are working um we had a few follow-up questions which we've not had a chance to talk through with them um but they're they're working with us we're collaborating we wanted to get more specifics on all the different classrooms versus just the air handler working on the roof um because we know that there's sometimes that it may not work in certain pockets or it's just you know it's there's a room that's too far away from um from you know where the handler is located so we're going to be following up with them and uh just getting more information to get back to the teachers because they just want to make sure they they feel safe in their rooms anybody have any energy building before we move on you're on mute michelle all right all right go ahead i i just want to say thank you for um for getting on that so quickly uh that's that's great with the uh hvac i think that's great thank you i spent a lot of time in in sweaty classrooms i i i can empathize with uh yeah with that uh feeling so and mike once you once you and rich find out will you um get that information back to us so we know absolutely you know what they find out and making sure that it's all getting back to them and getting back us absolutely we'll make sure it's on the agenda for the next uh committee meeting as well i appreciate that okay perfect okay um next up uh staircase at ais rich you want to take that one sure actually uh one of the things i'm considering we lost you rich [Music] uh partially because it's a supply chain issue hello hear me now it's fading in and out hello i'll recap this one for rich um so there's supply chain issues that may delay this one anyhow so there's a possibility this one may uh be postponed um especially if we need to use some of these funds this is an expensive project if we need to use these funds to get the high school floor put back together so we'll have more on that as we learn more about the floor and we get more information about the materials that we need for the staircase and can you just yeah can you just review which like what this which staircase it is and what's happening with it yeah uh i i so there's rich can you are you are you there i'm here i'm not sure about my connection can everybody hear me that's better yeah okay great so um a few years years ago we had a uh a fire drill and during this fire drill we had a medical issue where a student needed attention and they were on one level and the nurse was on the other level so you know the nurse had to go through the oh no building yeah so there's no way to get there outside the stairwell would solve that oh so we we dealt with mac passive emergency management director our first thought was to get a role that would uh block to the upper lap and hear me now sorry i guess i need to my uh millibytes on my bandwidth over here [Laughter] well there was there was discussion of the road we ended up going with the staircase and so first that didn't yeah that worked out so now we're we're working on a stairway and so could you describe uh to to luisa can i just ask a quick question for the minutes absolutely absolutely uh could you describe the stair while project just a little bit uh in a little bit more detail just so that i can reflect it accurately i would appreciate budgeted project that will connect the lower level to the upper level outside and allow somebody to move between those two levels without having to go through the school great thank you very much i appreciate that sure anyone else no all right move on all right richard do you want to try to talk about the any of the flooring it's it's these are much smaller projects at this point sure pembroke school we have a project in place to replace specific rooms that have uh carpeting uh we have a large special ed population and these floors they they tend and to get a lot of bomb but it's special other stuff on there so it looks really sharp am i good no you're fading it out i'll just do a quick recap of pembroke so it's a special ed um classroom so there's uh just a need that you need to be able to clean it up um you know things bodily functions fluids all that kind of stuff as well as food and you know so uh it just needs to be a floor that you can sweep and mop easily right now it's carpeted and we want to uh just make it more sanitary okay to to louisa uh our food chair what kind of what kind of flooring are you replacing it with oh that's a rich question uh what do we got there rich it's actually called luxury vinyl tile um it it's a vinyl tile that you don't have to uh strip and wax every year so it cuts down on accidents you know every year stripping and waxing you you always have somebody that slips on the floor um you just have to keep it clean which it's less maintenance uh our guys can spend more time uh doing detail cleaning and painting walls than stripping and waxing floors and it and it's and it retains its nice look without having to wax it thank you for the explanation you're welcome rich you want to try to do any of these other ones the partitions or the uh the ksi floor sure um now that ann taught me this trick about turning my camera off um hey so so the uh the partitions uh we have a special ed room at king street primary and a lot of you may know that king street primary it was built as a open format so there's no walls on our classrooms uh so we're just making up we're just looking at making this particular classroom uh a little bit more private um we're also looking at doing two classrooms at south street the two kindergarten rooms and it's a similar situation where they have half the floor is is vinyl tile and the other half is carpeting so we're we're looking at getting rid of the carpeting because uh carpeting can look nice but uh it tends to hold on to the dirt a little bit more than a hard floor surface smell too yeah yeah of all the the education fads i've seen come and go over the years that that open concept one i think is one of the more bizarre ones i've i've seen it's it's hard to believe there's still uh still relics of it so uh one one more thing mike we're still looking at uh removing uh high school chemicals from the science labs um you know with the pan endemic we didn't have to worry about it for a few years but we still built up a a good amount of inventory of chemicals that will need to be disposed of properly uh so we're looking at taking care of that this summer as well great okay i think that wraps up our list um any more questions about those projects i have an issue the microphones at uh the board of education meetings terrible terrible i mean i've been not doing i've been doing this a few years and i realized my hearing isn't the best but why can't we have a robust microphone so in front of everyone that functions so we can hear everyone very well uh there's also there's also a challenge with uh you know when we have a guest speaker or public comment sometimes and uh so please if it's i can fix this with a few batteries please do that all right i'm true i i can speak to that a little bit al um and talking with my telecom guru ed lathrop um i i believe when we put in the new microphone system we put in a few too many wireless microphones and with the amount that we have there it just doesn't work properly there's too much as uh not to throw out too technical of a term but there's too much peristatic oscillation um so i've had a company look at that and i'm working on getting a price for more hardwired microphones that you wouldn't get that feedback well i'm a radio guy rich you know peristatic oscillation [Laughter] all right so so you are working on it thank you for allowing me to vent it's just when it works it works very well when you get a microphone it works but uh there are usually speakers that and i like a robust listening conversation and uh and i i realized most of my school board meetings have been remote due to covet but i guess we're back in business and anything you can do to uh entertain you would be well appreciated i am sure thank you we'll see what we can do peristatic obsolete oscillation gotcha [Laughter] all right uh so the last item is um accreditation at the high school uh the northeast association of schools and colleges neasc um gave us a list of a few things that we needed to do to satisfy requirements um it's primarily about the elevators uh rich i understand those should be fixed by the end of next week and then there are some issues with the science lab you could tell us a little bit about those yep the uh the science labs um aside from the newer edition and see the the original edition is pretty tired um we need to replace gas valves uh water um really needs an upgrade and i know the city had put in a proposal for the design of that um so we'll have to check with the public works to to get the status of that a few of the other things that came up during the report were uh bathrooms being shut down due to uh repairs needed um i'll follow up with the city on on the bathroom repairs water fountain was mentioned and also there is something about high school administration having access to the city's work order system uh right now uh the the high school administration they put in work orders through us i can see the work orders but but the uh at the principal level they can't see it so i'm working with sean and and with our work order company to see if we can get a better solution for that be great i have a question all of these items that were on that um that list did we have a time frame to get all this done i am not sure of the time frame i know dan donovan would have that okay are the science are the science lab ones that are on the list to be are they scheduled to be updated well i know they they start with getting uh putting out a proposal for the design of the renovation so they've stopped uh doing the renovation though okay so it's it's this is going to be on the city side yes okay thank you i think that's all we have louisa okay does anybody in the questions go ahead michelle yeah i do i had spoken with a parent who had mentioned that the um showers at danbury high are not working or they kind of are not operable or something can you speak to that at all or is my do you know anything about the locker rooms and the showers in the locker rooms not being accessible or maybe not working at the moment is i don't rich do you know anything about that no that that's actually the first um uh hearing of that but i'll be happy to look into it thank you yeah we'll take a look and next meeting on the agenda thank you welcome anybody else on the committee board of ed no all right well if that's it i guess we can um motion to adjourn pick this up next month i moved second second all right obsolation
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[Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Music] so [Music] you may be seated good afternoon parents family members students staffed and dignified guests welcome to the 2022 cambridge virtual academy commencement ceremony my name is catherine carota and i will be your master of ceremonies today is a special day and one we are excited to celebrate together this ceremony is both a joyous and solemn occasion please let us remember to be courteous to those around us we need to be respectful to our seniors during the ceremony so no air horns or noise makers please remain seated while filming or taking photos and remember to keep the recording devices at chest level to not impede the vision of others seated around you also please keep the aisle or walkway open throughout the ceremony today's ceremony is being live streamed and will remain on the district's youtube channel to view at your convenience it is so great that we can be together today to celebrate the class of 2022.
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meeting of the board of trustees uh roll call uh dennis bender here christopher nice here maria okara and wilson soap and rick i'm here dennis lead us in the fish please i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you all right kylie we have any public comments prior to closed session we do not okay thank you all right so we're going to be going into closed session but first i have we have seven items that we're going to be discussing and the first item is conference of litigation government code section 549 56.9 current litigation five cases 1907-172-201183-2022-956-202-3366 three six two one one one three o three in government code section five nine five four point five and five four nine five six point nine d subsection 2 and e1 anticipated litigation 12 cases 1218 1907 2020 2105 2020 2107 2021 2206 2021 2208 2021 2209 21 22 10 20 21 22 11 20 21 22 12 and 20 21 22 13.
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there are two back-to-back consecutive track meets on the 24th and 25th at clifton stadium both them start 3 30. baseball is playing against t-neck at t-neck on the 23rd 4-15 the team also deserves special recognition for their best season in 27 years reaching the county final game it's a great feat for them boys volleyball is playing in the state tournament against north bergen at home on 23rd starting at 4 p.m and flag football is playing against jfk at jfk and patterson at six o'clock on the 23rd the last item is the longest text i've written for anything this year but i think it's worthwhile so as the weather warms up again jack starts to go back in the closet i feel it's finally an appropriate time to acknowledge clifton students primarily female clifton students and their issues regarding the clifton high school dress code argument service school dress codes are not a uniquely clifton issue by any means these are struggles between societal forces the clothing industry and the school environment that are incredibly difficult to juggle unfortunately the school ends up being the one that's a spin obvious plates at the same time strives to try to strike a balance and no scenario can everyone be pleased with the dress code i cannot fathom a solution to this however i still think it's imperative to voice these concerns here in this venue repeatedly stated in the chs student school dress code are statements that health and safety are the number one factor in form in informing the dress code quote of paramount importance in this dress code are the health and safety of the students and the avoidance of disorder and or distractions the educational process which is from a section of the state philosophy quote in addition the code is designed to encourage a mode of dressing grooming that is conducive to establishing a climate of discipline order teaching and an effective learning environment which ends the stated purpose many of the items under the clothing section are rational following i believe are and agree are rational ideas these include number four which is that jewelry posing as a potential danger is not permitted one a to maintain an environment conducive to learning scooper is not allowed items five a through f which include prohibiting clothing that references violence alcohol drugs sexual connotation and the like none of the items listed in the dress code would affect the way i come to school dressed i know very few male students who feel that dress code is imposing on them as is the case in any other school district is the female population that feels the weight of these regulations the most even since middle school i've heard of and witnessed countless times female students exasperated because they were dress coded for their shoulder straps not being three fingers wide or because their shorts and mid thigh these are specific guidelines on the dress code for apparel that easily and often does spark debate it wasn't until this year that i heard a final i heard a student finally say these factors are out of their control because all they can find they go shopping i absolutely believe them if you walk through wilbur you're on state plaza i challenge you to find a pair of women's shorts and a mid-thigh it's just not a contemporary style it will be difficult and will continue to be difficult for you to come what finally convinced me to talk about the subject was when a teacher had to warn the point the female students in the classroom that dress code checks would become much more frequent they rightfully so immediately voice their frustrations i'd like to end by quoting what a classmate of mine said about the dress code so much shame in being dress coded or being told that you're distracting others because of your body or having that insinuated it feels like us girls are doing something wrong when all we're showing is a midriff or if we're wearing shorts that are inch above our fingertips or wearing spaghetti straps and showing our shoulders i get it there's a line you have to draw the line should not blame a woman or make her feel shameful about her body and what she chooses to put on it these sentiments are echoed by young women in schools cross country this is an issue much larger than clifton and i'm not expecting a perfect solution by any means to come out of this discussion however it's still an issue in clifton and still should be openly discussed during clifton thank you very much for your time and have a good night uh andrew before you leave um andrew has done a tremendous job throughout this year he has a few more meetings left with us but i have been told that there is no one as of now replacing him so if there's any students out there that are interested please see andrew and he will steer you in the right direction to get that done so thank you andrew any of our student award recipients if you would like to stay for the meeting you're more than welcome but if you'd like to leave at this time that would be acceptable as well all right we can move on to adoption of the minutes of the meeting of may 5th so moved by mr abadrava second second by mr awad discussion mr president yes mr daley um i just want to make as i understand the minutes uh the the essence of the resolution is in the minutes that's from 13 down to further resolved at the bottom correct yeah on on the in the minutes it has adoption of the budget and it this essence of the budget resolution is in 13 from where it's 13 item adoption of the budget down to the last further resolved um yes i mean i can get it open but it it we show where there was the original resolution and then the the know because i know there's a lot of discussion before that and which is noted which is proper and i just want to make sure that's the essence of that yes yes sir thank you [Music] okay seeing none other comments uh roll call please mr abadraba yes mr awad yes miss bassford yes miss beltram yes mr kanova yes dr danny abstain mr paris yes vice president daley yes yes motion carries okay now dr robitosi will give the superintendent's report thank you mr president good evening commissioners good evening members of the public faculty staff students present here tonight just want to review a couple of things and a couple reminders for the board and for the community tonight was the first of our comprehensive physical education and health virtual parent presentations as this board is well aware the new health standards have been a little controversial they've been discussed here at our board meetings and tonight was the first virtual session uh that we had there will be another session on monday night uh may 23rd from 6 to 7 30 p.m virtually and that's for grades k-5 just like tonight was and there will be another uh session for grades 6 through 12 on tuesday night may 24th from 6 to 7 30.
