001good evening i now call the june 28th meeting of the wallingford swarthmore school board to order in opening is you're willing and able please rise and join me in the pledge of allegiance i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under thank you i would like to start by asking ms fagor to take the roll call mr ballas here here dr huff here mr cutis here mrs lentz here mr sullivan here mrs walkman here miss wakowski smith here dr grandy here mr berman here dr grandy you have nine voting members present all right thank you mr fagora uh so i'll start with board announcements um i do want to mention the board met an executive session prior to this meeting to discuss
002personnel and safety and also mention that dr palmer is not able to join us this evening due to travel before i move on to our first focus topic i do want to mention of course that wednesday is the last day for dr palmer as superintendent before she retires and we welcome dr marseille on thursday and um you know mr abbott i think mentioned a few words about dr palmer at our last meeting but i just wanted to say a few additional words because i've worked very closely with dr palmer over the past three and a half years and certainly over the last year to year and a half we've worked together very closely and i can certainly say the job of a superintendent is a very hard one and certainly over the past year it's
003been nothing short of extraordinary challenge for all superintendents and dr palmer is certainly among those that have worked day and night throughout the pandemic mr abbott did mention at the last meeting that if at any point you drove past the school and you saw a car sitting in the parking lot late at night it was dr palmer's and i can say that is definitely true having spoken to her on the phone many times late in the evening over many issues her dedication to the district and the students in our district has really been extraordinary and again i've worked so closely with her over the past year and a half and just see all that she has given to our district she's led very important initiatives during her five years of leadership and will certainly be
004missed so dr palmer we are all eternally grateful for all you've done for the district and dr marseille uh we're excited to welcome you on thursday and look forward to your leadership of wellingford swarthmore school district so that takes us to our focused topics we have one on the agenda this evening and that is a wellness committee report and so i will ask ms fagora to lead that discussion thank you dr granty while i'm waiting for the presentation to show up each year um before the end of the school year on june 30th the district all districts are required to do a student wellness new nutrition committee update i changed i want to say the title of the committee only because dr mccalla always she does a a wellness update also and she focuses on
005specifically mental health and social emotional learning so this really is part of nutrition as well as wellness so we've made it a little bit longer the student wellness and nutrition committee hmm okay go ahead thank you aj so i'm first going to start with the student wellness policy federal regulations it's really why we're here every local educational agency needs to have a school wellness policy for any schools participating in the school lunch program or the school breakfast program federal relation federal sorry federal regulations require schools receiving these federal funds to have a student wellness policy and the plan includes methods to promote student wellness to prevent and reduce childhood obesity and provide assurance that school meals and other food are consistent with federal standards this student wellness policy must contain goals for nutrition promotion education
006physical activity and other school-based activities that promote student wellness there needs to be standards for all foods that are sold and not sold to students during the school day so there's standards of what we can and can't do for students based upon nutritional guidelines from the state the student wellness policy also must contain implementation of the compliance on how we're doing this a description on how to participate in the wellness policy across the district and the stakeholders that are involved and also a description for reporting our wellness policy content our record keeping and our implementation so this record keeping includes our triennial assessments our meeting notes and anything that has to do with the food the policies that we have as part of the district on how we are giving out rewards to students information
007that for anything that's sold or not sold in the district there's policies and procedures and forms that teachers and staff need to fill out if they are doing fundraisers and this all comes through this policy and it's part of the record keeping our student wellness policy is number 246. our policy is includes and i really condense this it's a comprehensive nutrition program that's aligned with federal and state requirements where students are receiving consistent nutritional educational messages across the district that they have access to a reasonable cost to foods and beverages that there are physical education opportunities and any appropriate physical activities for students to do during a school day also an annual stakeholder report is to be shared regarding student wellness to inform the public on the policy and changes and initiatives and the policy
