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what happens in the ip world is that some of our positions are less than six or hours she may have a position that is a two hour position in a three hour someone vacates that go to a six hour and now we have two open positions when we just had one and so we're constantly with our order of offers with the contract having to go out and ask our employees first by contract if they have an interest in position if they have a seniority right to it they're automatically placed into it so the other positions when we look at the cafeteria assistant and the campus supervisor a good example is campus supervisor we have 10 open positions but it's only an fte of two so we have a tremendous amount of two hour positions three hour one and a half and so those add up and so when you start looking that's where you saw that eleven hundred and everyone i think was eleven hundred and forty positions from that effect when we only have 711 employees i have questions can you go back to the last slide please um so how many of these or all of these are partial ftes when you look at all of those positions maybe other than the campus supervisor there may be one in that group i don't believe there is right now that number ten i checked before i left is that eight will fill two this uh this friday none of those are full time seven half hour eight hour positions on that list and do you think that that's probably what's attributing to such a high number of vacancies is that they're all part time and very low part time at that well part of the issue cafeteria assistant's a great example we only feed kids in the morning and we feed them at lunch and so to have them work a full day we aren't there for eight hours so we have these short term positions to feed people in the morning and in the afternoon the other problem that's happened is when you start looking at campus supervisor and cafeteria assistant the delta we used to have with minimum wage has gone up from 10 to 15 very very quickly we used to be about 13 when it was 10 and as it goes up our now our dealt is 43 cents so our lowest level positions when you get to campus supervisor and cafeteria assistant are 1543 with the minimum wage increase july january 1 will be below minimum wage in this position but what's not built into that is the benefit factor when we look at those lower level positions we have to include about 50 percent of the hourly rate and benefits and so we look at and say how much does that position cost the district it's much much higher than what we're posting it doesn't help the employee working i do understand that that is an issue right i'm just kind of curious about what what what kind of creative thinking there is going into or out of the box thinking there is going into filling getting these positions filled because obviously what has worked in the past is not working anymore we're in a much different type of employer employee environment these days as a whole society so in a lot of our positions um and within csu you can hold combined positions so you could held a campus supervisor position you can a cafeteria assistant and you can build up to different hours and that's a different change and so people are able to do that the big thing when you look at ips particularly when you go back say 15 years ago we had about 225 positions in position control for ip today we have over 407 and so that has kind of exploded over the last couple of years it's become more difficult to fill this as we go we offer a lot more training we've increased those hours and most of those positions they're getting closer to six hours the full school day and so we're having better luck filling those now but we we have right now on our eligibility list almost 40 people that have signed up so i'd like to be an ip we have another recruitment that opens up next week and so is one opens we close i believe we opened 21 last year and so i think there is an opportunity for us to catch it finally but it is difficult particularly in this environment i have a lot more questions and things but i feel like this is like a brainstorming session that needs to happen or i don't know okay we could set up a time where the three of us can meet and answer questions and go you know through it if you'd like to set that up okay thank you and anyone else is welcome this is this is a challenging um area for us um we're playing constantly playing catch up um with jobs just for those reasons and students aren't in school eight hours so to create an eight-hour job and we don't have a need for it is a conflict with um fiscal you know um responsibility so and that's that's the tug of war that we're we're dealing with in some of these positions so all right so thank you diane since may we've done four rounds of hiring for ips the first two rounds was a lot of movement like david was talking before people leaving positions for four or five hours to our six and six and a half hour positions the last two rounds including one i did today i interviewed 16 people today i'm going to be offering 15 of those people positions not one of them is leaving another position they're all from the outside so we are seeing a change the last round was similar to that there were only like three that were leaving positions so we are coming around the corner on that and this is one of the best pools i've had for interviews we're getting a lot of these people that are in preschools in public and private preschools and because their numbers are so low they're looking for new opportunities and so these people with the experience are coming to us now so it was a really good pool so we are turning the corner i believe based on the increased rate that we've done and just every time we do an interview pool they open it right back up so i can just keep on going through them thanks for sharing that all right this is informational i really appreciate that so now we have uh uh a request by hanlon this is you again right you just thought you'd run away okay let me just uh okay so this is a variable turn waiver and um so we hired a new social worker counselor who is working on her credential and it's just another one of those situations where they do not offer internships for social worker counselors so we have to do a one-year waiver in order for her to put in complete her credential work while she's completing those classes and working on those hours that she has to put in in actual practice so i brought one last time for a variable term waiver and this is a new new person that we recently hired there aren't there just is no one out there with a clear credential so um these are folks that have a social worker license and can go back and fairly easily get the credential but they then have to put in those hours and that usually takes the full year all right okay any uh questions or a discussion i do um just because i want to make sure i'm reading the tax documentation correctly um in the attachment uh the paperwork it says that there's a question about how many individuals credentialed in the authorization were interviewed so is that not saying that six people who've held the credential already and i'm not i'm i'm definitely not casting inspiration on your hiring cards i like uh yeah where are you at i'm looking at page um three uh under c it says how many individuals credentialed in the authorization of the waiver request were interviewed so that makes it look as though six people who had the who who held the pps credential were interviewed for the position the numbers don't add up there and have to i'd have to check into that and get back to you on that yeah good question i will find out and then let the whole board know okay but we need to move forward with this correct for her yes i do need approval so that we can then apply to ctc for the clearance okay will ctc question the numbers on the document if just not with board approval no no and i don't know the particulars there may have been um there may have been an applicant or applicants that did not pass the background um check i just don't know um what the particulars were on this right yeah the numbers don't add could have been wrong credentials not an appropriate credential and then we would have been in the same same position yeah so i just would have i'll have to look into that and see what the particulars run that endless members don't have help can can you send that clarification as soon as you get it though jim yes okay yes thanks tomorrow morning okay any further discussion thank you tom for catching that any further discussion all right um may i have a motion then i'd like to move the approval okay tom i'll second that motion eileen seconds all right again this can be a voice vote um all those in favor signify by saying aye aye okay five to nothing all right and then we'll get a clarification hopefully by tomorrow so uh any items from the floor we have no speaker no additional speaker card no speakers all right um is there a board member who requests to agendize an item all right seeing that then um move to adjourn thank you all thank you you
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we do have a groundbreaking ceremony from 8 30 to 9 30 at higley unified so we do hope that the governor board can join us there and celebrate this this exciting endeavor for higley high school so yes thank you mr moore we have our invitation so thank you so much for that we appreciate it all right all those in favor aye aye motion carries 4-0 i heard her even though her microphone didn't go on mr schultz said i all right we are moving on to upcoming future agenda items as you can see these are some of the items that dr foley has shared with us but there's also other things of course in november we start to look at next year's course guides and things like that so there's a lot upcoming in the fall is there anything else the board would like to see on an upcoming meeting we're good very good i move that we adjourn second all those in favor aye aye motion carries and have a good evening you
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so welcome to the august 25th 2022 electronic meeting of the environmental commission this meeting is in accordance with executive orders from the governor to affect social distancing and mitigate the spread of the covet 19 virus we intend to conduct this meeting similarly to an in-person meeting however please be patient if there are technical issues public comment will be via telephone only to speak during any of the public comment opportunities of which there are two one at the beginning of the meeting and one at the end please call or 888-788-0099 and enter meeting id number 915-8343-9176 again um the phone numbers are 877-853-5247 and eight eight eight seven eight eight zero zero nine nine and the meeting id is number nine one five eight three four three nine one seven six this information is also available on the published agenda in the public notices section of the city website and on the broadcast of this meeting on ctn channel 16 at t channel 99 and online at a www.a2gov.org [Music] slash watch ctn all right so um galen would you read the land here at its statement sure i acknowledge that the land the city of ann arbor occupies is the ancestral traditional and contemporary lands of the anishinabe including otawa ojibwe and border wide me and wind our peoples i further acknowledge that our city stands like almost all property in the united states on lands obtained generally in unconscionable ways from indigenous peoples the taking of this land was formalized by the treaty of detroit in 1807.
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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 roll call please mr russia mr abu drabbo here mr awad here mrs bassford here miss beltran here mr conover dr dan mr paris here vice president daley here president smith here we have a quorum um commission commissioner dr danny is um there was a death in the family so she won't be here and mr kanova is relaxing on vacation um and uh our attorney delise is not here tonight but we're very happy to have her replacement mr john cru thank you and welcome uh miss beltran would you read the mission statement the mission of the clifton school district an open and reciprocal community partnership is to provide all students with a quality education to develop the skills necessary to become literate lifelong learners who are responsible and productive citizens contributing to a democratic society and ever changing world the open public meetings act the new jersey open public meetings law was enacted to ensure the right to the public to have advanced notice of and to attend the meetings of public bodies at which any business affecting their interest is discussed or acted upon in accordance with the provisions of this act the clifton board of education has caused notice of this meeting to be publicized by having the date time and place thereof posted at the city clerk's office clifton public library administration building senior citizen nutrition center on cable tv in the local press on the district's website and mailed to presidents of parent teacher organizations this meeting will be tape recorded in accordance with policy zero one six eight okay we're going to start with uh public recognition oh you want to do it the other way okay all right uh we'll do our presentations first um is janine up first or we're gonna do doctors mike doc all right um um mr doctor will uh make his presentation first sorry good evening dr robert tosi president smith and the commissioners of the board of education clifton public schools will begin working with the sandy hook promise to teach students to recognize warning signs and threats and provide them with an efficient means to report concerns their mission is to end school shootings and create a culture change that prevents violence and other harmful acts that hurt our children we look forward to working with them to accomplish this goal the program teaches students how to recognize warning signs and threats in social media in school and in the community from individuals who may be at risk to themselves or others and say something to a trusted adult use say something anonymous reporting system or call 9-1-1 once a concern is identified by a student they're able to submit a tip this can be done through an app that all students grades 12 6-12 will be trained to use through the say something website or by calling the hotline once the tip is received it will be processed by the crisis center which is open 24 hours 7 days a week 365 days during the year the tip will be vetted triaged categorized and handed off to the appropriate professionals this can be school personnel district personnel or even clifton police based on the threat level finally once delivered to the appropriate team the tip will be investigated and handled the most common tips received by the say something system are vaping and substance abuse anxiety and depression cutting bullying and cyber bullying suicide threat and ideation and planned fights in school violence by working with our students and empowering them to help others we hope to to curtail these and other situations which occur in our young people's lives and provide them with the necessary support i'd like to thank jessica tremble and martin garrow who worked on vetting of this program i'd also like to thank amy keloge for facilitating facilitating our introduction to the program thank you one of the reasons why we just have the logo up and why i'm not giving too much detail is because of our agreement would say something because a lot of what we share we're going to be sharing with the staff and students first giving them the information because if we give too much information they might believe that the app is available right now or that they're able to go onto this site and put in a tip and unfortunately we're not logged into it yet that happens come september 12th when we train all of our students if anybody has anything any questions for mr dr dr robitosi mr doctor forgive me if you said it but what is the cost to the board of education for this program it's free of charge it costs the district nothing and this is an ongoing program they're completely funded from different grants that they receive and from fundraising and from uh corporations so it's no cost to us now and moving forward any commissioners have any questions mr albertravo thank you president smith that was actually one of my questions but the other question i had was are you able to walk us through the process of say something see something or see something say something as far as the student's concerned is concerned so a student realizes that something's wrong whether they're told of a fight that's going to happen or they notice that their friends cutting themselves or they have suicidal ideations they can go onto their app uh they'll be pre-loaded with a code so they can go right in and there are drop-down menus and they select the different uh items that apply to them they give whatever information they can and then it's sent off to the crisis center a live person will look at it vet the information and if they need to they will reach out to this person to see if they need to provide immediate help immediate help could be contacting the police if that happens after hours because a student says that they're going to hurt themselves what will happen is one of the district personnel mr dungaro myself ms tremble would be contacted to provide contact information for that student that it might be because this person might be talking about themselves they could be calling for a friend who they think might be in danger so the police may not have the necessary information we're on call 24 hours to provide that information okay anyone else if i may from an external perspective um let's say it's not internal an external a community member um hears something or says something or like we've had in the past where social media post happens is there an external factor to this or is it only internal they can go on to our website there will be a link as of the 13th of september that they would be able to click on and provide that same information anyone else mr doctor thank you very much thank you thank you okay are you next no oh i'm sorry miss rogoza good evening everyone um my name is paula ragoza pbsis uh director director pbsis coordinator for the district is what i meant to say director right so to be someday thank you uh commissioners thank you dr robertosi uh mr president smith central administration for affording me the opportunity to highlight what we're doing in our district with pbsis tonight's uh tonight's spin on it i wanted to uh provide for us a little bit of what we've we did besides uh highlighting particular schools uh staff and students but there's so many wonderful things that as a collective we're doing that i wanted just to give you a little bit of that what we did and what to expect next school year um but before i get into that i do want to share a little bit about what happened this morning this morning i had the privilege to present to our new staff that are entering our one clifton community and it is with the energy that that came out of that that continued to inspire me for what i wanted to present to you but more importantly i i got to tell folks that are joining our family how wonderful we are and what we're striving to do and as you'll see in the next three short slides it's evident that we are all even though um at times stressfully working together we're making a huge impact day in and day out not only for our community our instructional buildings but our state and on a national platform so all right the cascade of services that we saw last year uh broke it down into four different pieces first what our pbsis teams were doing internally you saw all of last year the different implementation pieces of the universal tier so we are all clear that all of our buildings are implementing universal tier we also saw that secondary tier intervention started to kick off with training and that's amazing in itself you all afforded us the opportunity to present at monthly meet board meetings those that message in itself provided so much um is so much not pat but so much uh strength for the teams because they realize that everyone is appreciating what they're doing that it doesn't go unheard that you are all rooting for them and that everyone in the community stands behind all of those um late hours that they're putting in so thank you on a statewide platform last year we were recognized and we were asked to present at the njpbsis community of practice forum where we got to present our district-wide implementation of pbsis from there we had several school districts asked to follow what we're doing here and that was pretty amazing to share next njpbsis as a state network also recognized us for all of our buildings met 70 percent fidelity which is the the minimum right for implementation what that means is that we're doing it and we're rocking it out we really simply are on a national platform we were invited to present at the center on pbis national technical assistance that all happens because of the hard work that my our colleagues our peers and our students are helping we did such a great job that we're actually invited to present again on the same district-wide topic this october in chicago it's with great pride that i present to you that information because when i joined the clifton family i knew the the hard work that went into everything that everyone did and i wanted to be part of that and here we are the other thing to look forward to this year is we we just finished um recording a podcast for the university of missouri on the educate titled the educators blueprint check it out pretty cool so they're they're so they're so happy to get our shared resources that they've asked us to record yet another podcast on our security end and what we're doing to keep our school safe looking forward to this school year we're looking for our universal tier to continue to sustain in all of our buildings and secondary tier trainings and piloting from the following um schools this is an at a glance of the projected training and piloting for our schools and how we'll move in cohorts you know hopefully we don't have another major traumatic event like a pandemic that'll mess up our timelines but if all goes as projected this is what we're going to look like in the end i want to thank you because without your support without our without our folks and our our staff our teachers our administrators and our students and the parents and families at home this doesn't happen i just get i just get the privilege to show you the outcome thank you all so much thank you again as usual ms rogoza for all your hard work and efforts i truly appreciate it now miss kusalevich good evening commissioners ladies and gentlemen it's a pleasure to be here with you again this evening um as we discussed earlier um in the year we said that today i would be presenting to you all of the topics in the pacing for the health curriculum so tonight's presentation is addressing comprehensive health and physical education but we're only focusing on the topics in the health curriculum k through 12.
