WSSD Board Meeting 05/10/2021

001good evening i now call the may 10th meeting of the wallingford swarthmore school board to order in opening as you're willing and able please rise and join me in the pledge of i allegiance allegiance to the flag of the united states of america to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you uh we'll start with the roll call i do know that we have two board members uh who are not joining us this evening uh uh mr ballas and mr cutis are both unable to be here this evening but i'll ask uh miss favor to take the roll call okay mr ballas miss amino here dr huff here mr cutis mrs lentz mr sullivan here mrs walkman here dr grandy here mr berman dr

002palmer here miss patel dr grandy there are six voting members present all right thank you all right so this evening as usual we start with the student representatives report hello so first i have an srs care celebration recap the school extends a thank you to everyone who participated in one or many of the events this month during the srs care celebration the goal of these events was to celebrate diversity month earth day and asia week as well as to help students get a deeper understanding of each other and the world around them next the srs spirit wear shop is open school may be out for summer soon but it is always a good time to show school spirit and wear your srs gear this sale introduces an eco-conscious tea made with part recycled fabric and

003dyeing techniques that reduces the use of water in its creation plus it's comfy and comes in cool colors too orders are due by wednesday may 19th all orders can be shipped to your home or to srs for pickup during the week of june 1st the npe staff would like to thank the npe pto for all of their support and for providing several treats during teacher appreciation week last monday many students brought flowers into school to be added to a vase which was given to each of the teachers early in the morning the teachers were touched by the gestures throughout the week and deeply appreciate the support that parents have shown throughout this past year for wes a message from principal savage can you believe it's the second week of may he is excited to share

004that the pbis team has helped highlight the positive reinforcement system for students and staff students are being positively reinforced for being safe respectful and responsible throughout their school day wes thanks the pto mayday committee for finding a safe and fun way to have the west may the socially distanced masked and multiple session event will take place may 22nd check west mail for more information at west and at all the elementary schools students are completing their second week of pssa testing and teachers and administration are so proud of the students outstanding effort thus far next week fourth grade students will complete the final science sections lastly in the spirit of the school year quickly coming to an end at schrath even high school there is much going on for all four grade levels rising juniors and

005seniors are encouraged to run for a position on the next year's student council president vice president school board representative and officer positions are all available for the coming year interviews began today with the student council advisors ms perella and ms espatisito and with current student council members for seniors planning for the end of the year is being finalized events including commemoration the car parade senior ball and graduation are all only weeks away there are many ways to get involved in this process and the first meeting with students to plan commemoration happen today at fifth block additionally tickets for the senior ball which is only permitted to have in seniors are on sale this week for students more information can be found on the class of 2021 google classroom and parents can access up-to-date information through

006the school website also if you haven't already there is time to see the school's production of the secret garden come celebrate the cast and crews hard work talent and creativity making a show happen under so many new conditions this year that's it thank you thank you miss patel uh it's great to hear about all those activities uh you know it's that time of year i think where we're starting to hear about all the end of year celebrations and i think it's it's nice to hear about some of those milestones again uh happening although not in a completely back to normal way but getting closer and closer by the day uh so that takes us to the superintendent's report dr palmer thank you dr grandi i have a few updates for this portion of the agenda

007and then i'd like to think speak again before the policy section of the agenda so first i'd like to provide everyone with a brief covet update and i'm happy to report that on may 1st we held our first student vaccine clinic for our students age 16 and over students who were vaccinated that day as well as others who received vaccination prior to our clinic total over 70 percent of our eligible high school population and i know more students have received their vaccine since that date our second 16 and over clinic will be held on saturday may 22nd and for our students aged 12 to 15 we just surveyed our parents and 65 percent of our parents have indicated their interest in having their child receive the vaccine at our clinic tomorrow during my weekly superintendence

008call we'll be meeting with the springfield pharmacy to work out the details and determine the dates for the 12 to 15 clinic now that we know pfizer's vaccine has been approved for 12 to 15 year olds the springfield pharmacy has been a wonderful coveted partner and i'm very appreciative of how responsive they've been to not only wssd students but to all of the students in delaware county and since i mentioned my weekly superintendence call i'd like to share that the chester county health department will be with us tomorrow as well to discuss their latest guidance we're excited to see that the coveted figures in delaware county and in particular wssd have been steadily decreasing to the point where some of our mitigation strategies will no longer be needed in addition we've all learned from governor

009wolf that he is relaxing most of the required mitigation strategies on may 31st we'll be discussing our cchd guidance in particular as well as how it relates to the pa state requirements such as the attestation that all school districts have to follow after the meeting the pandemic team will consult and will make recommendations for revision to our health and safety plan which we prevented presented to the school board at the may 24th meeting now on a totally different topic at our march 22nd school board meeting i updated the community regarding litigation brought against the school district by one of our neighbors we were originally scheduled for testimony to begin on april 14th but it was delayed today we completed our first day of testimony addressing the neighbor's motion for a permanent injunction related to our

010curricular and extracurricular use of kingfield we continue to believe that our use of king field fully complies with the law as the school district is specifically exempted from the nether providence noise ordinance that would otherwise apply we got through three witnesses as well as argued a handful of motions nothing today was unexpected we'll go again on thursday and i'll be sure to keep the community updated and dr grandy that concludes my report for this portion of the agenda thanks dr palmer so we'll ask you to comment again during the policy section of the agenda next up we have board announcements i don't have any board announcements uh other than to mention as you all see on the agenda we will be filling the vacancy this this evening on the board following uh michelle downey's resignation

011i look forward to filling the vacancy and sincerely thank those that have expressed interest in serving on the board that takes us to focus topics we have quite a few on the agenda tonight we have three i'll ask dr palmer to introduce the first we do have three focused topics and for our first one i know my colleagues will be coming through the door any moment but let me give some background prior to them coming in for the presentation from march 2020 through the 2021 school year the wallingford swarthmore school district has faced tremendous challenges the lessons we've learned as a district have laid the foundation for our planning and preparation for the 21-22 school year it's our belief that teaching and learning in person provides a rich experience for our students that builds on

012the tradition of excellence in our district we are especially excited about bringing our students back to their beloved classrooms the halls the fields in the auditorium in the fall of 2021 to continue the success we have found in the late spring full in-person learning we also understand that virtual learning may still be needed for some members of our school community as the pandemic continues to evolve however we hope that number is very very small based on the hundreds of students who have returned to school this spring with much safety and success tonight our administrative virtual school investigation team will present a proposal for virtual learning with a partnership company called edmentum for those families who are not quite ready to have their children return to bricks and mortar learning this fall my colleagues denise citarelli

013jones and nora wheeler are getting set up right now and they will be joined by representatives of edmentum so denise and noor whenever you are ready take it away all right good evening everyone we're going to play with this microphone a little bit because i'm super tall and dr wheeler is not um so here we go um as a district we really have faced a significant number of challenges and all of those challenges necessitated adjustments from all stakeholders our teachers our students our parents our administration the school board and the wssd school community through these many adjustments we have learned a great deal about ourselves and our resilience and our determination however we all know this has not been an easy road we are really proud of our teachers our parents and our students especially

014because they navigated their way through the teaching and learning process during the days of all virtual learning of hybrid learning of learning where it's partial return where students were zooming into the class and in a few weeks just two weeks from today a return a full five days of learning in the brick and mortar environment tonight dr nora wheeler and i are here to share the recommendation of the virtual school investigation team and the administration for next year this is our team that investigated the virtual school options i've been told this is tricky so bear with us oh thanks here's our team here you can see we borrowed from staff we borrowed from teachers we have special ed representation here we have a principal who was also the principal of our online academy this year

015mr gabe savage and we have some teachers on special assignment so we looked at it from multiple vantage points okay thanks aj our committee and our administrative team firmly believe that teaching and learning in person in the classrooms of the wssd buildings provides a rich experience for our students that builds on the tradition of excellence in our district we have an outstanding faculty they are full of talented vetted teachers who bring a research and standards-based curriculum to our children returning our children to full in-person learning means students will have access to the wssd curriculum designed and developed through years of experience and hard work students will receive all specials and electives in our brick and mortar version including music art health library all ap courses and all wssd support services returning to the buildings and

016the spaces of wssd means seamless participation in activities clubs sports ensembles and more also due to the extraordinary efforts of our pandemic team and the building staff we have proven safety and health procedures in place to keep our children safe in short we believe strongly in our in-person brick and mortar tradition and are ready for may 24th to set the course for the return of all students on september 7th the news is good 71 of our students are currently attending school for four and a half days in person there have been minimal rates of transmission within schools since the return additionally vaccinations have been increased in staff members and over 70 percent of our students 16 and older have received vaccinations and this is set to expand to the 12 to 15 year old students

017in the days ahead all of this is to say we are casting forward with optimism for a safe secure learning environment where students and teachers can interact engage with best teaching and learning practices and where students can continue to have social interactions for wellness and mental health yeah that's a little bit too soon that's okay we also realize and understand that virtual learning may still be needed for some memories members of our school community we categorize this need in two classifications the permanent virtual students those who choose to remain in a virtual class indefinitely or who have been always enrolled in a cyber charter school and temporary virtual students those who may want a virtual option for a semester or two but who wish to return as soon as they feel comfortable doing so one

018lesson we learned is that our families do not want to make a rushed decision we agree that we want to give families as much time as possible to make an informed decision for fall enrollment joining in partnership with a leader in virtual learning provides our families the most time possible to make a commitment for fall enrollment we also know that the pandemic model of virtual learning hybrid asynchronous learning students attending via zoom while others attend in person does not serve our short or long term goals quite simply these are not the wssd proven methods of teaching and learning they were used for the emergency situation in which we were under and that we are now looking to move away from and move toward what we know to be the best quality top-rated education we have

019provided for decades did our teachers work to quickly acquire as many skills as needed to have students achieve the progress we required absolutely is it the model for the ages not even close to be fully operational and to achieve that same best quality top-ranked education wssd is known for we need at least two years of training and course development it is certainly something worth aiming for and we're anxious to begin that crucial visioning work this summer with the arrival of our new superintendent but that is not right now in the meantime we recommend a full return to what we do best teaching and learning in the brick and mortar setting i'm going to turn this over to dr wheeler who is going to talk about the partner company that the investigation team has settled on

020in our recommendation to the school board for fall of 2021. [Music] thank you for reminding me that i'm short i mean before i get to that actual recommendation um and prior to us investigating with the team that was mentioned you know we we did some homework and not only looked um around in the region but certainly in right here in delaware county um and what we found and you know this is using information provided on their websites um as well as we do you know obviously talk to our colleagues is you'll see that there are a range of options out there from full cyber options with district teachers that run k to 12 some of which that have been in existence for multiple years to ones that have a full cyber option but they partner