008the contact information and general information are found on the district website this is going to be updated after this meeting today but that information is um for anyone who wants to get involved has an opportunity to do so it could be community members it could be family it could be students so that's all on the website and it's under right in the beginning general information so every district needs to evaluate our board policies and complete a wellness assessment every three years because of covid there was a waiver it gave us a chance to delay the deadline of our triennial assessment and that was given to us until june 30th of 2021. well on june 11th 2021 there was another one-year extension given until june 30th 2022 so this deadline resets the three year cycle that
009we have so our next triennial assessment is due by june 30th of 2025. the triennial assessment will be placed on the website and it's been completed by all the our schools the triennial assessment looks at public involvement notification and assessment nutrition education nutrition promotion physical activity physical education and school based wellness activities there's a a rating scale from zero to three for most of our activities we are in the two to three range on our activities with three being the highest there are some things that our team our committee looked at and how we're going to improve them and we set them as part of our goals which will be coming up [Music] so since 2019 2020 and through the rest of this year our student wellness committee members consisted of this pretty big group
010of people this year though we've only met once and a lot of it has to deal with covid previously our year before that we met four times a year however we do have some things in place coming up for this year which i'm going to share with you and also some exciting news too so you can see right now in 2020 21 22 we have some new members this is one of the first years um i really had a nice response from students that they wanted to be on the committee so there are four new student members to this committee two are from the middle school two or from the high school we also have a new community member which is scott gordon and we will be looking for a new board member because dr
011huff is i'm going to take a break she told me until she's leaving so if you're interested in one of the board members please feel free to reach out to me um jen lentz is on the committee with us so we have representation from every single building either through the nurses or through pe so like i said we had one meeting we had a meeting on june 9th of this year and we are we discussed about changing the name to the wellness nutrition committee and what we did is we reviewed our student wellness goals we discussed our district goals for 21 and we just decided that we were going to keep our goals because they were still viable the ones that we had planned from last year we did not hit our goals this year
012and so we are going to just keep those goals and keep moving forward with what we're doing one of the things coming up too with these district wellness and nutrition goals is that um we're looking at nutrition education nutrition promotion physical activity and public involvement so when we did the triennial assessment these were the areas that we felt that we needed as a district we had to work on so in nutrition education we're going to work with food services to improve nutritional information into subject areas and part of that also is they're going to support a district-wide nutritional promotion so it's not going to be just by a building it's going to be district-wide we're going to continue to build and foster partnerships with the community for physical activities looking at local fitness centers sports
013camps anything that offers programs to students to support physical activity and then as part of our public involvement we'd like to improve communication to stakeholders regarding the student wellness plan through our district promotion of activities on the website and we do have some goals that we're going to look at regarding public involvement so our next steps for the wellness committee which was one of the um really i want to say what the committee was very excited about is we've decided to do this new initiative which um is going to be part of um our website we can send it out to each of the buildings for the principals if they would like to send it out in e-blast but we are looking at doing monthly podcasts on the district website to address certain things like
014screen time vaping anything to do with food rewards nutrition wellness issues and preferably too if there needs to be issues that each building may have we would do a separate podcast for that we're going to do the planning in august on this um i have uh the nurses uh pe teachers and a lot of the other committee members who are coming in we're going to work on the podcast they're going to start in september again working on our community outreach what we're looking at we're right now our committee is a district committee what we really like to do is refocus and work with the new school have new school wellness committees so that there's a school wellness committee in each building right now we're lacking in that and that's something that i i really feel
015as someone who's leading this that's something that we need just so that staff and students understand the policies and come to us with their concerns for wellness and nutrition again working with the food service provider and we're looking on doing that for meetings and events instead of just having people bring in things um we're kind of looking at more food items that are compliant with what our policy is and then the triennial assessments will be posted on the district website so they aren't there right now but that's one of the things that as part of our policy they need to be [Music] all right thank you uh do we have questions from board members kelly um mary thank you so much is the i wondered about the audience for the podcast are they um tailored