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[Music] we're going left i'm left i'm left thank you everybody congratulations head to the cafeteria for the final part of today's festivities i'm gonna turn off this that microphone really nice john you guys did a great job thank you mr green gotta get this in i miss
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yeah and the way that this works is that these press issues come from the illinois association of school boards they have a committee of um school district leadership and lawyers that kind of put together the policies and whatnot and then they send them out to the all the schools in illinois we approve the first reading and then between the first reading and the second reading before they're adopted we take questions concerns or any issues that are brought up i say that because with this first reading i got an email from our cespa which is the non-certified education association and they were wondering about policy specifically 580 which is court duty and it talks about how they will reimburse for jury duty licensed employees and our paraprofessionals are wondering what does that mean and one of the questions in that policy if you look at it it needs to know are we going to treat our extra our esp employees our aides and our non-certified people the same way we treat our certified i would think that from my experience here we have and we will but those are some of the things that get brought up when you look at these policies and so um i i say that we approve these with the knowledge that you know those are the things that we will change and make modifications to when we are finally approve it next month does that make sense this will be at the board meeting next month yes ma'am so what we're doing is we're approving the first reading and then between now and next month everybody's got a month to really dive into these policies and look at them uh scott middle camp and adam hemkin are the two board members that sit on the subcommittee that review them and and go over the the details but really what happens is uh you know alyssa and i will review them and we'll kind of answer the questions and we'll touch base with scott and adam and make sure we're on the same page but if so if you get anybody contacting you regarding any of the policies then forward them on to scott or adam and then you'll have the recommendations at the next meeting yes ma'am okay here's a point of clarification we are we can make our own rules we can amend the rules and they will survive and what happens basically is our press is kept at the association level in any changes so when a new press policy comes down our changes are incorporated into the new one so we don't overwrite them so yeah we've we've done that in the past well just i guess the last go round we did yeah right so exactly all right perfect any further discussion all right without entertaining a motion to approve the first reading press issue 109.
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she was selected as one of the grand prize winners only five were selected from get grades 11 and 12. she won an award there's a plaque that's going to go up that's got a picture of her painting i she also got cards with her paintings on it or they're painting on it and so she was one of only five she got an award from them and she also earned a scholarship to the summer school saturday art program at herron up in indianapolis so she gets to go up there and practice and show them how amazing she is because she's super awesome so um just recognizing her for that and uh yeah it's amazing it's like this big and we got it she got it done just under the wire we had to send it off on a friday to get it there in time and i literally took it to ship it while it was still drying so so she's uh yeah she's very talented she's won several other art awards in locally when i entered her stuff in in different shows well that's fantastic especially for james she's amazing yeah well i remember she won a grand prize for the duck uh yes in junior high school she actually won the same contest in junior high school and they used her painting from junior high school for all of their promotional materials and that was what was sent to us this year her painting was in the promotional materials this year cool so it's it's very very cool and her artwork will be part of a traveling exhibit of all the winners for the next three years and then she'll get back yeah yeah i wish she would be able to be here but she wasn't able to and but i just can't say enough wonderful things about her she's awesome yes yes so when she can come let's make sure we make another opportunity for awesome thank you guys thank you we have chris townsend and his team to present on the expansion of eagle manufacturing he's preparing to check give me a second here oh you just sit back there in the shadows you're doing your banana white compression [Music] sorry i don't know how to move back up [Music] there we go sorry about that all right so um just a quick presentation tonight so i wanted to go through um a little bit about our eagle manufacturing expansion that we've been working on here for a few months at this point actually um so just want to hit up some key points i'll have a lot of funny time for questions at the end to kind of dive in any details that you guys want but um maybe never works this is what happens when you project on zoom sorry there we go how does that do it that way that's right um so first question is why i think uh why are we wanting to expand eagle manufacturing um as far as space is concerned um we are current space we are currently in i think most everybody here has at least been in it at some point um worked okay for when we started and it's worked less okay as we've grown and got more students into the program and expanded the things that we do as a part of eagle manufacturing so we have a lot of equipment and space that is really separate from one another that really should be in the same space to allow us to use it a lot more efficiently we do not have room for any more expansion i've taken as much space as i could possibly grabbed from everywhere around us without getting space in another part of the building and we also have some supervision limitations because of that so we have four or five different spaces that students can be in at any given time which presents some supervision issues from time to time um as far as from the student perspective why would we do this it's going to allow us to give them more real world experiences bring in some different types of equipment and different technology it's going to allow us to arrange things a little more efficiently so it's more similar to a real world production environment um so a lot more real world experiences and probably more importantly is it's going to allow us to greatly increase the number of students that participate in eagle manufacturing on a yearly basis so at the very least doubling from where we currently are if not more than that um long term especially uh and then also it's going to allow us to the expansion vehicle manufacturing allows us to utilize the space we currently have in the high school here for engineering a little bit better and give us some more space to do more things within the engineering program and it's also going to allow us to expand our construction program and do some more higher level work within that construction program sorry i'm going to jump over here so um yes and i know mr austin presented about this a few weeks ago or a couple months ago or time flies i'm not sure how long ago was to be honest but these are all the programs to study at the high school that are affected potentially by the eagle manufacturing expansion um the construction program already talked about we have three courses over the course of three years that students can participate in that program that will be potential or expanded as a result of the eagle manufacturing expansion gives us more space here to spread out construction and do more with it our engineering program which is four-year four-year program will be able to utilize some of the space that is currently taken up with equal manufacturing equipment equipment that isn't used for engineering um and utilize that space more effectively and then the principles of precision machining digital design and business administration are all pathways to lead directly into eagle manufacturing so that allows us the expansion also allows us to teach those principles courses outside of the space we currently use which is used for engineering courses so we have issues with overlapping needing to teach in engineering course at the same time as a principal's course causes a lot of issues with scheduling and other things so that alleviates a lot of those issues and then once again allows us to get more students into these pathways as part of that expansion so that's kind of the why uh the how and where is or the how i should say is mostly due to a community donor um who came in and wanted to help brown county schools and we put forth proposal to the uh community donor or potential donor at the time for this expansion and all the good things that i've talked about i'll talk a little more about here in a minute that allow us to do for our students so that's a big reason of or how we're going to be able to do this and then also we're going to be utilizing pretty much all the equipment we have now we'll be moving to the new space so that saves us a lot of potential expenditures on new equipment so we will be moving a lot of that and also using an existing space that we have in the district and one that is currently unused which is that red box up there on the screen for reference high schools up there on the north side of the parking lot and then that is the kind of mid-ish section of the former intermediate school uh directly to the uh right of it is the gym and directly to the left is where the current cr of crc is currently located so that space in between where the crc is and where the gymnasium is is what we're looking at expanding into this is what that is going to look like i have a little more detailed one here on the next slide here in a second but we currently have the library taking up two of these rooms are i guess the elementary library that they use to house all those materials that go out to the elementary schools um that's currently actually taking the two rooms in the bottom are the southwest corner we're going to be moving one of those across so they're kind of across from each other on in the space there and then we're going to be taking these six classrooms three on the north side three on the south side to the right of where those spaces are and that will be converted into what you see here which is our manufacturing lab on the south side uh our admin lab there kind of within the manufacturing lab our graphics lab on the northeast side and then our shipping receiving and inventory area uh they're kind of in the northwest corner this is what it and i know obviously no you can't read any of this but this is what it looks like with actual equipment in the space um this has what the layout will roughly be with all the you know work tables and equipment and all the different things that will be going into the space this is approximately what it'll look like um currently working on figuring all that and getting all that finalized but that's kind of a rough layout of what it'll look like and the big benefits here um as i mentioned earlier increased cte course enrollment for students of brown county schools um increase real world relevant experiences for students crown county schools increase the number of students who are prepared for careers in this region there's a lot of need in brown county and around brown county in our region for these types of jobs and the experience that they get potentially decrease or definitely decrease numbers of students going to c4 for similar types of programs so they're keeping most of our machining students for example here in brown county versus having them have to travel to c4 and then also giving students more of a reason to come to school and we can engage in their education so it's a real i know most of you have been down to eagle manufacturing so you've seen what it's like what the students do and how they react or interact with the program and um we're just excited to be able to get more students involved and more students engaged in their education so i'm happy to take any questions thank you okay so what is needed to be done to accept the space to accommodate what you're going to do questions sure um so it's mostly there's not a whole lot of structural changes that have to be made there are some walls that have to be moved but they're all drywall so it's minimal most of it is honestly cosmetic and just rearranging the space there will be some hdac upgrades that need to be made to that space as well to accommodate the new equipment and the number of students but the big chunk of it is just reconfiguring and updating and making everything look like it belongs there and suiting him for the equipment that we have putting in uh air compressor pressed air system electrical requirements you know ventilation and plus some did i understand you were saying some additional uh equipment yes yes absolutely initially we're working mostly to get the construction done and so we can get over there but long term yes adding some more capabilities what kinds of things would you be able to do i mean like i know that you're you just added like screen printing with some other things like what are some of the types of things you anticipate having so uh more advanced capabilities of manufacturing um so allowing students to be able to learn and experience higher level manufacturing processes so as an example um part of the plan is to add a new cnc mill that has five access capabilities which is a much more advanced level of programming and knowledge to be able to do that that frankly doesn't really happen in high school ever very very few high schools do that um adding our automatic capabilities for screen printing so doing are we still doing manual screen printing traditional screen printing but also adding the ability to do automatic screen printing press so we can do set up and run larger runs and shirts and things like that um and just in general increasing our volume that we can do because of the space in addition to more students throughout the day and then as far as the staffing i know you and me or obviously the prior staff and i know we were working on one other staff member um how many more staff are we going to need to add or is that going to be it um well we have mr mcgill on the agenda tonight um and then we're talking about uh potential adding on to cover some other courses as well and we're kind of working through what that might be it's we are we've had a big demand for our for sign up for our courses for next year for our principals courses and those pathways so more than we anticipated so um we're needing to accommodate more students than we thought we would have to for next year so we're working through that i'm just saying you're saying doubling the number of students which as a teacher means yes should be more staff how do we accommodate that so the majority of that is covered with bringing on our third instructor to be able to take off of my plate some of those introduction engineering classes and then take off mr keeper's plate some intro construction courses um that's where we get a lot of that capacity um and then we might have we're working on ways to maybe fill in a little bit more potentially i don't think any decisions have been made until we know exactly how many kids are going right i understand when i hear you know i see this you've got this big facility you're talking about supervision of course that's really important as well yeah and and as a part of that plan it's been designed in such a way that it's much easier for a single teacher to be able to supervise the entire space versus what we have now um so for example you know our screen printing lab that we mentioned is in its own like conference room so it's literally like around the hall with no windows or anything and in this space in that you go back forward one more mr phones thank you um in that admin lab there the advisor's desk is kind of like right there on the hallway incredible window so from that desk you can see in essentially the entire manufacturing lab the entire graphics lab and then if you move walk out the door you can see the shipping and receiving areas so it's not perfect but it's much much easier to be able to see the entire space and give more supervision and honestly at this point when students are going to be working on their own they've been through a principles class and they know how we operate so they don't you know they don't last long if they're not gonna you know you know what i so you'll be putting windows then in the hallway so that you can see even though it's across the hallway yeah so yeah all those that mr keyboard is pointing out are windows those in the hallways there are windows so any of those darker areas are all windows open windows yeah yes oh it absolutely does yes yes huge difference compared to what we're doing right now because we don't i don't i have zeros anywhere even to the outside did any of your existing students participate in the design of the new facility absolutely um so um we had ideas about what we wanted to do and you know because we knew things we were gonna have that they weren't aware of but this was something where like for example our shipping receiving area i brought in our current shipping receiving manager and we sat down and had a discussion about what would be best to put where and what would make the most sense for the space um sat down with our graphics manager and talked through the layout even she was one who made some changes to it that i didn't even think about about oddly enough about supervision because she was originally we had the desks facing the hallway like the advisor's desks are across the hall and she's like i can't won't be able to see anybody and like monitor so turning them sideways for example to be able to actually see while she's working types of things so little things like that that i didn't think about they definitely contributed for sure right now when i visited you it seemed like you had a large majority a large population of seniors participating so you're going to have alan um so we have about 12 seniors right now we have about 23 in the program it's about half and half from this year to next