021with a vendor potentially using their district teachers as well as partnering and using not only the partner but using their curriculum their platform um to provide some type of virtual option again with some of them having been in existence for uh multiple years and the question mark refers to districts who as recent as the last couple of days have been reaching out to us because they're in a similar position trying to figure out what is the best option for them knowing that they may too have people who feel that they need a virtual option for next year and in the case of the full cyber um you know the fact that they are able to provide that with their own curriculum and their own platform and their own teachers is in more cases than not

022because they started that endeavor years ago and had that planning as uh dr jones mentioned to bring their teachers up to speed and in some cases initially partnered with a vendor in order to build that capacity within you can click the next one so our investigative process here and the team we mentioned to you um started in march uh investigating and looking at um potential vendors to um research analyze and talk to i think he went too far there we go yeah there we go so we provided each vendor a series of questions focus on important topic areas such as these um because we knew that we had questions of our own to ensure that what we put in for in front of our community was one that met our criteria in addition to wanting

023a wide variety of courses in particular at the secondary level we knew how the curriculum is delivered both directly by a teacher and through the activities assigned as well as how students would eventually be assessed on those would weigh heavily on our recommendation since it's a virtual program we also knew that the end user experience and types of communication are critical to not only the student engagement but their overall success we thought of both students and parents as those end users because these elements would help them navigate this platform um and the curriculum we were able to explore these features ourselves after presentations by each vendor um through access to their platform through what's called sandbox accounts which isn't exactly open to everything but does give you a nice understanding of what the end users

024experience would be like and allowed us to look at the curriculum how it's laid out um how it's assessed and whatnot and even take uh quote unquote the classes ourselves in part um the ability of the vendor to address all of these needs of our varied learners and the experience in terms of being able to accommodate the wide variety of students that are in our district as well as the cost certainly were critical factors as well when uh ultimately making our uh decision so we came down to our partner of choice we met as a team to you know uh independently went through our own research but then came together uh to discuss um and you can advance and our unanimous choice uh when thinking about all the criteria and what we felt we wanted

025in a partner uh was edmentum um admentum's ed options academy encompasses their k5 program with calvert learning and their sixth through twelfth program referred to as courseware so we might use edmentum and at options academy sort of interchangeably but they really are referring to one organization and as mentioned by dr palmer in a few minutes i'll turn things over to admentum to talk more about their organization and offerings but first i wanted to share a few key factors that led to our selection as a team for edmonton's at options academy over others we considered while we found many similarities and strengths in all the vendors there were a few differentiators for us now and in the future first we appreciated the varied enrollment options and flexibility that would give our families uh as denise mentioned

026uh that's something we we think is very valuable in any type of partnership there are also multiple supports within the initial investment with edmentum that we could take advantage of if needed or desired at any point in our partnership second the areas of curriculum and assess assessment stood out to us we appreciated the wide variety of course offerings at the secondary and curriculum such as math and focus at elementary uh stood out to us in terms of assessment there was a blend of traditional and project based as well as regular less formal checks for understanding to monitor progress ongoing along the way a third factor was and i should actually point out and and it was the use of that information by teachers um that was provided to us to show that they're not only

027giving the assessments but actually using it to make instructional decisions for students a third factor was the frequency of live instruction and live instructional support afforded to a student while the amount varied by level it is integral part of their program and we feel this is a very advantageous aspect for our students at this point i'll turn the presentation over to aaron culpepper who is an edmentum virtual programs manager thank you norah thank you denise let me go ahead and get my presentation queued up i think i just need permission to share okay can i get a thumbs up from somebody that you all can see my my slide we can see okay great thank you all right well i'm so grateful to be here with all of you my name as nora mentioned my

028name is aaron culpepper and i'm a virtual school programs manager here at admentum thank you so much for having me and allowing me just a short amount of time to share with you today how we plan to support your district and the students that choose to learn remotely as you go into the next academic year at edmentum we truly believe that every student has the right to feel safe and experience success at their own level based on their own unique needs and with an environment that works best for them edmentum empowers districts to transform their approach and build school around the needs of each individual learner to do this we focus on providing valid and reliable assessments for learning high quality digital curriculum expert educational and virtual program consulting and instructional services that are student

029and family centered we're proud to partner with over 8 000 school districts across the country supporting over five million students annually and that even goes into uh globally we are the industry leader in standards aligned online curriculum and work closely with the agencies you see listed here to ensure that our curriculum meets relevant standards from a content technology and accessibility standpoint as a result districts can save time and already scarce resources by being able to rest assured that it mentum curriculum is rigorous engaging up to date and aligned to standards both state and national we offer two types of curriculums as nora mentioned for our k5 learners we utilize a project-based learning curriculum called calvert learning calvert learning is designed with built-in supports for students learning outside the traditional classroom to provide a comprehensive digital

030learning experience courses include a variety of multimodal learning activities projects assessments that harness students natural curiosity to develop a lifelong love of learning this program for k5 offers all four core courses as well as art pe and health when students enter middle and high school their interest skills and plans for the future impact the courses they need to take to be ready for the next step with edmentum courseware you can address every student's needs with robust collection of standards-based online courses our offering of over 400 middle school and high school courses includes course subjects advanced courses cte electives and world languages when paired with a high quality and engaging instruction of an ad options teacher we believe that these two platforms and the robust course offerings provided provide a student experience that is engaging personalized

031and supportive of their needs so let's go ahead and talk a little bit more about the ad options academy experience at options is a fully accredited virtual school it's been around since about 1997 and we focus on partnering with districts to provide the best virtual experience a student can get we know that it's not a replacement for what the brick and mortar can provide but we do everything within our content our curriculum and our instructional services to to make it the best experience that we can courses are taught by highly qualified state certified teachers who have been trained in delivering engaging synchronous and asynchronous instruction and one-on-one support on average we see that students enrolled in the academy experience and 92 passing rate and an 80 course completion rate this academic year we have seen

032our highest level of enrollments to date with over 200 000 student enrollments because of this we've grown our academy staff by over educators which has allowed us to continue to offer the wide array of courses and live learning opportunities to students let's talk a little bit more about our amazing teachers and the instructional services they provide 95 percent of our academy staff has three plus years of experience in the field 41 have 10 plus years of experience and 13 percent have over 20 years of experience a hundred percent of our staff hold an educational related bachelor's degree or advanced degree 67 percent hold an education related masters and 10 percent hold a specialist or doctorate or advan or other advanced degree our teachers in the academy provide live lessons daily and are available for live

033help during the school day and often after hours students complete each course through the content within the platform and those provided by their teacher teachers will provide meaningful feedback within 48 hours and school and parent-teacher communication is key in our work with students this translates into the teachers being available during daily posted office hours daily live help zoom rooms during the school day weekly reach outs to students and their families quick communication turnaround time and progress data both on a bi-weekly and monthly basis i'd love to take a few minutes just to share a short video and i realized that i did not share my audio so let me let me fix that one moment my apologies just have a two-minute video so you can hear from our amazing educators [Music] are you all hearing

034that and they can access us in their own comfort level so if they're not comfortable getting on a video with us they can text us if their schedule only allows emails we're available via email and having that open line of communication that we're here and it's accessible to how you need it you can read on your own but those conversations about what you read need to happen together so i i want to know the kids beyond just academics i want to know what's going on in their real life and we we say build the school around the student if you looked at our professional development calendar it would it would slightly make your head spin right we have buckets of our teachers have to go to these sessions we have these suggested should go sessions

035and we have the wish list sessions and we created those around um assessments and conversations and relationships with teachers and i take it as my responsibility it's you know that if you're not coming what am i doing wrong and so what opportunities do i have to go grow and learn and build and share [Music] the first day of school we're not diving into the curriculum i want to know who's on the other side of the screen i want to see my student i want to see their family we have to that very first day help them understand how to navigate the environment as well as feel our excitement that we have them in our classroom it's about building that enthusiasm that first day sets the tone to want them to come back the next day

036all right thanks for letting me share that so as you can see we have some really enthusiastic engaging educators who are highly trained in the area of online instruction so moving into how we really do some of this building a school around a student again edmonton believes that building a school around a student doesn't just apply to those in the brick and mortar setting students working remotely also deserve to have a well-rounded school experience and all the things that go into that and that's really what we focus on within the academy so we support families and community family and community events to ensure that all students and their families know what to expect when they enroll within the academy they know how to communicate with their teacher join live lessons and generally what are the

037best practices in being a virtual student we provide training and support to the district to ensure that anyone that is helping with the facilitation process of enrolling students providing advisory or coaching services knows how to access all of the information including pacing data support for all of the information on what those those live lesson opportunities will look like so that they can be an extension of supporting that we really want to ensure that you all have the district has direct access to our teachers they're really an extension of your district and so we want to ensure that that is a comprehensive communication plan we also support students with ieps and 504 plans and we provide we will will provide special accommodations for students that have specific needs our teachers will also join district iep meetings

038to ensure all necessary parties are involved in supporting the student from all levels and then last but very importantly we provide the district not only with that training on systems and process and procedures but we also provide that expert consulting and i do have some of my team members here on the call if we get a chance to open it up for q a where they may be able to jump in and provide that because we do have some some really wonderful resources within the academy with a lot of experience to help in the area of building out virtual programming whether they're new or existing as it evolves over time helping create structured process and procedures whether that's around grading and attendance tracking or just how to engage with families and we'll even come in

039and help with marketing and recruitment services to ensure that your district is able to retain and even bring back students that may have considered or be considering other options outside of your district in june i know there are plans to host an informational session for families to provide which will provide a deeper look into the platforms that we use and the experience that students and families will have so i welcome any questions but from here i will go ahead and pass it back to nora and denise we're switching to ian yeah nope sorry about that it's okay yeah is that the next one yeah okay so the plan is for june 16th for there to be a virtual information session for families who are interested in edmentum and enrolling for that for the fall um

040that is not a commitment time that is just a time to to come and learn a little bit more about it in mid-july our plan is to start registration to open up a window for enrollment and in the case of secondary course selection we will have more information that comes out around that time administration once um we start moving forward we'll have lots of planning sessions around making sure that this is flowing out and great communication is happening and that everybody has the information they need to make well-informed decisions in august for those students who are registered for edmentum there will be an open house so more details are to follow on every one of those aspects but that's where we are with our next steps there certainly is a lot to be optimistic about