016more to parents and guardians are they tailored to students we are talking in august where i think we're planning on doing a little bit of both okay we what we did in our previous meetings in and 20. we wanted to have like presentations for parents and you know with covid we decided um this isn't this is a great opportunity to kind of move forward and do this we could use the screencastify and so um yes if there's concerns and that's kind of why we're looking at those building committees if there's a concern from the building and they need something for students we could do a podcast for that if there's something like we talked about mental health issues as part of our committee meetings again in 1920 and that didn't come to fruition either how
017he wanted to do that and so just having some of those things for parents to kind of instead of having come to our presentation at six o'clock on monday night it's just an opportunity for parents to access it anytime you want that's great um one thing i would encourage with the focus on nutrition is also to think about for a parent guardian audience in particular but also perhaps for students is education around anorexia bulimia particularly starting at the middle school level and i'm sure you or megan might tell me you actually need to start earlier these days perhaps about that um i've i've heard that concern uh around the anorexia anorexia and bulimia from a number of folks in the community and i think our our parents wouldn't appreciate some more education about it great
018thanks thank you i'll definitely consider that in people with what we're doing any other questions or comments jen thank you uh miss figure i just had a quick question i don't know if you know this yet because it seems like it's still evolving but do you know what the platform i'm assuming the podcast is an audio presentation most are but would this also be audio versus a video again the team was going to get together and express how they how do they want this to look unless this came from um our meeting on the ninth where um it was a ten and we had a pretty good attendance but it wasn't that diverse group of stakeholders so we were hoping to have more um a diverse group between students and just kind of putting it
019out there so i think we're just kind of laying the groundwork um in august hoping like we come up with these ideas on how this is going to look and then right now letting everybody know okay i always find it the irony with the screen time presentation that it needs to come through some sort of screen device but it is good information and it's good information to disseminate and for what it's worth i think also it would be wonderful to maybe and i'll likely be at these meetings but um to hear a podcast for adults presented by children because you know what would you want your your um adult to know because we can learn so much from their perspective on all of the topics that you just put up there if we listen to
020them so and one of the other conversations i had with dr mccalla we kind of overlap a lot with student services this student wellness and nutrition as well as her student wellness committees and um what we're trying to do is kind of uh have her come to this um our committee and give an update of what they're working on so that we're not you know putting spending too much time on something that she's already done or she's been working on so that we're kind of like on the same page on where everybody's going okay thank you i just thought of one other thing and it comes from experience um through work um when we think about if if we're ever moving in a direction of trying to provide nutrition education or even like healthy cooking
021ideas i know from presentations the nutrition group has done before uh that they have um they can build they build into their repertoire and their their offerings um things that are foods that are common for diff different populations and different ethnicities and so forth um and i think that would be a terrific thing to build into it you know how do you make recipes more heart healthy but take from food that is commonly served in the homes of different you know populations within the district so just another [Music] consideration any other questions i'll just put my two cents in to add to jen's comment about i think a lot of these health and nutrition topics um are really great to really engage the students as as you know uh to generate ideas about how to
022influence their peers as messengers and so you know i think as you think about the podcast series as you think about other initiatives around vaping and other things that having students very actively engaged in that i think can be just a win-win all around agreed and i think having really four students who are very interested and want to be active in this is another plus because we really haven't um had strong student participation before so i think that i think i'm excited about it so great thank you all right thank you all right so that takes us to time for audience recognition for response items for action on the agenda this evening and as a reminder public comment is a time for district residents and taxpayers to speak to the board about an issue that
023is before the board or may come before the board it is a time for us to listen and hear perspectives and experiences from our community and while we can't answer questions at the meeting there's always an opportunity to follow up after meetings if there is a specific question for the district for now we we do have two methods to comment in person and by phone and i do want to mention that one of the things i'm excited about this evening is at the july meeting we're going to finally put this room back to the way it was before kovet and allow ourselves to be organized in a way that makes it easier for in-person public comment to happen and so future public comment going forward in july will be in person so something i'm eager