year um and we have about 12 coming in ish for next year and then the year after that's when we start ramping up so and then when we had that discussion your target was to try and move the program further into where you get earlier participation is that part of this next curriculum in 2023 or is that something that's going to happen later definitely for next year so those principles courses that i was talking about as part of that pathway will get the students in the pathway to legal manufacturing either as a freshman or a sophomore and our eagle of manufacturing as well the middle school is going to help feed students into that program in addition to those principles courses so that is all those principles courses are being implemented next year we have we have one this year or two we're adding the design course and i guess the last question i have is from the donor that you had is the donor donation enough to cover just the reconstruction or the construction that you have to do or is there funds left over to the requirement equipment or um currently the commitment is for construction um and getting the space up to what where we need it to be and then we're working on uh um other means for the equipment [Music] i don't have the numbers off the top of my head for the number of students going to see for right now um i i can't say the big advantage of that for students is that they lose i think it's at least a period a day for travel time back and forth so keeping them here allows them to take more classes not only hours but also other classes here as well that they don't lose out on um but i do not have numbers yeah we're currently in in figuring that out we do not have a number at the moment well thank you very much for that presentation thank you of our presentations [Music] why do you know that her mother and my son thank you [Music] there we go so to begin with i just want to thank the board for taking the time to hear about our presentation and um to you know hear about this project that the three of us have been working on for the past year so for those of you who don't know my name is marie fields and i'm a senior and i am the student coordinator for the brown county pop festival um taylor is our assistant coordinator um she is a freshman and then of course mrs billings is our staff coordinator so our project this year was called the brown honey pop festival and pop stands for pursuing our purpose so the pop festival is a part of the basil scholars program which misspellings and i were selected to participate in about a year ago the basil scholars program this is a year-long leadership program for high schools seniors and their partnered educators it's funded by the bezos family foundation and yes the bezos bezos is his parents 12 student educator teams are chosen from across the united states every year and one team of five students is chosen from the african leadership academy in johannesburg south africa and the purpose of the basil scholars program is to develop a community change project or a local ideas festival as they call it based on an identified community so when miss billings and i sat down kind of over the summer and they were brainstorming what we wanted our local ideas festivals to get out and we had so many different topics that we could have chosen from it it was very important to narrow it down to just one but i kind of related it back to my personal experiences growing up in rural indiana i've always had really really big dreams um as you can see here when i was in eighth grade i wanted to be a supreme court justice and that was a trip that um miss oliver and i went on for history today um so i've always had really big dreams i kind of found myself having little resources because of the community that i grew up in especially because i'm a first generation college student and i'm from a low income household and one thing that i also noticed throughout you know my high school experience is there's definitely a pipeline between our brown county graduates and low-wage local jobs right after high school with little opportunity for career advancement yeah so taking marie's personal experience um we kind of took that as a starting point and then um brought that to our students and our staff to see if there was a larger need there so our students for equity group that already existed held a workshop at one of their meetings where students kind of brainstormed based on that prompt that you see young people in brown county need and gave us some of their responses and then we also sent out a teacher and staff survey um to have some input from the perspective of the people who are here to support our students what they see our students needing in order to have um a successful you know post-secondary future so based on those two things we kind of identified that there there was a sense of apathy when thinking about future planning amongst our young people and so what did they need to overcome that and we came up with this list that our students kind of brought us to of empowerment opportunity motivation direction and hope and so all of that's kind of tying together into the larger concept of purpose but they're needing purpose so this project's vision statement was the brown county high school will be a will be a learning community where all students feel empowered to pursue current and future educational and career opportunities that align with their purpose and aspirations and then their mission our mission statement was to connect students with post-secondary opportunities through workshops and resources that align with their own passions and purpose so they have a broader variety of options to consider after their high school so um in our initial you know phases of the planning process we partnered first with our um building administration with mr austin and mr hutchins and our master teachers and academy leaders um to kind of tell them what our idea was and what we were thinking about um we also brought on mrs breitzman and the crc and our registrar just pruitt um as kind of our our like adult team support team to help us through that and we also had a magnificent um core team of about 11 underclassmen um there we are this is a cute little picture of us on the day of our festival um we met once a week and they really helped us with student engagement um facilitating our purpose sessions which we threw about in just a minute and set up slash teardown on the day of the festival as well as you know providing a wide and diverse range of students perspectives on the development of our festival yeah so to fund the festival the basis family foundation gives each educator and scholar pair seed money of a thousand dollars and that is funding that's renewable um annually for the life cycle of of your local ideas festival um and then we were fortunate enough to have some additional funding through uh our bcs high ability grant program thank you um and so the majority of our budget as you can see there was spent on supplies um for the festival marketing supplies actual supplies we needed for the day of the festival as well as shirts for our volunteers one of the other major costs was the cost of the purpose development pilot session we did with an organization called nxu um and then also right anytime you have a big event you have to feed people so there was also food involved for our presenters our volunteers um and our teachers that assisted us that day so essentially the pop festival was broken um into two parts so the first part was our purpose discovery and that took place throughout four weeks in the month of april and then the second part is our big college and career fair and empowerment workshops which took place um during school hours on april 28th so for purpose discovery um in collaboration with an organization that miss billings and i were connected to through the bezos program um nxu we wanted to provide our students um with a curriculum that really focuses on four different um you know key components of developing your purpose so your identity your strengths your interests and your passions and our hope is that by our students exploring these things they will have a bit more of self-reflection and direction and an idea of what they want to pursue um now and after high school so essentially um before we presented this curriculum to our students um on march 22nd we had like an initial purpose training session with our core team with our match store and our mentor features as well as some of our administrators with nxu via zoom and then we implemented that um that curriculum over the course of four weeks so our students met um in their cafeteria during srt um the freshmen met on mondays the sophomores my dog tuesdays et cetera et cetera on week week one um that was kind of our introduction to purpose and they also explored the concept of identities um week two we explored our interests and our passions week three we did a strength assessment survey and then week four um we developed every student developed a um a purpose statement which mrs billings will get to in a minute um and kind of our incentive that we've you know tried to get our students to recognize was that um you know taking the time to reflect on what they want to do after life is obviously really beneficial but also um the each srt for a grade that had the highest rate of um turn in for their purpose exercises um received sugar peak pregnancy on so a perfect statement just so you have an idea of what our amazing young people came up with as a part of this so it's something that ties together identity factors that matter to you um with your strengths your interests and passions and how you will use those things to meet a need in the world so these were just a few purpose statements taken from our students and you can see they they do all follow right we provide them with that template and that structure so for example that first one as a strong outgoing woman so there's there's the identity pieces she connects with my purpose in life is to use my ability to console and communicate with others combined with my love of helping people to be a paramedic right um yeah so we've got some very specific ones and then we have some broader ones too um our next one is helping others to coexist and talk and discuss peacefully we i love the third one as a motivator leader and athlete my purpose in life is to use my ability to communicate and be a leader combined with my love of sports psychology and family to create a better environment for the brown county athletic program so yeah so after they spent four weeks creating their purpose the college and career fair helps them connect their carpet it gave them the chance to connect their purpose to any like life things that will help them later in life and um during their lunch time there were 30 vocational schools colleges and employers set up including brown county high school alumnus evan razor jasmine enemies and empowerment workshops which they chose from 15 options that fall into three categories information finance and self-care and on your handout you can see a list of facilitators workshops and all the different exhibitors that we're actually watching through yeah can you go back to just one slide so to clarify they had 15 workshop choices they chose five for the day so each student had an individualized schedule of five work workshops of their choice and then also had an hour to explore the college and career fair so um after our festival we had about purpose statements turned in and we had about 368 students um attend the festival on april 28th so in general um we received some pretty positive on student feedback in terms of the college and career fair um uh we so we sent out this survey um like about a week after the um big festival and our students said they wish that there was a bit more representation of the college and career fair in terms of trades arts culinary schools health fields and volunteer organizations as well as private colleges and in terms of the workshops and everyone on the stage to really enjoy them but they wish that they could hear directly from college students and also have more art based skills represented in the workshops that we offered and the purpose development they wish the students wished it was more spread out over the course of the entire year rather than you know all at once uh you know in the month of april and they also wanted um more context as to why um living purpose-driven life was important and why um we were advocating for things that we were advocating for um in terms of our staff feedback again they wish that um our festival was earlier on in the year to avoid um ap prep conflicts and they wish that it was more spread out rather than over the course of about a month we had several staff members say that they wanted to be trained in the purpose development so that they could help their students directly and some staff members said that they wished our festival was more inclusive for our students with learning and mobility differences um in terms of our workshop facilitators um they're very impressed with the logistics of our festival and our communication several of them said that they wish they had something like this when they were in high school and they are very happy to engage with our students in future years yeah and so as far as sustainability goes as i mentioned earlier we have continued funding from the bezos family foundation should this festival continue um we also um are in the process as a district of well i know it's been submitted um our three grant the state uh department of education and so um and christy reitzman has written into that grant um some of the costs of the expanded purpose opportunity curriculum as well as um funds to train staff on that curriculum so that we can we can utilize that more effectively and then additionally in our second year we would also like to look at getting some corporate sponsors and private donors um to help fund expanding the festival and possibly creating some scholarships that are attached to the festival for students that attend the festival um and then we'll talk about students okay so for future grow okay so okay um for future growth we are really hoping to expand this program more and as for our purpose sessions we are it's really for the pending approval of the three grant and we're adopting like the purpose curriculum with nxu and we are hoping to in the future change six staff members to be proficient in their curriculum and support other like smaller classroom teachers and for our college and career first part of it we are a visitor and actually have 50 exhibitors and more volunteer organizations so that students can also participate in that um and then more representation in fields in the different fields as many states earlier and for student involvement we've already had a ton of students say that they would like to be in this next year and on that um survey we set out a lot of people have already signed up um we are very grateful you know for rock county school administration to give us the opportunity to um you know implement this festival it's something that is very near and dear to my heart has been a really great way to end my senior year i wish that i would have had the opportunity to do this my freshman year um and continue to do it all throughout high school miss gillings and i really like this quote and we think that it kind of encompasses our entire festival fdr states we cannot always build a future for our youth but we can build the view for our future and i'm really excited to see um what brown county does with the pop festival after i graduate thank you you're open to any questions very nice i don't have a question but i have a statement and i deeply appreciate the inclusive activity comment from the staff feedback with students being making sure i just want to tell you all that i am so incredibly proud of you um i am excited to see also what the future looks like and how this is going to grow into even bigger outcomes for our kids so thank you i think you can get a freshman you know that end of the spectrum a lot sooner than that really promotes a lot of other things along the chain as i think about that my days in the high school so i wish i had some exposure to certain things i wouldn't not change my mind what i ended up doing but i just think thank you so much well i like that you saw a community need and a school need because this is something that we have been missing for a long time and i i really like this event and i like to see your energy about it but it isn't like oh you know we have to do this it's like this is exciting this is what we ought to be doing and i have often you know i've always been pushing you guys can say this because i had to both in seventh grade but like always looking outside of brown county we have to not be in even outside of indiana we have to not always be like oh i can go to ivy tech tech's great place but we need to be expanding our horizons and getting kids to understand there's a lot of things out there that they can do and but if they're never exposed to it then they're not going to understand those opportunities and so how can we make that real for them and i think you've done a really great job of like putting all that together and saying you know i have a goal in life and this is how i achieve it i just want to add on to that too though i think a big part of this an intention of this is to help our students understand that they can live in purpose here and they can have an impact on their community here too so as much as as much as we want to open doors and all of those things we want them to realize some of those stories can lead to here i'm incredibly proud of the student team so like it's a treat to work with them [Music] ladies and gentle as you well know you don't have to stay for the rest of your weekend next we have discussion items and there are none next we have approval of public session units dated may do i have a motion second a second any discussion roll call carol yes amy yes vicky yes motion carries thank you and next is action needed items at the recommendation to approve the 2022-2023 elementary student handbook do you have a motion to approve the elementary student handbook for 22-23 any discussion carol yes amy yes vicky yes stephanie yes motion carries thank you thanks i have the recommendation to approve the modified lease agreement between brown county schools and human services incorporated to additionally include the leasing of room 118 a as office space with an increase in rent from 800 a month 900 a month beginning the 31st of may 2022 through the 30th of may 2024.