041and on behalf of the administration and the virtual school investigation team i'll say again we strongly recommend the school board approve the proposal to partner with edmentum for the 2021 and 2022 school year we hope that the families who still believe a virtual school is needed are fewer every day as we continue through the summer and see the world open back up again and understand the value of education that wssd can provide within person learning but we believe that this is for those families who are not ready an option at this point we will we thank you for listening and we will field questions thank you uh let me turn to board members to see uh if there are questions uh marilyn go ahead so i have a question um specifically at the secondary level

042is for students that are interested in this is it an all or nothing kind of thing do they need to be um all admittance admin students or can they take one class virtually and three classes in in the bricks and mortar building or uh i mean i don't know if you have different answers i don't want to answer for you but my thing is for now um that's the future you know you're seeing into the future which is where we want to go with blended learning i think blended learning is a great option for now what we're looking is to keep this as exclusive for those families who are not ready to return due to pandemic and that we will have one teacher of record um what happens is when you have this blended you

043have to figure out who is the teacher of record and how are those transcripts interacting and how is that each one of those teachers pushing in like so if you think about middle school for example they have multiple teachers but they're on a team so then are they off that team this is a lot of logistics to do in blended which is why we would need more time to put that together it's a great question alright thank you other questions go ahead kelly um can you describe um it talks in the presentation about availability of of live uh teacher engagement can you describe what that looks like how many you know how much time a day are we talking about at the different grade levels yeah sure um should we have erin sure i'd be

044happy to take that one within a typical school day so right now we have live lesson schedules running until june 30th until and at that time our summer schedule will pick up um it's monday through thursday between eight and five pm and friday between eight and three live lessons are offered that's the same for our live help schedules as well um the i would say typically it's about two to five course offerings like live lesson offerings per week it depends on the course so core courses that are have a lot of students enrolled in them are going to have you know four and five live lesson opportunities per week um students will have access to a schedule as well their families as will any district staff to be able to see those schedules and certainly

045there's a benefit to kind of creating a structure typically we set them up so that like english for example is monday wednesday and so that students can kind of create a schedule especially at the secondary level of how they want to work their days but they vary throughout the day the great thing about having a large academy staff as i mentioned we have over 400 staff members is that even though a student will have a dedicated teacher of record for their course they are welcome to attend a live lesson for another teacher that's teaching that exact same course if that date and time works better for them we also provide recorded versions of all of our live lessons in case students need to reference back to those either as a refresher or maybe they weren't

046able to attend a live lesson that week i also think it's important to point out that the other companies that we looked into had significantly fewer live sessions than edmentum did okay so i think it's very important for families that might be thinking about this to understand that while it might be more it's completely different than what we're doing right now where they are fully online for the most part with their teachers five days a week yeah similar to a cyber school or cyber charter school there's a significant number of days where there is asynchronous work so it is expected that there is a guide on the side at home who partners with the student to especially in the younger grades to to do the learning and we have people here also who will be

047staffed to to be in charge of things here as the partner um however like many cyber charters and cyber schools there is that component of asynchronous learning for sure chapin hey this is about the um the cost so i don't know if i should wait until finance or if i can ask it now oh you can ask them um i thought i remembered when we talked about this before that it was uh charge per student per tuition am i remembering that correctly or not and aaron yeah aaron you can jump in there as well so that's one of the flexible um flexibility options that we have there's full-time student who would enroll they just know they want to be there the whole year there's also a month to month if they you know are just

048unsure about the start and want to get their feet wet there's also semester options so there's different options you don't necessarily have to enroll one student for the full year there is some options uh that we would have going into it and some of that would be driven by certainly the parent and the student and what they are thinking about for next year so you don't have to lock in every student as a full-time student okay so then and that's not reflected then on the order form it's a license fee like a set fee in minute the per student would would vary so right so we could draw down from that initial investment in any combination of ways that was necessary um as well as you know the person who comes in and said you

049know i'm just gonna i just want the semester but then in the semester they change their mind and want the next semester so it gives us that flexibility to not have to lock in all the the money to a full-time seat and potentially that student leaves and you know doesn't finish out the year but we've invested as a full-time seat okay that's what i thought i remembered and i just wanted to make sure um i was remembering that correctly so then this license fee is based on an estimate which could change is that right on the enrollment options that you're talking about what actually unfolds correct and if we um didn't necessarily enroll that many because there wasn't interest there are other things that we can use the money for within ed options in terms

050of you know bringing ourselves up to speed and training teachers or potentially even ideas like maybe the second semester at secondary it isn't too too early to say why don't we pilot a few different versions of online instruction with the support of edmentum so those are different scenarios we could use uh the money for if in fact we didn't necessarily enroll as many students um at the beginning of the year okay that's helpful thank you matt so just a couple of questions one can you explain how this works curriculum-wise you know how this interfaces with the students that will be here brick and mortar how does a kid that goes to the ed options for a year coming back in how's their curriculum going to align with the kids that were here brick and mortar

051so in part it would be like a student moving in from another district or moving in from another school we would evaluate what they've done look for how it how that it's aligned with um where at whatever point in the school year we're at and potentially have to fill gaps if there are some or pick up right where we left off so it really would be a case-by-case basis um what time of the year they came in and really evaluating just as we would a student from somewhere else knowing though that uh one of the reasons we um liked mentum is that there was a lot of close overlap so we don't foresee it being a dramatic gap unless of course the student you know which i wouldn't like to think any of our students

052but enrolled and maybe wasn't successful and didn't do work and didn't stay up to speed on so potentially they're a little bit off in curriculum but one of the reasons why we mentioned math and focus because you know we think about that curriculum in elementary school and the way it's sequenced and just the language involved with it um the fact that they use that as their primary curriculum for mathematics is um it would be a typical area of concern for us with a new student coming in if they weren't familiar with it so we feel like some of those curricular decisions that edmentum has made are closer aligned two hours and there wouldn't be uh these tremendous gaps um we certainly would have to evaluate there wouldn't be these tremendous gaps and things like ap

053are driven by national curriculum so you know there's a lot a lot of alignment there and you know course by course algebra one you know there might be a couple of units that maybe were done in different orders but it shouldn't be these large gaps of of uh remediation that we need to do okay and then i think the other question i have is for aaron which is i heard you say you have 400 teachers and 200 000 students am i doing the math right that it's 500 students for teacher no it's 200 000 enrollments that's individual course enrollments we track it by enrollments because we have some students we partner with some districts where they enroll their students full time which we say full time is six up to six courses at a time

054and then we have some districts that use us in a in a more blended capacity where they may use us for single single courses that students may need maybe because they want to be able to offer an expanded course offering that we can provide through the academy so they maybe they're they might even be a brick and mortar student taking a course through ad options so we have different ways that we partner with districts and so that's why we track it by individual course enrollments so for our district what would the elementary school class size what do you expect our ratio so i would say the live lesson like those classes are are maxed at i'm sorry 30 but each teacher is assigned to no more than 50 students that's in the elementary in secondary

055i think that goes up to around 200 since they're just individual courses we typically don't get too close to those levels and how does that compare to students that would go to one of the online charter academies in our experience how does how does that compare in terms of the class sizes i would have to investigate that more closely um because i did not look at that when i looked at some of the cyber schools and i'm asking that because it seems to me like that's really if we don't do something like this then that's what those families are going to do right thank you jen hi there i think i have a couple questions for miss culpepper and then some questions for um our presenters from our administration so ms colbert i'll start with

056you if that's okay sure um my first question is uh how long has your company been with this business model um with the districts i know you said you've been operating since 1997 but this particular model um i might refer to a colleague i don't know scott or todd but i believe it's been since of you know since the inception it's definitely evolved over time though yeah aaron the in the last uh four years before that we were pretty much doing um whereas you know students were just going online and teachers were answering questions and and so forth and within the last four years we switched to more of a live instruction model uh we just realized that that's what we wanted to do to ensure that the quality that we were delivering was similar

057to what they were getting with in their brick and mortar classrooms we didn't feel that just putting them on a computer and having teachers answer questions was was really the type of education that we wanted people to have and i know schools didn't want that as well so in the last four years we've made that pivot okay so i that was more of like a support type model until maybe four or so years ago it was it was more of a yeah so the teachers were pretty much just grading and then when students had questions they were responding to questions via email and like i said in the last four years we switched to the what we call now live help so if a student is do working on uh some form of their instruction

058on their own that at any time they can get access to that teacher we you know we didn't have that before and then we certainly realized that that caused some issues with student engagement and so forth so um we changed that model because we realized that it was just better educationally for the students okay and since you're operating somewhat similar to a cyber charter are your instructors are your instructors unionized or no no they're not okay and you mentioned that one of the form of communications that can happen is through the whatsapp app is that one that you guys choose to use are you just illustrating how flexible your communication lines can be that's just a flexibility that we provide there's no requirement that people use that okay some families just prefer that so it's

059mainly through calling texting emailing and then all of the communications especially the emails are automatically tracked in our student information system so students can access those communications there and as well as families because parents will have an account set up to be able to see communications and progress okay and one last one for you guys while this isn't why education was established part of seeing the whole student is understanding what they're experiencing in their own homes the flexibility for the student and their comfort level on one hand seems great because it accommodates the student and how they want to be seen or not seen or text or video but how do you get into the students lives with this type of educational platform to also ensure that they are safe not only in their own

060personal lives but also within their household because that is something that schools have a role that schools have you know just organically be sure you come to come to play over the years so how do you how do you how do you talk about that aspect of education so and i think they kind of talked about this in the video a little bit and i love how they they shared that but you know these teachers they're passionate teachers many of them used to work for school districts they may have worked in a brick-and-mortar setting some of them are even doing this part-time um while they have roles in in other districts and so they really are passionate about developing relationships with these families so that initial you know meeting with the student whether it's right

061at the beginning of the school year or if they're enrolling at second semester that initial meeting with the student is really to get to know them what interests them how do they prefer to communicate and engage and they're continuing that as they go through so even if a student is joining live live lessons with you know a class of 30. um obviously those opportunities you know it's with a bigger group but they may be breaking off into small groups the teacher's going to be communicating feedback to students and families and during that time they're going to be recommending hey why don't we connect one-on-one especially in the elementary we the calvert learning curriculum is really set up in a way to promote students getting off of the screen and engaging in projects and engaging in