024to to move back to our more traditional forms of engagement but for now for phone messages members of the public wishing to address the board for this evening can call 610-892-3470 extension 1102 to leave recorded comments subject to a three-minute time limit any comments left prior to five o'clock today are transcribed and made available to the board any comments left after five o'clock but prior to the end of the meeting will still be transcribed distributed to the board and made a part of the record but will not be acknowledged during the meeting is there anyone here in the audience tonight who would like to speak about a topic on the agenda this evening did you see anybody no okay and i don't believe we have any called in comments for anything on the agenda this
025evening is that correct okay okay so that takes us to our first item for action which is approval of the june 14th regular business meeting minutes and iso move do we have a second second thanks matt uh any discussion okay miss mcguire can you please take a roll call vote mr ballas all right miss samino dame because i wasn't here dr huff aye mr cutis hi mrs lentz aye mr sullivan aye mrs wachmann aye ms wilkowski smith hi dr grandy hi dr grandy the motion passes eight to zero with one abstention all right thank you mr aguero so it takes us to personnel we have 19 items for action and personnel this evening are there any on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest okay uh so first we have approval of
026five resignations and retirements uh all listed in the agenda and we have approval of two appointments kathleen ward long-term substitute special education teacher at west uh and shanae young home and school visitor we have the approval of three leads of absence as listed in the agenda we have approval of staff to work on the digital literacy curriculum at a rate of 37 per hour not to exceed 40 hours as listed in the agenda we have approval of additions to the summer school program as listed in the agenda with approval of a change in salary status for catherine pulos and kenneth huffnell as listed in the agenda we have approval of six instructional technology liaisons as listed in the agenda we have approval of a change of resignation date for martha cube from july 8th to
027july 9 2021. we have approval of a change of resignation date for george king from september 17th to august 20th 2021 with the approval of changes of assignment for chris matsanka to middle school principal tori montela to montello to substitute bus driver and keith evans to a ela temporary professional employee teacher at the high school we have approval of additions to the postseason pay as listed in the agenda with the approval of staff to work on the third grade scope and sequence math and focus curriculum review at a rate of per hour not to exceed 30 hours we have approval of staff to work on the high school math gap recovery curriculum at the rate of 37 per hour not to exceed 60 hours we have approval of staff to work on the rtii at
028the rate of 37 per hour not to exceed 10 hours we have approval of staff to work on the gifted program revision of matrix and processes at the rate of 37 per hour not to exceed 40 hours we have approval of staff to work on the social studies k-5 curriculum at the rate of 37 dollars per hour not to exceed 75 hours and we have approval of staff to work on the ela k-2 literacy curriculum at the rate of 37 per hour not to exceed 100 hours then we have approval of staff to work on social emotional learning and trauma training curriculum at the rate of 37 per hour not to exceed seven hours total and lastly approval of compensation for the 2021 2022 wellness committee nurses and teachers of the rate of 37 dollars
029per hour not to exceed 50 hours so all items in the section are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion thanks jerry do we have a second second i'll go with mary jo was it mary jane i wasn't you it was marilyn okay i have my head down okay thank you marilyn uh any discussion okay uh miss magura can you please take a roll call vote yes demino aye dr huff aye mr cutis mr cutis hi mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi mrs waffman aye ms wilkowski smith aye mr balas hi dr grandi aye dr grandy the personnel items pass nine to zero all right thank you mr aguero so that takes us to a policy we just have one item for action and policy uh which is approval of
030the adoptions of the dciu policies and procedures under the federal requirements of 34 cfr 300.151 through 300.608 for the 2021 2022 school year uh do i have a motion thank you kelly do we have a second second thanks mary jo uh any discussion all right uh miss maguire can you please take a roll call vote dr huff aye mr cutis hi mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi mrs walkman aye ms wilkowski smith hi mr ballas miss cimino hi dr grandy hi the motion passes nine to zero all right thank you mr aguero uh so that takes us to curriculum uh we have six items for action are there any on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest okay first we have approval of a 2020 2021 related services provider contract that's stipulated
031we have approval of a 2021-2022 related services provider contracts as stipulated we have approval of a 2021 esy tuition contract as listed in the agenda we have approval of an educational services agreement as listed in the agenda we have approval of 2021 2022 category 1 overnight field trips as stipulated with approval of 2021 2022 category 2 foreign exchange field trips as stipulated these items are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion so move thanks matt uh do we have a second thank you jerry any discussion okay um i'll just make a quick point on i know field trips uh were a hot topic a year ago for sure um and so you know i think we're all very optimistic that that all of these field trips can go forward that