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our bond council and financial advisor have talked about this for quite some time we're in an interesting interest rate market of course when we first began this discussion about six months ago we were looking at some really significant savings uh and it really depends at this point uh what the interest rates what happens to interest rates in the future but we felt it was a prudent thing to do to have the board approve the necessary steps to get this process started and one of the things that mentions is that if we can't save at least three hundred and fifty thousand dollars in net savings we won't proceed with this the earliest we can do this based on the current bond agreements is march of next year but we wanted to get this these initial approvals done so again i would say there's a long resolution lots of whereases i want to just mention the key points in this resolution um on page four section six says that that you're approving the issuance and sale on delivery of uh 2023 because this wouldn't happen until next year refunding bonds an amount not to exceed 13 million five hundred thousand dollars and as as it says there uh it's approved so long as the savings can be at least three percent and then at the bottom of the page uh section 10 you are approving the use of barnes and thornburg as our bond council stiefel as our municipal advisor and bearden company as our underwriter for this this project so this is just an initial approval and if if the interest rates are favorable next spring we will be bringing this back to you at that at that time so we're asking this evening for the board to approve this resolution are we anticipating in 14 months the interest rates are going to be more favorable or how does this work when the when the feds raise the interest rates and i know it works differently on bonds and stuff i guess that's why we have you here for all the hard questions because in part there's a real big fear of inflation and so that's driving interest in the bond market i think what you're seeing though is on if the station starts to come down by the end of the year then you'll start to see industries start to go back down a little bit so this will be very much of a thing that just you'll have to wait to see but there's no cost to adopt the resolution right now and then just put it on the shelf and then if interest rates come back and we're able to hit the target then we'll put everything together okay i remember doing it a few years ago i think we did in 13 is when we did it yes in almost 10 years jeff i guess i have more of a process question why do we have to approve it almost a year in advance to take advantage of it in march of 2023 i think the thought was first of all that if starts to improve by the end of this year we would start to get the documents in place we have to go to the radiation to get that done in january february as dr gabriel said the earliest we could sell the bond would be in march and close in april um and so just because of having him here to be able to explain it to you number one and number two just to be able to hit the market if it makes sense in addition we had to have the building corporation here for the high school sugar ground the same people have both corporations so rather than having them so it's more just the formality of putting it putting it in place that if bond market gets more favorable then we can jump on it if not we just ignore it any other questions no we need a motion shoot my laptop went to sleep uh mr president i moved that we approved the motion to approve building corporation building or board of directors i think it's uh your one before no i think it's written it's a mystery yeah sorry oh it is yeah i sorry yeah it's approved the sale of refunds yeah yeah that's what i get for reading i um i i motion that we approve the sale i'll just read it from here oh thank you oh sorry refund bonding oh my gosh refund refund bonds yes i approve that prove the sale of the of the refunding bonds oh my gosh is my face right right now now you're good we'll need a second i'll second motion has been made as seconded all in favor say aye aye anyone opposed motion passes 7.3 thank you it's okay i've done that thank you mr everett this evening i'm recommending that the board approve the 2022 2023 textbooks and supplemental materials for adoption and this evening you'll have some additional information presented by shannon carol so shannon's first so good evening and i have a detailed list of textbooks and materials to be adopted has been provided for your review and approval these include combinations of textbooks and online resources from a variety of publishers the majority of the courses in the business list are the result of ipl revising career and technical education courses to align with new state next level programs of study otherwise known as nlps you'll see that out of us a lot as a result of state changes some of our high schools of semester courses are changing to year-long courses and new courses are appearing as options in selecting resources that best supported the specific needs of their course teachers were mindful of being good stewards of resources and providing the support that students need to learn please also note that in our practice is to make a public notice of the availability of the resources that are being recommended this evening for public to be able to come in and review those resources i am kind of appreciative of i did get one the highlights of the recommendations by department were provided to you rather than reading all of the items i'll just list the departments and if you have questions about any of those i'll be happy to answer them we have body safety 6-12 business family consumer science music science social studies and special education courses are all a variety of them all are recommending resources so if you have any questions about the weekend what you see on the board is the specific list of items with their isbns and this will become a part of no questions are you going to do the other material at the same time i don't know i think you have to do a motion on that yeah they're two different knives yeah there's no questions i move that we approve the 2022-2023 textbook and supplement supplemental materials presented for adoption second motion has been made and seconded all in favor say aye aye is anyone opposed motion passes four to one seven point four thank you this evening i'm recommending that the board approved the textbook rental and fees for 2022-2023 school year and again shanna will provide you with some additional information so what you see displayed is information about the middle school level textbook rental and fees that we're recommending you can see the changes over time displayed on there the far right is where you'll see the most recent the courses with the courses for middle school have increased only slightly in sixth seventh and eighth grade and that's due to the addition of body safety materials and increases in costs of materials for our tech ed just like we've talked about those with our building projects our tech ed courses also we're seeing that fees for middle school bridges you will see which is the bottom set of boxes that you can see have dropped from last year to this year we've been able to take advantage of using our devices and rather than purchasing a paper planner for students we're able to not charge for that and have students use electronic services instead for middle school for high school fees see when it comes up it looks very similar for high school again teachers and administrators are diligent to consider ways to avoid raising student fees while some courses thought decreases other visa increases often due to newly adapted material with increased prices from publishers or digital program costs we work to make financially prudent choices seeking to provide curriculum at the lowest possible cost in the the 2022-23 range so what you see for the high school is a range and that range actually did not change on the average um has been updated however from 400 to 425 and the way that we came to that was by actually taking all of the high school bills from this year and looking to see where the bills actually fell because the iterations of courses that students can have make it very difficult for me to give you an exact number but what we found was that 94 of the bills were within that range that we had provided to you and it's been steady for us however when i did the average it was slightly higher so we have made that represent what we're actually finding to be the case for our high school bills and in general please also note that because of early college programs dual credit and other things such as that that we're offering in our comprehensive high school that's the reason why some students are actually above that 800 so these are the fees that i'm recommending for no this is this is my least favorite thing to vote on every year so that's well documented and publicized over the last 11 years so it's not your fault i i know i mean i know the time and diligence that the team that puts the textbook adoptions together and and the parent involvement i mean it's a large group of people that that does this and goes through this it's just you know i think i think as i always say i think we're one of 12 states in the united states that actually charge a book rental fee so maybe the guys downtown i would be focused on that said my peace well if we don't make a motion scott we're not going to have books i know i've got all right i'll i'll do it i'll do it rob maybe you shouldn't be the one that has to make this motion maybe that's the no that's all right i move that we approve the secondary textbook rental and fees for 2022-2023 all reluctantly second [Laughter] guessing the second all in favor say aye aye does anyone oppose motion passes i guess the good news is i want to pay these fees next year yeah that's true 7.5 thank you this evening i'm recommending that the board accept bids for renovation of the esc here this building and dr long will provide you with some additional information thank you tonight we're asking the board to approve the bids to renovate the esc on april 28th of 2020 two uh we opened bids and on april 29th 2022 hunt and fanning howie held a d scope meeting to review the bids with the low bidder both ae com hunt and fannie howie recommend accepting the bid and the alternate number one from dalman contractors llc for the amount of 452 934 dollars if approved the work will start tomorrow and we will finish before school starts how about that for a bold move mr alexander i think i heard it i think the bold move is you've already emptied the offices out well i did have i did have to move some furniture around we're just relocating some furniture i got that same email where everybody's at now they must they must think we approve this no i just had to get furniture relocated bill i did have a couple quick questions yes sir my when was the last time we renovated this building significantly um 2008 when we moved in been a few years yeah about 14 years um and then i noticed there was an alternate on here that wasn't selected was that a cost conscious issue yes it was just more than we wanted to pay okay so it's more than we budgeted for it well some of the improvements i saw in there are probably long overdue too yes they are it's it's time to fix stuff and we're adding a couple offices in another conference room uh for for us in here in this building because we're using every single space that we have so we're going to reconfigure a little bit add a couple of offices and at a conference room and for them to be done by july 5 you know for an extra 5800 i think that's my announcement that's that's what i thought we we want to get we want to do as little disruption as possible to the payroll department because everybody likes to get paid uh and so we're going to try to get their area done first and have the business department and hr because they're hiring people and paying people so we'll get them back in their side first and we'll let dr arkanov live out of his car for a few more weeks until we get his side done we're not worried about him we're worried about the rest of you thanks bill yeah and i do apologize the renovation has started some of it they've taken everything out so when we separated you all just now and told you to go sit somewhere wait we had to go in the basement and find a place in the basement you had to go elsewhere then stand so thank you for your patience and i do mr daniels you mentioned it but we're trying to gain a couple of days um so we don't disrupt payroll it's a good time between when payroll was was was made and then when they have to do it again so i i did try to buy a few extra days by having furniture moved before uh the renovation started so great i didn't want you to know the reason behind that i just one surprise i didn't get a call to help you move furniture you ready for a motion sir no other questions mr president i move that we approve the motion to accept the biz from the renovation of the educational services center motion been made is seconded all in favor say aye aye aye anyone opposed promotion passes okay next on the agenda is announcements i can run through them real quick june 14th we have an exec session at 10 a.m at the innovation center june 16th an executive session at 6 00 p.m at the it center and june 16th is our next regular board meeting right here in this room at 7 00 p.m does any board member have any comments or anything okay let her rip um [Music] sorry wait a second well what you're looking for i just don't want to get the number wrong sorry here it is okay so um the center grove education foundation board of directors last night approved funding for 14 teacher grants four professional development grants and one big one dream big grant totaling and fifty 53 dollars and twenty seven cents and so amazing um in her amazing fundraising efforts with her team that i think the the check presentations are tomorrow so this is exciting for the education foundation that's a tremendous amount of money raised do the recipients know yet or do you surprise them so don't tell i i would like to uh i'd like to to bring up dr long for a second dr long was uh recognized for a nasr award it's a national award for school safety leadership and a lot of you guys don't know but bill works really hard behind the scenes to keep our kids safe and and i can say with 100 assurance the roughly 9 100 students we have here are safer because of bill long is sitting up here at this table honestly bill we uh thank you for everything you do for my kids and everybody else's kids in the community and this this award is definitely well deserved thank you any other comments from anyone i have nothing tonight me adjourned
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um there is one more person that we have to thank tonight and that would be miss fiera let me tell you just a little bit about what makes ms fiera such an exemplary and incredible figure in our community first would be her devotion to her students she is always willing to go at length to explain to students the topics in her class and always excitedly offer extra help during pace to those who don't immediately grasp the topic there's been many times when i've walked in and she's excitedly explaining some algebra 2 problem to a poor student as our advisor for the nhs this year she has truly become a role model to us all if any of us ever needed anything we we knew that we could approach miss fiera and she would assist us no questions asked when it came to the fundraisers we planned this year she would meet with us thoroughly go through every detail because she truly cared about the cause we were raising for she was always willing to entertain our ideas for fundraisers and nevis let us feel like we weren't hurt which was very much appreciated she constantly wants to help those around her and perfectly defines the word community her her kind heart radiates throughout our school and is felt by all students from her corny jokes during nhs meetings to her motivational videos in class i am proud to say that i have worked with such an amazing woman this year and i know all of the other officers echo that sentiment and i'm truly going to miss your guidance and wisdom as i go forward so on behalf of myself and all other members of the nhs class of 2022 we thank you for your service and advice and it's customary that's in nhs speeches we end with a quote so i'd like to quote myself and i would like to quote that ms fiera you are a amazing woman if we could all please stand and recognize miss farah please [Applause] on behalf of the honor society i would like to thank everyone for attending this evening ceremony we hope that you will be able to join us in the cafeteria immediately after the ceremony for refreshments and now to conclude please remain seated until all of the members have filed out of the room thank you have a great night [Music] you
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she has received various awards for her excellence and achievement over the course of her time at fulton high school including the bausch lomb science award in 2021 taylor's teachers have noted her exceptional dedication leadership skills and compassion for others that will set her up for certain success in the future taylor will be attending the university of connecticut in the fall to study actuarial science taylor congratulations well deserved well done good for you can you say anything taylor thank you looking forward to graduation taylor right yes excellent okay um mr miceli has our valedictorian joined us do you see her on the list anyway i i do not see her on the list so we'll just uh embrace her presence when she arrives okay so can you um let me know when that happens all right cheer bro nails so we're gonna move on at this point if that's okay that's fine we'll be happy to recognize a valedictorian when she shows up if she's able to get away um so the next part of our agenda this evening is comments from the audience is there anyone who would like to make any public comments in the audience this evening [Music] okay not hearing any um do we have any additions to the agenda this evening i do not um okay on to routine business items looking for a motion to approve the minutes of the april 7th 2022 education business meeting so move to ria i can second that chris thank you yeah chris uh are there any questions comments edits to these minutes i'm hearing nothing all those in favor of the motion please say aye hi hi hi um so anyone who's opposed i will abstain as i was not at that meeting um emotion carries uh now we're looking for a motion to approve the minutes of the may 3rd 2022 board of education special meeting thank you chris and maria are there any edits or questions about the these minutes hearing none all those in favor of the motion please say aye hi is there anyone who is opposed or abstaining okay that motion passes as well um onto board of education committee reports tonight the only one we have is curriculum to chris anyone wanna you guys met correct we did i was waiting on sue to jump in since she is the chair i apologize it's a little distracting right now um yes we had a [Music] great sorry i'm just trying to gather my thoughts um we had a presentation on [Music] um chris refresh my memory totally blanking or sarah well do we have a social studies presentation thank you to up do you want me to just go through it okay we we had a an update as to where we are with the k4 social studies presentation uh just to update the board since we had started this project before covid and in transition with a new director of teaching and learning to just give everybody an update as to where we're standing we also had some presentations for new spelling program that will be presented later this evening and a new high school course and an overview of uh work we've done over the years in diversity equity and inclusion i miss anything chris nope oh that was it thank you thank you and sorry about that thank you no problem um okay thank you very much we can move on to bhs student representative reports all um sorry i was taking a test i had to move over okay um since this is my last report i thought i'd talk about how the bolton school system shaped me and my peers to the people who we are today my family and i have been in bolton for about five generations now and one of the reasons why we keep coming