062offline learning so they'll be doing journal checks well they're say you know hey let's set up a short zoom meeting and go over your journal and it might be you know going over some of their handwritten work and during that time it's one on one where they're engaged with the student they maybe have the parent there as well we love when they have the parents there as well so um you know i would say it's through those one-on-one engagements and it's through that communication that they're getting to know the student and certainly picking up on if there's anything of concern and communicating that back to the district if there's anything that they're picking up on to ensure that students are getting the best experience they're progressing and ultimately you know that they're safe as well

063are your teachers and staff mandated reporters as well sorry i think that cut out the very end what was that are your teachers and staff mandated reporters as well i don't know the answer to that one scott or todd when you say when you say mandated reporters would um it might just be something we're not like if there's a child protective services yes yes absolutely yeah 100 and um not only are they that but you know i just i want to really make sure that we understand that we we do research all the time on what's best for student engagement and so on and the number one thing that we know is that relationship that teachers have with those students outside of the instructional aspect of that and again that's one of the reasons that

064we move to more of a live environment but our our teachers work very hard to develop those relationships with those kids and and have those relationships you know as an ongoing thing and that they are they're constantly look one of the nice things about the online platform is you know there's a lot of data there's data where i can see attendance data i can see how well a student's doing in a class you know how often they're logging in all those things and the minute those teachers are seeing any kind of red flags in those areas they're they're not only reaching out to the students they're reaching out to the parents or reaching out to district personnel if you know that might have relationships with those students so so we exhaust every you know tier

065of inter intervention if you will to to develop those relationships and we even have i know this just goes a little bit outside your question but we have situations where teachers that might be local in the area they'll they'll do something to stop in and ask the students to meet with them so that they can possibly have that you know develop that relationship as well so there's um there's a lot of ways that we go about that um to develop that relationship we know first and foremost that is what is the key to success but you know again getting back to your question as far as mandatory reporters they absolutely are thank you so much i think the other questions i have and just a couple are for our administration but i appreciate it um

066i was wondering and i don't know if this is for you dr jones or for for you nora i was wondering if um just so that i understand and that the public understands correctly that this is an option for students who have determined for whatever reason that they don't fit with the brick and mortar the in-person learning in our district is that right it's it's not in a way is it set up to encourage or force anyone that wants to be in person learning to be learning online correct okay it's almost like a separate school in some ways is that right except that you've talked about some of the transitions back if it's a temporary online learning situation right and it's a partnership so we will have ongoing district personnel that will be interfacing with

067um with potentially the students the parents but certainly the platform and monitoring um so yeah we will see them as our students and you know depending upon and we're only looking at a year but ultimately they're they are if they let's just say it was a senior who was in you know they're going to get a wallingford swarthmore diploma they're kind of it's a it's like but it's an entity of itself but partnered with us okay thanks so much go ahead kelly uh maybe just a couple more questions um i just want to clarify that the cost associated with this there's an annual license fee that's the 95 000 and then it's 2500 or 3000 per student that enrolls i'm still not understanding that the way it's laid out i don't think so i think

068of it this way to partner to get you know to get the um infrastructure up and running to get the program up and running we everybody anybody makes an initial investment we selected that number um partly because of the unknown we're not entirely sure how many um families may use it but also because there are other ways that we can utilize the funds um beyond just a full-time enrolled student or even a partially enrolled student so we feel that should we not need it for more than a handful of students we can still use those funds but ultimately if we draw down from the initial investment it goes by the rate associated with however they're enrolling so if they want to enroll full-time for the whole year that's where we would use the 3 000

069or 2500 amount to draw down from the 95 but let's say they want to enroll as i only want to go for a semester i know for sure i'm going to be back in january okay so there's a different dollar figure associated with a semester enrollment and we would draw down from the 95 000. so we selected 95 uh partly because like i said we're unsure we think it's going to be a small amount but we want to make sure that it wasn't too small that we're we're left having to pour more money in right away but also thinking about those other ways that we can uh utilize the supports that uh edmentum has for our own personal growth as a district trying to offer more options and even thinking of the question that was

070asked um by marilyn of you know potentially unique ways that we could do credit recovery we could do i just want to take an extra course west wildlingford doesn't even offer it but they offer it as a standalone course so those are things that potentially we use that if we didn't have the full-time or even partially enrolled students okay um and then two more questions that i think are for the um edmonton team first question is around turnover of the staff so we we got the information on their average tenure but i'm curious about what the turnover rate looks like annually um and then the second question is if a student needs to contact uh the teacher and perhaps it's something that doesn't take place over zoom or over over email how are they actually

071doing that contact are we we're contacting them by phone but how are they reaching that i mean in a district you would be contacting them through a district phone for example so how are we doing that later we would obtain their personal information so when we set up students in our student information system we request that we get a personal um you know a lot of students especially secondary have cell phones so if with permission we would get their cell phone um and be able to call and text and again all of that you know they'll recap and log or we can you know set it up a different way if there's you know we don't want to have student student personal student information we would use the parent and are they contacting the teacher's

072personal are you providing phones to those teachers who they are accessing our teachers have phones they use um i can't remember exactly the system it's like a google phone they have so where they're calling a number it's you know it's not their their personal cell phone but it's not just like a an office line it's a dedicated phone number that they have that they can access during their working day and then the other question um the turnover the turnover so we do have we do hire part-time staff and they are contracted employees so part of our staff typically about a hundred i think this year it's about 100 plus of our staff members are full-time so we will typically retain those teachers every single year and then we have this year we had in upwards

073of about 300 part-time teachers that were brought in just to help handle the sheer number of enrollments that we had due to you know virtual learning increasing so those some of those will go full time depending on if we have places for them and then others of those may um in their contract and you know go on to another role thank you i just had one other contract question so it sounds like we have this initial investment and you know if only three students use this next year those funds would remain available in subsequent years if there was you know five students the next year seven students the next year it would still draw down on this initial investment from year one correct right okay all right thank you any other questions math sorry just

074one quick just so i'm clear i'm assuming that any extracurricular stuff would still just be through the district right so the kids that choose this option would still be eligible for our sports teams theater program all of that stuff correct our courses are ncaa approved so all of that would transfer and i'd just jump in to say that i would like to think that students who want to participate in activities and sports and everything would come on in and be taught in the buildings thank you i just sorry i just thought of maybe one more question is is the document that's attached in the um the board material is that the actual contract or is that just a purchase order i'm not sure what's your ref it just lays out the cost that is a

075purchase order the the contract is actually referenced from within there so it's included by reference and that's what we're working on and you'll kyle you would have the opportunity to look through that and and would need to look through that okay are there performance guarantees built into this and i'm thinking of things like disaster recovery plans and so forth if the i don't know where this is all housed and delivered from but what happens in the then of the disaster do we have no access or do we have access through disaster recovery i can i can answer that um first of all our our whole platform works off of amazon web services so there's um redundancy built in to every to every aspect of that um we we have not seen an um any kind

076of downtime you know in the last really two years since we we switched to it to the amazon web services um the so again as everything is backed up um we have the redundancy so if uh there is a server down things just kick over you don't even know no that happens um if there was you know i'm trying to even think of you know something so catastrophic that um that something something would be down for a period of time um the with everything being backed up the way it is you know ever no data would ever be lost or anything like that um i'm really in i'm not trying to like dance around that question it's just that with the all the different redundancies that we have built in i i don't i don't

077see um anything like that ever ever be an issue do you have data that you collect on on um latency system latency yes yes and i don't have those figures for you but if it is something you guys would like we can certainly provide it for you i i would like to see that and follow up i mean the the disaster recovery component and the latency component of the system i mean we we all work in environments where system latency can make it very difficult to complete your work so i'd like to see data performance data on that and then kyle in terms of or maybe this is for us in terms of the contract are there performance guarantees built into the contract that's it okay i mean the contract speaks to um there being

078potential for interruption but if there is a a potential interruption then it would there are certain other provisions that kick in at that point i guess i'm thinking more of even just the expectation we talked about having two to five um live hours for example of live instruction a week the availability of um the teaching and support staff i would want to see that laid out in a performance guarantee with service level agreements kpis attached to it that's what i'm accustomed to seeing with that type of an agreement so that if that is not delivered upon we have we have options it's a hundred thousand dollar investment we should have options against that it does refer to the live training in terms of their responsibilities um within in the roles and responsibilities section of the

079agreement thanks thank you okay other questions or comments okay chapin did you have anything else no okay all right thank you very much so that takes us to topic two uh dr palmer you want to introduce that one i do and for topic two i know ashwina mozakowski will be coming up to the podium as the next in-person speaker and we have our other colleagues joining us online and she's going to introduce this but to precede her i'm going to say i am really really happy we have the item on the agenda tonight it seems like we have been talking forever that we needed a new k2 literacy program but we weren't ready to make the introduction of the program or the recommendation to the board so i am thrilled that my colleagues are here

080talking about a proposal to put before the board tonight ashwini you can introduce the item i'm just very excited that you're all here tonight are my friends on the zoom too we're here ashwina okay thank you um so thank you good evening thank you for having us tonight we are very excited to present our proposal for the k2 literacy program and joining us by zoom tonight are kelly keane first grade teacher from srs jeanette kaplan first grade teacher from west and kate frieil reading specialist from npe our presentation book thank you our presentation will cover the following areas the process we used to explore ela programs the research that guided our thinking discussions and ultimately our decision making and our recommendation dr jones will talk about the vertical team process that'd be used so we

081began the vertical team process back in 2010 the idea about a vertical team process is that you pull together teachers and administration k-12 in a subject area and you do a four phase i won't call it years i will call it phase a four phase process and the process begins with a year of review and in that year of review we look at our curriculum our instructional practices our assessment practices we compare it with what other districts are doing we compare it against state standards we compare it against research and best practice from there we make determinations about what we want to see our curriculum become what we want to keep the best of what is and where we want to go that becomes the phase of development in development we take our existing curriculum

082and we add to it and we enrich it sometimes we wholesale change it and when we are finished we purchase sometimes we improve most times and then we move to implement part of implementation is teacher professional development that's an important component especially if it's the adoption of a new program for example when we adopted math and focus a new way of thinking about math instruction all of our teachers needed to be trained when we adopted reading workshop from lucy calkins out of columbia university in new york we needed to train our teachers and how to do that we adopted that model third through eighth grade teachers were trained so implementation happens after the cusp of training once we implement the job is not over we move into monitoring and part of monitoring is establishing ahead

083of time well ahead of time well before implementation how we are going to measure the success of the program what are our data points is it qualitative quantitative how it will compare to our state scores on pssa if it's a pssa subject these are the things that undergird the way we run our curriculum office many districts do a curriculum audit in 2010 we realized that wildingford swathmore needed a curriculum audit process and this has been our process ever since in 2010 we purchased the pearsons reading street for k-5 literacy reading street was a program that at the time the superintendent was very excited about and so our curriculum director at the time went ahead and purchased that since that time grades through three through five moved away from reading street and we purchased teachers college