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good evening at this time i'd like to call this regular meeting of the dysart unified school district governing board to order let the record reflect that all board members are present please stand for the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all this time we'll move to recognitions and celebrations and begin uh with a banned performance dr dean thank you good evening madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet and our community this evening i will turn the recognition piece of this over to dr croto thank you dr dean madam president uh members of the board uh cabinet and guests tonight is our distinct privilege to have shadow ridge high school marching band here uh shadow ridge high school marching band is in the direction of mr kerwin forest and we're very excited to hear them tonight so mr forrest the floor is yours hey [Music] so [Music] so [Applause] [Music] [Applause] madam president you know that we're back in school when we get to hear marching bands performing their show and the school fight song so thank you mr forrest and the shadow ridge high school marching band excellent job always good to hear a good marching band thank you for coming all right next we'll move to recognitions and celebrations b2 government finance officers association and the association of school business officials international financial awards dr dean thank you madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet and our community this evening i'll turn this in this item over to mr hicks but i do want to just make a quick statement that once again it is outstanding to see our finance department being recognized for their transparency and financial excellence so mr hicks thank you very much good evening madam president members of the board acting superintendent dr dean colleagues and community members i am very proud to announce that dysart has once again been awarded our certificate of excellence in financial reporting by the government finance officers association and the association of school business officials international so i know that i say this a lot but i'm just going to say thank you to miss maridel spidel and miss francie wolfe bauman many times i say it but once again they deserve it they do a lot of the work the heavy lifting as our third party auditors are performing our audit they look at a few more areas we have to provide additional information then we have to submit an application to both organizations for reviewing to determine if we met the criteria and of course we did and um it is mainly on their behalf so um so this award really represents all of their and their team's hard work and i appreciate all that they do for us and for our district so thank you very much great job to your entire team really appreciate everything you all do all right next we move to item c addressing the governing board audience with individuals ms chaffin this is the time for the public to comment members of the board may not discuss items that are not specifically identified on the agenda pursuant to ars 38-431.01 action taken as a result of public comment will be limited to directing staff to study the matter responding to any criticism or scheduling the matter for further consideration and decision at a later date in order to facilitate accomplishing the business of the district in a timely manner a time limit of three minutes will be imposed for each individual or group addressing the board when you approach the podium please state your name for the record first we have mr william conium good evening madam president members of the board dr dean and members of the cabinet my name is william mcconium a parent of two dicers students during the executive session later this evening the governing award will be selecting finalists for the future superintendent and discussing the interview process considering that a superintendent's contract could be as long as three years there's no doubt that the superintendent that the current board chooses will have a profound and lasting impact on dysart there are currently two governing board seats up for election there are now four candidates running for those two seats only one of those is currently on the board therefore it's guaranteed at least one of the other three candidates will be on the board in january it's entirely possible that two of the three could be on the board in january the finalists at the governing board selects this evening will have their panel interviews in three weeks the interview panels are to consist of parents students teachers support staff administrators and community leaders in the interest of transparency and collaboration with your future colleagues on the board i ask that the board allow the three candidates to participate in the panel interview process if you will not allow the candidates to be panelists at least allow them to be silent observers thank you thank you next we have sharla khalasar hi my name is charlotsar and i'm actually here to talk about the safety concerns in our dysart district i've been a parent in the dysart district for 10 years i'm not going to name our school publicly just so that our public information isn't out to the masses our schools our fence is four feet tall around most of our school and i watch people jump over it frequently our gates are unlocked on the weekends and anyone can get on our campus with ease and without camera systems nobody would know they were there until they were already on the property after the incident at thomas ranch on august 12th i called our school to ask if we were going to have outside recess knowing that the perpetrator had was still on the loose and they hadn't found the suspect the school said it was business as usual because we were just outside the radius of the school lockdown which was under five miles at that point there was no indication or information given what the person's intent was and he was seen with the gun and tried to enter a school property so our concern was that he was going to find another school to try to infiltrate many of our schools in the district don't have cameras and they would have no idea that somebody was on the campus until it was too late um it was i have a kindergartner and she plays on the playground that faces the main street in and out and i was told that she was going to go to recess as usual with this guy on the loose and i thought that was very very concerning and very negligent to let the kids outside knowing that somebody was potentially going to harm another school in my time with my kids in the district for the past 10 years there have been many occasions where kids have brought weapons to school and i've asked my kids about protocols and procedures and my 10 year old tells me that the protocol is to hide 30 students behind the teacher's desk you can't hide 30 kids behind a desk they're not all going to survive the only change that has been made in my time as a parent was a wall that was put in our office a wall with no glass that anyone can jump over and have access to our school we have been using the same safety measures since 2009 i think it's time to do something to create a safe environment for all of our students and our teachers we can't rely on past safety and we have to ensure a safe future i am calling this board to action to ask you to implement safety measures in the mid in the middle schools elementary schools k through eight school and we did not get that so i'm concerned and confused why we didn't get it we have the same age demographic and we have even more than that so all of the schools and the staff deserve safe protection i'm asking the district to devote resources thank you dr dean can you follow up with those concerns and and specifically giving an update on the glass installation madam president we will do that as a matter of fact uh mr musee and uh mr yeager are here this evening they'll be more than happy to talk with miss coles after meeting next do we have haley is it carvalho okay slightly taller than the last one patricia oliver neil heslin scarlett lewis kimberly and felix rubio are among parents who all thought it would never happen to them they are parents who lost their children in the parkland sandy hook and the recent shooting at robb elementary in uvalde sending your kid or spouse to school should not come with the fear of them not making it home because of gun violence i have a kindergartner that loves her teachers her friends her administrators and comes home every single day with a smile i don't worry about her making friends i don't worry about her learning her sight words i worry if she's alive i worry if i can make it to her school in time because i my husband and i taught her this year before she went to school those are some of the horrors that face parents of school age children's and i understand that the unthinkable can happen in a grocery store in a movie theater but there is a responsibility and a weight that comes with sending your child to school and keeping them safe i have watched the previous governing board meetings and i have seen other parents ask for more safety measures and i know i'm not alone after thompson ranch incident i felt it necessary to find out what our own safety measures were in depth on our campus and i discovered that on our campus and many others that there are no cameras no buzzers no school resource officers and now that i know how poor the security is on our campuses i can't sit back and not take action i've made countless phone calls over the last two weeks to find out how to get some of those resources school resource officers upgraded security systems i have spoken to city council members senator aides members of this governing body employees employees of the the district and everyone tells being in school and you and you'll you'll get more comfortable i'm not an emotional mom i'm an angry mom and there's a difference i want our kids protected safe and protected or different teachers shouldn't have to die to keep our kids safe because they're covering their students bodies whatever the dollar amount is to get school resource officers and security upgrades is the price that you put on all of those teachers staff and children's lives until you fund this endeavor i know that the district hired mr yeager and that is a step in the right direction funding is an issue and every time that dysart district loses a student due to safety concerns it's a preventable matter and it's something that we can fix in the long run and we can either figure out how to keep students here or we can teach students on grief seminars and how to cover themselves in their classmates blood to keep them safe you guys get bombarded with requests all the time many of which you cannot fulfill and i know no one wants to think about this scenario i refuse to be one of those parents who stand in front of congress but think that can't happen to them you the board have an opportunity to make a change and you can champion this you can save lives and you don't have to do them alone you have parents like myself who are begging to help we are not asking you to do this but we are asking you to make this possible thank you thank you dr dean likewise can you follow up absolutely yes thank you next we'll move to superintendent governing board updates do we have a student update madam president we do not have a student update this evening okay we'll move to superintendent update madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet and our community this evening i have a couple of things i want to share with the governing board and we're going to show you one heck of a cute video in just a second but first i want to let you know that we were excited dr croto and i were excited to travel to yuma last friday night to watch our very own dysart high school football team open the season they opened two weeks before other high schools against yuma high school and we are happy to report that in the last minute of the game they came back and won the game 21-18 so it was exciting to start the school year from a football perspective with a win the remainder of our high school athletics teams get underway next week with their competition in all fall sports this afternoon we received an email from a parent of one of our kindergarten students at one of our schools thanking us for our commitment to making sure that our students understand patriotism and patriotic education and so she sent us this video and i felt it was very important that we share this with the governing board she was a proud mother of this kindergarten student who in their course of their conversation at the dinner table and speaking about her dad who's retired military personnel the important things he did to serve our country and the students said he wanted to show his patriotism and show what he had learned at school so click play on that video [Music] and so that is absolutely giving a round of applause that is levi and levi will and his family will join us in september where he will lead the pledge of allegiance for one of our board meetings and with that madam president the last part of my update is to let the board know that following the first executive session this evening i will step out of the board meeting and dr crota will be available should you need anything further and that's my update tonight thank you thank you next we'll move to governing board update i'm gonna go let it go oh really okay um mine's pretty short but it was fun i had the privilege today of visiting um ashton ranch and marley park and rancho gabriella so i've begun going back out and seeing the schools it was really a lot of fun and i learned a lot so looking forward to going to a few more but anyway thank you to the principals and assistant principals for letting me tag along for a little while i appreciate you taking time out of your day thank you i'll go i just want to take a second and say thank you to mr yeager and mr musee to our administrators our staff our faculty at thompson ranch and to dr dean and cabinet um luisa i'm sure you were probably pretty busy that day i just want to say thank you to everyone who has made safety the priority thank you to everyone who followed the protocols and procedures with our situation at thompson ranch the fact that everything went as it should now granted there's always learning experiences i'm sure there's a time for discussion and reflection but overall the doors were locked the police were called thank you to el mirage pd thank you to surprise pd thank you to the sheriff's office and all of our law enforcement who responded that says a lot about the priorities from the top down that the staff and students followed the procedures administrators strong leadership cabinet super acting superintendent strong leadership that could have gone a lot differently so i want to say thank you to all who are involved thank you for following procedures i appreciate that thank you i too wanted to share just a few words regarding the august 12th lockdown i happened to be in a meeting with dr croto when a call came in with reports of an armed individual attempting to gain entry into thompson ranch elementary school and when you hear something like that the physiological response is nearly indescribable unless you've had unless you have experienced something like that similar to yourself goosebumps heart in your throat tear in your eye and just all the unthinkable images that we see on the news flooding your mind but what happened next was even more profound than the feelings i was experiencing within seconds dr croto mobilized a team of cabinet members and district staff to report to the conference room to await further direction interim superintendent dr dean was contacted within minutes and returned to district office and immediately transformed the conference room into a command center although i know we have regular tabletop mock exercises that help us to prepare for similar emergency responses they're not real but two weeks ago i had the privilege of witnessing our leadership team put their expertise into practice and i was nothing less than impressed dr dean did an exceptional job leading this his team and determining a plan of action that said the level of competency i observed in our cabinet members our district staff and all others present in that room was exemplary without missing a beat everyone was proactive in assuming their role and immediately got to work when emotions are high communication can sometimes get lost not true with this team communication was clear direction was competent and the vibe in the room was highly collaborative everyone's voice was heard and valued and everyone's focus was ensuring the safety of our students and staff as can be expected the incident was very fluid in the beginning requiring district leadership to quickly reassess re-evaluate and execute a new plan again this happened without delay and was always in accordance with the direction we were given by local law enforcement i know multiple law enforcement agencies responded that day and i want to thank each and every one of them i'd like to particularly thank the el mirage police department for their prompt and efficient response although i understand there are ongoing questions and concerns regarding the incident that continued to be reviewed i'd ask the community to be mindful of the fact that because all of our law enforce because of our law enforcement the school was quickly swept and cleared of a threat and all children were returned home safely i'd be remiss if i didn't acknowledge mr kerr and his thompson ranch staff for maintaining composure throughout the incident providing reassurance and comfort to frightened children and above all adhering to district protocols by ensuring that all ex because of that there is no doubt that lives were saved that day mr kerr thank you for your leadership i saw him a second ago i hope he's still here attitude as a parent who was locked in the back room of a library during a very real lockdown in 2012 right after the sandy hook tragedy whereby witnessing how lockdown procedures are implemented at the school level i have now been on the opposite end by witnessing the protocols that are implemented at the district level when a threat is made against one of our schools in both instances i can say without hesitation that dysart has safety protocols in place that should instill a sense of confidence within our community when it comes to ensuring ensuring student and staff safety i'm also reassured by the fact that dysert continues to keep safety in the forefront always looking for ways to evaluate and improve practices to ensure that our processes continue to become more secure taking a proactive stance to improve safety with every opportunity the unthinkable can happen when we least expect it dysert is not immune to tragedy but i am thankful to all of you who took part big or small to ensure that all students returned home unharmed so thank you all that's all i have thank you next we'll move to motion to approve consent agenda to entertain emotion i will move that we approve consent agenda items as presented second i'm updating sorry oh no i came up did you get mine okay i don't know why it says update motion carries next we move to information discussion uh g1 update on enrollment and staffing for the 2022-2023 school year dr dean thank you madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet in our community this evening dr polling will provide a brief update on our current enrollment and staffing as we have finished day number 17 of the school year it's flying by already thank you dr dean madam president members of the board cabinet and community a enrollment and staffing update this evening i will start with our current email this is after 10th day of 8 17.
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no intro no intro happy friday wildcats we're gonna have some fun it's mr wolf student activity director i'm here with our new football coach mr chavez is he excited for your first game tonight yeah excited you know the kids have been working hard for a couple months now so they're really excited to kind of hit somebody else besides our own teammate everybody's excited we're ready to roll we're excited too it's a whiteout couple questions what can we expect out of the wildcats we're gonna be throwing the ball all over the field are we running the ball this year what are we looking like you know we're gonna do whatever it takes to win you know if we have to run the ball 50 times a game if we have to throw the ball 50 times a game you know whatever it's going to take for us to come out with a w can you tell us the first play or are you keeping that under wraps yeah we're going to keep that on the wraps for sure let's meet some of our students see what they know about the game test your football knowledge for a chance to win some shirts come on it'll be fun who's it you gotta walk all the way up there what's your name trinity nelson and what year in school are you trinidad a junior it's friday night tonight we have our first football game you excited about that yeah obviously everyone knows the quarterback everyone wants to be the quarterback but it takes a full team to be successful can you name three other positions on a football team beside the quarterback linebacker receiver so much later that the old narrator got tired of waiting and they had to hire a new one running back yeah we have running backs too good job trinity all right coach chavez has a shirt for you anybody want to answer a question on camera happy friday who am i here with caleb williams what year are you caleb i'm a senior i'm a senior you're a senior i'm not you a football fan kind of every 10 yards that's a good thing for the offense right what do they get every 10 yards first down let's pretend you just caught a pass for 10 yards be the receiver and show me a first down symbol i would get my boner out and i'll be like i like it coach chavez has a shirt for you thanks caleb i'm here with you man i hear you're on the football team yeah do you know that guy over there who is that coach any good coach motivates their players and has you know a team motto team statement what's the west chicago wildcats vision statement this year what do you guys all say break by brick i'm here with jack here you're on the football team yep everyone talks about offense defense but the third element of the game that's very important is what special teams that's right we're gonna see if you can catch a punt [Music] a lot of pressure i'm here with tommy murphy on the football team yes what positions are you playing this year we're running back into safety all right running back let's see the touchdown celebration all right wildcats i'm here with elon aga i'm a senior at west chicago community high school thanks for doing my job for me and you are i'm janet archon and i'm a senior so the team scores a touchdown what do they do let's see it let's see your best all right we can cut that out we can cut that out don't worry okay they're going to try one more time it's football season i'm here with janet hostico yeah what you're in school area i'm a senior so you've been around for years you've seen a lot of competitions here at west chicago do you name all of our conference foes that we will be playing this year we have streamwood bartlett glenbard south and east and we have south elgin elgin larkin east aurora um that all of them you
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good morning wildcats it's friday we're gonna have some fun we like to have fun on fridays it's our first full week of school you guys have done a great job i'm mr wolf student activity director we're gonna talk to some students see how their first week has gone and see what they know about the high school you want to be on camera for a quick short all right good morning uh who am i here with logan well going you're in school are you i'm a sophomore how's your first week of school then it's all right okay we'll take it uh you're on the cross country team i see good way to get involved uh we've had some changes here at the high school like every year what is the new period that everybody has after third period then then he got it you get a drawstring backpack good job all right good morning who am i here with i know i know what you're in school yeah senior new changes every year at the school one new change is that one day a week almost every week for the entire school year you guys are going to get to sleep in a little extra and have a late start what day of the week will that occur on monday monday she's not setting that alarm this coming monday i'm here with jack rick jack what year in school are you jack uh i'm a senior now time flies i remember when you were a freshman so every year there's changes around the school this year we have a whole new bell schedule can you tell me any time that any one of our class periods start not gonna let you choose first period though to the minute what time does any class period start second period starts 8 46 i'm going to assume that's right because i don't even know it's friday and i'm here with nick for connoisseur that's common last name because first week on well i'm tired me too i hear you so we started denze this year you've met your den teacher which i hear is mr turnbaue he's standing right over there what two days a week can you get academic support as a freshman during your done time tuesdays and thursdays is that right mr turnbull oh so close so close i'm assuming it's then if it's not tuesdays and thursdays it must be [Music] who's getting interviewed here mr turnbower nick tuesdays and thursdays will be your den uh lesson so that means that uh wednesdays and fridays will be the academic support very good very good nick all right you get a lanyard good great job nick welcome to high school it's friday and i'm here with romina and apparently you're on like color guard or flats you guys will get to perform at blue and white night i think so yeah yeah i believe are so friday night blue and white night make sure you guys go there for a t-shirt we got a lot of changes every year and one of them is we got a ton of new teachers this year we got 33 new teachers can you name one [Music] all your teachers are returning teachers you don't have any new teachers happy friday wildcats i'm here with benjamin benjamin always wants students to get involved we got a busy weekend right away starting off we got to play uh tonight and saturday night featuring two brothers that are from the marvel universe can you tell me who those two brothers are i believe it's thor and loki it is thor and loki you kind of got a little thor vibe going and you get a wildcat pride t-shirt made by your very own bigotees team happy friday wildcats i'm here with leslie leslie and what year in school are you leslie i'm a senior senior congratulations you made it excited to be a senior yes i am all right great all right uh just like every year there's a lot of new changes around the building and one of them is we got a ton of new teachers we got like 33 new teachers here in the school did you know that yeah okay she knew that can you name one of them mr odishu yes mr odisha he's our new src teacher great job here's a new wildcat pride shirt for you made by the wegotes team [Music]
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yes 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 so we'll start with making a motion to accept consent agenda items motion by earl we have a second second by travis any discussion all of those in favor raise your right hand 7-0 um then we'll go to ask if there's any one person who would like to speak on any items that are on the agenda or any other topics no uh i do want to remind everyone that we are live streaming the board meeting tonight so we'll welcome those that are joining us online or those who catch the replay um so we'll start with um on the agenda items old business on neola approval nikki asking for approval for the neola policy for teacher appreciation grants no changes from previous and part of us getting approval for those grants annually so asking for approval so i have a motion by pat do i have a second second by tony any discussion all those in favor 7-0 next we go on to the the one finance the this is the second reading of the regular budget and there was no changes there's only a couple of little changes i'm going to talk about next slide please the only change i made on this slide was the fact that we will be advertising on september 9th it's no longer put in the paper so to be consistent with what we've done in the past i had two dates on there we really just do it on the 9th because that's two weeks before the public hearing so that will be that will be done after let's see i'm asking for permission i forgot to ask that yes i am asking permission to advertise though when we get to the end of this next slide no change in this either but i do have one little note we did the adjustment to fix adm from what we're seeing the trend to be and i also updated all of the sped numbers the honor graduate numbers and things like that and those basically offset each other so our adm numbers dropping but our other things brought it back up so we're still setting around the exact same numbers that you're seeing on here about the 30 million 400 000 so no change there which then brings us to the next slide which didn't change at all we're still going to be advertising 500 thousand dollars in rainy day 35 million in education 15 million in operations and 3.6 million in the debt service and you can burn through the rest of these slides because nothing really changed last time if you want to set just keep on going until we get down to keep going keep going keep going and another one and we'll get there next slide right there this basically a repeat of what i just said this is the last slide we always talk about this is what will be in the advertisement and with that is there any questions on this since there's really no changes but do you have any questions from two weeks ago or need any clarification on anything oh i guess i would like permission to advertise so um based on the this that was presented um do i have a motion um to allow philip to advertise the budget for 2023 motion by chelsea do i have a second a second by susan now is there any discussion no okay then all of those in favor is your hands seven oh anything else with that hello okay perfect thank you seth so we'll move on to new business um under programs so we have a teacher evaluation tool that needs approved yes so we're asking for approval for the teacher evaluation tool this year aaron stoner committee chair is here and i want to thank all the committee for their hard work on that the teachers have voted on the use of this tool for this year and it had a 97.8 passing rate so i've asked aaron to briefly kind of share some of the highlights of what's different with the plan as opposed to previous years and then i'll ask for approval okay as you flip through obviously you'll see any changes are in yellow most of these changes are just really clarifying or providing just making sure we're being as transparent as possible you'll see on page three and then multiple other times throughout the document where it really defines that the idea in that professional domain that the professional domain which is where you get or we're just making sure you are behaving at the bare minimums of professionalism here dressing interacting with colleagues that kind of thing that it does not do anything to help but if you are lacking in those basic areas it can negatively reflect upon that score by 0.25 correct um so that is that change is highlighted a couple times in there just to make sure like i said everyone is aware of it you'll also see there are some changes in there just taking out language that are referred to old methodology that was used particularly at the middle school about standing when you answered a question and that kind of thing which is a it's not a something that they follow anymore so it was taken out uh we also added in just a little bit more definition about the attendance teacher attendance and which is on page 12 under core professionalism um in addition to that so that any schools in our district who wish to go for stem certification through the state so that they have what they need through this document to be able to reach that certification there we have provided no changes at the top portion in those domains just further evidence that would allow for them to get what they need for stem certification so stem things that would be evidence of those different domains wonderful thank you thank you aaron they worked very hard as a committee we actually people joined the group this year typically as a committee we struggled to get plenty members on and we had at least five new members yeah and we didn't even offer different snacks or anything so that was exciting um so asking for approval for the evaluation tool for this school year so i have a motion by travis do we have a second second by pat any discussion okay then all those in favor next we have the assessment data presentation so i just want to share with the board our final assessment scores from last school year these are now not embargoed any longer by the state for any portion so i wanted to give a brief presentation tonight kind of on where our performance is at and what net steps we're taking as a corporation so next slide please so statewide assessment results for ilearn saw slight increases of an average of one to four percent this is across the state in the state subgroup performance continues to indicate significant and greater impacts for students in subgroup areas so covet and the pandemic we know affected certain cohorts of students who might have already been struggling um even greater than other peers and then finally across the state you'll see a trend and this is an interesting fact this is true in elementary and secondary that our kids are recovering in english language arts quicker than they're recovering in math and you see that in both jennings county and statewide beta next slide so i put this slide in there this is from not last year this is from last year's beginning of the year when the state studied what impact coveted had on our kids and they predicted at that time that it would take to reach pre-covered levels more than one year for certain student groups and one of those certain student groups is our free and reduced lunch or our kids who are living possibly in poverty and so that is still true and we would be in the second year of that status next slide statewide summary 41.2 of our kids statewide were at or above proficiency and ela and you see that difference that math is lagging slightly behind statewide with 39.4 at or above proficiency and math socioeconomic that's the one of those cohorts that we discussed that it takes longer for recovery from covet is what's predicted by research groups and you can see that was true in statewide data this year students who received paid meals potentially not living in poverty their passing rates as compared to those who might be living in poverty so what does it look like for us overall as a district i pulled a graph i really love some dashboards that five star provides for us as being a partner and one of those is showing the statewide average for all i learned scores third through eight and then what our jinx county average is and you can see prior to the pandemic in 2019 we were below scoring below state average and our parallel path that we've taken on recovery and the last two years we are showing a slightly greater rate of growth in ela from last year to this year than was the state average but we still are not meeting those same state average targets so definitely an area we're looking at in math you can see that we had a greater impact during that covered year from 2019 to 2020 than what was the state average and our growth trend is not quite matching yet what we're seeing at the state level so whereas math is a struggle for students statewide that's definitely echoed for us these are actual proficiency scores per each building and it is broken down by ela and math and then those two combined scores are the first category so you can see our district average fell at 23.6 that is actually the same district average of the prior year as well each individual score is then broken down by grade level so on this graph in the left hand column you'll see what we scored in 2021 by grade level what we scored in 2022 by grade level and then i also added a column to show you where that state average is falling some of our grades show growth from um the same grade number like third grade you can see we were 29 and 21 but then we showed growth as a third grade on the whole in 2022.