back is because of how great the school system is my grandfather he went to school when it was located in a little building on school road and now it's a garage but that's where you went to school and my mom my aunt and most of my cousins went to the elementary school before bcs was built and now my sisters and little cousins are and i are all currently in the school system my sisters and i have been here since preschool and it's changed us all for the better i've made friends and memories that will last a lifetime but more importantly i learned the skills i need to leave the school system and live a successful life the seniors have a task of finding out what our next move in life is going to be and it seems really daunting at first but there's so many ways that all makes it easier firstly my freshman and sophomore year we had college fairs where we learned about different colleges and what they had to offer so it kind of got us thinking about where we might want to go another great thing is that anybody can have a leadership position in bolton no matter what their interests are whether it's a team captain student council national honor society a club leader tutoring or volunteering there's always something that students can do to get involved in bolton has volunteer has volunteering guidelines that we each have to meet before we graduate it usually is 50 hours but with coverage it got modified but we still did have to do some and if we're part of the national honor society we have to get 10 more hours to graduate personally i have been team captain for cross country basketball and basketball for multiple years in the national honor society of vice president and the co-president of the donut club and if you talk to any student they will most likely answer that they have at least one of these leadership decisions one of the reasons that so many students get involved is because of the school size we have a lot more opportunities to get involved because in bigger schools you'd have to run against people and usually we don't have to do that different colleges oh with the college fairs it actually helps us like with what guidance has to do too we all met with guidance at one point or another to talk about college and our future goals and they've been so helpful during this process and it really helps us and make it as smooth as possible there's been many times with myself or others that there were issues with applications or that were just stressed and didn't really know what to do and time and time again the guidance department has always helped us now we're committed to our next destination and whether that be college the military or trade two other senior requirements are taking ap gov or civics during our and doing our senior capstone project taking those classes teaches us about the united states government and how it works and how it was created it puts us right back on track and to make informed decisions in our life the captain project is completed in our senior year and includes a research paper and a project portion where we can put pick whatever topics we want personally my research paper was about different types of working dogs and what they do and how why they're important to the society and my project was to train a therapy dog other people's projects included building rockets coaching teams learning how to compost and learning how to play an instrument it's important because it focused all the it helped us all to be focused and disciplined and even helped us find new connections because of this project i learned so much about dogs and how they act and i even helped teach a therapy dog class and now i have connections with that therapy dog company that i can keep doing when i when i get older along with volunteering all students must also have to complete a job shadow this helps us narrow down what we marry down what we may think we're interested in for a career one day this helped me decide my path by shadowing different people in a medical field an ophthalmologist a physical therapist physicians assistant and acupuncturist the juniors and seniors have an opportunity to also earn ap credits and ece credits which would earn credits for college there are a lot of different topics areas to choose from and there's even more next year the credits will transfer to almost any college and it helps us lessen our course load and have an easier freshman year and even a jump on college most of us are able to take these classes and it also looks really great on our resume great job thank you and very much go back to your test quick good luck um um no he's not here tonight but i do believe we have a parent who was having some technical issues under comments from the audience so i don't know if you want to what you want to do with us that's fine go ahead if you'd like to make a comment you have three minutes oh thank you very much i won't take three minutes um this is sue dinunzio and i'm representing a lot of the senior parents who we were having trouble finding this link and i think that there may not be so many of them that were able to find it we just wanted to to stress our concern about graduation night and we're hearing that there's going to be a limitation to tickets and we're just hoping that um we will you guys will consider extending the tickets from six to to more than that considering that graduation's outside so just so you know um thank you for the comment um it's not a question and answer period that's not what's allowed under commentary so thank you for the commentary and i'm certain that uh mr miscella will be reaching out uh thank you and i know that there are other parents who who also wanted to share their their concern about that so is it is it recommended that we reach out to mr miceli or the board of ed or who well i think we gotta go ahead and i would say all the above but okay all right thank you thanks thank you okay um let's move along um community meeting reports has anyone been to any meetings that they'd like to share all right i can go um attended the bolton scholarship fund meeting uh in april no may sorry keep getting confused because we changed our date to the first wednesday of the month uh so the may meeting uh was the most recent one um [Music] our applications uh have been closed for this year's scholarships so we're now in the process of reviewing applications and making determinations and the scholarship awards will be announced at graduation this year i also wanted to bring up under community meeting reports i know several several of us attended the public hearing on the budget but i just wanted to mention that one of the comments that was made during the budget hearing related to the issue of the student population in bolton public schools and the fact that it has been going down we were challenged by the townsperson who made the comment to come up with a plan on how we were going to address this issue of continuing uh declining enrollments so i would certainly want to encourage my fellow board members to look into that further at a future meeting it is an issue that i've also been concerned about and i think we owe it to the taxpayers to be looking at it seriously that's all thank you chris um we can consider that for future um i guess also there was another community meeting which was a town meeting where we took some money that had been for um door locks and applied it to our septic failing septic system so that passed um was there any other community meetings anyone else can think of okay hearing nothing i'll turn things over to the superintendent for the superintendent of schools reports mrs hecht if i may uh our valedictorian has arrived excellent thank you all right we're gonna hi sam how'd it go did we win we won five to four last inning come back awesome that's awesome that's a great day all right so everybody it is my pleasure and my honor to introduce to all of you the 2022 bulletin high school valedictorian samantha sondik congrats sam so sam has involved herself in many aspects of bolton high school from being captain of the varsity softball team to co-chair biggs and littles program as well as participating in national honor society and serving on various school committees sam is committed to equality and inclusion and has spent her school career volunteering with various local and national social justice organizations she has been the recipient of the frederick douglass and susan b anthony award the joseph shanahan u.s history award as well as other awards for excellence and leadership sam's teachers have all spoken of her honesty determination and passion that will help her succeed in the future sam will be attending smith college in the fall to study government and spanish sam you worked very hard and this is a well-deserved honor congratulations good for you sam um just thank you to the staff and uh board of ed and all the teachers who made it possible for me to achieve so much i can't thank you enough thank you good job thank you congratulations again all right now we're going to move to superintendent of schools report if i could please and our first up is a math curriculum update and i'm going to turn it over to uh mrs malinowski good evening everyone uh as uh mr misali is getting this up we are on uh a every five years we take a closer look at various curricula throughout the district and this year we took a closer look at our math curricula and this is a more complete update of what has changed over the past five years since our last big report with me this evening i see uh the alicia rose is our six through eight core leader who's been able to make it this evening as is diana mkhilochi i saw on the chat but i'm sorry my screens have changed and remain rene midford i'm not sure if she could make it this evening renee is the academic core leader for high school and diana is our k5 leader tremendous team and we are very grateful for all the hard work that they do in guiding us and helping make decisions next slide please beginning at the high school and i will just say that i am happy to report that we are feeling comfortable comfortable in all at all levels about being aligned to our connecticut core standards as we know this was a year of re-engaging with academics and school and that has been a close study at all levels so i won't keep repeating myself we also at the high school have to consider other national standards such as ap course standards and at this time our yukon ece standards we have two courses that we've taken up over since we've met a few years ago calculus and statistics and this evening we will be proposing a third class uconn elementary discrete mathematics the students in high school who receive college credit for um ap when they pass an exam their exam at a specific score and is that the discretion of uh the colleges if they choose to accept that credit where a yukon ece course uconn guarantees that credit with the passing grade so it's it's excellent the amount of work that our teachers and department have put in to offer more opportunities for our students to receive these credits and have some some options for being such a small department and small district and i do have to say to be uconn ece teacher you must get approved by the college so it is not just oh hey we want to do this there are extra steps so i'm very grateful for our teachers who are willing to step up for that and of course ap has its own training as well at um our status we're always on ongoing revisions looking how we can better our curriculum and our instruction as we move along we are now at the point of being able to be current with post pandemic status where we are with our topics uh and continuing on to align with transferable skills and bolton's portrait of a graduate in grades 12 10 through 12 you can see the list of our electives that we also offer and moving on to grades eight six through eight so six through eight during their pandemic years uh did roll into a new program the ready program which was a continuation of the k through five program grade six uh had a partial rollout and truly a full rollout this year and seventh grade also rolled out ready eighth grade uh they the directive was to start the training however our eighth grade teacher dove in and has also rolled out for our non-algebra course ready as well it's been a tremendous resource and we've been working on revising the units in atlas to to align with the program and certainly the teachers were able to attend pd for the program always looking at sbac and making sure our work aligns with that analyzing our data at bcs we have the opportunity for the win time the what i need now and the ready program what's wonderful about it and for families who've seen it at home it has a robust online portion which allows students to have a personalized path which is called my path which aligns with their assessments and what the teachers are seeing and then on go moving on to k5 this is our third year with ready math as our main resource this year we really spent a lot of time looking at fact fluency and our instructional practices with best practices and a few new supplemental online programs to help us with that as well as utilizing my path and the ongoing work again continues with uh the work in our atlas and this year was a big focus on assessments and revisiting our practices and how we consider our big ideas and learning targets for each unit and because of covid especially in the k5 world we've had to revisit the unit sequence again in its alignment and we are feeling confident that we are feeling more pre-demo pre-pandemic-like than i was able to report last year uh is there anything that i've missed from my few academic leaders who are here or any of the building administrators who support us in this tremendous work hearing none i do want to thank them we really can't do that this work without this extra effort this is a stipended position outside of school hours and we are very grateful for the energy and the learning and the professionalism of our leaders and the ongoing support of our building administration so thank you very much and that concludes my report on math thank you any questions for sarah or the leaders or principles on this okay hearing goodness thank you sarah very much i'm going to turn it over to mr giard for an update from bcs good evening um cover three things tonight end of year events a little bit of information about eighth grade promotion and then we'll end with the talking about the successful student-led conferences for end-of-year events we're currently finishing up smarter balanced testing uh with a few makeups left to complete everything has gone very well technology every kid's using their chromebooks don't you know what i mean you're always a little on edge but everything went perfectly and we have a few makeup so we're going to finish the end of next week our fifth and eighth graders um still have ngss testing that's going to take place on may 24th and that is a one day science test we then jump into june full steam with two parent events on june 1st which is the incoming kindergarten parent uh meeting at 6 pm on june 1st and then the 5th to 6th grade transition meeting which is at 7 p.m also on june 1st both events were held via zoom last year and it was overwhelming response from parents that they want to even post pandemic when we get to that point to keep it via zoom so we're going to try it again this year on june 10th we will have our academic awards assembly which is for grades five through eight and that's going to be at 9 15 a.m and that's on june 10th last year we did it via zoom as well and got some good feedback and we're going to have it on zoom again this year and the last day of school is june 15th our promotion plan uh the eighth graders are extremely excited we have some end of the year activities coming up uh promotion is scheduled for june 14th at 10 a.m at the high school and a huge thank you to mr miceli mr bachmovich and the bhs custodians for hosting uh bcs again this year at the high school because it's an undertaking to get everything set up for that early in the morning and to have us over the day before for practice so a big thank you to them uh like i said the promotion will be at 10 a.m it's a ticketed event and we'll have a photographer it'll be recorded and also streamed on youtube the ring date is going to be the same time on june 15th same time and location uh student-led conferences we were actually able to see it through this year we had we were just about to implement them in march of 2020 before the pandemic hit and we were able to see it through this year we had the actual conferences uh via zoom which went really well and that was on march 17th and 18th we had 98 of students run their own student-led conference with their crew leader and their parent or guardian present the students reviewed the goals they created in the fall and the work samples that they collected that supported their work towards their goals the goals included two academic goals a habit of work goal and a transferable skill goal the goal is directly connected to the portrait of the graduate and the work that we're doing at the building level we surveyed after student conferences both the students and the parents to get some meaningful feedback so we can even better next year we had 48 parent responses on the survey with 81 percent of the parents saying that they felt that the student-led conferences helped them to understand their child's strengths and challenges at a as a learner so i thought that was an extremely uh great feedback the 81 percent of parents felt that they uh saw a meaning in the student conference uh on another question 83 of parents selected that they either agreed or strongly agreed that they had a positive experience with student conferences on the student survey we had 163 responses and 132 of the 163 which is 81 of the students said that they put their best effort into preparation for the student led conference and 60 felt that they understood themselves better as a student and learner because of this process uh there were also open-ended questions for both parents and students and we're reviewing those responses we already have some great ideas to build and be better for next year and we put together a short video that mr miceli is going to queue up in a second that highlights the student led conferences and i hope you enjoy all right mr g i think i've got it wave me off if you can't hear it though no volume we're not hearing anything okay no problem i think i know what it is welcome back friends i'm here to tell you what i am great at proud of and how i grew this year i will share a habit of work and scholarship a transferable skill one strength and one area of focus at the end of my conference i will give you a chance to ask any questions you may have and i will ask you for some feedback so we've been working on a presentation and collecting work samples for a while and now i get to present it to my parents and to show them what i've been working on and how i've been doing student-led conferences with the concept that came out of building the portrait of a graduate and building student ownership of their learning and the learning process and they set four goals throughout the year and they collected work that they're already doing in their classes connected to it so saying what was the objective of the project the feedback they received from the teacher the growth that they've experienced that's where the value in this comes from is that they're telling you the story behind the assignment or the work connected to that goal and how they grew in that area thank you mr osborne for joining us remotely i can tell a student that maybe he's waiting last minute or something like that and that goes right over his head but when he has to reflect about what his grades are like and what his work habits are like and how he can improve that is going to stick with him much more than just teach intel academy i think it was great it's nice to hear from her perspective how she's doing um ultimately you know if she doesn't feel she's doing well on something i want to hear that her not necessarily from her teacher um she needs to be accountable for her learning which she definitely is and that will only help her improve um next year as you know the independence and learning and expectation will become greater if she goes to high school so i know that if i have questions for a teacher dan and i can call and find a time to have a meeting with any of her teachers if we need to but again i