084youth of study which is the lucy calkins reading workshop unfortunately in k-2 there have been no changes we were set to have changes two years ago began the work and then there were disruptions changes in leadership and also the pandemic it is long past due for us to move in the direction of undergirding our k2 literacy in fact the addition of reading street that we have is now out of print so we do need to move in another direction even if we loved reading street so moving forward the materials will support the program will not be available for purchase for reading street it's time for us to pull in what we do want to do dr mozakowski has done a great job she came in in july and immediately hit the ground running she assembled

085the team they began looking at the process of what are we doing that's working what are we where do we want to go with it how will this interface with our three to five program our six to eight program our nine to twelve program they've done an outstanding job of pulling together really what some fantastic ways in which for us to have k2 literacy in wssd so i'm going to i'm going to yield the microphone so they can really talk about this exciting work so like dr jones said we did pull together a team these are all the teachers that made up our team i'm not going to name all of them but i would really like to thank them all for the work that they did we met several times during the year and

086i got it thank you and the process that we use so we had we put together a team of teachers it was an atypical year being in covid so typically we would have a pilot where we would have programs uh brought into our classrooms teachers would use the program for a period of time we would go in we would see how the programs are being used how students are responding to them and get feedback from teachers so we became creative this year like everybody else we reviewed materials from all these different companies we had presentations from each of the reps from the different companies and what we did was we rotated the materials in each building over a period of time so that teachers could have access to the materials could try them if they

087wanted to and were having meetings to talk about each of these uh products we created surveys to get feedback from the teachers and we had regular meetings to talk about each of these um and they were all phenomenal programs but we really wanted something special for our school district so before i turn it over to kate friel who's going to give us insights on the research part um that guided our process i'd like to say that we truly believe that students have to learn to read before they can read to learn and our goal for our students is to develop the habits of good readers and to learn to read with purpose so they've become empowered and confident lifelong readers and this is what we based our work on as we went through this process

088kate thank you when we began this process our first conversations revolved around what do we want in a program what parts are essential for us to have what strengths and needs do our students have that really brought us to look at the science of reading we started reading the research that is out there we shared articles and webinars with each other to grow in our understanding of exactly how the brain learns to read tonight we're going to share an overview of the science of reading and how we plan to incorporate it into the new program for k to 2. first of all decades of scientific research has shown that reading is not a natural process learning to speak is a natural process for children but learning to read is not the human brain is not

089wired to read reading has to be taught learning to read and write involves explicit systematic and cumulative instruction that requires children to make meaning out of print and know the different sounds in spoken language and to be able to connect those sounds to written letters children also need background knowledge and vocabulary knowledge so that they comprehend what they are reading eventually children need to recognize words automatically and read text fluently while at the same time attending to grammar sentence structure and punctuation so that's really a quick overview of what the science of reading has taught us and as the graphic um on that page oh we went too fast there we're still back that page um states that teaching reading really is rocket science all right so now we're yes i do love that graphic

090um okay our next slide please thank you in 1986 goh and tumnur proposed a simple view of reading to explain the importance of decoding or word recognition in reading the simple view of reading is a theory represented by this mathematical formula it demonstrates that the view of reading has two basic components word recognition which is the ability to use sounds to recognize words times language comprehension which is the ability to understand text and that is how you get to reading comprehension so for example if i were reading a spanish passage um and i have not taken spanish since high school i would actually do really well decoding the words um because it would be pretty easy i could decode the words i i would know the sounds so i would score one for the word

091recognition but i would really struggle to understand the passage because i don't have enough vocabulary anymore and i don't understand the language structures anymore i don't remember though so to make meaning so that score would be a zero so it would be one times zero so my reading comprehension would be a zero so you can see that students need both strong decoding and strong language comprehension skills to reach that ultimate goal of reading which is reading comprehension the simple view of reading is really that umbrella view the the tree top um so we're gonna if we turn to the next slide this is scarborough's reading rope and this gives us the close-up view or the ground level view so the simple view of reading was up here and this is really the ground view um

092it's really a metaphor for understanding the complexity of reading that's based in science the creation of the reading rope dates back to dr hollis scarborough her lectures she gave her parents um on the complexities involved in learning to read originally she spoke of skilled reading as resembling the strands of a rope and she used pipe cleaners on to illustrate how it was all interconnected and the inner dependence of all the components and i think this is a really this visual is a really useful tool for educators as well as parents as we determine best practices in reading instruction and think about how our students develop as readers you can see that the reading rope is divided into two parts focusing on language comprehension and word recognition again focusing on the two domains of learning to

093read just like the simple view of reading effective tier 1 instruction should encompass all the components of the reading rope so that students learn to both decode and comprehend and according to scarborough in 2018 weakness in any strand can disrupt reading and weakness in several strands will disrupt reading even more we can use this reading rope to identify the needs and target instruction and intervention for our students so now let's take a look at the individual strands as we unravel the rope a little bit next slide please on this slide you can see we put both the simple view of reading and scarborough's rope so you can easily see the correlation between the two i'm going to explain the lower cord of the rope the word recognition the first piece is phonological awareness phonological awareness

094is the ability to recognize and manipulate spoken parts of sentences and words for example they would include things like identifying words that rhyme recognizing alliteration segmenting a sentence into words identity identifying the syllables in a word and so on the most sophisticated and the last to develop is called phonemic awareness phonemic awareness is the ability to understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes and it's one of the best early indicators of reading success when lessons are taught consistently each day with the explicit teacher modeling and scaffolding students improve in their reading spelling and writing because they learn to hear the sounds in words the next piece is decoding decoding is the ability to apply your knowledge of those letter sound relationships including the knowledge of letter patterns to correctly pronounce

095written words understanding these relationships gives children the ability to recognize familiar words quickly and to figure out words they haven't seen before although children may sometimes figure out these relationships on their own most children will benefit from explicit systematic cumulative instruction in this area once these basic relationships have been taught the best way to get children to refine and extend their knowledge of letter sound correspondences is through repeated opportunities to read the last one is site recognition researcher david kilpatrick explains a sight word as a familiar written word that is recognized instantly automatically and effortlessly without sounding it out without guessing it doesn't matter if the word is common or uncommon phonetically regular or irregular it's defining features that is is stored in your memory and it's instantly effortlessly recognized a site vocabulary refers to

096all the words a student knows and instantly instantly recognizes phoneme awareness plays a central role in building a site vocabulary so you can see that effective reading instruction must be students skills in all three of these areas for word recognition i'm now going to turn it over to jeanette kaplan who's going to discuss the upper part of the rope language comprehension thank you kate so as kay mentioned the simple view of reading is really a mathematical formula two factors word recognition times language comprehension will equal reading comprehension and just as word recognition needs to be systematic explicit and cumulative when teaching children how to read so also does language comprehension needs to be taught in a very intentional manner and there are multiple strands within that language comprehension rope the first two are background knowledge

097and vocabulary these two are so important in helping children learn to read and i think it's actually been um one of the most exciting things that have come out of this year-long exploration into reading is the understanding of how important background knowledge and vocabulary are um in addition to that we have the language structure which are the parts of the word or parts of a sentence verbal reasoning which addresses a lot of the reading comprehension skills that we work with students like finding the main idea inferencing drawing conclusions as well as literacy knowledge which is understanding the parts of a text and concepts of print all of those five strands make up this language comprehension studies have shown that the best way to build vocabulary is to learn words within context so i know from

098my own experience if i were given a list of words to memorize for the sats say that would be very challenging however if i were taught those words within the context of content my ability to remember and retain those words would increase dramatically and so that's what we want to do with our students not only teach them vocabulary words as isolated words with their meanings but also give them the content in which to understand these words there have been a couple of really seminal studies that have been undertaken just to show how important background knowledge is to reading comprehension in 1987 um the most famous of these studies was a baseball study where they took a group of junior hires half of whom were determined to be really good readers on literacy reading tests and

099the other half who are considered to be poor readers in each of these groups half those kids knew a lot about baseball and the other half didn't know that much about baseball all the students were asked to read a fictional account of half an inning of a baseball game and then asked to do a test to demonstrate their comprehension and what came out of that study was that the poor readers who knew a lot about baseball outperformed the good readers who knew very little about the content so the conclusion is that the ability to comprehend really varies given a reader's familiarity with the subject and if we are serious about understanding the simple view of reading not only do we want to provide students with the skills they need to be able to go to

100text but we also want to be able to give students the knowledge and the vocabulary that they will need to be able to understand a text so the takeaways from this is that learning to read actually means acquiring knowledge knowing stuff makes you a better reader and as many of you know and recall from raising your own children little kids love to know things they're curious they want to talk about things they have an amazing capacity for remembering lots of facts we'd like to capitalize on that in our k2 curriculum we want to move away from teaching reading as a set of decontextualized reading comprehension skills and really move towards an understanding that when we teach kids things about history and science and culture we're actually building the building blocks of what they need to

101be able to have strong language comprehension in order to have good reading comprehension finally another big takeaway from this is that all children regardless of their reading level need to have access to grade level texts and even advanced texts that they can learn from and one of the best ways in k2 to give students access to these grade level and advanced texts through teacher read aloud so again and again we kind of see the position of the teacher and these advanced texts as a mediator in order to expose kids to lots of different information and the most effective read allows are often embedded in what we call text sets so lots of different ways of understanding and approaching some content our real hope is that by the time a student encounters a word whether it's

102in you know 8th grade algebra or 10th grade you know u.s world hist u.s history or world history that they'll be able to decode that word but also that they'll have already been exposed to some of the background knowledge to be able to comprehend it as well with that being said we're really excited for kelly to talk to you about the different parts of the reading program that we would like to propose for k2 thanks jeanette so i am going to talk to you today about the programs that we have selected for k 2 that we would like to propose going along with the simple view of reading there is the word recognition times the language comprehension which equals the reading comprehension underneath the word recognition umbrella we feel that there are a few programs

103that meet our needs one is hegerty which we'll talk about which is a phonemic awareness program the second is foundations which addresses the phonics instruction and word study and the last one is geos which would only be for grades one and two and that is um putting text into the kids hands which we'll talk about in just a few minutes underneath the language comprehension we are proposing the fountas and panel classroom and underneath the fountas and pinell classroom we're proposing um a few different components one the interactive read aloud two the reading mini lessons the guided reading books for kindergarten something called words that sing and again geodes you're going to notice is underneath both sections and we'll talk about geodes when we get there so on the next slide is the first one which