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knowing where we live work study and recreate does not change the past but a thorough understanding of on of the ongoing consequences of this past can empower us in our work to create a future that supports human flourishing and justice for all individuals and that's the land heritage statement uh thank you galen do you want to move on to the roll call sure okay okay commissioner needham commissioner needham council member dish present all right councilman uh commissioner graham commissioner graham councilmember griswold commissioner collywood here chairperson brown president in ann arbor commissioner president participating from my home in ann arbor okay uh vice chairperson mitchell here in ann arbor commissioner vandenbroe commissioner vandenbrook commissioner orio commissioner okay commissioner gibb randall you're in ann arbor commissioner martian commissioner martin commissioner gruber here in ann arbor all right uh commissioner nedrich here in ann arbor all right we have a quorum all right thank you galen so the next item on our agenda is the approval of the agenda so um is there a motion to approve the agenda as written um shannon seconded by john morsky is there any discussion raise your hand or speak up no suggested uh no suggested additions or modifications so um whoever approves the agenda as submitted uh raise your hand or say aye bye why it passes unanimously i believe um any news i don't i don't think i saw anything so no extensions either so the agenda has submitted um the next item on the agenda is the approval of the minutes from the july 28 meeting um is there a motion to consider the minutes i move the minutes be approved as submitted is there a second second shannon seconds um all who approve of the minutes of july 8th raise your hand to say aye hi mike um any opposed any uh okay they passed unanimously so moving right along here um this brings us to public commentary so uh this is an opportunity for persons to speak up for up to three minutes please call 1-888-788-0099 and enter meeting id 915-834 this information is also displayed on the meeting agenda and video feed city staff will select callers that will raise their hand one by one using the last three digits of your phone number in order to electronically raise your hand to indicate your desire to speak please press star 9 on your phone you will then hear an automated announcement that the host is allowing you to speak when speaking please move to a quiet area and mute any television or background sound so that we may hear you clearly please state your name and address at the beginning of your comments and be patient there is a delay of up to 30 seconds before a connection might be established galen is there anybody on the line right now right now there is no one okay let's wait 30 seconds okay for anybody on the line yet caitlin there's no one on the line okay then this ends the first public comment period uh there's a second one later on in the meeting around 8 30.
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we're going to go through all of the topics and there had been previous conversations with concerns um about the cert specific lessons that are being taught and i'll be giving an example i'll be reading through a combination of lesson plan and script for a lesson in second grade a lesson in fifth grade and a lesson in eighth grade those lessons are interlaced with the pacing um so if you'll indulge me i'll be going through the pacing now now one of the main concerns that parents had was opting out and i would like to let everyone know that the opt-out letters broken up by the pacing topics for kindergarten first second third fourth fifth middle school and high school have been posted on our district website they're actually reachable through the academics section under health and physical education but they're also reachable on every individual elementary school and school page under announcements so parents can easily find the opt out letter to identify the specific lesson that they would like to opt out of at the same time to make it much more clear to parents when this lesson will take place these opt-out letters will also be posted in each of the health teachers google classrooms which is where they list what they're teaching that week what topics are being taught that week so just in case someone isn't sure if they want to use the opt out now they can just go right to that teacher's google classroom once the year has begun and they can see exactly when the lesson will be taught and they can always submit their opt-out at that time um the opt-out is really very simple you reference the letter and you send an email to your building principal okay so here we go we begin with kindergarten the kindergarten health curriculum topics we have eight lessons on feelings including types of feelings stress mindfulness empathy conflict resolution bullying and teasing sharing and caring for others respect four lessons on self-care and hygiene one on dental care and three on germs four on community safety community helpers fire safety home safety and personal safety for on nutrition including healthy foods food groups and healthy versus unhealthy food before we move into first grade i just want to explain that was only about 20 lessons that's because in the elementary school health is not a full year course the health teachers come in for about 25 to 30 minutes into each class about 20 times per school year or two marking periods first grade once again we revisit feelings there are eight classes including stress mindfulness empathy resolution bullying and teasing sharing and caring for others respect and family friend relationships three more lessons on self-care and hygiene including tooth care germs communication when they're ill and the importance of sleep and rest five lessons on community safety including community helpers fire safety home safety personal safety emergency situations and using 9-1-1 and medicines four classes on nutrition including healthy food groups healthy foods food groups and healthy versus unhealthy food in second grade we have seven classes on feelings types of feelings stress mindfulness empathy conflict resolution bullying and teasing sharing and caring for others respect family and friend relationships safety one class each on stranger safety personal body safety and personal safety three classes on nutrition healthy food groups food groups and my plate healthy versus unhealthy food and once again self-care and hygiene including a combination of dental care germs communicating when you feel ill and the importance of sleep and rest we have three classes on social health including relationships roles of family members acceptance of individual choices or expressions and stereotypes and then one class that addresses physiological terminology and systems and in a moment i'm going to share that lesson with you but the physiological terminology and systems lesson addresses body parts including penis vagina testes and vulva and the muscular skeletal cardiovascular and respiratory system so here's a sample of what that lesson would look like the goals by the end of this lesson students should be able to correctly identify multiple body parts including two parts of the male or female genitals they will correctly identify basic body systems including the muscular skeletal cardiovascular and respiratory system and they'll be able to explain why it's important to know the correct terminology for their body parts including the names for genitals this is part of a growing movement in schools and youth organizations to teach correct terminology rather than euphemisms so following the updated standards the pers the lesson would go something like this the classroom teacher would come in and we have some scripting in these lessons so that we can guide our teachers to exactly how to talk about the topics we're talking about so we'd introduce the topic hey boys and girls today we're going to talk about our bodies including parts that we all have in common parts that are different and parts that are covered when we're in public explain that it's important that everyone knows that their how their body works you need to know you have a body you need to know how it works and how to take care of it so we can all be healthy the teacher will do something simple like calling out important parts of the body while asking students to point to that part of the body such as eyes nose arms legs etc once students point to that body part you'd ask them well what does it do eyes are for seeing legs are for walking and running noses for smelling it may then go into a conversation along the lines of even though we all have a nose do they all look the same they look different we all have eyes do they look the same do they look different we all have skin does our skin look the same does it look different even though our bodies do the same things we can look different and then we would move into naming and defining the body systems including the muscular system skeletal system and so forth the new vocabulary to this lesson is identifying that there are parts that are covered by your bathing suit these are the parts that you don't show off in public these are the parts that you don't show anyone except your parents or your doctor and those then they would say well what are those parts well boys would have a penis or testes girls would have a vagina which is the external female genitals um the internal female genitals and a volvo which is the external female genitals it would be as simple as that moving on in terms of illustrations there was a major concern that was brought to us by a concerned community member about the introduction of pornographic illustrations we are not demonstrating pictures or showing pictures of the specific body parts the illustrations will be these are the parts that are covered by your bathing suit your bathing suit parts parts that you keep private and here we have the illustrations that would be used in class as you can see it's pointing to the external part of the girl's body that says vulva and it's she's covered up the growing area is pointed out covered up same for the boy and one major focus of this is the body safety rules that no one should see touch take a photo or video of the parts of our body that we keep covered by our bathing suit these are our private parts and then it goes into talking to a trusted adult if somebody tries to touch or view those body parts and that is it for the 20-minute second grade physiological terminology lesson now we're going to go back to our pacing in grade 3 we have 10 lessons on safety and community health these include emergency services like 911 police fire and poison control school safety support like the nursing counselor addressing the effects of climate change and current prevention protocols including pollution and recycling efforts community health centers water safety which includes swimming and lifeguards asthma and allergy care and prevention [Music] sun safety including skin exposure hydration and spf protection stranger interactions motor vehicle safety such as seat belts communicating safely through digital media and personal boundaries in friendships and then the third graders get 10 more detailed classes on nutrition and food safety how healthy eating habits affect wellness choosing healthy foods to create a balanced meal storing and handling foods meal timing meal frequency where to find healthy foods nutrition facts and food labeling food allergies food preparation nutrition goals and nutritional trends in fourth grade we go in more detail into systems there are nine classics classes on basic anatomy and physiology as related to health conditions and diseases students learn about cells and organs the circulatory system the respiratory system the digestive system the skeletal system the muscular system diseases which are infectious and communicable mental health impact on wellness and the medical professionals role in overall health then there are 11 classes on medicines and drugs this includes alcohol tobacco and other drugs students learn to identify tobacco-containing products such as e-cigarettes and vapes they explain the unhealthy effect of tobacco use they learn to identify alcohol containing products they explain the unhealthy effects of alcohol use they identify over-the-counter drugs and they review the use and misuse of over-the-counter drugs and that even over-the-counter drugs must be used with parental or doctors supervision we identify illicit drugs like inhalants opioids non-prescription cannabis and other drugs they review substance abuse disorders and the unhealthy effects they review assistance available for people with substance abuse they learn ways to say no to drugs and they practice common interactions with peer pressure so they can say no to drugs they learn about drug misuse and how that can affect their relationship with family friends and community then we have 12 classes on personal growth and development injury prevention sleep nutrition including food choices and healthy habits the importance of physical activity life management skills stress management goal setting self-image emotional health hygiene doctors visits including checkups physicals and blood work and dental hygiene including dental visits and then we have classes the three classes on adolescence which is the puberty social and sexual health the main lesson takes one to two classes and then there's one class on demonstrating ways to promote dignity and respect for all people uh the two classes that we normally would be done in fourth grade back in the day these were the classes that were taught boys in one room girls in another but it's been decades since well over a decade that we've been doing them together and the students learn about puberty physical the physical changes including the hormonal changes that cause puberty as well as secondary sex characteristics social and emotional changes and they learn to identify the health care professionals with whom these changes can be discussed they do learn about human reproduction and that ways pregnancy can occur but they differ and they differentiate between sexual orientation and gender but by definition only they explain the importance to communicate with their trusted adults about these topics now i'm going to go through a sample lesson plan with some scripting again to give the teachers an idea of how they're going to be addressing this lesson in but this was actually written by our teachers and this is how our teachers have been addressing this lesson up to now so the goals of the lesson are to describe the physical and emotional changes of puberty children are taught to anticipate puberty with positive feelings and to recognize that the timing of change is individual students will distinguish among the definitions of erection menstruation nocturnal emission ovum puberty and sperm they learn the purpose of bras athletic supporters and menstrual hygiene products they learn to distribute puberty facts from puberty myths and it is reinforced that being curious about puberty health in your body is normal and that you should ask questions and have conversations about it with your trusted adults so the lesson would be introduced and i'm going to give you some of the scripted examples that our teachers are provided with but which they then themselves have created so the lesson would start off usually something like is anyone feeling nervous today it's okay it's normal to be nervous sometimes when people are nervous they laugh it's okay to laugh because i want this lesson to be fun but you all know the difference between laughing with each other and at each other so remember we're trying to develop respect what is puberty puberty is the physical and emotional changes that occur in the transition between childhood and adulthood does it happen in one day no keep in mind these changes occur slowly over time why do you think puberty is important to learn about what happens to everyone it might have started already for some of you puberty can be scary but it's a lot less scary if you know what to expect the teacher will set up ground rules called group agreements and they'll set up rules to help everyone feel more comfortable with the conversation so boys and girls listening listening is important listen to me listen to each other make sure that if you're laughing you're not interfering with anyone else's learning if you have to giggle that's fine but pull it back together because if we're laughing too much we won't be able to listen and learn a lot of this lesson is just to demystify the conversation be respectful what is it like to be respectful in class some of you may have learned about puberty already and know more than others and that's okay just remember we're all learning together i don't want anyone laughing at each other making someone feel bad for participating you're all fifth graders you're mature enough to handle this i promise it's also important that we don't use words like gross or disgusting because all the changes we'll discuss aren't totally normal and saying that words like gross or disgusting could make someone feel bad about their body ask questions it's important it's normal to be curious about this stuff the students are encouraged to raise their hand ask questions as they go [Music] are there any rules that they'd like to add to the list then they're going to review the major changes that occurred during puberty this might be brainstormed as three lists or it might be a venn diagram again talking about typical development and reminding students that this is not the case development varies by student and they're going to compare what are the changes for females for males and what changes happen to everyone for females they'll discuss how hips widen breasts develop ovulation menstruation and vaginal discharge for males they'll talk about their shoulders broadening facial hair deepening voices sperm production erections and nocturnal emissions and then the venn diagram in the middle would show what happens to everyone during puberty everyone grows taller most people get acne sweat body odor pubic and underarm hair their genitals enlarge they develop crushes they become self-conscious their moods change and then the real goal of this lesson is this part and this is some of the scripting the teachers share with the students that it's really important to have healthy communication with your parents or another adult that you trust so that they can answer the questions you have about these topics at home the children are encouraged to talk to their family even if it might feel uncomfortable and the teachers do things like diffuse that by saying i have a secret for you your parents sometimes feel uncomfortable about talking about this too some of your parents might be even more uncomfortable than you and we encourage them to talk to their parents and we encourage them to talk or to another trusted adult in their life and that's it it ends with hey congratulations you've survived puberty class now what kind of illustrations or visuals would students be getting in this so here we have two very basic charts as you can see there are no body parts shown here they're very generic for the boy the poster talks about body size and voice hair changes skin changes changes with their penis what is sperm and the body shape for girls same thing body size hair changes skin changes menstruation breasts and body shape and that's it that is the fifth grade puberty lesson usually one lesson sometimes two but that's the whole that's the entirety of the lesson and now we're going back into our topics and i hope that what we're seeing and hearing from this is that even the health curriculum our comprehensive health and physical education curriculum is very wide from kindergarten through 12th grade the health portion is just a subset of that and the portion on sexuality is even smaller it's tiny in comparison to all these topics so in sixth grade there will be a series of lessons on personal growth and development including individual actions affecting health genetics family history responsible actions behaviors and development and health of oneself more detail on bodily systems skeletal system digestive system nervous system lymphatic system endocrine system cardiovascular system respiratory system and immune system emotional health including self-management skills mental health social health and emotional health personal safety hazards in personal space community safety healthy and safe choices and preventing injuries community health services and support including cpr health conditions and emergencies life skills training cpr with hands only traumatic stress and suicide prevention dependency substance disorder and treatment and they do spend almost two weeks learning about how to prevent dependency substance disorder and treatment in the areas of alcohol drugs and tobacco in seventh grade we have about a week on emotional health self-management skills mental situations psychological situations emotional situations and personal relationships once again we revisit drug alcohol and tobacco use and prevention with the topics of drugs alcohol tobacco substance abuse dependency vaping and peer pressure and then we go into nutrition nutritional wellness diet healthy eating meal planning calories health and performance unit on lifelong fitness what is the fit principle social and mental and physical benefits of lifelong fitness physical um performance and health status and then personal safety bodily autonomy personal boundaries bullying teasing and preventing sexual abuse we have community health services and support developing an advocacy plan personal health family health community health global health and pregnancy and parents what are the strategies of a pregnancy prenatal care pregnancy testing signs of pregnancy pregnancy options adolescent parenting and resources to assist with parenting now we move into eighth grade topics healthy behaviors personal health responsible actions emotional health self-management skills mental situations psychological situations emotional situations and personal relationships and here we have more detail in the area of social and sexual health healthy and non-healthy relationships communication skills friendships romantic and sexual relationships sexual behaviors consent vaginal oral and anal sex contraception and stds community health services and support including health conditions and emergencies sexual health services life skills training suicide prevention cpr and aed breast self-examination strategies to address health issues and health conditions diseases and medicines including genetics health conditions diseases and illnesses sexually transmitted infections including signs symptoms and potential impacts and abstinence personal safety including sexual consent sexual agency sexual harassment sexual assault domestic violence dating violence sex traffickers and exploiters all about prevention and personal safety dependency substance disorders and treatment the impact of drugs and alcohol substance disorders community health services and social and emotional well-being now i'm going to give you a sample lesson in the health curriculum when we spoke um earlier a couple of times already we spoke about the fact that any conversation about sexuality must by law begin with the promotion of abstinence so the lesson topics for this lesson include abstinence and sexually transmitted infections and sexually transmitted diseases teachers clearly state that abstinence and and teach children need to leave these lessons knowing abstinence is the only 100 percent effective way to prevent a sexually transmitted infection or a sexually transmitted disease students need to be able to correctly recall that there's a gap between when a person may know about versus start to have sex they describe at least two ways including sexually transmitted infections including hiv can be transmitted they need to be able to name at least one health care center in the area to which they can go for sexually transmitted infection testing and treatment that is affordable and available to them and this includes something like their pediatrician's office the lesson would begin where sexual abstinence is defined as refraining from all forms of sexual activity and genital contact including vaginal oral or anal sex an as abstinent person is somewhat children are taught that an abstinent person is someone who has either never had sex or someone who might have had sex but has decided not to continue having sex for a period of time again abstinence being the only 100 effective way to prevent an std or sti and the goal is for everyone in a particular class to feel that this relates to them and their life just like with the fifth grade lesson the eighth grade lessons include are intended to be respectful inclusive of many perspectives and allow students to see themselves and understand their own health and sexuality um some more scripting for the teacher is that abstinence piece that is it begins the lesson and it continues throughout the lessons the topics are introduced by explaining that contraceptives are a way to prevent the transmission of sexually transmitted infections and sexually transmitted diseases um if people were to engage in vaginal oral or anal sex there are many kinds of birth control that work but only if they're used consistently and correctly this means methods are used every time the way they're intended to teachers teach them that all methods may work a little differently but some protect for right now some for a short period of time some for a long period of time they review the types of contraceptives the teacher will [Music] use use terminology like we've reviewed contraceptive methods we've learned that some are effective in preventing stis and stds they're going to look a little closer at two ways which stis and hiv can be transmitted they need to be able to name at least one step that they plan to personally take to reduce or eliminate their chance of contracting one of these diseases as well as identify their pediatrician or other local health center to get treatment should something like this happen to them and again one they're reminded at the end and throughout that if they have any questions about the content of the lesson that it needs to be referred to their trusted adult now in ninth grade this is the same sexual um education curriculum that we've had for many many years and it is much more detailed in ninth grade we start with a unit on pregnancy and anatomy they review the email reproductive system organs and ways to keep healthy the female reproductive system organs the menstrual cycle and ways to keep healthy fertilization what is a fetus an embryo trimesters the uterus during pregnancy healthy stages of pregnancy stages of birth and types of delivery they go into social and emotional health relationships emotions bullying counseling depression grief and loss suicide prevention and trauma in ninth grade this is a full marking period that does meet five days a week they go into sexual health and std and stis in more detail they review bacterial stds like chlamydia gonorrhea and syphilis viral stds like herpes hiv hpv and hepatitis parasitic stds including pubic lys scabies and trichomoniasis the symptoms treatment prevention and myths and truths about these stds and sdis they review contraceptives in more detail than they had ever before including barrier methods like the male condom the female condom the cervical cabin diaphragm chemical methods such as spermicides hormonal methods such as the birth control pill birth control shot nuva ring ortho eva patch and iuds behavioral methods such as abstinence timing method and withdrawal method surgical methods such as vasectomies and tubal ligation non-surgical methods like as escher side effects effectiveness and proper use of these types of contraceptives they learn in detail how to um self-administer a female breast exam and for males a male testicular exam there are lessons on consent for to prevent sexual assault rape acknowledgement of the age of consent and laws related to consent and then we go into community health community-based programs and settings schools work sites health healthcare facilities and communities chronic diseases injury and violence prevention mental illness and behavioral health unintended pregnancy oral health tobacco use substance abuse nutrition physical activity obesity prevention now we're in 10th grade i'm not going to read every detail for 10th grade because that is exclusively driver safety and every topic that you see listed here tied to the standards is chapter by chapter the driver education safety book that is released by the state of new jersey in the dmv and it starts off with legal procedures and obtaining a license all the way to how to drive how to stop a vehicle buying and insuring a car two wheel vehicles and then four more weeks continuing on use of seat belts and safety safe driving road hazards highway driving driving in the city threat net recognition accident prevention etc and that is the 10th grade health curriculum in its entirety in 11th grade we go into nutrition eating habits personal nutrition health plans nutritional trends and the relationship between nutrition and physical activity then we have the unit on drugs and alcohol drug use and misuse commonly abused substances and health risk behaviors we go into first aid life skills training personal protective equipment responding to an emergency scene assessment medical emergencies environmental emergencies and first aid kit contents they go into detail on cpr and aeds including how to perform cpr on an adult child or infant and how to use an aed on an adult child or infant they go into common and chronic illnesses including common diseases and health conditions as well as social emotional health including relationships emotions bullying counseling depression grief and loss suicide prevention trauma and once again they revisit the female breast exam of the male testicular exam and go into community health community-based programs and settings school worksite healthcare facilities in their communities mental illness and behavioral health unintended pregnancy substance abuse nutrition physical activity obesity prevention they go into sec um with the consent education to help prevent sexual assault rape age of consent and understanding of the laws of consent they continue with relationships and consent they learn about healthy and unhealthy relationships sexual abuse relationship skills for boys and girls rejection breakups and moving on abusive relationships sexual assault and prevention again rape age of consent and laws of consent and then we move into death and dying communicating about death and dying practical matters related to death and dying and the funeral and related items and finally we are in 12th grade health just before graduation in community health they review community-based programs and settings schools worksites healthcare facilities and communities chronic diseases injury and violence prevention mental illness behavioral health unintended pregnancy substance abuse and obesity prevention they go over anxiety and stress once again managing stress addictive personalities anxiety and panic attacks depression and mood strings post traumatic stress disorder academic anxiety and over scheduling and stress they go into goal setting planning their future choosing a college joining the military living on their own paying for college skills and success working getting a job they go into personal safety once again we revisit the breast and testicular exams for cancer prevention and how to address peer pressure and social norms they go into social emotional health with emotions counseling depression grief and loss suicide prevention and trauma and lifelong fitness the benefits basic components body composition energy balance the activity triangle nutrition exercise fitness diseases wellness and sleep and we have now reached the end of all of the topics which our students will learn in comprehensive health and physical education with a focus on the health education component from gates grades k through 12.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