032we're approving tonight but i would just encourage uh parents when making decisions about these trips to review all the cancellation policies in detail because there are some financial commitments that that are involved um some of which funds are recoverable if something does come up particularly related to the covet pandemic but just encourage everyone to take a close look at those details uh well in advance any other comments before we take a roll call vote okay uh miss figura mr cutis hi mrs lentz hi mr sullivan aye mrs walkman aye ms wikowski smith hi mr dallas hi miss amino hi dr huff aye dr grandy hi dr granny the curriculum items pass nine to zero all right thank you miss figura uh so that takes us to finance we have 11 items are there any on
033the list anyone would like to separate let's rest okay so we have approval of payment of invoices to vendors dated may 19th uh june 22nd 2021 we have approval of the treasurer's report for may 2021 with acknowledgment of receipt of the financial statements for may 2021 as stipulated we have approval of 2020 2021 budget transfers as stipulated we have acknowledgement of receipt of a donation from mary and tom renke of a thousand dollars if approval of the quoted insurance proposals from arthur j gallagher risk management services for the 2021-2022 school year is listed in the agenda we have authorization to enter into an agreement for the property at 152 park avenue in swarthmore setting the assessment at 480 000 for tax year 2021 we have approval of the renewal contract with powerschool for its e-finance
034software and related items for the 2021-2022 school year not to exceed 59 000 as stipulated with approval of the annual software access agreement with raptor technologies for the 2021-2022 school year not to exceed 3 000 as stipulated with adoption of the 2021-2022 final general fund operating budget um funded by the tax rates as listed in the agenda and the amount listed in the agenda we have approval of the 2021-2022 homestead farmstead exclusion resolution as authorized under provision of the homestead property exclusion program act and the taxpayer relief act all items in this section are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion so moved thanks kelly uh do we have a second second maryland thank you marilyn any discussion so i have a comment on the budget item on jay um
035and just some background before i make my comment which is you know despite taking the exceptions for special ed here and getting us to a 4.2 percent increase in our budget we're still projecting a dip of 900 000 into our fund balance that's going to take our fund balance from 6.3 million down to 5.4 million and we're not going to be able to do that many more times so we need to find a way to balance this budget as soon as possible i'm disappointed that we did not get a chance to review this budget in detail in a finance committee meeting given the projected dip into the fund balance i don't think we can avoid the 4.27 percent increase and we're also up against the legal deadline to adopt the budget so i'm i'm feeling
036stuck but at the same time i'm feeling comfortable voting to adopt this budget because of those couple of factors namely that i don't think that we could avoid the 4.27 increase that said i'm expecting that we're going to take a hard look at these line items with the next superintendent and business manager as we go through the year to make sure that we're spending our funds in alignment with both our priorities and our needs as a district and i want to do that also to try and minimize that dip into the fund balance thank you thanks matt can we um i'd also like to offer some comments um uh in addition to what matt shared um we as matt said we did not have as much time to review the detailed line item budget this
037year for a number of reasons um i do want to say though that i know matt and i both sent a lot of questions upon receiving it and i want to thank miss q at the same time for providing very quick and detailed responses to those questions to matt's point i agree i don't think that there is a path that doesn't require us to increase the tax at the rate that we that we are proposing um and i want to share a few comments um and this may take a little bit so i apologize but why and how i got comfortable with making the decision to vote yes on the budget um miscues shared in many meetings um this year and in prior years that salary and benefits makes up the majority of our school
038district's expenditure similar to all school districts that's roughly 70 percent of the entire budget for wssd i would remind everyone that pension contributions are mandated by the state the district does not have any authority over the pension contributions i have a high degree of confidence that wssd is offering an appropriately competitive salary and benefit package that makes up that 70 percent of our budget so that we can attract and retain highly qualified teachers staff and administrators during the 2020-21 school year the district negotiated and word approved three collective bargaining bargaining agreements and five compensation plans which represent nearly 100 percent of our district employees that process included benchmarking salary and benefits through comparisons to peer districts in delaware county and the region the benchmarking was done by district administrators and through consultation with the pennsylvania
039school board association the results of those analyses were shared with the board and discussed in several executive sessions throughout the course of the year prior to board approval of those agreements some of us also did our own research particularly looking at the administrator act 93 agreements for districts in the area um in addition um so i can say that what we are offering is competitive and it's appropriate based on what we see um with peer districts in the region and in the in the county um also the district's part of a consortium and i might not be using exactly the right terms here but it's essentially a purchasing consortium run through the dciu that negotiates healthcare benefits on behalf of many schools and public of other public employees which has enabled our district to obtain