104is hegerty hegerty is a phonemic awareness program and like kate had spoke about earlier phonemic awareness is the ability to understand that spoken words are made up of individual sounds called phonemes and it is one of the best early predictors of reading success each lesson in the hegerty program includes 10 components eight of them are phonemic awareness skills there's one letter name and letter sound recognition activity and also a language awareness activity these lessons teach rhyming they teach being able to have children identify medial or final sounds and words it helps them learn how to blend or segment sounds they can add and delete phonemes or sounds in words but hegarty is not a standalone curriculum and it should be used as a supplement which leads us to our next program which is fundations foundations

105is a program by wilson language and it is a multi-sensory structured language program so it provides research-based materials and strategies and it's a comprehensive reading spelling and handwriting program so with wilson it is a systematic sequential explicit and cumulative program to build foundational skills in phonics and word study high frequency word study reading fluency vocabulary handwriting spelling all those components that you heard about when you're learning about the science of reading so the foundations includes comprehension strategies but it should also be combined with a core literature-based program that integrates um a comprehensive approach to reading and spelling which then leads us to the fountain panel as jeannette had alluded to with the interactive read-aloud the interactive read-aloud collection through fountains and pinell really is the foundation for literacy instruction it's organized into 25 different text

106sets and each text set consists of about four to six high quality picture books that reflect a global perspective with uh diversity in authors and illustrators in genre and themes characters and settings and topics and each set of texts has been carefully um and intentionally selected to have a connecting idea a central theme to help children build that background knowledge the interactive read aloud connects with the science behind language comprehension that kate and jeanette spoke about with the scar bros rope as it's designed to nurture students abilities to construct meaning an interactive talk rich environment the books are organized to help students make connections among ideas um to notice parallels in the craft of writing across multiple texts and it helps build context and background knowledge and vocabulary skills moving on the next component is

107the reading mini lesson so reading mini lessons are short concise explicit inquiry-based lessons um about a principle that students can apply to their own independent reading so these lessons are grown from the interactive read-aloud experience and it's linked to the independent reading and the mini lessons are broken into four different mini lesson types management literary analysis strategies and skills and writing about reading the management is really letting kids explore their life as a reader they learn how to work together in the classroom they learn how to use the classroom library for independent reading and they start engaging in classroom leaders literacy work the literary analysis is where they start thinking and talking about books they notice how authors tell their stories they study different authors and illustrators they study fiction and nonfiction books they think

108about author's message they um you learn about text features um they start understanding characters and and settings and how stories work the strategies and skills uh helps the kids search for meaning um in in what they're reading they um they learn how to monitor their own comprehension and how to self-correct and back up when they need to and they become strategic as they're reading and the last one is the writing about reading where the children are introduced to a reader's notebook they start learning how to write about fiction books they learn how to write about nonfiction books and respond in writing to the things that they are reading and the last components that we are proposing are the guided reading and the geodes so the first part is the fountains and panel guided readers we're

109proposing um over 200 original titles that are diverse genres and topics and this reading collection is implemented with small groups of students so the children read a selected text in a small group while teachers provide explicit teaching and support for the reading in guided reading uh is responsive to individual students strengths and needs the geodes is actually a program published by great minds in conjunction with the wilson language who are the authors of foundations they collaborated together to create geodes which is a collection of accessible knowledge building books for developing readers if you've had a child in first grade you know that most early literacy books are quite basic uh geodes are rich with facts and ideas that are designed to spark students curiosity to build their vocabulary and black background knowledge about the world

110around them so geodes follows the scope and sequence of foundations and they are what we call readables a readable is a type of text that um in which specific decoding strategies are coupled with content and vocabulary and they all blend all that pieces of that reading rope uh that you saw earlier so i know there are a lot of different components to all of this reading um you know we looked at a lot of different programs a lot of them are what you would consider your big box programs where everything is wrapped up into one little package our pilot committee felt that these pieces and these individual pieces of curriculum best would serve our students and meet the needs of what we were um attempting to bring to our district so with that um i

111think it's back to ushrina yes thank you kelly and thank you kate and jeanette i mean you can hear from the passion of the the teachers just how excited and committed they were to this whole process it we had some very lengthy rich discussion before we came to this uh recommendation and i cannot tell you just how much in awe i am of the expertise than the teachers brought to this conversation and that i see every day in the classroom or in meetings with them so we in this we understand that we also have to continue focusing on the writing and we will continue using the lucy hawkins units of study that we have but putting together a k2 literacy program the way we are recommending we understand that it is not in anything in

112itself that it is going to be an ongoing process so we will also continue exploring um integrating writing in a more intentional way in all content areas because like you hear you heard the teachers can consistently say we want to keep focusing on building background knowledge across content areas so we know that this is one of our goals um we will continue using the fantasy and pineal benchmark assessments and the unit tests from foundations again assessment is also one of the areas where we know with the science of reading that we are we're talking about we're also talking about an art of teaching because it is a different way of teaching it's really intentional and purposeful and we want our assessment to be the same way this the proposal in is in two parts we

113are proposing to adopt this program in k1 for next year and in grade 2 in the 2022 and 2023 school year for budget reasons number one because it is um we we have we are able to pay for the program for kindergarten and first grade for next year and to build it in the budget for grade two in the following year also the current students the current grade two students have started the career with uh their journey with us during reading street in kindergarten and in third grade they would move to lucy caulkin so that way they will have their kindergarten first grade and second grade with reading street before moving to uh lucy hawkins in third grade like we keep saying we really feel that this is the best program for our school district

114it is unique to our school district it has the combination of the foundational skills that we are looking for it is the best part of three research-based program and we are very confident about that it is grounded in a long-term vision that is to build strong foundational skills practice these skills skills intentionally and the ultimate goal is to achieve fluency and comprehension currently our students with ieps are already receiving interventions based on foundations and as we keep building our core tier one program we want to offer that to all students in tier one so that our students with ieps are already getting it and they can get interventions that are either enhanced or revisions of uh based off of foundations and this is a program that will continue to grow we know that and again

115we're very excited and confident that this is our k2 literacy program so thank you for allowing us this time tonight and thank you jeanette kelly and kate all that you brought today we can take some maybe immediate questions if you have any all right thank you uh for that incredibly thorough presentation and uh what is clear is a remarkable amount of work that's gone into from the whole team and really trying to assemble a curriculum for moving forward um and then obviously early literacy is is so critically important i had a question about you know it's great to see the team do this in-depth work on really trying to pull the best from lots of different sources and i'm just wondering in terms of implementation whether you foresee any challenges with you know teachers getting

116up to speed quickly on all these different pieces that are being brought together uh for the next academic year and like how to support them yeah so hegerty is really a very practical you know hands-on approach with the phonemic awareness and instruction piece so we have no doubt that our teachers will pick that up really quickly fantastin panel is already part of our uh we already use fantasy finale not to the extent that we're using it now but we have used pieces of fantasy now so the big lift would really be foundations and we again our special department is already using foundation so we have teachers who are used to foundations in the buildings and we have we've had kits foundations kits in the building that teachers have been borrowing or referring to so with

117professional development and uh the knowledge base that is already there and i also think there is a big eagerness to do this the right way and i think that we can we can do it great thank you uh other questions uh kelly just um a comment or two um again i also want to thank you for the presentation for everybody that was involved in in helping to select this and i i have full confidence that um the team that you guys assembled knows a whole lot more than i do about curriculum and um and instruction i had asked you guys two questions um prior to today's meeting that i wanted and i wanted to share that with the um anybody that might be watching um the first thing that i had asked you about um

118and it was referred to in the presentation also was whether the program offerings themselves are matched with our focus on diversity equity and inclusion our mirrors and windows that we want to bring into our classrooms and i was really thrilled with the response that i got to that and if i if you guys don't mind i know we're running short on time but um the the comments that i got back was part of what fontes fountas and pannell wrote back here since the publication of autism pronoun we've done a thorough review of our books and book development processes and attempt to reflect ever-evolving and more nuanced perceptions of what authentic representation means we want all children to see themselves accurately and authentically represented in our books and to experience perspectives and worlds outside their own

119our editorial process includes actively recruiting bypoc writers and illustrators in order to have a diverse range of voices experiences and perspectives represented and working with an outside sensitivity review organization to ensure that we're being sensitive to all cultures and perspectives represented in our books and you guys went as far as to provide me with multiple different books that are part of this um with the authors and so forth so it um looks fantastic from that perspective and i really thank you for the effort that you put into responding that question um the second question that i asked you was about the cost of the program and i was also really excited to see that in comparison to the two other uh major program offerings that you looked at this actually falls slightly below the midpoint

120of the two different ranges that you looked at as well so from an economic perspective also it looks like it's the right um a good choice for our district so again thank you go ahead matt just one follow-up question to kelly's question but first my thanks as well i really appreciate all the work that went into it and the research and showing you know scarborough's rope and how you're addressing each of the strands is really helpful to me uh the question i had also related the cost so the what's in our packet in finance tonight is a year one cost of just under a hundred thousand to transition kindergarten and first grade and just under 80 000 for year two are those one-time costs or is there then ongoing yearly costs as well it is

121a one-time cost but like in every program we have consumables so some of the the consumables is every year the the workbook that students will be using but otherwise it is a one-time course with the manipulatives that that comes in the in the kits some of the manipulatives obviously as students use over you know maybe four or five years we would have to replace but otherwise these are really like teacher materials because this is really not what we are teaching but how we are teaching so the guided readers the books that uh kelly mentioned these are the books that are going to be in the hands of the students and they will be able to interact with the books but otherwise it's really the that art of teaching that within that philosophy okay and the

122consumable cost is it materially different than what we currently pay for reading street yeah great you'd like to be checked yes thank you dr masikowski um i i had the benefit of seeing this uh this uh proposal at the education committee so i'm not gonna repeat ask those questions that either i or my colleagues asked but um it is so obvious how much these teachers in this committee cares because it would have been easy to check the box and not pull from different programs and and i'm so grateful for that i did notice uh my question is more about um the screen screen based time for kids this young i noticed in these slides that there were books presented and i didn't see one child reading off of a device is that what you also

123anticipate when you implement these programs that kids are going to be touching books and holding books and [Music] watching a teacher read them actual books yes right this is why i think uh jeanette and kate really talked about the text sets because they really are books that we want in the hands of the students okay great great thank you so much i hope that as many community members as are comfortable sending their kids into the building do so to take advantage of of this great stuff coming down the pike thank you any other questions or comments okay thank you thank you good night good night thank you thank you thank you thank you so we're getting there we have one more focus topic we are getting there but all three of our focused topics tonight