just feel like it's so important for her to be able to tell me how she's doing and be proud of that or be honest you know i need to improve in this area that intrinsic motivation to improve and learn is is really important for students [Music] they were virtual it's just that mrs osborne works in the school so that one actually wasn't persons uh but the rest were via zoom it was a great event thank you any questions for daryl great job thank you all right on to curriculum update and i'm going to turn it back over to ms malinowski oh no i'm sorry i'm turning it over to mr miceli for a bold high school update sorry no problem uh first i wanted to personally thank emily for her detailed reflection and a short explanation she was not interrupting a bolton high school test uh she like a handful of other bolton high school students this year and in the past years have taken upon themselves to take the emt course so emily actually stepped out of her emt course was she taking it uh to present to you tonight because uh she needed to keep up with that work so i'm really proud of of everything that she's doing there too and i think she really captured where our class of 2022 is right now they've been an amazing group of students keeping up a great attitude even in the in the face of some difficult years just a quick note to throw out about class of 2023 as you all know we do have our students participate in standardized testing including the psat and the sat one of the components of the grade 10 psat is the possibility of being recognized as a national merit scholar although we don't know of any of our current juniors we'll be finalists we do know that some of them qualified as semi-finalists and as i mentioned that because the semi-finalists actually means they scored in the top three percent of all students in the nation taking that test um sometimes we have one semi-finalist rarely we've had two um this year we had four um so fingers crossed that at least uh some of those for members of the class of 2023 are named as finalists and i'll update the board on that um a few months ago our grade nine teachers presented to you about team 25 uh we're so happy with how that new model to support incoming students work this year we are continuing that model with the class of 2026 with a few modifications things that we've learned our grade 9 teachers have already begun communicating with the grade 8 teachers at the center school and we are excited about official 2026 kickoff day which we have scheduled for august the week before school opens and as we rapidly approach the one month mark to graduation we are getting ready um we're going to use a similar format as we did last year incorporating scholarships and awards into that outdoor ceremony for commencement um and i have been coordinating with bolton scholarship foundation and projection project graduation families uh to make that all happen and we plan on live streaming that event on the bhs youtube channel thank you any questions from mr miscellany okay hearing none now i'm on to mrs malinowski again for the curriculum update for the last time for the last time yes thank you so hopefully every board member was able to get a packet that looks like this is just a clip of what you should have in your pocket which is a about two and a half page update for each content area as to where we stand with standards and assessments and some of our practices i'm happy to report that as always and even this year which i know at various times throughout this year it has been a challenging year to keep up with every level of professional responsibility and our teachers yet again um just rose to the challenge of making sure they were able to keep up with checking in with where we are with curriculum updating making sure our documents and our resources are reflecting what it's like to be back in person versus where we were with kovid we tried to document that so as things shifted and changed throughout uh that we were able to have record uh for so that it's fair and equitable and everybody could see where we are within the district and we can provide our best practices for the kiddos uh so throughout each one i've identified the standards that the different content areas are aligned with and then the different assessments that go along with the different contents also added and i kept from last year's report because it's worth recognizing as then the number of online resources that we now implement for assessment practices especially some of them which are also instructional uh but the teachers and the did go through and add which ones they really do use for their assessment practices one of the silver linings of our remote time and and covid has been this tremendous understanding of of things such as jamboard google forms and now how do we use that appropriately so that when is it best to do something through handwriting and through more uh pre-pandemic styles versus piece um some of the platforms that are responsive and give immediate feedback to the students so for each content area we also added the online resources which again are greatly supported by the board's budget and we thank you for that ongoing support and i do thank our teachers for being very thoughtful uh through this process so instead of going through every single one are there any questions that the board may have for me monica is on the call and is ready to take over the reins we've been able to meet and um so thank you very much for your support with this ongoing curriculum work thank you sarah very much for the last curriculum update that you will give in your very amazing career and now on to your last professional learning summary great so going on to uh the work that we continue to do the chart again this is a a snip of the document that was sent to the board members of the various types of professional learning that our staff engaged with this year all of our professional learning uh is aligned to goals our both district goals school goals you know and certainly our goals have to be responsive to when there are mandates so some of the things might be more mandate driven but that's very few and far between and no we need to be responsive to the state and so on some level we are responding to our goals in that way uh the majority of all pd this year remain to be virtual for obvious reasons and in that way some pla some pd was actually more available because they became late afternoon short meetings versus a full day or having to leave to go to a meeting i anticipate next year we'll see some of our partners such as crack and the other rests around the straight state offering pd opportunities in a virtual format when they're short and that opens up some doors for our teachers and administrators as learners uh there has been a slow transition to a few in-person pd opportunities and next year we anticipate that we will you know fingers crossed everything goes in that direction we'll be seeing more opportunities for that so again i really do want to thank the board and the community for their ongoing support of the teachers and their learning so that we are able to provide the best education possible for all students here so with that any questions about anything on our professional learning again thank you very much and i have to say as that is my final report about curriculum professional development which is a huge part of my role i am very grateful to this board and to the town for the amazing support uh for the learning of our teachers because it really does show how the students are the total focus so again thank you thank you sarah very much and finally our strategic plan update for the year all right kristen you saved everything for the last for me huh i did sarah it's a whole bowl of wax here all right well that's okay because uh joe and daryl are going to help which you know can't do any of this work without our partners here so uh as always our work is grounded in our portrait of a graduate and our strategic goals and um which are highlighted here so at the our first goal focusing on student success uh at all levels the pk12 we focused on all the bulleted items that are listed here and this has really been accomplished through the embedded pd and learning that we just looked at and again the support of the the board and the town for our eight early release days that allows us to do much of this very important work turning it over to mr miceli uh thank you so some of the things that we worked on this year was you know that flexible time that we call connections um we kind of always take a peek at how we can improve that that was part of our our work this year um we actually have an ongoing revision of capstone capstone looked different this year than it did last year and next year there's already some changes that we're making that you know we think are going to improve things uh primarily um the biggest thing that our board members might notice is that it's starting sooner um the pathways uh for responsive intervention rti to you know focus on credit recovery mastery and support you know in all areas really making use of all the resources we have to support students uh and the continued implementation of that you know all that digital work that sarah referred to earlier and the team 25 work that i mentioned earlier and all the bullets listed for bcs under student success have been ongoing and year long throughout the year we've collaborated with vhs to ensure a successful transition for our eighth grade students to ninth grade as you heard earlier we recently completed our spring student-led conferences and are in the final stages of gathering more feedback from students and families so we can make it even more meaningful next year we continue to utilize our pbis team and school-wide expectations to guide our work and making bcs a positive learning environment and lastly k-5 teachers have done an amazing job this year and the saffron has been an integral part of that work as well continuing to work hard on their development of clear learning intentions and success criteria um all this work supports um the student learning and towards specific standards as evidenced by our standards-based report cards and connects directly with our bps portrait of a graduate our goal too is about creating a caring culture foster responsive caring and inclusive culture and a collaborative relationship so again at the district level excuse me all of our activities have been ongoing and these are what you see pk12 very similar to what was presented at mid-year and then dhs and bcs will report more specifically you know so you know the caring piece you know is also interwoven into those those big structural pieces that we have in the school that flexible connections piece um we did all sorts of you know not just academic activities but uh you know other things to support students during the the tricky times uh and that team 25 piece um again wasn't just academic support with social emotional support um and even a huge boost in communication of parents uh with the newsletters that they did every month and at bcs uh we take obviously the similar the high school tremendous pride in our caring culture that we've established and we work hard to build upon that work that we've done in the past uh we have done this by continuing to include inclusive language and titles in our classrooms uh through building teacher-student relationships with learning experiences like the student-led conferences and by encouraging students to think and explore uh their future at bhs and beyond with our eighth grade career day which is tomorrow and by other interest building activities as well so we're super excited about the career day tomorrow and ucs is a special place our third goal uh talent development uh i've spoken to this already in many ways can't do this work without our academic leaders uh our administrative team this really is a a collaborative effort and um no kidding aside this year has been been a challenge to make sure we're carving out that time and continuing our learning and i again thank everybody and especially the the motivation to continue learning through these times we do have a ongoing pd calendar that for the past two years we've left it more flexible than set just to be responsive to our needs but the plcs at each building are aligned and also flexible for what needs are going on in the building but always with an eye to our district goals and building goals another piece is team i have to say we have quite a few new teachers and the team program is a required program but it is also part of a pd opportunity where teachers are able to visit each other's classrooms they it's very reflective so we are very active in the team program and uh we have a very supportive district-wide p-deck committee at both buildings one key piece has been this revised plc schedule and structure as i had mentioned earlier this has been the year to be responsive you know at the middle level daryl really needing to dig in and make sure those student-led conferences happen along with all of the other work and the high school to to address the ever-changing needs of as we get back to this post-pandemic school so that has been an ongoing work uh so sometimes we give these very big picture ideas and so we're gonna take a pause in this presentation to highlight something that's very important to all of the administrators and teachers in this district about diversity equity and inclusion and our work while we are talking about this strategic plan was part of our last strategic plan that has been a goal an embedded goal in everything that we've been doing and so our professional learning that happened prior to 2020 and some of it still ongoing has included the master report approach and you can see our topics with our supporting organizations so this is not learning that we just pick a random group these are very highly recognized and vetted groups reputable um and the nice thing about it there's been some long ongoing relationships so it is not the many many years ago i know when i started teaching uh you know you get the one and done and that's it for your for your pd these have been this has been ongoing and i i do want to emphasize that so as you can see our topics that you've heard at many board meetings mastery approach portrait of a graduate culturally responsive practices student engaged assessments the workshop model and i do want to say a workshop model and that's k-12 we've looked at that not just as an elementary practice there have been open choice book clubs and there's the support of from crap from being part of open choice and as mentioned before team module 5.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
so it's 7 times forty thousand is two eighty plus twenty thousand so that's the bulk of the four hundred fifty thousand dollar reduction we didn't recommend any changes to the non-certified salary line um we were able to reduce the pension retirement line by 66 409 because after we had submitted the budget we did get an update from the actuaries on the town pension funding requirement and so it's 66 409 lower than we went into the budget knowing about so that that is a definite pickup that's helpful towards the 450 000 reduction we took five thousand dollars from instructional expense from our pupil services line but that line is still going up 90 166 for the year then we removed 78 591 from support services across a variety of the line items in that category and did not um make any changes to the maintenance and operations budget which we believe you know is is and and was very tight because of you know not only the needs of of our building repairs but mostly because our utility costs you know which have increased you know due to inflation and the increase in in oil prices so we didn't want to touch the maintenance budget so that that is the recommendation that was put forth by the finance committee again the board members have the detail in their um package so i'll stop there to see if there are any questions i know the board does have a motion that they could put forth um before we move into any discussion or questions i'll just um i'll make the motion so we can just officially answer the discussion um a move that the cheshire board of education approves an operational budget for the fiscal year 2022-2023 of 80 million 664 420 as appropriated by the town council representing a reduction of 450 000 from the board of education's recommended budget do i have a second on that motion second andrew thank you now we can move to discussion tim thank you adam yeah so an observation uh on this just looking forward a year if we are fortunate enough and oil prices drop the utility prices drop in some way i i'm not i'm not particularly fond of uh reducing the pension funding i i have my when i see what's happening with the markets and stuff and i've never really been a fan of how it gets funded i'm guessing that we're not 100 funded at this point right no but the contribution we make to the town pension is based on what the actuaries recommend and yeah i if you i don't want to guess but we're somewhere north of 80 i was going to say 80 or even 70 with the market going down but i know it's not it's not really tied to the market the wall street it's there's a lot of uh alternative investments in there which would include stuff like real estate which might be way up but then it could go way down anyway just generally um if we do save on any of that i personally would my hope is some of that money savings from the utilities which is not getting touched here would end up going back into the um pensions it just concerns me it always um so that's just a general comment a question so i'm looking at the certified salaries and this is uh i feel like that's a routine question every year the teachers we have 300 350 or 400 teachers a certain most of them stay for 30 years some of them retire and you can kind of estimate the savings with the number of teachers that are leaving with regard to our non-certified personnel do any of them in large numbers stay for 30 years or is it a higher turnover than that 2 years five years ten years where you just have where you have the constant turnover so you can't really look at it from a budgetary perspective it's just baked into the budget anyway it's not like you have people leaving at the end of the year that are making a significant salary or benefits well you know certainly from a salary size you know a certified staff whether it's teachers or administrators those are the highest paid individuals in the district you know as far as you know do they do they stay and are they replaced with someone at a lower step it doesn't work that way in the non-certified we don't have those 14 steps the most we have in any of these bargaining units is five steps and that's the secretary's union okay so you don't have the same impact when you get a retirement in the non-certified salaries and we do have employees that you know do give us 25 30 and even more years of service than that but it's not i mean if the teachers just say the teachers are 90 of them and i don't know if this is true but say 90 of them get to 30 years it's not 90 of non-certified getting to 30 years i'm gonna guess that it's not but i've never looked at okay at that gotcha and the numbers are also smaller anyway they get paid less than the teachers okay um i had one more question i can't think of it i didn't jot it down but i'll i'll give it back for right now man can you just click i'm looking at the seven retirements one resignation so this is just a differential between we are filling the positions but at a lower pay scale yeah so you're going from a top step in pressure it's 14 step 14 so roughly going from a hundred thousand we're assuming a sixty thousand dollars okay higher you know so step three or four is what the assumption is based on okay thank you yeah and this by the way this this teacher salary line does include you know the three and a half additional teachers that were added that we need for next year's enrollment increase thank you mr grippo so i apologize i was not able to make those budget meetings so i'm hoping that mr matiana can you tell us what the town council found wrong with our budget or over budgeted in our budget i know that we put our budget together in january and there's a lot of information that comes in after that but i'm always interested in knowing from the town side where they see are where they see that we can give up 450 000 from our budget that was very lean in my opinion