in pre-k had 530 students k-8 14 352 students high school 8196 for a grand total of just over 23 000 students 23.078 and so that is our enrollment as of 8 17 and staffing since may 20th which was the close of last school year we've hired 390 staff members and teaching vacancies we're continuing to work hard on filling those currently we still have 24 elementary school teaching vacancies and two high school and we'll continue to work hard to fill those positions so and the good news from my understanding this afternoon is that that elementary number is now 23. fantastic it does it does change daily as we're working hard every day to hire and uh thank you to the hard work of school administration and hr staff to continue to hire staff thank you for the information just out of curiosity what are we doing to address the uh the shortage to cover the classrooms so um right now either short or long term subs are being utilized to cover classrooms in some instances we've had like a interventionist transfer back to the classroom to cover that classroom while we're looking for a teacher it's a fourth grade teacher so you know it's a hard staffing time when you have a fourth grade classroom you cannot hire for it's not you know typically it's always been special education which certainly is the case but um just um those a variety of things so do we tap into um like the interventionists and i know like we also have our um like church teaching and learning specialists are they are we able to transition them into classrooms if we absolutely need to yes absolutely okay thank you any other questions or comments from the board i do one dr polling the teachers excuse me the long-term staff that we have in those classrooms right now are they are any of them retired teachers people that have actually been in classrooms for more than three to five years i i have no doubt i don't know that number but but i'm sure there are some okay i don't have that exact number yes but we have a variety of staff absolutely that do long term so it's wonderful all right thank you yep any other questions or comments from the board okay we'll move to information discussion item g2 information on establishing board liaisons with the cities of surprise el mirage and young town city councils dr dean madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet in our community um this item is brought forth from previous uh board conversation and board agendas to discuss the possibility of establishing board liaisons with the three cities listed uh surprising mirage and i believe actually it's the town of young town if i remember correctly i have spoken with the city manager of of surprise i'm i'm playing phone tag the city manager from el mirage miss dikes and i have spoken many times in the last two weeks um about many other topics that were pertinent this one just hasn't we haven't connected yet um in conversation with the city of surprise the city manager stated that they are opening to or open to beginning the conversation about the liaison and looking to see how that would work as we move forward and so it's an opportunity for us should the board have interest down the road to establish or re-establish i should say this liaison it's an opportunity for us to start that conversation and outlining the purpose of each um of each organization's approach to this so as i stated the city of surprise is on board to start the conversation the other two cities we're waiting to to have that conversation with thank you um dr dean are you able to provide any historical context as far as like when did we when we used to have at least for el mirage and surprise we used to have liaison which i feel like it's really important to just build those collaborations those relationships with our cities and so i'm so glad we're also including the town of young town because we do have students in young town as well but do you recall like why that stopped madam president so i have some historical knowledge in this my 18th year in the school district uh you know i i want to start by stating that we have exceptionally positive relationships with the cities that that we serve and so um between the city of surprise the city of el mirage and the town of young town when when we work with them our collaboration is outstanding and and they're great partners to us and we are great partners equally great partners back to them there was a time when uh the board i believe the board had and the superintendent at the time had had felt that it would be a positive another positive step forward to have a liaison from our governing board to the councils and uh and have opportunities to have conversations on happenings in the district um and happenings in the city and so once upon a time i believe our very own mr williams who i saw once um this afternoon um i thought i saw him but mr williams actually was a council member in surprise and he actually served as the liaison for the city council and so um our liaison and the city council liaison would get together and that often included the superintendent and the city manager in those conversations as well and it was an opportunity for them to again just share information things that were happening back and forth and potentially discuss ideas of partnerships or you know potentially new collaborative opportunities exactly why that ended i'm not 100 certain other than i do recall that that the purpose of the meetings began to wane and the information that was shared back and forth started to get very short and so the meetings became five and ten minute meetings and so i believe that over time those just started to fizzle out and that's just the best of my recollection um you know from today as i stated we have great relationships with the city staff in in all of the cities and so it's it's a wonderful thing that we have going with each of our cities they understand the importance of our success to their cities and we understand the importance of their success to our school system and so um you know we continue operating in that perspective if we were to move forward with this i think it's important that we start to look at an outline of what exactly we would see as a purpose that i could then share with the city managers to share with their councils and mayors to move forward with that as well okay thank you um i'll open up to the rest of the board well if i recall um our board liaison was and um uh she accompanied dr platnick dr kellis and i think you are right that it did kind of fizzle out a little bit there um but we haven't had one since 2020.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
the more interesting data to look at though are keeping kids are apples to apples in groups so the kids who were third graders in 2021 are the mostly same group of kids who are fourth graders in 2022 so that's another way to look at the data whether we're growing in grade level standards year to year or whether cohorts of kids are improving you'll see mostly in language arts we did see cohorts of kids recovering stronger in ela which matches our overall data than we'll see on math in the next slide an interesting data point for us as a district is our kids who were the youngest tested students during covid saw the greatest impacts so last year our third and fourth graders we saw the greatest impacts this year it's that same group of students who were fourth fifth graders so that's something we definitely have our eye on coming up for the next year knowing that our current fifth and sixth graders have great levels of covet impact compared somewhat to peers our third grade i learned scores follow this same trajectory we're about two percent different than we were last year's scores and that's really dependent per building um where our scores fell we have buildings seeing great success with using science of reading strategies and that is something that we're sharing data on internally and trying to make sure that we're recreating things that we know are working with kids for intervention like our barton reading and spelling program with all of our students that takes us through some secondary data at the high school level the statewide average in biology is 30 our 2021 scores were 15 and we saw slight growth in 2022 at 17.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
um so there's no special presentations uh there's no unfinished business so the next item on the agenda is new business so um this is going to be a bit different um as you all know there was a contamination of the huron river by chromium 6 on july 29th i believe it was reported to igua on august 2nd i think and iglet started a testing program on the 2nd and the 4th and it's all uh it's all uh we've been lucky um i looked into it quite a bit um i asked city staff if they wanted to come and do a presentation about it but they declined and subsequently now you see that um um if you look at the uh here the best information i've seen is with the heroin river watershed council or with the uh county washington county health um you know health department uh because mdhhs and uh and iva are the primary government regulators um they're supposed to respond quickly to this sort of thing so as i'm sure you all know um there was instead of some eight thousand pounds of chromium-6 that released into the river uh we only got uh something like 40 pounds so a very lower a much lower number that's that's i'm sure that's just a rough estimate anyway and so uh um if anybody has any questions we can talk about that but i thought i've given that event that what i would do is uh just have an open discussion among all of us on various water quality issues um because as you know we uh we've been a little bit quiet since we did the storm on on water quality issues since we looked at the storm water you know special storm water management district overlay about a year ago and we have some new commissioners now that are forming a nucleus of the new water quality working group so i thought this would be a good opportunity to just have a have a discussion among ourselves about uh about what you know what the challenges and threats are uh overall for the city's water quality um both coming in and going out and um and see what we uh and see what how we all feel about uh about these various uh threats and what kind of prioritization we might wish to uh bring to all these issues so i think that'll help us get centered and oriented towards making a contribution to the community and city council on these sorts of topics so i just drew up you know the the small presentation that i drew up and posted on legistar and that uh kalyn distributed yesterday um is just basically a guide for discussion just to try to structure it a little bit now so we're not wandering all over the place so i'll i will try to moderate this discussion uh and so if you like to chip in now please raise your hand at any time um but before i do that i looked into into the chromium-6 issue and i um and i attended the rally that was held outdoors up in milford which was attended by yusuf ravi um the chairman of the oakland county commission kathy griswold was there a number of other people from the local uh from the statewide environmental community you know environmental ngos and you know it was uh as you all know um it was uh there was also some potential criminal liability because there was an alarm that went off uh and uh 460 times and it was just turned off and this happened after hours by an employee that wasn't supposed to be there who resigned the next monday so i checked in with jeff irwin and lucifer avi about this and they both told me that in this circumstance um the investigative authority is with eva um and it's the attorney general that has the prosecutorial authority so i think over the next few months we'll see what transpires here that i think it just outlines you know since we're the major community downstream of wixom and this tribal plant um i think we we all need to pursue this as diligently as we can and make sure that this this just doesn't happen again because as you know obviously was the same um the same um you know corporation that contaminated the haram river with fifas for many years and uh you know this basically happened because they have an eye they have an existing um industrial pre-treatment permit to run all their waste that's pre-treated for hazardous substances supposedly before it goes into the uh waste whitson municipal wastewater treatment plant but um you know uh the p-fat pfos compounds and pfoa compounds have are still not listed as hazardous waste and so for that reason that they're not they they know they don't um necessarily declare that they're releasing them because i think these can only be uh my understanding of the law and please contradict me if i'm wrong is that uh they're only they're only required to list on what uh official um you know epa i uh identified and defined hazardous substances are um you know that's all they're required to report to the government what the government says is toxic and so this is a major of course um a loophole within our um the safe drinking water act and the clean water act so this kind of thing needs to need to be this is one of these things that needs to be addressed at the federal level because that's where the original authority comes from and uh you know my understanding is the michigan state has laws that michigan state is not allowed to regulate anything um any uh and re-regulate anything uh more more stringently than what the federal government regulates so the state of michigan was somewhat hampered there until uh and this provided them the authority the fact that just the fact that the epa wasn't regulating the most hazardous substances allowed michigan state government to do that so um so um here we are and i think this is going to be an ongoing discussion during the coming year but um um i will share my screen i think galen can i get permission to share my screen okay here we go um do you see the green box at the bottom yeah i do um hang on a second recording in progress well here we go so i got it okay i just still had it in my uh you know in my icon bar can everybody see this okay so yeah just raise your hand if you want to step in here and um i'll i'll work the slide deck so um in the general category of improving water quality in the antarctica region um uh the uh there's four separate categories you can think of there's a drinking water there's our storm water that's released into the huron river and the groundwater where we have several contamination plumes we have the uh you know the galman 1 4 dioxane plume and we also have various plumes of trichloroethylene for example coming from some legacy dry cleaning establishments here in the city um and then we also have of course we release compounds into the huron river through our wastewater treatment and our and waste the water is separated out from the solids and the solids are are they used to be called sewage sludge but a number of years ago uh you know various people wanted to have a prettier term for it so they call them biosolids now not sewage sludge um and so those biosolids are spread on fields and ann arbor's biosolids are and are receiving order contracts with various companies over the years to spread our the biosolids from our wastewater treatment plant onto agricultural fields nearby so that's a matter of public record um that's kept by the state so i have i have some of that data that i've collected so i'm happy to share that with anybody who's interested in a commission or principally through the uh you know through the water quality working group and um as we can just look over the data and the information and see what uh what uh what we might make of it and what we want to bring to the full commission in the near future you know during the coming year so um so let's just address drinking water first um so there uh as you know we've got 85 or so of our drinking water comes from the toronto river um the water intake is uh important pond you know upstream of the dam and uh we get about another 15 of our standard capacity from various wells you know that are around uh uh that are placed around western and or uh and insider township i believe so what are the different threats to this water quality uh first of all um there's industrial and commercial sources so these are what are normally called point sources and these are the ones that the government regulates uh point sources particularly um through the uh clean water act and the safe drinking water act so we have that tri-bar plant there are actually four um chrome plating plants owned by tribal that are up in uh up in wickson and so they again they released pfas in the liver and they released uh chromium-6 just recently they reported that but you know um it's it's always difficult to say what else they may have released which is not which is actually toxic that has never been defined as a toxic substance by the government so um so this is an ongoing problem that's going to happen until we can reform on some of the federal laws or perhaps if we can find the room in the state if the federal government is not stepping up and we can petition the state government and try to get to our elected representatives trying to get the state government to try to address some of these toxins as happened with peoples and uh just to for a rough overview you know the fifa's contamination was not discovered until it was um added by the epa to what's called the uh unregulated contaminant monitoring rule which is a modification of epa's authority so that epa can test for various substances that are not regulated currently that they think might be a might be released prominently and might be health hazards um throughout the united states and so part of the ucmr3 um the the samples were collected in 2014 and epa reported the data in 2015 and that's when and ann arbor's drinking water plant was one of the testing sites for ucmr food and that's when um the pfos contamination and other p-thousand compounds were discovered to exist in our drinking water so the city of ann arbor uh reacted as promptly as they could and initiated i believe initiated um actions to try to figure out what the source was way back in 2015 or 2016.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
are there any questions commissioners any questions from commissioners dr robinsozzi miss lovage i just want to ask a question that i've been asked by you know some people and and we've discussed um in eighth grade why even mention the term anal sex why is it even in the standards because we have students who are participating in sexual activities in middle school and there is a misconception that anal sex is not sex so you will have students who avoid oral sex or vaginal sex but feel that anal sex is safe and appropriate for them to indulge in anyone else we'll start over here miss password um so the lessons are all broken down into categories and two weeks yes okay so um if i'm a parent that i want to choose like i'm going to a restaurant a la carte wrestling can i pick and choose can i opt out of certain lessons or i have to opt out of the whole curriculum you actually cannot opt out of the whole curriculum you can only opt out of individual lessons which is why we have the list of topics for each broken out by the grade levels where opting out tends to take place but have it broken out from k through 12 those are now on our website and a parent can send in and indicate that i do not they'll send an email to the principal saying i would like to opt my child out of the following topic and this is backed up with what is in the teacher's google classroom where they're going to show exactly when they're teaching that lesson as that reminder that you have sent in this email to opt out of this topic this topic is coming up this week and the parents will see that but the school will also have that on file of which children would then be opted out of that lesson and given an alternative activity okay so my other question would be to that is that because we have to teach these standards and they're mandated by the state of new jersey if a child doesn't take a couple sections or they uh there are certain things i have a couple questions but i'm going to give this four to my colleagues before i continue is what do we substitute for those lessons and how do we make it that they're able to get the credit for that curriculum that's mandated the students will be excused from the topic so they would not get a negative penalizing grade for missing a topic but they would be given an alternative lesson that is part of that curriculum usually something that's already been taught if they're in the upper grades they'd be given one of these you know probably an article in the area of health on a previously taught topic and have to do some kind of a response because it for in the upper grades most likely but not always they would be in the media center um and that's the perfect place to be you know on their chromebook and doing some reading an article and responding to it in the lower grades they'll most likely not be getting an alternative lesson but they'll get to do something like go on imagine math or go on um you know robotify in another classroom or in the media center or do some other activity mr paris did you have anything um miss belgium i um just for clarification the lessons that go on in the second grade those seem to be the most controversial um where were those previously um it's only a sing it's only a single lesson with four vocabulary words the four vocabulary words were not specified previously anywhere until fifth grade or where where was it prior they really never specified naming specific vocabulary words in the old curriculum so it would have come along in in fifth grade when you're learning about your body about your chan the puberty changes and then you'd hear about it again in eighth grade and into high school and the mandate is for it has to occur in second grade for like seven-year-old students by the end of second grade a student should be able to name whether they have a penis a vagina a vulva or testes okay okay um mr awad anything mr abu java thank you president smith mr slovers thank you very much for your um presentation um can you so when should parents expect or if they want to opt out at what point would they receive that is that before the school year after school year at what point should they could go on the website right now okay and let's play those devil's advocate a little bit let's say there's nothing on the state level now but if there's a majority of opt-outs does the district foresee i mean obviously we have to report the numbers i'm assuming and please tell me if i'm wrong who opts in who and who opts out number wise um we've never been asked to report that in the past okay so to you to to or through you are through the presence of the superintendent maybe schools love is going to answer this um do we anticipate to report these numbers who opts in who upset if we have a majority of opt-out versus opt-in we've heard of nothing not i doubt that's something that's even on the radar and the reason i mention is because a lot of people have been asking and obviously i've been throwing towards the superintendent because he's he's more knowledgeable than this but um the question i've been receiving or i've been hearing just in seeing on various places so what happens if more people opt out then opt in so people are asking well is there going to be an opt-out option that's not my pre-view and that's not your peer review no superintendents that's a state level that's just from my knowledge base am i wrong or yeah i think that that's that's correct i just want the public to understand to understand what the chain of command what the pecking order on this is from how it's being handed down and to understand at the same time um we cannot foresee the future we cannot foresee what's gonna happen opt-ins with opt-outs even if this is maybe just wiped out next year and the governor decides to wake up and say you know what didn't work as planned as i thought it would so i just wanted to confirm that thank you vice president daley nothing mr levitt you just leveraged thank you so so much for that uh extensive and uh a great presentation i know you took a great deal of time to present that so thank you again i'm very grateful to our teaching staff and our super our former supervisor nicole turi and our new supervisors um stephen vienna and all the teachers who worked on compiling all of the information and how it will be taught in pacing throughout the school year excuse me uh mr president through you to the superintendent can we get a copy of this um so we have it for ourselves and i have i have one other question i'm sorry can you explain to me in second grade what personal body safety means that really focuses specifically on the please do not touch my parts that are covered by a bathing suit it's that little poster that was that i showed an example of that no one should touch or see or videotape or take pictures of parts that are covered by the bathing suit and yes we will share with the entire board and this will also be posted in the health and curriculum the curriculum section of the website where we have all of the other presentations that we have done including the community presentations and there will be other community presentations coming up in september um with dates that are going to be posted on the website um if they're not already there mr president sorry one more thing um because mrs kuslov mentioned community um is that community presentation going to be like how we had a few weeks or about a month month and a half ago where we have in school and you'll see where i'm going with this uh we can try to do one in person we could i can speak to the the to rutgers and see if we can maybe do one of them in person at the high school and one of them virtually we do tend to get far far more parent participation when they have that virtual option um and the reason i'm asking and i asked superintendent this um i believe a couple days ago uh you know all your hard work your staff's hard work of putting this together and trying to discuss about what's happening uh in terms of curriculum and people are like well i didn't know i wasn't aware of that there is some sort of presentation being done whether it's virtual or in person have we actually ever thought going into the community picking a location or two locations on one on each side of town because it seems obviously that most of the people who are speaking out are our religious institutions whether it be a synagogue a mosque or a church have we decided to maybe pick one location of each on each side of town and maybe do an open house in coordination with them rather than doing on a school property that maybe we can do something within the community itself that had not been discussed previously but i would leave that in the hands of dr robertosi thank you okay again thank you so much for that presentation we know that took a great amount of time and we appreciate that thank you [Applause] okay leave this light okay we'll move on to public recognition this portion of the meeting is open to residents and non-residents of clifton for the purpose of addressing any subject matter pertinent to and or directly related to the operation of the clifton public school district residents and non-residents are requested if they're in person to sign the register provided for this purpose all speakers are asked to state their names municipality in which they live in subject matter before they speak comments are limited to five minutes per person issues raised by members of the public may or may not be responded to by the board all comments will be considered and are responsibly forthcoming if and when appropriate your questions may or may not be answered by board members during their comments the board asks that members of the public be courteous and mindful of the rights of other individuals when speaking specifically comments regarding students and employees of the board are discouraged and will not be responded to by the board students and employees have specific legal rights afforded by the laws of the state of new jersey the board bears no responsibility nor will it be liable for any comments made by members of the public members of the public should consider their comments in light of the legal rights of those affected or identified in their comments and be aware that they are legally responsible and liable for their comments uh we'll start uh do you have anyone on uh we do would you like to start with the yeah let's start with that first we'll start with the those that are online certainly just so those that are here get an opportunity to hear them okay we have um lady esperanza hello hi how are you good how are you i'm pretty thank you so much okay you're uh you're free to address the board now you have five minutes tommy you have five minutes to address the board okay yeah yeah actually it's possible to speak with somebody in spanish um if not i can't try it but i'm like not too good to speak but i can try we have we have someone here that may be able to help you out okay oh i appreciate it thank you so much okay she was just joining us and she didn't realize it was public speaking is this um i don't know if this is motion to close the uh virtual second by uh mr uh motion made by mr arbor java seconded by mr wad okay now we'll go to uh those that are present if you would wish to address the board if you kindly come to the podium and you'll have five minutes good evening tom whittles president of clifton against substance abuse uh first i want to offer my condolences to the cowell family don cole was the councilman in clifton and mary colwell served on his board uh it's a great loss to the city don was a numbers a true true gentleman and he's what we sorely missed second is next wednesday night clifton against substance abuse will be hosting their second annual overdose awareness night at clifton city hall it's a candlelight vigil it will start at 8 o'clock run to about 9 15.