124were really really important and i'm gonna add again i'm so very excited to see this recommendation come through to the board it was a tremendously thorough analysis and in the end i don't know that we could have picked anything better it is really a wonderful recommendation so our third really important topic tonight is our budget for the 21 22 school year and tonight ms q is back with us she's presenting the proposed 2122 final budget and our budget estimates now have been reviewed and refined but they're still not a hundred percent yet but they're pretty close so as we plan for the 2122 budget we remain committed to maintaining our excellent educational program strengthening our mental and behavioral health supports and broadening our diversity equity and inclusion focus tonight the proposed final budget is presented

125to the board but the board will not take action miss q's presentation and the proposed final budget will be posted on our website under the department's business office as well as on board docs and then at our next board meeting on may 24th the board will adopt the proposed final budget and then ultimately miss q will refine her estimates before she gets to the 100 estimate that she'll present for final approval for the board on june 28th so miss cute take it away thank you good evening um it's been a while since i've been in this room it seems odd this is as dr palmer has noted this is a presentation of our proposed final budget before we actually prepare present the final budget in june given the presentations already completed in the work of

126the board to come i will try to keep this brief i do want to note that we are presenting this proposed final budget we will continue to analyze the revenues and expenditures throughout the remaining time prior to the final budget in the end of june there are on items that are still unknowns in this budget state and federal revenues this would include title programs state basic ed funding special education subsidies transportations and others it also includes federal dollars including the federal coveted relief dollars that are referred to as a rpsr or sr3 all of these are still open and we're still trying to ascertain the most accurate numbers we can get additionally we are still waiting on finalizing our tax assessment values from the county these final numbers will be needed to set the new

127millage rates for the coming year this budget is based on a full return to school for the 21 22 school year including cyber options that were discussed earlier i'll surrender this has been an interesting year to say the least the most predictable thing about this year was its ability to change your plans your needs your projections everything moves we'll start with local revenues for the 2021 projections these include things like property taxes per capita taxes transfer taxes interest earnings facility rentals and miscellaneous revenues projections for 2021 indicate that we've come in under budget in a few areas including real estate taxes increased due to the extended discount period interim real estate taxes the county suspended the billing of interim taxes for a period of time interest investments the interest market is greatly reduced student activities

128admissions admissions not being charged at various events that were traditionally charged and rentals use of facility fees were greatly reduced throughout this year the state revenues including basic ad subsidy special education subsidy transportation subsidy the rental sinking fund plan con debt reimbursement special education and peacers reimbursement property tax reduction allocation there was a reduction in transportation reimbursement but that was offset by projected increases in social security and peacers reimbursements finally federal funds normally include our title grants these went down by forty thousand dollars from the budgeted amount however there are also coveted grants that were coded to the federal funds so we are actually up in this particular area by approximately a million dollars so overall we see an increase in our revenues by approximately a million dollars next slide so let's look at our

129expenditures for 21 for 2021. salaries and benefits make up 70 of our district budget this year we had to hire additional staff to cover the online academy and other substitute positions as a result we are over budget by 340 000 in salaries and 237 thousand dollars in benefits purchase services includes professional services things like therapists consultants legal counsel contractors it also includes tr tuition for specialty schools the intermediate unit programs payments for community college repairs leases such as copiers and insurance in this area we are under budget by 738 000 this is used due to using hired substitutes instead of the substitute service a reduction in contracted services due to the delayed start and cohort periods students being accepted into the approved private school system and the state program that provides us with a reduction

130to tuition supplies and equipment are things like textbooks small equipment utilities instructional and non-instructional supplies and software this area is over budget due to purchasing ppe supplies and equipment including things like masks desk shields sanitizers sprayers tables and chairs and so much more i never anticipated having to have daily discussions about isolation gowns and desk shields and sneeze guards and you name it principal and interest fee principal interest and fees is our debt service but it also includes things like memberships licenses and other fees a significant portion of this under budget area is due to our refinancing that occurred earlier in this year so base based on all of these projections we're going to come in slightly over budget next slide the fund balance the fund balance can be likened to your savings account it

131should be used to pay those one-time expenses like replacing a roof but not for paying monthly bills the state permits us to have an eight percent twelve percent fund balance based on the size of the budget wssd is permitted to have up to an eight percent unassigned fund balance eight percent would be almost seven million dollars of unsigned money and we are projected to be at 6.3 million or 7.3 at the end of 2021. we start off with an 8.5 million fund balance at june 30th of 2020 we had a projected deficit from the budget of 3 million dollars which would have left us with a fund balance of 5.4 million dollars the asterisk there has to do with we have a budgetary reserve of four hundred thousand dollars that number would be adjusted by

132that four hundred thousand dollars if it wasn't used our actual projection is a fund balance again starting at the 8.5 million dollars we're showing a deficit of 2.2 million dollars so our projected fund balance at the end of the year will be 6.3 million dollars and that does include we're not using the budgetary reserve in that area our allowable fund balance was just shy of of seven million dollars so that's our projections so now it's time to talk about the 2122 figures so let's review the revenues in the 2122 budget local revenues make up almost 79 percent of the revenue budget again these are things like property taxes per capita taxes transfer taxes and so on state revenues make up just over 19 percent of the revenue budget again these are education subsidies and the

133like and federal revenues normally make up about one third of one percent of our revenue budget the 2122 budget still does rely on a portion of fund balance to balance budget for 2122 the structural deficit is 943 thousand dollars this is approximately one percent of the total budget requirements this is a reduction from the preliminary budget which had a deficit of 1.3 million dollars let's move on to expenditures as i said earlier salaries and benefits make up approximately 70 percent of our total budget purchase services make up approximately and again these are the professional services like therapists and consultants legal counsel contractors tuition and many other areas debt service and fees would make up approximately nine percent of this budget and supplies is just approximate just under 3.5 percent this again is textbooks small equipment

134utilities and other instructional and non-instructional supplies and software the budgetary reserve at four hundred thousand dollars represents less than one half of one percent for a total budget of 88 million two 982 dollars we'll go back to the fund balance now as we discussed at the earlier slide we would be starting 2122 at a 6.3 million dollar fund balance the projected use of the fund balance is nine hundred and twenty one thousand dollars which would leave a fund balance of five point four million dollars again there's a 400 000 item relative to our budgetary reserve if we don't use the budgetary reserve this number would be bigger at this moment the district is using the fund balance to pay normal operating costs instead of saving those funds for large unexpected items the state permits an

135unassigned fund balance of eight percent as i said earlier and at this point we would prevent a 7.1 million dollar fund balance or we are about 1.7 million dollars below what we are allowed let's move on to taxation and act one i used this slide in the last presentation what is act one it's an inflationary factor developed through legislation in 2006. it is first calculated using a year average of the statewide average weekly wage and the employer cost index the resulting statewide number is the base act 1 index which serves as its starting point in calculating each school district's adjusted act 1 index so it is basically an inflation factor kind of like the cpi for 2122 the act one index edited space is three percent however we went through a countywide reassessment per act

136one of 2006 the district must use the prior years index in this case 2.6 percent so the inflation factor is further diluted by having to roll back one more year since i mentioned countywide reassessment let's talk about the countywide reassessment we are still finalizing reassessment values but it but at this point in time the district went from a 1.4 billion dollar assessed value to 2.6 billion dollars if we reset the millage rate based on the new assessed value we would go from a 48.36 mils down to a 25.67 mils we are we are eligible for a special ed exception this year the exception is based on the prior two years of special education costs the special ed exceptions uh the special ed expenditures of 13 million dollars for 2018-19 are compared against the special ed

137except expenditures of 2019-20 which are 13.6 million dollars the state sets the years for this comparison and they are using those two prior years so this exception is basically providing district funds for costs the district has already expended this budget includes both the act one index and the full special ed exception for a total of 1.16 mills or a 4.34 tax increase please please remember that even with this increase we are still using almost one million dollars from the fund balance to balance the budget each year we talk about the effect on the median's assessed value prior to reassessment that was about a hundred and seventy nine thousand dollars which represented about eight point six thousand dollar eight thousand six hundred fifty seven thousand dollars in real estate taxes the new median assessed value is

138three hundred and thirty four thousand dollars or with the tax increase it represents eight thousand nine hundred fifty nine dollars or an increase of approximately three hundred dollars with a reassessment some properties will see an increase some properties will see a decrease in taxes basically the way a county-wide reassessment is supposed to work about one-third of the property should see a decrease one-third of the property should see an increase and one-third should remain approximately the same having gone through everything next slide what's next we do have a finance committee meeting next week next monday the following week is when we will present the proposed final budget for board approval june 14th i will make my final budget presentation and june 28th the board will need to take action on that final budget any questions thank

139you miss q um i wanted to just just for the purposes of uh bringing some other information into the discussion um you know one of the things we often talk about so of course we have a exceptional school district from a from an academic achievement perspective but we're also exceptional for other reasons which is fiscally were quite different than a lot of other districts around the state in terms of our residential tax base very little to no undeveloped land and also a very high dependence on local taxes in terms of funding formulas be able to just talk about some of those fiscal constraints that we face that are a little different than some other districts we're different than even the other school districts in delaware county having done research currently this district is 94 residential

140and six percent anything else basically commercial we are number one in the county for having our reliance on residential properties and having the least amount of commercial we are that was my next statement we are you are correct we are number one in the state for our reliance on residential properties and having so little commercial property um i'm not sure that's a statistic i really appreciate but unfortunately that's the hand wallingford swarthmore has dealt so i do understand that when when the board is looking at a tax increase we are looking at a tax increase on the residential taxpayer thank you yeah i mean it's never um you know something to get enthusiastic about in terms of looking at you know this type of tax increase but it's also you know the fiscal reality that

141we face right now i'd also point out that um we would be in a much more dire situation where not for some of the federal funding uh that we're getting so the the hit that the fund balance would have taken would have been far far worse were not for uh the several rounds of federal funding um that haven't even covered our expenses but at least have mitigated uh some of the impact the the revenue projections that you had earlier um the federal revenue projections um so the the federal coveted relief money if my understanding is correct is is essentially spread out over is it three fiscal years so there was a little bit in wow there was a little bit and last year there is a piece that we have used in this year there