040very competitive rates for the health care benefits that we offer as a reminder another 10 percent of our budgets now we're up to 80 percent of our budget that 10 goes to the debt service so that remaining 20 percent is covering a vast array of necessary spending on things like books supplies curriculum technology utilities insurance equipment maintenance repair um i ask questions specifically on a couple of these topics i ask questions about supplies the spending on supplies was largely the same as our 2021 budget levels i had expected to see a decrease there after getting feedback from ms q around that i understand that we have left a hundred thousand in the budget uh for covin because we don't know what to anticipate in this coming year uh in terms of uh measures that we
041would need to take that require us to purchase supplies and overall the 20 21 22 budget is 3 million which is 500 000 less than what we actually project to spend for 2020 2021 so there is actually a decrease in supplies where we do see areas of increase it is supporting our english language learners program which we're bringing back from the iu the iu program has become unsustainable from a financial perspective and it's not being supported in the same way that it had been in the past it's also being used for kate their k-12 literacy program our ap staff program uh differentiated math and reading support and things of that nature so it's going directly to educating our students i asked specifically about operations and some areas of increase that we saw there those are
042primarily for repair maintenance of our buildings and our equipment inclusive of things like our hvac system fire alarms sprinklers fire extinguishers painting our srs tech lab renovation the sm the middle school retaining wall elevators it goes on the pedestrian bridge repairs that need to be done so those are all things that the word has um looked at in the past um it's part of our our operations plan we've talked about them and it's supported through the evidence that the district has provided to the board in the past the curriculum increases again support on the ell program that came to literacy we do see some significant increases in areas of need particularly speech and language support we have needed to add time for purchase services in those areas due to student need the same is true
043for professional education to support emotional support again we have an increased need student needs learning support we've invested in some technology that helps us educate our students in our learning support programs as well and finally i think that based on what we just looked at in terms of all of the work that teachers and staff are doing over the summer i think that we can fairly uh easily um dissolute anybody the idea that our teachers and staff do not work over the summer we just went through a tremendous amount of work that they're doing over the summer and so some of our our increases are actually supporting this incredibly important work related to a number of different things um supporting mental health social emotional learning uh trauma invested practices our multi-tiered systems and supports our
044wellness committee work our summer curriculum uh i could go on and on um suicide prevention a lot of a lot of work in our mental health support so those were some of the areas that i dug into personally where we saw some increases um i wanted to share that because i know that the burden that we're putting on families in the district is not insignificant it's quite significant for the same reasons that matt has articulated and for the reasons that i've just walked through i will vote tonight in support of our budget all right thank you kelly any other comments okay i just want to thank our the members of our finance committee um for all the work you've been doing um and agree with with matt that we have to find a way to
045get to structural balance um you know it's been obviously a tumultuous last couple of years from uh not just a pandemic perspective but from a budgetary perspective as well and obviously the two are very closely related to one another so i think it's a very high priority for the district to find a path forward to structural balance so that we don't continue to erode at our fund balance if there's no other comments uh i'll ask mr to take a roll call vote mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi mrs walkman hi miss wakowski smith hi mr ballas miss samino aye dr huff aye mr cutis hi dr granty hi finance items pass for the vote of nine to zero all right thank you ms fagora okay so that takes us to audience recognition for response to
046topics not on the agenda this evening uh is there anyone who would like to make a comment hi if you could just share your name your street uh and then your comments hello my name is paul jacobs right now i road another province and i didn't want to let it go unremarked that july 1st will be the 50th birthday for the willingford spotlight school district it was not loved at the beginning the lawsuits continued into its first year it was being fought in harrisburg through its first year the um swarthmore was seemed exceptionally to not like it the swarthmore school board actually passed a budget anyway the interim committee that was supposed to become the school board disbanded itself rather than serve as the new school board um you guys might have felt that way