uh to begin with that's a um tricky question to answer the way you asked it however the um you know i i don't know i don't think the council found anything wrong per se in our budget and the town council i know that that you know and the board members know the town council's authority is to reduce our budget but not what line items to reduce uh in discussions with the council and and dr solon and i did meet with the town council a couple of times you know it was made clear that you know we entered uh and submitted a budget that was very lean because of the medical benefits funding that we needed to increase and we knew that and um you know again dr sullin did a very good job of explaining and highlighting how many of our accounts were actually zeroed out in our request to the council and i think at the end of the day the the simplest way to explain it is the the town council for the overall budget for the town needed to achieve a number that they felt would not impact the taxpayers more than they thought it should so i you know again i don't know that they found anything wrong with the budget but they handed down a 450 000 reduction and and it's you know the board's you know requirement to to meet that reduction so we do the best we can in administration to come up with the recommendation that will impact student learning the least um and you know manage to the number thank you for that answer i just so you know it wasn't meant to trick you i know that it's meant to just illustrate this idea that this this is an arbitrary number that gets slashed every year from our budget that we that we deem is necessary to operate at um at a level that we need to operate at so thank you you're welcome yeah and i'll just say when i was on the council and being here on the board uh i would add i advocate for boards of ed being their own taxing authority i think it makes more sense it really i don't feel like it there's there's a there's a disconnect between the town taxing for the schools i think new york state i believe boards of education tax they are a taxing authority um i think that makes more sense the the question i have uh for adam um finance committee looking at uh you know we're talking about school modernization student growth you're going to put it on the agenda at some point about reviewing future staffing levels just starting that conversation just wondering if that i don't know if you mentioned that here tonight or if it's yeah um i was actually going to discuss it after the vote so oh [Laughter] okay sorry yeah i'll talk about it after um are there any other questions or any other questions or discussion about the emotion on the floor okay um uh seeing no other discussion i'll just uh read the motion one more time motion for consideration is that the cheshire board of education approves an operating budget for the fiscal year 2022-2023 of 80 million 664 thousand 420 as appropriated by the town council representing a reduction of 450 000 from the board of education's recommended budget um all in favor uh opposed abstain okay great so that's uh five four one abstain okay great thank you um uh yeah so uh to sort of uh acknowledge to answer your question from before uh in the discussion um so the uh the uh at the end of our uh finance meeting the the finance committee decided that we're going to meet um two more times this year one time in august and one time in november um in august um dr sullin and mr masiana are going to prepare financials as to what our um i guess physical situation will look like um if our our proposed next generation plan does not pass referendum and what that would mean as far as having to purchase trailers to um to be able to accommodate the the additional um influx of students that were anticipating um and the cost and you know where possibly where they would be and you know sort of the options that we would have as far as that goes and so that that's going to be our main topic for august um in november um you know we'll have a i guess a more clear picture uh for uh for future planning and we're going to kind of maybe start working through like a sort of like a 10 year plan and see where what sort of uh staffing we're going to need to accommodate for this population increase it what's that's going to look like and and we're also examining any potential um new uh curriculum initiatives or program initiatives of such as perhaps uh a language or or things like that so that what that's going to look look like from a cost perspective to be able to work that into our budget uh going forward as well so that's sort of our our thoughts um you know going forward so thank you um i think that's kind of what we had that's what we had discussed at that tail end of the meeting there um and so uh let's see i have here to ask miss miss solano to speak about grant activity sure so the board members have a packet in front of them um a sheet that's entitled grants report end of year 2021 2022 looks like this so i'll provide an overview of these grants most of these grants are two-year grants so you can see we've and i won't go through line by line but i'll with the numbers you can read that on your own but let me just provide an overview on what some of these grants are so we have our title grants title one and two used a lot for uh supplies and defraying the cost of salaries deferring the cost of some ia supports as well title iii is used for support and training around our english learners we do some consultation with aces to directly train our teachers in the variety of services that can be directly given to students within the classroom you're familiar with our perkins career in tech ed um grants which again helped to defray costs in that area and have been used in the past to buy some equipment and make some updates in the cte departments also on some occasions for some curriculum writing the supplemental enhancement grant we was not available but we are applying for the next one that is available and i know that sean mcewen is currently working on that our ida grants have to do with special education a lot of that money is used for salaries again ias especially on the certified side some of the arp money was used for tutoring also for in-service for rentals supplies etc open choice is a grant that we get through our students who are coming from new haven that district pays us a small small stipend per student for the students that come into our district and we use that to support activities and resources etc that students through the open choice program may need adult education that is our mandated programs which currently ryan murphy is handling and managing that we again defray the costs for resources and training and software things that we need to run that program peck jones we had 27 000 that was used for library books that we've spoken at at length about in the past we did not apply for to use any of that money um this current year we felt that with the um esser grants that we were able to cover a lot of ground smart start again funds our preschool programs at darcy you see we have the esser cares act which was shared with some of the private schools in district again we've talked about that in large part in the beginning was spent on ppe but also some of the other schools used it in training the sr2 and sr3 cares act again you've heard a lot about our bounce forward plan and how we use that money both for our coaches increased administrative support summer transition program tutoring providing intervention and also getting some of our teachers up to speed with t cell certification regarding our increase in english learners and that's really the overview of all of our grants i feel ignorant right now what where is the web school so i'm looking just so people at home are following this there's a list here and it says cheshire public schools cheshire academy saint bridget's i know um the web the web school is in our nexus um location i'm not sure jarvis okay yeah what grades is it or is it college okay oh okay okay i got it all right i understand thank you um marlene the um in regards to the sr-3 funding um so is that showing the year that we took the money in even though it's spread out like over i think what through two or three years is that kind of how it's represented here so we applied for that money um and have it earmarked but we we're spending it in stages based on what we need it for thank you you're welcome um are there any other questions from early um i just the disaster funds it's a lot of money and um it's it's spreading out over a few years are we going to be able to sunset the programs that we are funding or are we going to become dependent on is this going to find its way a permanent place in our budget well i think that's what the bounce forward plan was really about was about really putting the money into our current teachers and and really raising the tide and making sure that we're investing in our current teachers and the people that we have here so that once the money runs out we have something to show for it so we didn't hire a lot of staff in that regard we really did a lot of training so in in some cases um for example you know a math coach at the middle school that had been something that was on our wish list and something we moved forward with but we put that in place again because of the needs around you know learning loss and we were able to move some of that money in this direction so you know i think that would be evaluated at the end of the the grant too i think the other item that is a consideration in the factoring here is the enrollment increase that's projected to and what would that look like we're trying to stretch out the resource as long as we possibly can and they've been kind of talked to that earlier but um at the end of that journey we're trying to make that journey really long on the federal support that we have coupled with a strong emphasis on raising capacity over just hiring people um so i think we you know the board we thought that that was really prudent i think it's two years ago believe it or not that we were just first discussing this and that that'll run a five-year span by the time it's said and done so i think we're in a pretty good place around that and i think we've asked this before but these funds are it's not yeah any other questions okay great um are there any other questions in regards to any of the items in the finance committee report this evening all right seeing none we'll uh move on from finance um we had an item on the uh jennifer uh uh personnel and we are going to be postponing that right okay um we do not have to table that or anything so there's nothing to report at this time basically right correct okay okay so we'll move to planning and school modernization sure um kind of a big update but uh on may 10 the town council unanimously approved three resolutions forwarding the projects to the next level um and allowing the board of education to apply to the state for the actual grant on june 30th for filing the application with the state oscgr on june 30th moving the projects forward so it was a pretty um monumental night there were some members here from the board of education as well as town council um for as town council approved that um so unanimously approved that was that was great um also if you i'm sure everyone here knows this but for those listening at home um oddly in the state budget our reimbursement rate went from 35 for new construction to 50 um in the budget so now all these projects it's going to represent about 20 million dollars in savings to to the town um based on the approved based on the discussed budget for the new school construction project what else june 30 we're set there's going to be additional discussion on june 1st with the potential adopting the actual cost for the project um and then moving forward with the application on june 30th i have to give a shout out to the superintendent he's really put a road show together going to every um meeting of every local board and body possible i'm pumping the project it's going to be in the parade um pushing for a vote um when it goes reference referendum in november enough you want to add any sure i can take up uh yeah thank you and i i want to um thank marlene too who has been joining me as part of the roadshow act uh and we have covered a number of places just wrote a quick list down the library board of directors there was a dodd day festival we went to uh last saturday we've hit highland dodd and do little ptos in the last two weeks i think that covers all of them actually we've been to all of them we went we had a school business partnership in thank you andrew and uh collectively with the economic development council is part of that uh as well we as you said would we'll be in the memorial day parade um there's a board to so look for us to be honoring our veterans that day and passing out some information on the project i've also solicited chs juniors for a social media intern um tick tock isn't my thing if you follow me on instagram thank you but we need i need to up my game um particularly as we get out more information and uh as soon as i sent the video out to our juniors and i shared it with marlene she said well i want an intern too so um we have 15 students that uh expressed interest in helping us with social media and i know they'll be instrumental in us communicating with the broader community for our you know not only our referendum but beyond so that's it for me on school modernization i actually should include that uh the executive committee meeting uh took place yesterday with uh leadership from the town and town council uh and you know we're trying to nail down specific language for the referendum and what the uh i've i know i've had some questions from the board about what the non-advocacy period means and everything so um vinon and i uh will be representing the board at a meeting with oscgr on the 23rd of may just kind of nail down the last bits before we move on here so looking forward to that same good i just um kind of where are we with the building committee establishing that group so um there's a a process that the council wanted to engage in where they would identify individuals representatives from the board of education and representatives from the council to select that committee that you're speaking of to to solicit and select those members our advisors and colliers have been pretty clear about having a small committee that would be dedicated to this group over the course of four years that it would be important that they have you know a decent degree of project and or building experience as they'll be kind of guiding you know two schools over the course of that time and so the the i think the plan was to kind of discuss that project that the council would discuss that project at their june 9th uh council meeting is that fair andrew yeah andrew i thought i heard you say the referendum in november is that locked down is that what the council said they want to do at this point it'll be locked down when the council passes a resolution which we anticipate is happening june 1st all right so let me rephrase it it's not by virtue of a vote yet but is that what they're going with there's a november referendum okay so this so that means it's we're looking at opening in the 25 26 year if everything happened 26 20 26 huh august of 2026 so 26 27 okay so this was the discussion that sort of john my loan was leading talking about if we could shave a few months off and we're saying we're not going to bother with it we're just going to go with a november referendum and or is it possible to run parallel tracks and get that expedited i don't i don't recall exactly i'm just curious if you could speak to it yeah go ahead well what i was going to say is the referendum date doesn't impact the application date which is the more important date um so june 30th we will still be able to submit the application november we hold a referendum that doesn't affect the timing of the project that's right to the extent that we can start doing some work in advance of the referendum that can be done such as preparing a request for proposal for architects so that the day after the vote is held if it referendum passes then the building committee can get to work very very quickly on hiring the architect to begin the design work for example because we already did the process of issuing the rfq getting their getting their qualifications in reviewing everything town supports it say they do and then that day they can you're the one we want we already know it so okay okay great thank you welcome yeah the motion that was approved i'll just read it i have it right here by the town council was um can i read emotion like this yeah i mean okay reporting okay um be resolved at the time of council authorize the cheshire board of education to apply to the commissioner of administrative services and to accept or reject a grant for the construction of a new so there's one says nora and the other one says north end and be a further result that a school's next generation building committee is hereby established as a building committee with regard to construction of a new northern elementary school with members to be determined we have further resolved that the town council authorizes preparation schematic drawings and outline specifications for construction of a new norah elementary school there's the same resolution also for north end um so andrew you briefly mentioned your report that our reimbursement rate went up from 35 to 50 that's um kind of a big deal um do we know how that came about and has oscgr had any comment on that as far as will that change um qual you know how they look at our qualifying spaces or is there any other changes that might happen because of that change so state representative liz linehan and courtney cullen and i believe were the two that pushed for that on the state side when it was included in the budget um so state rep was there to discuss how it all came to be and kind of walked through what it means um so it's 50 for both new construction and for renovation um i don't know how oscr is going to look at i think we have a meeting um on 20 i believe it's the 24th not the 23rd right yes i think you're right there at the uh on the 24th the um this is not unprecedented that it be a legislative change in the reimbursement rate uh farmington meridian others have gone through that i think vin and i were looking at a couple other towns that also had the same thing so um they went to 60 percent in two towns that we were looking at so it's not unprecedented um it's it is you know short-lived and so you know i think there adds a level of urgency for us to act if we are to secure that reimbursement rate i mean at the estimated construction cost now it's going to save 20 million dollars so it's a huge it's a huge benefit to the community um yeah and i i looking back on past projects i think the last time we had a reimbursement rate that high i think was in the 1970s when we we put the first edition on to the high school i think of something like 60 or 70 back then so um thank you to our legislative team for really helping progress this project forward it's a real opportunity for us and i hope that we can make good use of it um any anything else from your report or questions or comments okay thanks great um are there i don't think there are any other standing committees so um yes yeah just one point on the personnel i don't know if uh jeff you might be able to speak to this so we're gonna have a personnel committee meeting uh regarding your annual review uh tuesday may 31st do you happen to know if tony was leaning toward a full board meeting or just the personnel uh he was he was definitely looking for a full board meeting there a full full crew i did um awaiting some responses on that okay in terms of availability i sent out the calendar invite on that one okay yeah and just for the public who's watching and my expectation is this is going to be we'll do it in executive session um so it's the public's not invited but just being aware that we'll be doing his annual reviews starting it'll be more than one meeting yeah um but we'll be kicking that off on may 31st thank you mr white um okay uh next up is approval of minutes uh can i have a motion to approve the minutes faith second oh oh yeah i will you know i can i oh yeah you know i've been reading the motions sorry so i i guess yes excuse me uh move at the cheshire board of education approve the minutes from meetings held on april 21st 2022 and may 5th 2022.