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uh so in years past we would always tell our board liaison what topics we would like to be visited with the two cities and um that worked out well but i think i think you're right that it did after a while just start to fizzle out with the five to ten minutes so um quite honestly i think it's it's a great bridge and just like you said we have had great connections and relationships with both the cities and looking to have the town of youngtown is even better we just wish we had something out in waddell which we don't but hey uh so i i'm all for it we're actually putting the discussions together and um uh giving an outline of things subjects that we could discuss madam president missouri singapore i want to make certain that that i'm clear in the conversation the the meetings as they began to wane did not wane negatively no um and and and i know you're not alluding to that but i just want to make sure that i'm clear in that um you know so that it was always a very positive atmosphere um there just came a point in time where for a lack of better terms the it had run its course but again we work weekly with our cities if not daily on many many items and and we can't thank our cities enough they're tremendous partners whether it's police response or whether it's you know community related or facility need or assist with permits or what have you they're they're tremendous partners and and we we can't thank them enough for that in the i know you're still um trying to connect with a couple of them but in conversations that you've had do you get the impression that they're looking forward to initiating that liaison relationship again in those discussions madam president while i haven't as i stated specifically had this conversation with cities of el emirates and young town i can tell you we've had more conversations with city of el mirage than we have with young town the city of el mirages is very open to continuing to work with us in any way that we possibly can again just as with the city of surprise even though it's larger our relationships are beneficial to both entities and so it's important for them to have strong schools in our mirage and it's important for us that their city be successful and so to answer your question indirectly i would say that there it is likely that there would not be opposition to the notion of of looking at how to move this forward and maybe we can just start having them quarterly if we were meeting too often and there wasn't much to discuss maybe quarterly would work but i do think it's important that the board as a whole have input as to what will be discussed during that meeting and then there'll be a very public scheduled agenda item for okay this is this is the feedback that i received or this is you know so we can all just talk about it and still feel like it's the entire board and the councils as opposed to just conversations that happened between two individuals or one you know and madam president again having the um ability of having been here for a long time i've seen a lot of i've seen the relationships with our cities ebb and flow um or flow and ebb depending on which uh you may consider and you know we've worked very hard in the last several years um to just maintain and and build that very positive relationship having a board liaison with a council liaison with both offers the opportunity to continue that i think that it's important for us to just make sure that we are clear on our end from the board at board end as to exactly what it is exactly what you state that the board has opportunity for input into meeting topics for lack of better terms and and i don't recall how how frequent those meetings were um back in the day um but um you know it's perhaps um the sign of them running their course was a sign of our relationship um really building together and perhaps you know a need at the time to not discuss as many things as as we did it in the past but that need can always recycle okay thank you any other comments or questions from the board i just want to say i think they were probably monthly or every other month it seems don't quote that that's what's going through my mind but i don't want to don't publicly state something incorrect monthly might be a little much i can understand how maybe after a while there wouldn't be much to talk about i agree i might encourage i might encourage the board to consider another information item um with this topic after i've been able to to communicate with the other two cities as well i'm going to meet with the city of surprise city manager on monday and we'll continue this conversation there but if we if the board would like to schedule another information item it would give us an opportunity to really delve into this a little bit further and have all the information from all the three cities maybe once you get maybe once you've had an opportunity to have conversations with the three you can just you know propose and just put on the agenda very good yeah thank you i'm just curious as part of these conversations um with the council and i'm sure that these conversations already happen at an administrative level as far as growth and high density housing projects that might be upcoming depending on how the councils vote on that um but i would like more information as a board member um so i would appreciate maybe some i i know that you can't necessarily tell us everything because maybe a vote hasn't happened like recently for the city of surprise but even just knowing that there's potential for something coming down down the road i think that's important just for us to understand where those where that potential growth is going to happen in our schools madam president miss denzel moore we certainly um are fortunate to serve a very growing community um on you know in many ends and so uh we do have staff that meet regularly with city planners um and and seek out our input and so we're more than happy to find a good format in which we can provide that information to the governing board thank you thank you all right next we move to action discussion items uh action discussion item one recommendation to approve sponsorship and vendor package for the arts festival dr dean madam president members of the governing board members of cabinet and our community although march seems so far away the dysart festival of the arts for the year 2023 will be here before we know it and is something that encompasses uh miss marinelli's role and so this evening um i'll turn this over to dr croto as we begin the process already for the 23 festival of the arts doctor thank you dr dean madam president members of the board uh dr dean cabinet and guests uh like dr dean said spring is right around the corner we have an awesome event i know all of you were there last year at the arts festival so our director of arts denae marinelli is here to tell you about some sponsorship and vendor packages and she is the master behind planning this whole event so she is very excited to share the information and get started danae it's all yours thank you good evening president pritchard governing board members dr dean and members of cabinet i am here this evening to brief you on some of the updates we have made to the 2223 festival of arts sponsorship and vendor packages we are proud to say that after quite the hiatus we were actually able to have our festival last year with extreme success with that we are bringing forward some changes and updates based on what we learned from the event this past year there are two parts to this package there's a sponsorship package and there's also a vendorship package so attached to your agendas you guys should have a detailed packet of all of the sponsorships and what each one lines out to be i'm not gonna go through all of those right now um but as you can see we offer sponsorships ranging from seven thousand dollars um to any donation or sponsorship someone would like to give we don't turn down funding a few facts about the 2022 festival this past march we successfully sold our sponsorships for presenting sponsor program map sponsor all eight stage slots four front of the arts in two in-kind donations for shirts and signs totaling twenty-five thousand dollars we immediately reached out to all sponsors following the festival for feedback and received overwhelming positive responses on what they received for the price that they paid we received a commitment from almost all of our sponsors that they intend to renew their sponsorship for this coming festival which was great news so what we wanted to kind of bring forward today is some of the updates that we made to the um current package that we have so updates as much as mentioned presenting sponsors is now a new price tier and for that new price tier we've now added in social media posts premium ad space in the program um the sponsor name of on the schedule of events and then the name will now be displayed at by our chalk exhibits and the community mural so that is where we warranted that new price tier we are in addition adding a new option which is going to be our arts experience sponsor which is going to be many of the same benefits as the presenting sponsor but on a smaller scale instead presented instead of being presented festival-wide it will occur at our arts experience so what we're doing there is we're going to be taking the stage that was in the gym creating a new stage for those events to happen on and we're going to be turning the gym into an immersive arts experience for all of our patrons attending the events so we'll have a 15 to 30 minute workshop put on by our high school dance students so kids can learn a tick tock dance or something of that sort bucket drumming a piano lab and hands-on arts area so we're expecting that to be a really high traffic area so we want to kind of use that to our advantage with a sponsorship and giving another opportunity so we're excited to see that one new piece come to life this next year the other piece that we changed was we split up our stages so we used to have a stage sponsor it was two thousand dollars to sponsor a stage what we found this last year was that some of our stages are in a more um have more visibility in foot traffic than others and so what we've done is we've now branched those off so though we have the same eight stages some are now a thousand dollars some are now two thousand dollars instead based on that traffic area which will hopefully appeal to some people that don't want to pay the full two thousand dollars next are our vendor options and again as you can see we have everything ranging from two hundred dollars for our vendors all the way down to free if they are a community partner with us a couple quick facts based on last year as you kind of look those over we sold 43 booths last year of those booths three were retail booths 18 were arts and crafts three were boosters two were student booths nine were food trucks and eight were community booths so our updates to these levels the arts and crafts booth all we did was we added on small home-based businesses to help give some clarity between a retail vendor versus an arts and crafts so like your scentsy vendors and those people were confused as to whether they were retail or whether they were arts and crafts we wanted to make sure that was defined a little better in addition to a school and booster booth we had some phenomenal students that actually came and sold their artwork we had one that was there that was a um a balloon artist she was amazing but we didn't want them charged the same price as in a full-blown business because they literally just came in for the day and did share their art with us so we added student booth on at the same price as boosters and schools they need to be dice art students and then our community partners we just added the description for clarity that if you're a community partner we're giving you a free booth that you are not selling product at that booth and lastly the food trucks we've increased that base from a hundred dollars to 125 we learned last year we had a couple of booze that we're selling like chocolate dipped strawberries they don't have a truck so we were asking them to pay for the arts and crafts booth and then pay for the optional electrical which actually put them at a higher cost than the food trucks which we found not to be equal so we went ahead and moved our food trucks up to 125.
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we are still working on those numbers and increasing where we are scoring and helping our kids be prepared biology is a tricky when they may take the course at different times during the year and then they're tested um typically for us at the end of the year in may and this is a new one so we don't have comparative data for the first time ever all of our juniors took s.a.t and now instead of istep that is the benchmark for high schools across the state so our school scores on s.a.t match the kind of patterns we see with our elementary which i thought was interesting and that we scored much stronger in ela and literacy than we did in math across the state the average you can see that bottom column was about half of the kids in the state are meeting men benchmark on sat that are 11th graders our rate was at 43 so we are at that average but we're close to that math across the state about a third of the kids are meeting benchmark for us that rate was at 17 and we have some that are in the approaching category so this is data that this the high school has just had for the first time ever using sat it is providing a lot more in-depth information to us than what istep did previously the high school's working into by department needing and looking at where our kids are scoring and what available interventions and programming we already um so what are our next steps after looking at our assessment data from 21 and 22 we've already started a lot of these steps we definitely see room for growth our first target is to get state average get all of our kids to state average but then we would like to go past that and exceed it we understand we have work to do we are seeing positive recovery but we are also looking at that data and finding where we can share successes of what we know is working with our kids so a few steps that i wanted to outline that are important and we're working on right now one we have a larger than usual for jennings county population of staff who are four years or less into teaching so we've been putting a lot of efforts into making sure we've increased professional development opportunities available to staff make sure that we have different types of professional development for our new teachers and a robust mentoring program so that's something we've been putting in place the last two years and has continued and enhanced this year next is our students who are in poverty we're making sure that we're identifying students who are struggling across the board but we're recognizing that research is telling us they may need extra support so if we see that students or a particular group need help we're providing plenty opportunities like this summer where we tried our summer tutoring program we've never tried that version of summer school for elementary and we're collecting our data to see what kind of success rate that had if it's something we want to continue offering to students and families mtss intervention across the district k through 8 we are seeing progress and growth and when you look at the kids individually the kids who are involved in our program for getting intervention they are showing growth data that's very encouraging that we're on the right path of helping kids in need the next piece that we have is making sure when we find a highly successful program like barton's that we're providing it standardly across the board in all of our schools increased intervention supports in math are needed typically historically title is strongly um used as a support and mostly literacy in schools but there is availability for it to be used to help support in math so we're looking at making sure that as we're helping intervention for our kids in literacy we're doing the same in math we already mentioned grades four and five cohorts for keeping an eye on them and making sure they have plenty of support and then the final one for k through eight is the state has done something actually pretty fabulous they've identified standards that are heavily needed for each grade to recover from covet impacts and they're providing a plethora of supports for schools and teachers to help do that so for each individual standard as a teacher i can click on that standard and go to entire library of resources available for me to teach that standard and in our schools every one of our buildings are diving into that data and looking at it together and getting access and learning about how to get to those supports so we're excited about that program and finally um at the high school i know that they would echo me saying this we want to say thank you to the board for approving through esser the positions to create even more mtss programming so when we identify that kids need support at the high school level that we're right there to step in with intervention um they gave me data that even within the first week they'd already had 150 kids access that program at the high school and they're looking for those numbers just to grow in addition to that at the high school level we're looking especially within math because that's an sct area our focused professional development make sure we're offering all opportunities available and have all of our staff members have access to resources they need to teach in the classroom so those are some of the things that we're working on in response to our data to make sure that we're on a continuous path of improving thank you um good question i i've had conversations with others about the summer school and the programs that we had when will that data be available where we could take a look at um you know how many intended how many accessed and what kind of outcomes we got from that i will be able to do a presentation at the second september board meeting so we have to summer school deadline report that we'll gather data and then our fabulous instructional coaches took pre-data in may with kids who were going to participate in the tutoring program they tracked the number of sessions the kids attended and right now in august their classroom teachers are gathering the post data of how they performed after summer tutoring so the second meeting in september we'll be able to share that information perfect thank you this was an inform item on the agenda does anyone else have any questions other questions i guess i do have one yeah go ahead is there a reason why the high school is not doesn't get any title funds does not qualify as a title school so that could be an option for the high school there's a couple steps to that it does put some more requirements and parameters to how they offer programming if they choose to access that funding that might impact programs that they already have so that's why traditionally we've looked for other remediation money for them the other thing to think about is it's one pie and so when we put another we're just going to be dividing the pieces a little smaller for all the schools in the corporation if we add another piece of pie into that puzzle and with the high school's population size they would take a sizable chunk so by adding them to title funding we would be potentially removing some funding from the other buildings so but it is optional for them it is they would qualify based on their free reduced percentage i was just wondering if we could funnel some dollars to support that map and we've had those conversations uh as recently as this week dust and i kind of reviewed that data as well because it's a year-long process to apply if they choose to do so good question for the title funding would be a multiple layer conversation as title director i would sit down and share budgeting numbers dr hallick and i would discuss what impacts that would have on other buildings if we needed to do it as a long range plan if it's going to have impacts on other buildings we use a lot of our titles dollars to help for staffing for people to be available in the buildings for intervention so that would potentially have some impacts we need to plan ahead for you're really hopeful that your early intervention by putting your dollars in early grades will prevent from the need of having it one day at the high school and that's true the high school reflecting score where the foundation was laid in elementary high school is not totally responsible for those scores and currently high schools have access to a lot of dollars because a lot of the focus of across the state is on preparing kids for college and careers and for career technical education so we have ways to fund those programs that the elementaries wouldn't have access to so we're looking into that there's some impossible obstacles there when they want all these kids to pass algebra or whatever is required for their core 40 or whatever requirement they have out there and the kids don't have the foundation to do that so they're kind of set up for failure and i don't know how much we can prop them up we need to fix it at the elementary great conversation okay any other discussion no then it looks like we have another informed item school improvement plans um and this one's just very short it's that annual time of year again when all the schools have worked to update their school improvement plan so those are available they are digital format if anyone on the board would like those in a printed copy i do have those that i can share with you so just informing that those are prepared and i'd like to ask to bring them back for approval the next time so it's just an inform that we're working on that so those are available to the board members electronically but if you want i would copy a hard copy close your ears um it's like nick you can get you a hard copy we want to review those so that we can vote on those at the next video i'm sure you want a hard copy no because the binder is all right um looks like we're down under professional staff and under recommendations yeah i have a couple i'd like to recommend ed ertle for james county high school counselor a two-year contract continuing through 6 30 in 2024 and then karen schneider jennings county middle school teacher and athletic director for the elementary i had inadvertently brought her days and as 12 the last board meeting and that was for a partial year they should be 25 days for a full calendar year so i'd like to make that recommendation as well so um i don't know if we need to take these separate but i think we'll just take them separate just to be sure so let's start with um do we have a motion on ed earl i have pat second tony any discussion all those in favor 7-0 and then um the second one the recommendation is for karen schneider the change in days from 12 to 25.