047sometimes this year um but in august there was a picture in the paper of a wallingford swath school district bus there with the new lettering and at least another providence it seems to have been pretty pretty popular um so i did want to remark on that it's you made it 50 years that's pretty great um maybe another 50. the other thing i wanted to remark on um this week the township another providence township board of commissioners uh discussed changing the zoning rules to make it easier to establish charter and private schools in nether providence and i think the school board and school community should be aware of these changes and uh if you are a big fan of our public schools then you should let your commissioners know that maybe making it easier for charter
048schools to come into our township may not be in the best interest thank you great thank you um i think we have one called in comment i'll let kelly read that and then if there's anyone else who would like to comment you can make your way to the podium this comment is from robert cristaldi of putnam boulevard in wallingford i have a comment that is not on the agenda tonight i'm concerned that the district and some of the latest policies about requiring students and staff to refer to transgender students by their preferred pronouns the district's diversity and inclusion committee has stated that they are inclusive to all people including transgender people but also people of religions i'm concerned that the district is forgetting that some people have religions such as me that do not allow
049for people to transition and change genders while i understand that the district must protect students i think it's very important that we don't forget about people like me and people who have religion i hope the district will keep this in mind going forward especially in the curriculum it's a shame that part of the phys ed curriculum in 10th grade has to do with handing out of packets that require to say things like you need to call people by their preferred pronouns and saying things like don't decide someone's identity for them even if you don't agree or understand if you don't agree or understand that should be a person's decision whether to call someone else by their preferred gender i hope the district will consider this moving forward and this will not be the last time
050to hear from me on this subject thank you and good night do we have any other comments i don't think we have any others uh that takes us to school board reports does anyone have a report from a district subcommittee or out of district role kelly i'll just um the finance committee did meet monday night a week ago um and at that time we actually reviewed the renewal of the insurance um is that the right word the uh coverage levels right the um that was in the finance um committee for approval tonight so the entire um set of coverage packages that we we reviewed and approved earlier was the topic of that you any other reports all right uh do we have any old business this evening i don't think it's technically old business but
051i did want to take a moment to thank mary and tom reinke for their donation it's in the obviously it's in our agenda tonight but to especially thank them on behalf of this board for their very generous donation thank you yeah i would echo that thank you for for mentioning that any other okay do we have any new business yes go ahead uh yeah so with a bit of a regret that i have to announce my resignation from the school board effective july 11th uh as a result of changes to our family situation we have uh chosen to move out of the district and we're no longer inside in the district as of that date as such i am required to resign from the border doing uh i would like to express my appreciation to
052members of the board uh it's been an extraordinary 18 months and i the willingness of all of us to listen to varying perspectives and look for common ground and generally reach consensus on what is the right thing to do for the school district and for our students and i appreciate that it's been a very rewarding 18 months i also want to express my appreciation to the administration teachers and to the parents of the school district uh without their hard work and dedication and commitment over the past especially we would not have come out of this year or this school year in this positive way as we have and in a way i'm kind of sad leaving because uh i'm excited about the upcoming year out of the pandemic with new leadership i agree that our
053financial challenges are difficult but i think our future is very positive and i'm looking forward to kind of look over your shoulder and see how things develop in a very positive way again thank you very much sorry to believe well jerry i want to just really thank you for all of your contributions to the board um you've been an incredible voice uh throughout all the decisions we've had to make and uh it's been extraordinary having you on the board and i particularly want to thank you for the incredible commitment that you had to standing up a lot of our work focused on dei you know that committee on the board has really been a working committee unlike any other in terms of um really doing a lot of heavy lifting to try to move things
054forward around diversity equity and inclusion and so um again i just really want to thank you um you've been you know again an incredible contributor to a very collaborative process uh over our time working together okay any other new business so i guess i should mention um similar to past vacancies we'll post details on the on the school board website on the district website uh about filling uh billing jerry's seat but we won't miss you uh all right if we don't have anything else um i did i did just recall as as jen was remembering things that we we did approve tonight i did want to congratulate our new middle school principal uh chris medsanka i don't know if chris is still in the room i can't see around the corner uh but again we're
055very excited uh to have uh have you uh taking on this leadership role at the middle school uh it's very exciting so with that this meeting is adjourned you