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without further ado let's let us begin at this time would you please stand for the pledge of allegiance after the pledge of allegiance please remain standing at our national anthem please place your right hand over your heart ready begin 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 please remain standing for our national anthem [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] thank you please be seated i would like to begin the ceremony by introducing our distinguished guests who are here with us today trustee al-jabbar president of the anaheim union school district board of education trustee brian o'neill clerk of the anaheim union school district board of education trustee anne marie randall trejo member of the anaheim union school district board of education [Applause] mr michael matsuda superintendent dr jaren fried assistant superintendent educational services and our very own miss jackie counts director of cambridge virtual academy [Applause] i would also like to acknowledge and recognize the following individuals who are also in attendance this evening mr ryan rueles cva's assistant principal [Applause] mr tyler sherman cva's teacher of the year [Applause] miss casey spencer and mr ray solarzano cva's lead teachers [Applause] mr joel saldana administrator of student support services [Applause] i would also like to thank our cambridge virtual academy teachers and our counseling staff who have supported the graduating class of 2022 inside and outside the classroom and especially a big thank you to all the families and parents who raised amazing cva scholars who will be recognized this afternoon [Applause] at this time i would like to now introduce cva's asb vice president senior anna mansolut to deliver our first speech of today welcome and good afternoon my fellow cva colleagues families friends board of trustees cabinet and cva staff members i'd like to start off by saying how truly phenomenal of an opportunity it is to stand here today and represent the cambridge virtual academy class of 2022 none of us graduating on this stage today started our high school journey onto the stage together if you asked me four years ago where i'd be graduating from i wouldn't have said cva just because it didn't exist yet however throughout the last two years we were brought together from across the anaheim union high school district across the state of california and even from across the world to be united through a brand new virtual school here in aohsd called cambridge virtual academy we didn't see each other every day either instead we logged on e-cadence once a week to join our class conferences none of us knew what we were walking or rather clicking into when we made our decision to join cva but even so with discussion boards our incredibly considerate dedicated teachers and constant reminders of all the possibilities available to us we've formed a truly unique connection with each other and whether we've been here for two years or less than a semester we've come together to form cva's remarkable second ever graduating class even though this is the last time that any of us can say we're in high school the last two years have taught me that standing on this stage and saying goodbye to this chapter in our lives doesn't mean saying goodbye to our curiosity and ambition at cva we had the unique opportunity to take a step back and see both our world and the countless opportunities that might have been hidden find a door we would have originally had sorry hesitated to open and whether it was through our civic learning projects learning how to be successful with online group projects or becoming virtual mentors we have gained what is probably one of the most unique sets of skills of a graduating high school class i know personally that if it wasn't for cva i never would have had the conversations with teachers during office hours that reignited my love for learning in the last two years i've had opportunities to join a fellowship where i met friends and mentors co-founded a student-led mental health organization with some of said friends and had the life-changing opportunity to be this year's cva asb vice president and all of this was started thanks to maybe two or three emails from my now counselor miss poncey and our now asb advisor mr sherman we've all paved our own paths by diving headfirst in unfamiliar territory and in the end we emerge victorious none of us seniors here today need to stop pushing ourselves intellectually or restrict ourselves from taking necessary risks to satiate our ambition this is a lesson that i'll carry with me for the rest of my life and it's one that i'm certain that my fellow bees will as well we may not all be following the same paths after today but we will all be taking the lessons we've learned to make countless more memories let's all walk into the next chapter of our lives with our heads held high after all we're ready to tackle whatever obstacle or challenge we may face i mean hey we managed to navigate clover 19 in the in the last two years so i know we can handle anything else that comes our way congratulations my fellow class of 2022 graduates we've done it [Applause] now seniors let us reflect on our last year of high school and watch our senior slideshow [Music] so [Music] so [Music] [Applause] [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] so [Applause] it is now my honor to introduce cva student ambassador miss catherine carota who will deliver our second speech of today [Applause] hello everyone my name is catherine carota and i am the student ambassador here for cva i'd like to start off by congratulating the graduating senior class of 2022 you guys we made it it's been a long year of hard work overcoming challenges and coming to terms with personal trials and tribulations however there was never a time when we as a community community doubted your efforts even though cambridge virtual academy is a virtual school we in the class of 2022 are united and all of you guys have become my second family i am looking forward to seeing how far you'll go in life and what amazing things you'll accomplish we don't know where life will take us but whatever path we choose to take let's remember what we have learned while being a bee here at cva whether it was time management kindness or leadership so to my fellow graduates i wish you luck there's no guarantee that life outside of high school is going to be a walk in the park but let's make the most out of it and live it to the fullest even with challenges and all i wanted to take this opportunity to thank our cva teachers and staff for not only devoting their time and efforts into molding us into the exceptional students we are today but for also connecting us with us on a personal level cva was just an online school before we had you to our counselors and faces thank you for providing us with so many opportunities and inspiring us to be our best selves we are very grateful that you persevered with us to the very end to our teachers who not only taught us hard and soft skills but also saw the potential in each of us and were there for us when we needed someone the most thank you thank you thank you all of you teachers are amazing and we are thankful for everything you have done for us to our administrators who worked to shape the school into the most vibrant and exciting place to learn and be educated here in auhsd we here today are proof that you have accomplished this objective you have worked tirelessly to make this school shine and it was not in vain and lastly to our parents and guardians thank you for pushing us to be the best we can be providing for us day in and day out and for loving us even when we could be obnoxious there aren't enough thank yous or words to express how grateful we are to have you all in our lives and to my fellow classmates i am truly going to miss you all as you help me become the woman i am today this is not a goodbye but i thank you for being the best classmates i could have possibly asked for thank you [Applause] i would now like to introduce our cva director miss jackie counts [Applause] it is an honor to me to welcome our students parents family members teachers staff and honored guests on this special graduation day a graduation ceremony is a time of celebration a reflection of the year and an open door that welcomes the future and our future is a bright future look cambridge virtual academy's senior class our cva community is so very proud of you we're proud of your accomplishments and your achievements we're proud of you as you continue your journey some of you are entering the workforce others are attending community colleges and universities but we're even more proud of you for your dedication your resilience and transformative success that we've all witnessed you all did this despite this living through a coveted era and being a hundred percent virtual hopefully these lessons that you've learned will carry you through your adulthood i imagine that many of you made a decision or your families made the decision for you to attend cva because we provided a safe harbor from the pandemic yet something amazing happened at cva and you found yourselves in the midst of exploring and contributing to this amazing unique learning environment many of you have shared that cva exceeded your initial expectations experiencing civic learning projects taught by caring expert teachers interacting with other students through discussion boards and in your class and organizing a flexible schedule that's scheduled to participate in aim internships concurrent sports and classes dual enrollment classes at cypress college google certifications and in asb in-person activities to connect with others you truly experienced cva as you open your door this future door always bring joy with a smile gentle words or a simple act of kindness promote safety and well-being for your body mind and spirit focus on supporting innovation and creativity pushing your thinking well outside the box stay energetic flexible and embrace change as an opportunity not a threat i want you to know that how grateful i am for all of you that you're here today and that you will always be part of cambridge virtual academy know that you leave behind a legacy of caring and compassion for making this world a much better place for all remember we are cva thank you [Applause] i thought i missed this should i do this yeah um i wanted to thank catherine for the welcome address and your very inspirational speech and thank anna for your beautiful speech as well both of these young women did a beautiful job at capturing the significant impact cv hay had on their lives both academically and socially great job it's not it is now time to recognize some of the academic awards our seniors have accomplished seniors as i pronounce the academic award which is symbolized by a cord or a sash please stand to be recognized with applause and then be seated career technical education cte pathways [Applause] dual enrollment [Applause] seal of by literacy gold state seal merit diploma [Applause] google certification completion state seal of civic engagement [Applause] a through g [Applause] and academic honors seniors who've earned 3.5 or above grade point average [Applause] okay thank you miss counts class of 2022 we have arrived at the moment you have all been waiting for i am pleased to introduce our dignitary who will be presenting diplomas to our graduates board of trustee president mr al-jabbar miss poncey cva's lead counselor will now read the names of the class of 2022 graduating seniors please respect each of our graduates and hold your applause until all the names have been read anna padilla salud [Applause] catherine carota [Applause] sharon kim [Applause] victoria celia rodriguez [Applause] alexis marie martinez [Applause] had a sin [Applause] krisha parmar [Applause] bruce jennings [Applause] jasmine guadalupe arroyo [Applause] [Music] maya sahira de leon [Applause] nancy patel [Applause] colin you win [Applause] connor boa [Applause] angelina guidos [Applause] justin kwan [Applause] edward marcano [Applause] see you jin you [Applause] donya you have scaredy [Applause] and not with us today emily rodriguez and aiden sheehan [Applause] class of 2022 please rise it gives me great honor to present the class of 2022 to the board of trustees for certification please welcome to the podium board of trustee miss anne-marie randall trejo who will now certify the class all right i have the distinct pleasure and honor as trustee of the anaheim union high school district to officially certify that the students present here today from the class of have all duly met the requirements of the state of california and have completed the prescribed course of study established by the anaheim union high school district students you may now move your tassel from the right to the left and we congratulate you bravo [Applause] thank you trustee randall trejo graduates please be seated thank you for attending the 2022 commencement ceremony for cambridge virtual academy families and friends please remain seated until all graduates have exited the auditorium graduates please follow our distinguished guests as they leave the stage parents family members and friends please remain seated until all graduates have exited the auditorium please remember to take all your belongings with you and enjoy the rest of your day thank you so much so [Music] now [Music] oh [Music] you
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