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and this was all before the empire the state impart program was started so um i i'm not sure exactly when the city uh began to install uh um you know granule or activated carbon uh beds charcoal beds basically to absorb the pfos that's coming in tonight i'm not exactly sure when uh tribar uh stopped uh releasing pfos to the river but again there's a fish advisory uh because pfos will bio accumulate up to a thousand times higher concentrations in body tissues a thousand times more concentrated than it is in the water that they're swimming in so even though the pfos concentrations in the water were roughly equivalent to what the epa existing epa health level advisory was those numbers dropped dramatically and uh they dropped dramatically since then on the epa last june i dropped them from drop them down to sub parts per trillion for pfos and pfoa these are the legacy launching pfos compounds that bioaccumulate and so uh so it may be another and eaglet continues to test the fish every year they collect the fish samples and store them and then they're analyzed by the michigan department of health and even services over the winter and usually around march first is when they update uh the fish advisors statewide and so that's when the community when you can see uh what the fishing what's changed in terms of the fish advisors from the year before around march first um so sarah you have your hand up yeah hi i'll just chime in um so i am involved so i worked for eagle actually and um i've been involved in pfas on the heron and i'm sorry that i missed the last meeting um steve where you talked about pboss um but yeah so like the pfos and surface water in the huron has dropped significantly since the remediation at wixom um but we're still finding concentrations you know above like what you should be eating and fish um so part of our ongoing studies is looking at pfos as a source to fish and sediment so we have ongoing research where we're actually looking i like food chain studies with sediments collected from um like around the huron river watershed um so i just wanted to provide a little update on that that the state's still working on that um and hopefully that study will help inform um if sediment remediation is needed within the watershed okay all right well thanks sarah um and uh it's our you know with the chromium six i'll just mention in this context the chromium-6 means that it's a high oxidation state of chromium um and so it's the high oxidation state of that of the chromium makes it a very strong oxidizing agent which is probably what makes it carcinogenic however various natural processes when it's in the environment even in water or soils or in your body will fairly rapidly it converts because it's so reactive it's oxidizing agent it will oxidize whatever a lot of a lot of compounds will come in contact with it and so it's pretty quickly reduced from chromium 6 to chromium 3 which is um not recognized as a as a toxic substance it's in fact an essential nutrient um that's involved in um a lot of central um metabolic processes and mammals at least and so um that chromium three the epa is recommending that recommends a surface water limit of 120 parts per billion and a drinking water limit of 100 parts per billion but those are that that's for total chromium because of this fact that the chromium sex reacts very quickly um it seems like the epa has not really established a you know a drinking water criteria for chromium sex they just specify one for total chromium because i think that the assumption is that whatever chromium sex might come in from the intake uh through the standard water treatment form processes gets reduced to chromium food and so you just want to measure you want to use an assay that measures all the chromium if this chromium 6 would be there for chromium so um you know the way these things are regulated is these npdes i've forgotten what that stands for but um if somebody has a permit to release uh any substance from an industrial or commercial enterprise so they're supposed to have an ndds i believe i'm sure sarah knows more about this than i do um but again there are uh and ann arbor and the city of ann arbor it has npgs permits as well um and the university of michigan for example has a permit on its waste through the ann arbor wastewater treatment plant and uh there are various other um enterprises within the city here that have their individual empty des moines of course the wastewater treatment plant itself has an fpdes permit so uh some of that data can be found on on the internet um and the question there is uh is where it's hard to tell what other non-mpdes sources may exist as for example uh it's come to the attention through various ngos nationally that have done some testing that uh that actually uh car washes use and so you know it's probably in the extra special deluxe you know detailing treatment that you get where you can make your tires look like new so they're probably spraying something like uh this is just a supposition speculation on my life but it's something like that like displaying some product on your car probably on the tires and uh it contains pfos that it's it's hard to tell what kind which pbos compounds there are um that are being used for that purpose but um i think a lot of car washes recycle um their waste water my understanding is that some of them do but i'm not exactly sure where all that goes whether now it goes into the sanitary sewer or whether it goes into the groundwater or maybe both depending on the location that this is going this is ultimately going to present an issue where car washes are going to have to stop using phosphorus they're going to have to probably acquire an mpd and yes permit if they choose to use ethos or other chemicals so um the testing programs are pretty minimal that's why i personally am a big fan of citizen testing because you know prices have come down quite a bit like for example you can get a reasonable uh pfas measurement of drinking water uh for eighty dollars by mail order and um so i've used it i've used it for my water coming out of my faucet both here and a few other homes and uh the results i get compared to what the city posts on its website so uh but um the the 80 test is not an epa approved as yet test so you know it's not legally defensible uh but it's a very simple test that anybody can use uh you can order it from a company called cyclopure that's in illinois so um so uh another major source of agricultural so of course pesticides and nutrients are the major pollution uh pollution sources so the haran river watershed council has had a great program um that our rick rick lawson over the heron river watershed council has done outreach to uh various agricultural enterprises upstream with us they're all upstreamless in the huron river uh they're mostly in the arms in boyden creek um and mill creek um which is around dexter and davis creek and portage creek so those percentage numbers on the slide just reflect the amount of land in these drainages that go into the caron river which uh which are devoted to agriculture and of course most of it is uh corn and soybeans because of the farm bill some subsidies and uh as commodities so uh you know a lot of farmers use quite a lot of pesticides for corn and for uh soybeans and uh i can uh there's some information that uh like we can look that anybody can look at on here under the watershed council website about that study and about what the results were uh so rita you have your hand up actually that's all i needed to know is uh the information on what's found in the testing so i'll look it up thank you yeah okay and pesticides you know of course because if they're growing corn and uh and soybeans uh both of those plants have been bred um uh over a decade ago to be resistant to glyphosate or roundup so they use it or um many farmers use enormous amounts of roundup you know to raise these crops these commodity crops corn and soybeans so and and so much roundup has been used uh of course that there are native plants that have taken up that gene and that have resistance to uh glyphosate some some some very uh very invasive ones as well so it looks like this practice may be ending soon uh just because there's a lot of invasive native plants that have glyphosate resistant so they'll move on to some other pesticide but of course some uh the classic ones like dialdrin and other things that were used on these commodity crops contaminate most drinking water nationwide and they do have accumulative health effects um so but the human river watershed council has been doing a pretty good job at testing for these things within the watershed and they've reached out to farmers to try to get them to manage the nutrient releases in the river which besides the pesticides of course the nutrient pollution becomes is uh we're mostly talking about phosphate here in nitrogen well the focus is usually on phosphate because phosphate uh encourages harmful algal blooms and in stagnant waters um so this is a contributing to the uh harmful algal blooms that appear in the summer uh downstream of us and they are over at uh ford lake and velvet lakes behind those dams the river the water is not flowing it gets amazing from the sun and you get uh and you get um harmful algal blooms uh which create toxins which in fact it's a big problem in western lake erie and the city of toledo had to shut down its water system drinking water system for uh a week a number of years ago and uh because of the global warming that we experienced through the climate crisis this is becoming a much more serious problem uh also because there are more of agricultural operations like capos especially that are spreading they're allowed to spread their manure now manure from animal farms is generally um pesticide free compared to uh composts and biosolids but the nutrients are are at a very high level phosphorus and nitrogen so those contribute to the pollution um within the state now especially when they're spread on frozen more snow-covered ground in winter as the state allows that and this has been a major point of contention most of the ngo community in the state here is trying to prevent farmers from spraying their manure on frozen agricultural land because there's not enough big enough buffer it's not a big enough natural barrier between the agricultural fields and the river to try to absorb some of these nutrients before they went off the surface and enter the river so another another thing to consider here is a lot of the agricultural lands are you know were reclaimed swamps so they have tiles uh there's a tile system that underweighs the soil flavor cultural um fields and those drains generally drained into a pipe that goes directly into a surface water stitch and so that does not help to matter at all either so um this is this just serves as a reminder that you know the city has signed the content judgment consent judgment that we discovered uh a year ago with the state of the state had seen the city of ann arbor and a few other permit holders for discharging too many nutrients in the river so we're under consent judgment to try to reduce uh the nutrient pollution that comes out of what wastewater treatment plant and that's going to be a topic for discussion that a uh uh that they can another environmental commission meeting sometime within the next year so um another source for drinking water is so sarah you raised your hand again yeah i just thought i'd circle back on the pesticides um so the state right now is uh working on recreating water quality standards for a class of pesticides known as neonicotinoids so if you guys have heard of like the bee colony collapse disorder neonicotinoids are the type of pesticide that that led to that issue um and we're also finding that they're incredibly toxic to organisms living in rivers um so like mayflies like ept taxa if you're familiar with that term um so yeah the state's working on water quality standards for that class um so far they've passed uh for amid a club grid which is the one that's most toxic of the six um and then um yeah there's plans for other pesticide projects and in following years so we do have a small program to help address some pesticide issues and i have nothing to add for nutrients thanks steve okay and what about chlorophyrus uh oh um no no plans to study that is that more of a human health or an aquatic health issue yeah it's neurotoxic control uh really you have your hand out yeah i was just to ask sarah when you say um some actions to be taken could you describe this a little more pesticides right yeah so we um so for the neonicotinoids we conducted a um a sampling plan for the saginaw river watershed and that was just completed last month um so we did monthly samples for all six neonicotinoids comparing like monthly one-time sampling to a passive sampler so a problem with monitoring for pesticides is that they're really flashy right so you get a rain event you get this huge pulse you know if you sample at the wrong time you miss it so we were comparing different strategies for sampling for um for neonicotinoids then also trying to understand if concentrations refining the environment exceed you know what we know is toxic to aquatic life um so our results from that study showed that we were getting experiences of chronic values so that means long-term exposure for like 30 days to that concentration could cause you know a crash in the population of mayflies and chronomeds so it wasn't good news um and yeah there'll be more to come okay yeah thank you sarah yeah so the third category would be residential because uh you know and this mostly of course comes through consumer goods and what nutrients were sending down the drain so um you know like your garbage disposals you know not just toilets the garbage disposals sinks kitchen sinks um and so this is where a lot of the people's contamination comes from because you know it's been all the legacy pfos compounds like pfos and pfoa especially they've been circulating with food supply for decades so estimates are still that you know on average worldwide basically 70 percent of your exposure to ppos comes through food or cosmetics um five percent roughly comes through dust you know through household dust you know through carpets and uh draperies and other things clothing that's uh coated with pfas then of course there's pesticide residues as well so and the reason i started with drinking water is because of course um most of the regulation here in the united states of course is not focused on human threats to human health much more so than threats to ecological health so drinking water the regulations for drinking water tend to be stricter and and be taken more seriously than with other um with them with toxicities to the ecological community and wildlife so um the next category would be storm water so where do the threats from storm water they're um most of them come through impervious surfaces so the city has the city owns on a lot of impervious surface with their roads and sidewalks um every home owner has a roof every building has a roof every building people have driveways so um because the storm water is running off an impervious surface directly through the storm sewer into the hung river it washes a lot of um nutrients and pollutants into the river along with it uh because they don't have the opportunity to be absorbed in the uh uh you know in the uh [Music] you know through the soil through the natural uh soil and in fact i was shocked to hear this because i'd always assume that you know while lawns grass uh is is pervious but it turns out that compared to like a forest floor uh grass is about uh was only about fifty percent um impervious so you know even if you have a good lush lawn a lot of the rain that falls on your grass about half of it's going to run off onto the sidewalk into the stream you know no matter how how soft uh you know the soil is underneath uh you know compared to a a well mulched garden or native or you know native planting so um you know a major a major problem is road salt and it's mostly the chloride rather than the sodium or potassium so i'm sara did you mention something about this yeah sure um so yeah chloride really um became a huge issue with some pretty recent research showing that it can be quite toxic to fresh water mussels so in 2018 water quality standards for the state of michigan were established since then you know there's been a lot of work trying to understand well how do we actually implement these standards and get chloride levels down when road salt obviously is so necessary for our safety in the winter so there are some states that have these they're like smart salting programs to help you know municipalities and public works offices you know learn different strategies for using less salt with still the same safety standards and things like that so that's exciting and hopefully something like that can can happen in michigan um part of you know i guess some work that i'm working on is i've been collaborating with heroin river watershed council they provided me with a data set with chloride data for the entire watershed so i'll be analyzing that to understand where the sources are coming from and then with my work in the state of michigan i've been i actually proposed a project for next year to focus specifically on the huron river watershed to look at fluorides so that would include you know runoff from roads and collection by the adjacent river to see what the connection relationship is and another issue is um road brine so using um oil and mineral well brine to consolidate roads that aren't paved is a really common practice in michigan and those products not only have a lot of chloride but they also have high metals um and other contaminants in them so we're also looking at a project to understand uh runoff from those types of roads as well so that'll be coming in the next year and hopefully i'll have time to present to this group on the findings of those because uh yeah those research things okay thanks sarah one of the things i've heard is that these brines are often times they're like fracking waste water fluids from fracking yeah anything about that i'm not sure like the fry if we're allowed to use fracking um i know mineral well-brine as well as oil gas field brine is allowed with certain restrictions but yeah i'm not on the fracking theme so i can't speak to that okay well that's something that i think we ought to look into um you know what what priority what practices are allowed and which are are just not reported because i've heard i'm not sure about michigan but i've heard that that's a big problem in california for example um because um in some other states uh where fracking fluid you know has been used um it's contaminated groundwater but but i i heard that a lot of states are either not aware of it or uh or don't really care about it um about you know fracking fluid waste because you know it's it can be hazardous because of the chemicals that are used but also you know you leach out a lot of radium and things like that there are these substances called 10 worm uh ten and orm which are you know toxic uh metals plus like a radioactive radium and so uh you know the states that you know the states where fracking is more prevalent like ohio southeastern ohio pennsylvania they uh they're not allowing you to inject uh or to to uh you know to uh you know to bury these uh these fracking fluids and landfills hazardous waste landfills anymore so the state of michigan has been petitioned to uh to get these fracking fluids from other states have them you know disposed of here because they're no longer allowed in these states where it's become much more there's much more public awareness about it so that's something i think to look into as well um so then of course there's nutrients coming off the stormwater as well um and this is uh estimates i've seen i don't know what of course what the number is for ann arbor but i've seen various studies that estimate that maybe half of the nutrients uh that went off in municipalities are coming from stormwater and the other half come out of the wastewater treatment plant so we should look into this in more detail during a commission meeting over the next year um as we you know address uh you know the consent judgment for uh because the city has to come up with a plan for reducing um it's uh it's uh you know releases of phosphorus to the hunger within a year or two so um so what other threats are there there's of course petroleum products and coal tars i mean this is recognized so the city of ann arbor has banned full tar spreading coal tar in the driveway to sail your driveway uh coal tar has been banned here i'm not sure what the state's done about it because i think it's still done in the more rural areas in town here but the thing about coal tars is they don't you know they're carcinogens and uh but they don't they don't they're not very soluble in water usually so they do migrate but they'll migrate slowly off wherever they're applied so i don't know if anybody knows more about that you know please raise your hand okay then of course there's miscellaneous chemicals like window washing fluids yadda yadda um and then um one of the things that's uh a growing or recognizes a growing health threat worldwide are micro and nanoplastics while the iron river watershed council looked at microplastics and they found it's coming from everywhere you know there are no point sources of microplastics because academic studies on the west coast usually uh published by people on the west coast have indicated that you know half about half of all the microplastics come from a tire well or rubber tire wear and that gets airborne and so those microplastics are spread by the air and then that's how they get into the ground water and how they get into the diameter because um somebody measured microplastics in various rivers in ann arbor and in the state of michigan and it was discovered that the iron river had have the highest levels of microplastics statewide so and i i i'm sure a lot of that comes from my worn tires that have been spread around but of course there's plastic bags and other plastics that deteriorate and microplastics are defined as something less than i think five millimeters but basically it's defined as being sort of out of sight out of mind you know there it's plastic pollution that's macro and we see we pick up that litter but once it gets down to half a centimeter in size roughly it's nobody's going to pick it up anymore so it becomes a microplastic even though you know it's not so micro but all these compound all these uh plastics these polymers will eventually degrade down to nano sizes where um the size of the plastic particle is smaller than the cell and a cell in your body and so what happens of course is that uh there's two things first of all these plastics will absorb and concentrate various toxins from the environment you know the water the a lot of um a lot of pollutants who are more attracted to binding to the plastics and they are the water so as water passes around these plastic particles uh they will absorb and take up many pollutants such as pfoss and um pesticides endocrine disruptive chemicals things like that and so the major problem of course is you can drink them you can get exposed to them you know there's an estimate that's spread around or that we all have about a credit card size amount of plastic in our guts um it's still like a microplastic so it's not absorbed into your body but the pro the major problem is once they become nanoplastics they will get absorbed both through your guide and through your lungs so there's uh there's an estimate that uh you can definitely measure [Music] so you uh measure uh [Music] losses in lung function in people depending on how much nanoplastics they've been exposed to as you inhale these particles they stay in your lung you know just like smoke particles would if you're a smoker and uh they gradually leach out these toxins but they also in themselves they they interfere with proper lung function and so so they're out there they're getting smaller and smaller so uh it's even if we stopped you know making plastics and having them out in the environment it's going to become it's going to become an increasing problem worldwide as they exist plastic that's out there gets more into the smaller and smaller levels and becomes airborne so um you know this is a principal uh spur on people to try to to try to ban plastic to try to just stop especially creating disposable plastics and just try to stop um um you know getting it out of the environment personally i think it's hard to see where we're not going to be using plastic anymore because it is such a cheap malleable construction material you know it's in dashboards of cars it's uh in all of your household appliances you know we all know how widespread plastic is in consumer products you know our computers our cell phones so i don't think we're going to get real plastic but this is where the circular economy is going to be especially important if we can get plastics that are made that will degrade cancer molecular levels like uh you know the newer generation greener plastics like uh poly lactic acid pla and uh there's other there's other plastics that come from that are used from biological monomers which degrade down to non-toxic natural products so we can get plastics um made to those materials instead of petroleum or if we can um handle the waste the plastic waste more responsibly that's another thing that you know as i said before you know half of them half of these plastics come from more tire wear so in my mind this like uh speaks to the need for uh i mean and it also comes from brake pads you can definitely measure uh you know break that particles coming from on standard um you know disclaims um that are in the environment as a nanoplastic so um you know this is something that's a distinct threat it's a growing threat even if we stop making plastics now and throw them out and so we've got to really be pay attention to this so the third category was groundwater so the threats to groundwater come through pervious surfaces so it's the same same compounds but instead of washing down directly into the river through the storm water it'll get absorbed into the soil and into the ground water which as i mentioned before that's where a lot of the microplastics and however come from uh as far as what it's known so far so you know what do we have here we have the galamon white four dioxane plume we have of course there's plumes from uh light from legacy dry cleaners they're various uh chlorinated solvents that are used like uh um tetrachloroethylene and trichloroethylene and then there's uh of course uh pfast contaminations of compost and biosolids so um i'll expand on this a bit because as you know um because p-files have been circulating in the environment for a long time uh they are in the biosolids they're in their wastewaters and they're in the compost now the cities the city tested its compost in 2019 i believe and we have measurable values of all the pfas compounds the sum 47 that are tested standard through the standard high level tests on 47 different pfos compounds that are located here that are existing part pavilion levels in our municipal compost um uh i think our biosolids were tested but i don't recall seeing that data um um also they probably tested the wastewater effluent to try to see what ethos compounds are coming out from there but those haven't been uh they've probably been tested by receiving the reports so i think that's something that the commission should look into as well because regulations are going to be coming in the future that are going to make an impact on the city's budget i mentioned this um last month when i talked more about so i won't i won't go over this in any detail but i think um this should be a focus for what we're doing that's trying to do our our community budget for pfas and see and see what our existing levels are and what remediation technologies might be available um but of course the ultimate the only real solution is to just turn off the spigot and get the uh debbie dingle submitted a bill in congress for the last four years called the pfas reduction act um and so of course um and it's in committee and she's been very resourceful and trying to get it attached to the national defense authorization act and other such bills that you know have to be passed by congress because their budget bills and the filibuster doesn't apply and so um so i think i'm hoping that within as soon as possible that that her intact fifa's you know product protection reduction act will get passed and so we'll stop getting these toxic compounds released into the environment and into our consumer products and food supply so uh just moving on to wastewater and biosolids um it's the same story i mentioned before that uh that uh generally um you know it's the uh from the point sources if they have industrial pre-treatment permits and go through a wastewater treatment plant um that's a potential problem uh for the city because it's getting a pass through just like the wastewater treatment plant in wixom a pass through from the tri-bar industries they contaminated both their biosolids and their wastewaters so their wastewaters ended up in the liver and contaminated their drinking water uh but the pfas compounds also ended up in their biosolids they were spread on agricultural fields they were spread on farms and there was a family-owned farm in heartland if you recall was contaminated the gentleman was raising beef cattle and he was donating the beef to various charity organizations and youth events and he feels terrible about this so i don't know what the state legislature is going to try to do about this but this is a very common problem all over the united states and so um i think it's where it's i think we should take on this responsibility of maybe looking at it in a disinterested manner and trying to collect information and evaluate it and try to see what um what remediation uh and you know update uh the residents here and uh city council about what um about what regulations are coming down the fight and what uh and what remediation technologies might be useful and do a cost benefit analysis follow them so and then of course those consumer goods i'm not sure what the city can do about this you know we the city did pass a law um when nutrient pollution was originally um discovered to be a problem back in the 70s and uh and uh because the soils in michigan are naturally fairly rich in phosphorous the thinking was well you shouldn't have phosphorus in your uh in your in your detergents you know because phosphorus is a common additive to dishwashing detergents and other consumer products and so on the state the city banned the use of phosphorus fertilizer and also the use of it in uh and selling here in the city in this community banned selling consumer products like dishwashing detergent that have added phosphorous to it and um and they were successful in getting a lot of the local businesses to not do it but my understanding is that anybody can walk into any of these box stores and if you ask a clerk for their fertilizer that has phosphorus in it now they will sell it to you they're just not allowed they're not allowed to put it on the shelves but anybody can walk up and ask somebody if they can buy it and they keep it they keep some in the back and so yeah yourself so so um so there's that as an example i'm not sure how far the city would go in trying to ban some of these other toxic substances like sunspoons endocrine disruptors because it's definitely going to damage the marketability of our municipal compost and our biosolids because the alternative to spreading our biosolids on agricultural fields is a way you could spread it in in forests or something like that and maybe get away with that um uh but um the alternative that's been um they've been done in new england is most many new england states have banned uh the spreading the land application of any biosolid because of pfas contamination so the cost of the city is going it generally costs about four times as much to put these sewage sludges into a hazardous waste landfill versus you know on one on natural land which is a tragedy because um you know because uh that soil amendments biosolids and composts are are about the best soil amendments you can have for growing anything so this is a this is definitely a threat to the city's bottom line and there's also regulatory job as well so um so i just um summarized at the end here i just listed some informational resources i mean i'd recommend anybody to go and explore the haran river watershed council for those of you who do not may not be aware of this um i think it was created in 1965 or so and includes representatives from local governments such as ann arbor uh jen lawson is a regular uh participant uh in the meetings he's a city staff member um they're represented out of the county train commissioner evan pratt attends these meetings as well um the dream that the state of michigan a lot of the regulations come through the county through the drain commissioner or the water resources manager i think they changed the title from drain commissioner the water resources manager but evan pratt is the current person who holds that office in washington and so a lot of the a lot of the basic regulations and monitoring is done through the county county water resources commissioner formerly called the drain commissioner and then there's a local organization of governments called semcog the southeast michigan council of governments and so if you look at this website you'll see what they uh what they have on water and then eagle of course has a couple of websites there's mi waters is where you can find a lot of data so i put here the site map explorer uh this is where you can find information about mpdes comments and wastewater treatment plant ipt permits so you see those are all under the water resources um file system structure and they're wet on the mi waters website so that's a good place to look for information and then of course uh for pfas only uh there's the impart website is um is very comprehensive they talk about where contamination has been found what their plans are or what sites are under investigation uh and what the regulations are that's where they talk about the uh uh pfas fish advisors as well and they point you to the uh dnr the department of natural resources webpage which has all which hosts all the fish advisories and then on a bigger lot a higher level i'm going from the local level up to the higher level so there's another entity called the great lakes commission of the study that spends a lot of money this is an international commission so it includes all the states which border the great lakes plus the uh provinces in canada the board of the great lakes so this is a larger regional organization that is tasked with um regulating water quality in the great lakes so and then then of course at the uh highest level we get the epa and so this is where you can find out information on the clean water act and the safe drinking water act you know which are the major authorizations of the congress has given epa to regulate on water quality so uh so then the question is well what um what initiatives um would we consider well just around water quality um so we can consider a resolution to support h.r 4314 which has been submitted every year by yusuf ravi our local uh state representative um it's uh it's a bill that's was drafted to re-empower michigan polluter payloads michigan used to have uh reasonable really uh good polluter pay laws but governor engler in 1995 neutered them completely so um so this is a bill that's been sitting in the legislature the current uh legislature does not um will not even let this come out of committee for or hold public hearings on it or anything so because of you know um because of lobbying and sense of lobbying they get from the account on chemistry council and the michigan chamber of commerce so these are the major powers that are prevented by political pay bill from getting passed by our state legislature then of course there's the for gelman plume cleanup that we got involved with just last year because in october because this was all under a consent order that was sealed to the public and so that seal was broken last october and so the environmental commission had four um four sessions public meetings on this and so we issued a resolution to council uh recommending that the epa consider it as a superfund site because uh you know this was this plume was discovered in 1984.
⚗ AI-reconstructed · cite from original above
i believe our our committee chair sent invitations to the board and we would like you to all to join us uh it's a night of remembrance and awareness for the lives lost to overdose and understanding how addiction affects everybody uh and on a personal note i want to thank dr robitazi for all he's done to help us put this together as well as jessica tremble and jennifer bergman who work very closely with our organization thank you and i hope to see you next wednesday night eight o'clock clifton city hall thank you anyone else was to address the board excuse me pardon me of course my apologies so thank you good evening everyone mark bernsach holly street just have a couple of questions about the presentation from miss kusalevich i want to know if the district could be more proactive in notifying the parents about these education standards and possibly reach out to them and send a blast email to them regarding some of the most controversial topics about that to be more transparent so so i'm asking the board for that maybe post it on social media because i i could say with almost certainty that not a lot of people still know about this and a lot of these questions have been asked about those and i think uh a lot of these a lot of these items that we've discussed in the past are referenced tonight and they're still in these you know within these uh standards that are being demonstrated for these grades also that the opt-out forms that a link be sent to the parents as well i i urge the board to consider that also my message to the students in the district the school year in clifton is about to commence and i would like to take the opportunity to wish all the students continued success education can be likened to a great canvas and this year i hope our students throw as much paint that they can on the canvas of their education i appeal to the students the parents teachers and staff to value and uphold the importance of motivation this year i have no doubt that most of our students will propel themselves into their education they will make the most of the canvas of opportunity that they are offered and they will achieve the goals that they aspire to attain to i have no doubt if they remain motivated in the classroom then they will realize their dreams education should be sound creative and innovative and clifton school district together with the parents and the students themselves will help make this a reality help four letters that can mean so much four letters that could be seen as dynamic planned action or as a plea i feel confident that the teachers in clifton high school will take action and help the students to achieve their academic sporting cultural and lifelong learning i want to take this opportunity to thank the teachers for their continued professionalism excellence and dedication it is your motivation in the classroom that will help to create a year that is ripe with opportunities however even more importantly the students themselves will have to take action to further their education i hope most of our young ladies and gentlemen too are beginning to realize that they cannot merely sit back and expect the greater school community to do everything for them they should realize the importance of motivation and be prepared to help themselves it is an appeal i make to our young children today i urge you to help yourselves as well make the most of the fantastic educational opportunities that you have throw as much paint as you can on the canvas of your education this year if you can do that then one day you will be in a position to respond to the plea of others who may need your help help four letters mean so much you must help yourself so you ultimately can help others each young lady and gentlemen in our district in their own way will need help you will need to help your family you will need to help the environment you will need to make a sense of the world when sense and reason sometimes goes missing you will need to help solve problems through innovation and invention and you will need to help turn indifference into action i believe this is our goal at the cliff i believe this is our goal as the clifton schools school years commences let's continue to work together to help each other to be the best for our families for the city of clifton passaic county the state of new jersey and our country thank you for your time and god bless america have a good night everybody [Applause] ray little clifton new jersey i was totally impressed with the new new things that they came up with tonight beautiful programs beautiful job beautiful presentation with the new curriculum but i am not for the curriculum and i think there's a lot of people not for the curriculum and i would like to know why we can't opt in instead of opting out from the ladies presentations she said we got things going on all over the place telling the people how they can opt out why can't we do the same thing to opt in give them the option to opt in let's see how many people really want this program the people i talk to don't want it so i don't know who you're talking to but if you read the paper on monday wayne does not want it belleville has already stopped it so i mean i don't know who you're talking to this is supposed to be the city that cares do we really care about these kids are we opening a can of worms i think we're opening a can of worms that's my personal thing what is the penalty if we don't do this did we ever find out superintendent that's a question sir we don't we don't have a question and answer period back and forth okay when you get back to us because the last meeting i came i was very disappointed because we got up we spoke and then after we spoke you spoke and we walked away like we were ignorant people like we didn't know what was going on but apparently one of the commissioners knew what was going on and he agreed with us so if he agreed with us he didn't know what was going on neither i didn't understand that and i understand there's other people on the board that don't want this neither so how does this work out they were ignorant to i guess because that's the way it sounded to me like we didn't know what was going on now tonight we're fully aware of what's going on god bless you people god bless america thank you anyone else wish to address the board the hello president the president smith uh commissioners dr patosi administration and citizens uh it's good to see you again this is a new school year um i am proud to say that i've been re-elected president of the clifton student union um so i just want to say that i'm happy to be back thank you let everyone know who you are elias ragsdale um i'm happy to be back and i plan on working together with you to ensure that every student has the best education experience possible and i just thank you for all you do thank you thank you good evening everyone my name is samantha basford and i'm from clifton new jersey although i'm not new to this room or this podium tonight i'm going to say something that i never thought would have come out of my mouth a few years ago tonight i'm announcing myself as number eight on the ballot as candidate running for clifton board of education on november 8th before i go into my background i want to get a formality question out of the way yes if you didn't know i am the daughter of commissioner judy bassford however that is not the only part of my identity and who i am i'm a proud first generation college graduate with a bachelor's degree in communication studies with a minor in dance class of 2012 and i obtained my master's in 2014 studying media and communications arts from pace university i attended grove hill nursery school school number five highlighting being on the toughest corner of valley road as safety patrol with crossing guard miss t and if you're from that area you understand what that means i attended woodrow wilson middle school and i graduated from chs in 2008 where i was on the varsity gymnastics team and a proud student of the cast program where i even hosted my own tv show on channel 77 before youtube was cool i consider myself a forever college student and a forever learner because i never left i work in student affairs since being in college being an r.a orientation leader student government senior president and the list goes on to say that i've had many leadership roles working with all different types of leadership styles would be an understatement just look at my linkedin page as i progress in my student affairs career i learn how to be a resource for both professionals and students participated in many diversity equity inclusion trainings learned facilities in custodial management property management oversaw multiple budgets worked with faculty and residents became helpful became mental health first aid certified trained others in conflict resolution crisis management implemented professional development trainings advised two multicultural sororities sigma lambda upsilon senoritas ending sorority incorporated delta sigma theta sorority incorporated incorporated as well as other student organizations and advocated fiercely for the buy puck and lgbtq plus community student success is a passion of mine i understand the student experience and the development they need for life beyond 12th grade these transferable skills i mentioned are a touch of who i am and i'm committed to anything i do with and ten percent i'm currently in my second position on the executive board of northeastern association of colleges and universities housing officers giving back and making impact on housing professionals in our region i work at columbia university irvington medical center as the assistant director of residential experience where i supervise a multi-general staff sorry multi-generational staff including three unions a mail room an athletic center six medical student ras and anything that happens to be community experience of the day i believe my qualities and background are unique as a candidate i seek to give staff faculty and students the holistic experience as i can hit the ground running in this position as i understand this commitment for me it's not just tossing my hat in the ring i'm an active member who comes to meetings observes and is consistent when speaking not because i'm influenced to what is said or what needs to be heard but because i truly believe it i stay very until each end of the meeting even if it's really late and if i'm not attending here i'm watching on youtube live just ask my nail tech who thinks this is a bravo tv show i want to make sure i'm a part of financial decisions today that are not going to be an oopsie in 5 or 10 years that make impact on another board because maybe we were rushing or there wasn't close attention to detail i want to make decisions in our district that are equitable and i don't want to see any students specifically students in here who film so upset and hurt because they're not accepted by the people who who are in this room i'm not being pushed by political party or an agenda i feel based on what i've witnessed in this room in public that i'm a strong woman who cannot only impact today or three years but impact the future of clifton i am authentically who i am if you watch this meeting or have had a conversation with me you know who i am and it's not my intention to otherwise convince you differently after all who wants to spend more forced time with their mom if you want to engage with me online tinyurl.com backslash sam bassword board of boe or just grab me on the go i hope i made it this far with five seconds to go so remember vote vote for the better basford on november 8th who graduated in 2008 and is number eight on the ballot any great good evening my name is anthony santiago you can call me tony i live in the lakeview section of town and i'm a candidate for the board of education i want to start by saying thank you to the board the teachers the administrators and the staff for all your work the last couple of years it's been challenging to say the least you had to adjust on the fly i'm sure at times you're even looking around for locus so i just want to say thank you especially to the teachers and staff again i just think it's not said enough thank you guys a little about me i've lived in clifton over um going on 28 years now my wife and i raised our kids here their the products of clifton schools they graduated they went on to college and graduated from college we were involved parents from the hsa to participating and supporting school events myself i've always been somebody who wanted to try and help and serve in any way that i can so i coached little league i taught ccd or religious instruction i was a member of the late few lakeview civic association before it dissolved i'm currently a member of the clifton ada or disabilities committee in the city which is a volunteer community my professional background is in human resources i'm also a real estate agent in town as an hr professional i've recruited various roles and i've led internship programs and management training programs so you know my background experience there i think can apply and help students prepare for the workforce as a real estate agent i work with buyers and i see that they are constantly looking for good school districts and i see how that correlates with property values and thriving communities people ask me why i'm running and sincerely the reason i'm running is because i care and i want to serve and i want to help the school district and the students that's the approach um i believe that the board and anyone in a government role should take is that of a public servant it's not a political job it's not a government job you're there to serve the public and all of the public one of the the issues facing the city is i believe spacing and crowding and it's been an issue for years since my kids were young i've seen and witnessed many catholic schools close and uh other entities that are not the school district or the city end up getting those schools and i always thought why you know they're literally schools with classrooms i i know that more recently we've obtained some of these schools and we're using them for pre-k which is great but now we have we would have pre-k to contend with right which is even more classrooms that you need and i just think that when those schools are available we have to capitalize and take advantage of those opportunities if i'm lucky enough to be elected to the board and represent the clifton community i want to get things done for them i know that being on the board i cannot do that alone as i do now on the disabilities committee i would work as part of a team if i want to change something or implement a new initiative or solve a problem i would have to do that with the rest of the board the board votes on things collectively i can't just do that on my own so um i personally am somebody who is collaborative i'm a relationship builder and i have to do that in my work experience as well as my volunteering that's a little bit about me and what i hope to bring to this to the board of education in the clifton school community i look forward to getting to know more people and students sorry i look forward to getting to know more people and students in the upcoming months and sharing more about uh where my position is on the issues my name again is anthony santiago i'm number four on the ballot for clifton board of education thank you so much for your time have a great evening [Applause] good evening my name is lori lalama and i'm the president of the clifton education association there's a couple of things i'd like to go over i would like to see people contact their legislators for the federal waivers for the child nutrition program we need to extend the usda school meal flexibilities for all children here in the state of new jersey president biden through the u.s department of education has put out the student debt relief and if you could go online you'll be able to see the program and see if you will be able to save money from your student loans next i'm here to combat disinformation and dangerous rhetoric in our district these claims are blatantly false but this hateful rhetoric also has the potential to jeopardize the safety and mental health of new jersey students our district provides a safe nurturing and inclusive learning environment for every single student in the district the resources here maintains the integrity and honesty of our schools janina kusalevich gave an excellent report tonight and i'm very proud of all the work that that janina does as well as our staff now um i just heard that wayne did not pass the curriculum i just reached out to my counterpart there and that's not true they passed it last week so i just want to make sure that people understand what the truth is and i just want everybody to understand what's going on generally in the united states most americans are unaware of a decline in individual liberty and the reason is obvious the decline rarely takes the form of sudden personal deprivations but instead takes the form of unnoticed erosion and thus we've come to regard whatever state we are in as a normal condition leonard reed so i really want the public to understand that we have phenomenal teachers we have a great curriculum staff and most of us here are parents and we wouldn't do anything to jeopardize our students and their welfare thank you very much [Applause] anyone else wish to address the board marsha miller clifton i'm going to promote a book it's called battle for the american mind uprooting a century of miseducation by pete heggseth this was on the bestseller list for a number of weeks i think it's worth looking into i'm expressing the need to reject the new sex education standards for the 2022 academic year we need a resolution being not to teach these new standards the option to opt out does not work because the new sex education standards is sprinkled in throughout the year it's a misnomer to opt in or to opt out by the way it's extortion to cut funding to the schools if they reject the new sex standards we need transparency not the way these new standards were erected in the middle of a pandemic according to dr meg meeker a pediatrician for 32 years and teaches at michigan state is opposed to the new sex standards she states the disconnect is striking to separate the child from the parent the parent is the child's advocate not the teacher or the school system the child is forced to choose between the parent and the teacher great psychological damage is being done the child will doubt their ability to form opinions and damage their psyche and damage their ability to reason teaching sexuality at early ages is traumatizing we need independent hearings on new sex education standard mandates these standards are putting tremendous pressure on teenagers to identify as straight gay or bisexual not who they are as human beings but puts emphasis on their sexual being this misleads them and psychologically damages them genetics is an actual science genetics is a predetermination not cultural intuition irene erickson a researcher stated there is no evidence to support these new sex education standards and no medical data the transgender trend is skyrocketing by social influence why are we normalization normalizing a sexual agenda between children and teachers a change needs to be made to protect the children and this goes along with megan's law as governor younkin of virginia stated in education everything through the lens of race we need critical mass we need critical history we need critical science not indoctrinating our children we need to have faith in education not politics in trenton parents and teachers need to be united as of tuesday 17 plus schools have rejected the new sex education standards and many more to come if you support the sex education standards for new jersey government schools academic year you are destroying our schools and you should resign tonight thank you anyone else to address the board seeing none motion closed motion second hi mr abu dravo second by mr awad okay we'll move along we have adoption of the minutes of our uh regular schedule meeting of july 28 2022 motion by mr abu drabo second by mr awad discussion seeing none roll call please mr abedrabo yes mr awak miss basford yes ms beltran yes mr paris yes vice president daley yes president smith yes motion carries you ready to go yeah yes sir okay okay our superintendent will now have his report thank you mr president good evening commissioners members of the community faculty and staff tuning in from home i apologize for my phone ringing earlier i have my uh i usually have my phone off and i have my children on do not disturb but they have the emergency breakthrough so if i don't answer the first time they call again and it rings so it's okay everything's great got a lot of kids everything's okay but thank you um i have some prepared comments in my report but i i certainly want to answer uh the gentleman's questions sir thank you very much for um for addressing the board tonight you asked if i remember you asked two questions one was about the possible penalties for the district not following through or not teaching the new sexual education standards and then um why don't we allow parents to opt in instead of opt out so this this the second one let me take first because i actually know the answer to that the reason why it's an opt-in versus an opt-out is because there's a statute there's a law that allows parents to opt out and i just like to read you part of that statute there is no there's no mention of an opt-in in the law the law says and it's new jersey statutes annotated 1835-4.7 any child whose parent or guardian presents to the school a signed statement that any part of instruction in health family life education or sex education is in conflict with his or her conscience or sincerely held moral or religious beliefs shall be excused from that portion of the course so that is the opt-out provision of the law and we can't have parents or students opting out of an entire curriculum however a parent can opt out of a particular lesson a particular piece of instruction about one subject and as you saw tonight from miss kusalevich's presentation i think the the items that were deemed controversial are maybe three or four 20-minute lessons throughout the whole entire k-12 sequence i mean in like 20 minutes in second grade and maybe another one lesson in fifth grade maybe another lesson in eighth grade and if a parent deems that that is in contradiction with their moral beliefs or they don't think it's the school's job to be teaching that and we're going to make the opt out readily and easily available but we cannot make it an opt-in the second question is is a little more difficult because when you ask what is the penalty for a school district if they do not teach the standards the only thing that the department of education has publicly stated and i'll read the quote i have a quote from the department of education's communication manager her name is laura frederick who was quoted as saying districts that do not teach the standards will be penalized for instruction and program in the appropriate curricular area what that means is every three years the new jersey department of education evaluates school districts through a process known as cusack just so happens of course that clifton will be cue sacked this year and there are five categories that we're evaluated on and one of the big categories is instruction and program so for sure what would happen is we would be penalized under the instruction program requirement of cusack which would mean the district would be put on an action plan the communications manager goes on to say we we can't speculate excuse me so the nature of the penalty might vary we couldn't speculate because it would be a fact-specific issue and the severity of ramifications could vary as would be the case for other statutory regulatory violations so it could just be that or it could be that in addition to what our biggest fear is and what has been uh threatened although it's i've never seen it done i don't know if it's ever been done a withholding of state aid so that specter is always out there that hasn't been publicly threatened in particular to not teaching these standards but that is always an option that the state has i can't see them doing that but it's an option so sir i hope i answered your questions to the best of your ability to best of my ability um and certainly if you have any questions you want to meet with me you can call my office we'll set up a meeting yesterday i was proud to welcome over a hundred new staff members to the clifton public schools at our new teacher a new staff orientation at clifton high school we had a motivational morning for them to get them excited for the new school year later on that day they had a wonderful lunch in our high school our brand new high school cafeteria the kitchen area and they got to see the you know i told them that they've never seen a kitchen like this in any high school ever and it's true they were overwhelmed at how beautiful our kitchen is there's the stations there was an asian chinese station there there's a mexican station that we call chipotle uh clifton chipotle there's a pasta station a substation and they got to experience what the students are actually eating on a daily basis now normally most schools if i said we're going to feed you what we give the students most adults would be like no no we're good you know all right we'll get something we'll go out on our own but it was so good they were so very impressed um and it was just a nice way to welcome them into the clifton school district mr smith was able to be there and welcome them mr paris was able to be there miss miss judy basford was was available to be there and the support from the board of ed was nice to see to see you there today they learned spent most of the morning learning about our district safety protocols also about harassment intimidation and bullying our counseling procedures learning about pbsis our student database real time and and they had a variety of curriculum updates tomorrow they'll be going to their home base where they will participate in psyop training that's sheltered instructional observational protocol thank you just gonna lean over to my curriculum person make sure i was doing well and they also received cultural awareness training which i think is not only necessary in a place like clifton i'm just so happy that we do it so we we provide all of our new staff some cultural awareness training let them know that some of the students that you have in your classroom from different cultures you need to be aware of it and i love yesterday when janina gets up and talks to the new staff she speaks in polish to them for the first couple minutes and she at the end she asked him so who's happy to have a job here in in clifton and about five people stand up out of a hundred i'm just like oh and then she starts speaking english so none of you really want to work here and then everybody stands up but the point was that on your first day of school if you're a teacher your first day of class and you have this great thing prepared and you're welcoming your students and you're enthusiastic there's a very good chance in clifton that you're going to have children in your class that don't have don't understand a word that you're saying and that's something that you need to be cognizant of something that you need to be conscious of and i think it was it's a great way to welcome i thought you're going to bring out the spanish too because i'm giving your secrets away janina speaks polish fluently spanish fluently english we're working on she's doing pretty good so welcome to our new staff all of our staff will return next thursday september 1st and our students first day of school for our students is tuesday september 6th tomorrow principals will be sending back their welcome sending out their welcome back emails to uh all of the parents with building specific information about you know the obviously that school starts on september 6 but what doors to go in through and all that stuff student schedules will be available for parents and guardians to view on our parent portal on monday august 29th the letters with login information for newly enrolled students were mailed already on august 19th so a new student gets a letter mailed with their login information parents who've already had students in our district have their login information if they lost it or they forgot it there's a mechanism for them to reset their password and so a parent logs in they're able to see their students schedule see their students bus stop the times and they get to sign off on all the millions of forms that we all used to sign on the first day of school now it's all done electronically 90 of it is done electronically also we're going to do a big push to remind parents about the meal applications for the last year and a half maybe it was almost two years due to the usda waivers all students receive free lunch that waiver has expired so we want to remind parents that students will not be getting free lunch unless they had qualified for free lunch in the 1920 school year but only then they get lunch free for september so they have to reapply and any parent that didn't have free or reduced lunch excuse me it's only free now there's no more reduced any parent that didn't may apply so we're encouraging all families to apply the it's on the parent portal it's i believe much easier to fill out the application now than ever before so we're encouraging uh parents to to apply it's going to be a little complicated with remembering who was you know free in 1920.
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they are already banging down our doors to be at this event so i don't see a 25 difference being an issue for any of these trucks so those are our main differences there and i would not be doing my job if i did not have a shameless plug so the festival of arts will be held on march 25th 2023 from 10 a.m to 3 p.m all over valley vista high school so i will take any questions i just do want to say that both the chocolate covered strawberries and the food trucks were outstanding last year whatever we have to do to bring them back i'm in favor of thank you so much for the presentation all the information it's truly a staple in our community it's an event it's not just uh you know um i mean i would say just an event at a school i mean but it's more than just a a dysart school event it's it's a whole it's like a staple of our dysart community it's just amazing the way it's grown and all the work that everyone puts into it i just i enjoy it every year um the arts experience sounds wonderful i'm sure that's just going to be packed i think that's going to be great we agree um and then just for clarity what's an example of a community partner so we reach out to like our local theater so like theater works um ghost light theater west valley um arts council comes out wham comes out so those those community partners that share the art because in addition to us showcasing our students it's a great opportunity to show our community what other arts there are out there and get our students those opportunities to go and see stuff outside of our school district so we work really hard to bring in those um community partners to to kind of showcase the arts okay so maybe because i noticed how you said they can't sell anything but they might bring like flyers and information they can promote okay perfect all right thank you any other questions or comments just a real quick one miss marinelli um thank you for defining the home based um i'm sure you may have gotten some some folks talking about it but i'm glad you defined it so thank you very much and um do we remember how many people actually attended last year we believe we saw between 75 to 8 000 people and you're expecting how much we're going out with those numbers and then if we get beyond that then we'll increase our numbers the following year so our goal is always to keep increasing which we're going to continue to add that one really big piece that's going to be a little bit different every year so hopefully i'm not gonna say more than eight thousand but i would of course love to see more than eight thousand ten thousand ten thousand right thank you very much and madam president i just might say in closing that the vision for this festival has been is starting to be realized and you stated very well that it's a community-based event um and i do want to just give miss marinelli just a tremendous amount of credit even though once upon a time as a principal she turned me down to come work for me at my school she does a tremendous job in organizing this festival and and really running all of the dysart arts and so thank you miss marinelli for the exceptional job that you do appreciate it very much all right with that i move the board approve the sponsorship and vendor package for the festival of the arts second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by joe grant no tracy tracy sorry sing doll i'm sorry motion passes wonderful all right next we move to request for future agenda items all right next we have a call for executive session pursuant to ars 38-43 for the purpose of discussion or consideration of matters relating to school safety operations or school safety plans or programs and pursuant to ars 38-431.03 a1 for the purpose of screening applicants for the position of district superintendent and review interview question structure and process so at this time i move that we go into executive session second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by pick one joe grant there you go there you go oh it's me yeah cleaned on you motion carries we're adjourned for executive this time we'll reconvene the regular meeting and we'll move to item k action discussion items um k-1 discussion possible action directing superintendent search committee to invite specific applicants to interview for the position and i will name these individuals in alphabetical order i move to direct the superintendent search committee to invite the following applicants to interview for the position of superintendent dr jim dean dr calvin stroy and dr nicholas wade i have a second second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by dawn densmore dr nicholas wade i'm a yes motion carries next we move to k2 discussion and possible action regarding final directions of interview protocol in regards to the superintendent search i moved the board established an executive session on september 22 2022 at 1 30 pm pursuant to ars 38-431.0381 for the purpose of interviewing finalists for the position of superintendent of the dysart unified school district and on october 6 2022 pursuant to ars 38-431.03 a1 for the purpose of discussing the finalists interviewed for the position of superintendent of the dysart unified school district do i have a second second motion made by christine pritchard seconded by don densmore i'm a yes cheers promotion carries next we move to a german eye move that we adjourn the meeting motion made by christine pritchard seconded by joe grant thank
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do i have a motion by earl do i have a second second my path any discussion i guess i just want to confirm that her original contract called for the 25 extra correct any additional discussion okay all those in favor of then amy i need to be the stem sponsors too perfect we'll go next page so one to bring the stem sponsors to you for approval and we have them all listed there brush creek would be stephanie puckett hayden bailey kradock graham creek courtney christ john sand creek daniel wiley nve judy white sippio vi davis the middle school tara kelly and the high school charles will asking for approval for this okay i have a motion by travis do i have a second second by her did you i'm sorry i'm gonna say susan i thought you raised your hand susan i got susan so i have a motion by travis i have a second by susan any discussion no all those in favor seven uh um now down under support staff shannon we have recommendations yes recommending teresa brandt for the janice county high school cook position sally emily for sand creek parapro 29 hour position randy hill jr for jennings county middle school 7th grade assistant football coach bridget jagger for sand creek elementary sped paraprofessional penny jones jennings county high school cook justin koontz jennings county high school maine office student worker dianna marshall hayden elementary cook stephanie rain brainer sand creek elementary esser parapro holly rose hayden elementary paraprofessional catherine safely jennings county middle school cook and she's moving to a james county middle school music paraprofessional theresa short sand creek elementary paraprofessional move from full-time to part-time kennedy vance scipio elementary parent professional amanda walt jennings county high school cook and connie wilson moving from scipio parrot pro to scipio librarian asking for approval so if it's okay with everybody we'll take those as a group so do i have a motion to accept that's right travis motion my travis drive a second second by pat any discussion sorry we have an enrollment update it's going to update the board on enrollment for this school year as of the first week of school we were down 99 students to the previous year's beginning of school enrollment we are currently as of last friday we were at 3877 students and we will say we updated the numbers a little ahead of this friday because we were curious and we have gained 19 more students since that number so we are seeing an upward trend on enrollment that does usually happen each year all the way up to october 1st um and so then in addition to that with the potential loss of 99 students across the district we really want to dig in on what's what those 99 students have left us to go to where they're at so we've asked each principal by september 15th to contact those families and those kids and find out where they have decided to enroll and what the reasoning is for that things that they experienced in jennings county that they thought were wonderful things they experienced in jennings county schools that maybe they had some comments for improvement but that's information we'd like to know so the principals are contacting them individually i already have three principals have their data back in um but they can't reach them by phone they are going to mail a letter and i include it in your board packet a sample of what that looks like that survey we're sending for exit data for k-8 and then the one that we're looking at for 9th through 12th graders so that's information by mid-september that we'll be able to discuss and have back if this was an informed item does anybody have any questions or comments i have to give kudos to susie webster and dustin roller for developing those and being willing to help out with that i also agree i think that's fantastic i would like to encourage you to try to figure out if there's a way that maybe these surveys or that touch point could be it be via text this generation is just very connected to phones whether it be students or parents a lot of people what i find even when i'm looking at interviewing and hiring people even in healthcare is they will not answer a telephone but they will respond immediately to a text so anything that we can do to make sure that we're reaching out and getting this feedback would be ideal and i'm you have a great it department i'm sure that there would be an opportunity for them to offer suggestions but um it's just you it's very interesting you'll call to set up an interview they won't answer but if you text them man it they're right so it's just the way it is we we have students leave during the year like moving if we can catch them in the guidance office when they're pulling out on hey give us a couple minutes why are you leaving i'm really fine down there mr roller's developed a plan for that this year he's going to personally talk to each kid who's withdrawing and then if they do choose to withdraw part of that exit form is helping them create a plan for what they're going to do after they're out of school if we're unable to convince them or help them with staying enrolled any additional discussion okay down to finance help ask asking approval on quite a few donations here so i hope i don't butcher this too bad campbell township volunteer fire department a thousand dollars to brush creek for stu snacks the masonic lodge 219 500 dollars to brush creek for student snacks bar cons 150 value and playground uh balls for the rush creek school coffee creek christian church 250 dollars to graham creek for student needs westin baptist church 500 to grand creek for student needs decatur plastics 500 to sand creek for student needs ebbing auto parts and fresh prints shelving for the jennings county high school supply shop modern woodman 700 in snacks to the jennings county schools bee lee family dentistry two totes of school supplies to the jennings county schools lowe's a hundred dollars to jennings county high school for the school supply shop and the 2023 2022-2023 hope mission hope food drive program jackson county bank five hundred dollars dennis and sheila cockrell 225 christ baptist church 200 simcoe 225 grayford road church of god 225 dollars helix polly donating bags warren hall 225 the eye care group 500 and expert eye care 225 asking for approval i got a motion by tony do i have a second second by pass any discussion all those in favor it's fantastic so next on the list i have capital projects finance plan presentation seth you can pull that one up please thank you this is the first presentation of this next slide please schedule for that is there'll be a second presentation on the 8th with the request to advertise we will advertise on the 9th and then the public here will be set for the 22nd and adoption on the 6th and again this is like the other one there you're advertising on gateway and we'll put it on our school website so it is no longer required to be in the newspaper next slide please basically what we're what we've got here is the 2023 2025 capital assets this is items that we're buying like potentially buying a uh it vehicle or we're having to get a zero turn mower it's a three year window and i'm just trying to anticipate working with roy on where the vehicles stand and it's about 332 thousand dollars last year this was 508 because we had three buses on that window but we're looking i have one bus on this list just in case something happens we're not we won't be looking at a lot more buses for a while from that standpoint because we're currently setting so they'll probably we'll probably add more buses next year for the next three year window for 2023 capital projects coming in around 1.4 2024 2.0 and 2025 7.8 you see a pretty good size jump there bigger than what we've had in the past also and that is because roy has worked the last month or so trying to look at our the really bigger picture 10-year plan and with that we went ahead and threw items on here that have the potential to be needed in the next three years so that's why the 2025 project looks so tall and looks quite as quite a big jump there but it's things that um there's a variety of things between safety items and hvac seems to dominate the list when you when you look at those type of items that's going to be your heavy hitters within that answer any questions on the capitol and this is a report basically that has to be filled out with the state filed the state so when we turn around and actually have to spend some of this there you guys have already looked at the detail of it and looked at what's on there so when it comes up it's not a surprise so this was an item for inform so just our information does anybody have any questions for philip we'll move down to food and service prices asking for approval for meal prices for the school year these are the same numbers that they were we kept the prices the same as they were pre-coven this year the universal provision federal government grant they gave free breakfast and lunch has expired so we are back to all of our policies and procedures that were in place prior to coven um worked hard to not change that price for families of what we were paying prior to covet so the student breakfast price would be a dollar fifty for paid lunch 30 cents for reduced and then there's free of course lunch would be 275 and 40 cents for reduced so asking for approval for those prices motion by earl do we have a second second by chelsea any discussion just a comment to stay like you have there in this inflation is remarkable so thank you any additional discussion all those in favor oh moving on to operations we have a food service student program update yes so stacy green is here to offer an update on how this is working for our students we have made a committed priority to providing food for all of our students whether they have a negative lunch balance or not they'll receive a free meal i'm sorry a full reimbursable meal meal at breakfast and lunch so how we're going to make that work and be able to offer that stacey's going to share information thank you hello everyone it's nice to be here as nikki said free and free meals have expired for the school year as you know and thank you for approving the meal prices as they were we know it's a hardship for everyone so we'll make we'll make try to make it work with that being said is inflammation re-implementation of the meal policy and these are things stated in the mill policy but i just wanted to share with you again how we're going to implement that so all and you have these i think in your information as well so all k through 12 students will receive a full reimbursable meal if they do not have money in hand and that's a full reimbursable breakfast and or lunch they won't receive a separate meal or a different meal it's the same meal all the kids get and it's the reimbursable meal as always they can't charge all the cart items after that you know if they don't have money in their account it's going to be an iou or a charge we will then contact the parents through a daily text message is currently sent to the parent or guardian for each student who owes meals and also a text through skyward so it's an email and or a text every day it's daily and that's already been implemented and in place k through k through six after the second week of school um which we've already done iou letter notifications go home in the student newsletters and the teacher writes a negative balance from the list from the school secretaries the school secretary will give it to the teacher that she'll put in the student information the newsletters that go home with the students in their folders grades k-12 notification letter one two and three is sent via email and the parent or guardian notification through the skyward portal so it's sent via email as well as through the portal and you have those copies as well um currently after 10 student days any student who owes 10 or more a phone call to the parent from the school secretary just to make it a little lighter and it's informational that they do owe 10 or more currently any student who then owes 25 or more a phone call to the parent from either the secretary and or the principal those schools know their parents the best on whether or not that is a secretary phone call maybe the parent just forgot or maybe it needs to be from the principal because of the amount now owed and or um just they know their parents best per ido as i mentioned no student or all adult a la carte adult a la carte purchases are permitted that your chips and your drinks and your extras and things like that so that won't be permitted and per idea we no adult meal charges are permitted so we ask our adults not to charge their meals so any questions yes um so if a child has got a negative balance of twenty five dollars what their parents seem to be struggling to pay is the window open for them to apply for free absolutely yes that that is available all school year long we have sent multiple applications out we will continue to do so so with those newsletters that are sent home with those students an application with the letter is in there with if they and also if they need assistance because we do have some non english speaking households they can reach out and we will get that to them in spanish we do have spanish applications as well and we can get other verbiage and other for that but anyway yes we will get applications to them and help them as well do you have a general what's our pre-launch percentage running as a corporation um we don't get that number till september because august isn't finished yet but i i would imagine it's around the same around 55 50 yeah high 50 percentage so and our principles when they reach out to individuals if they would qualify for the application that maybe want help filling it out we do invite them to come in the building and we assist people personally if they just need help getting that filled out some of the information on there and maybe um maybe i read it wrong but why is milk 50 cents and then the whole meal is 30 cents is that did i misread that no so a reimbursable meal the milk comes with the meals so if they want an extra meal say it's a lunchbox student or whatever whatever it's considered an a la carte purchase so it's an a la carte pricing or a calculation from the ido so we pay around 25 28 cents for carton of milk and with that calculation it comes out close to 50.
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