142is one more significant federal fund that based off of an earlier finance committee meaning we were comparing that against the expenses we had but at this point we don't have clear guidance from well the federal government nor the state as to a what is that final number of that fund and b what are the all all the allowable uses of that fund so at this point i have not put it into the 2021 projections and i've only put a little tiny piece of it in the 2122 for esy so that is still that money is still unallocated in either the projections or the new budget okay have we heard any there hasn't been any communication on the timeline of when more specifics will be communicated around the uh approximately a week ago the federal government

143released the very broad stroke guidelines of what needs to be done relative to it now the states across the country need to take those broad stroke guidelines and turn them into something solid so i'm not anticipating that we're going to have an answer to this question tomorrow by any stretch of imagination it's probably going to evolve over time okay yeah i mean i certainly think i think the way you describe fund balance is important that you know it's not a source of funds that is intended to fund operating costs on a recurring annual basis and if we continue in that direction obviously we run into issues so it's important that we try to preserve that fund balance at a healthy level uh i i always tell people when that when people ask me questions about

144the fund balance i tell them to liken it to your sa your savings account at home if you are paying for the new roof out of your savings account that's an unanticipated expense that you certainly could do if you're paying your mortgage out of your savings account how long does your savings account last because if you're paying those monthly bills out of your savings account you're going to have a deficit very quickly that you won't be able to overcome yeah i think that again underscores the uh enormous importance that the federal fiscal relief uh played for our district this year um i'll invite other board members who have questions or comments from usq kelly um i wondered if you could um comment at all on our expectation in this budget with respect to we we've

145had the proposal tonight for the um edmentum program and so does this budget um assumes that we do not have the incremental um contracted staffing for the online academy of i'm understanding that is correct correctly and how can do you roughly what the cost of staffing up the online academy was hold on a second let me set the right page i have it here all right um the online academy was now this does not have the reduction for the state reimbursement for social security appeasers so this is the gross number not the net number um the gross number is 1.4 million dollars so we're talking about if we were to continue to offer something like that and we had similar enrollment in it again it would be a 1.4 million dollar cost versus an expectation

146i'm assuming that we built into this budget for a 95 000 cost versus 1.4 million correct okay thank you any other questions or comments all right so they'll certainly be an opportunity to talk more in the finance committee meeting but thank you miss q thank you all right um so that takes us to our time for audience recognition for response to items for action on the agenda this evening and just as a reminder public comment is a time for district residents and taxpayers to speak to the board about an issue as before the border may come before the board 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

147a specific question for the district for now we have two methods to comment in person and by phone and just a reminder that everyone in person must wear a mask for phone messages members of the public wishing to address the board can call 610-892-3470 extension one one zero two to leave the recorded comments for the board subject to a three minute time limit any comments left prior to five o'clock on the day of our meeting are transcribed and made available to the board 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 uh i don't believe we have any called in comments uh for items on the agenda or

148or otherwise um but uh it sounds like we have someone who'd like to speak about a topic on the agenda if you could just state your name and your street um and then uh go ahead with your comment uh good evening i'm robert cristaldi of of putnam boulevard in wallingford i'm a junior at strathaven high school and i was listening to the presentation on the cyber school for next year and i'm very i'm very impressed uh and i definitely think physically it makes a lot of sense 95 000 versus 1.4 million but i am concerned that it appears to be that we're sending our students away to another district like it almost seems like that's what we're doing and i think we kind of need to rethink that personally i think everyone should be back

149in to next year which would be no additional dollars so that's kind of my thinking and if if i was in charge that's what i would do but i'm not so um and that's all i have to say thank you great thank you uh do we have any other comments i see one coming we'll wait a moment all right good evening uh just name and street good evening amy caruso colonial drive wallingford region one i had some comments regarding the policy changes that are in progress um they're 16 on the second reading and 16 on the first reading so i just wanted to make a note on the record that um i have submitted commas and changes regarding many of them and i have um enjoyed the participation in the policy committee meetings and i

150look forward to hearing some feedback on the substantive changes in many of the policies i am wondering um how there will be differentiation in policy regarding students who are home educated versus online academy or the edmonton program i would also regarding the budget i would like to have a little more information on what the assumptions on a full return to fall mean and how um policy regarding class sizes would be affected regarding the class sizes in person and the class sizes online and the teacher balance as far as that goes lastly regarding [Music] the relations with law enforcement and some other issues that i had brought up before i think it would be helpful to have a little more clarity on who in the district is responsible for security and related matters both in the

151district and at each building and that's all the comments that i have tonight thank you thank you do we have any other individuals who would like to make a comment okay i don't see any uh so that takes us to our first item for action which is the uh approval of the april 26 regular business meeting minutes and iso move do i have a second second thanks matt any discussion okay ms fagor can you take a roll call that miss amino aye dr huff aye mrs lentz aye mr sullivan hi mrs walkman aye dr grandy hi the motion passes six to zero all right thank you miss figura so that takes us to personnel we have seven items for action and personnel are there any on the list anyone would like to se any any

152on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest okay um we have the approval of four retirements and resignations uh sad to say ms q our business administrator patricia mcgary a bus driver and katherine lathberry a substitute bus driver and lawrence baker substitute bus driver we have the approval of nine appointments david neal a computer science teacher at the middle school amelia kane an art teacher for the online academy david bear social studies and science teacher at the middle school anne marie ward a district social worker amber coe math teacher at the middle school casey goldberg a special ed teacher at srs eric pintoff administrative assistant at the high school lynn chadwick instructional support at the high school and mitra harry singh sub a substitute custodian in the district the approval of five

153leaves of absence as listed in the agenda with the approval of the 2021 summer school program appointments as listed in the agenda we have approval of renewal of the ad vision insurance coverage as stipulated with the approval of an addition to spring athletic supplementals for the 2020-2021 school year is stipulated and we have the approval of the appointment of an instructional support contracted staff member through avena healthcare educational services as stipulated all items in this section are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion so moved thank you kelly do we have a second second thanks any discussion okay uh miss fagor can you please take a roll call vote dr huff i mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi mrs walkman aye ms cimino hi becca grandy hi motions pass six

154to zero thank you miss figora so that takes us to uh policy and uh we have 16 items for action and policy for their second reading and 16 for their first reading uh and so dr palmer i believe you're going to summarize the items i am so at our last board meeting i explained why policies may be recommended for change from time to time and because i know everyone doesn't tune into every one of our board meetings i thought i'd like to share it again this evening so first the district belongs to the pennsylvania school boards association and their policy news network the policy news network is part of an annual subscription service that provides information on current and revised policies and administrative guidelines the policy news network provides information about changes in federal and

155state laws and regulations the effects of court and arbitration decisions and issues related to school governance administration student achievement and school liability our wssd policies that you will find on board docs follow the psba format so we look to the policy news network first for our guidance secondly we work with our solicitor as well as other legal counsel they may make recommendations for changes as well independent of what we are reading in the policy news network and third we may find that some of our policies are not as clear as they could be so we may make administration recommendations for clarification or for an additional need that we have so as dr granty said tonight we have 16 policies on for first reading these policies have been reviewed by the policy committee and they are

156recommended for the board to take action this meeting so some highlights under the 100 series which is curriculum we have two policies and they are somewhat related as to why we're making the change on the policy they are 113.1 discipline of students with disabilities and 113.4 confidentiality of special education student information and while there haven't been any changes to the individuals with disabilities education act or its regulations there have been changes to the state's cyclical compliance monitoring process so there are revisions to those policies that pertain to the monitoring we also are working on policy 113.2 behavior support wasn't quite ready for this meeting but we will be bringing it forward after one more review by the policy committee meeting and that also the three policies fit into the rationale for why we were revising

157these under the 200 series which is our student section we have one policy it is 218.3 and it is action and placement related to students convicted or adjudicated of sexual assault and this is a new policy it is drafted to comply with the provisions of act 110 of and it is a required policy for all school districts under our 300 series for employees we have eight policies our first one is 311 reduction in staff and in this case section 1125.1 of pennsylvania school code was amended to restate or i'm sorry reinstate seniority provisions regarding suspension of professional employees the key part that was revised here is the seniority section of this policy so that it aligns with the pennsylvania school code changes the next 300 policy is 314 and it is physical examination and this

158one references um the board approved health and safety plan they were added to policy 314 as well as a definition and language regarding health monitoring for staff we also added specific language on communicable diseases and exclusion from school facilities based on state regulations or guidance from our state and local health officials pretty much covet prompted those changes 317.1 is educator misconduct and this policy has been updated to add a section to address circumstances when the allegations underlying a report of educator misconduct include conduct that appears to constitute title ix sexual harassment and other discrimination you'll see through other policies that are coming forward that with the title ix changes that are out there there are a number of policies that will be impacted by that the next policy is 318 and it is attendance and

159tardiness and the title of this policy was revised from just the tardiness piece and it added the attendance and the new language was added to address staff reports of unexpected absences such as related to covet 323 is tobacco and vaping products and in this case act 93 of 2019 and act 111 of 2019 made modifications to the pennsylvania crimes code regarding the use and sale of tobacco and vaping products on school property and in this part psba updated the definitions terminology and revisions of this policy as well as policy 904 which is also on for first reading tonight that policy is public attendance at school events but it is those two changes in the law that prompted those changes in the policy we have one more on i'm sorry a few more on 300 328

160is compensation plans and salary schedules and it is a new policy for us it's not new in terms of recommendations for psba it's an older policy that we had never adopted it's part of the psba series it makes our policies more complete so i included it on our policy review policy 332 is working periods and this was updated to reflect the new provisions in policy 803 that the board also had relative to all iterations in the school calendar and when we revised the school calendar and the school days based on emergency provisions to address our instructional needs primarily because of covid this policy is also amended for the same reasons to take that language into consideration policy 334 is sick leave and this one particularly deals with the language addressing medical documentation and it was

161revised for consistency with policy 314 physical examination and it brought in the terminology beyond just that of the word physician and it includes a licensed physician certified registered nurse practitioner or a licensed physician assistant then we move on to our 800 series and we have one policy under operations and that is 819 suicide awareness prevention and response this is a new policy for us and it complies with requirements of act and it reflects current research recommended practices and it also provides meaningful resources and then in the last section which is the 900 series or community we have four policies i had mentioned the 904 public attendance at school events which pertains to the changes in the crimes code relative to tobacco and vaping products and selling on school grounds the next policy is 906 for

162public complaints and this policy was revised to provide a more clear structure within the policy this is also one of those policies that we have to have because we have federal funds and we have this policy is broken down if you have a general complaint a public complaint but if you also have a public complaint pertaining to a federal program 907 is a policy on our school visitors and this is another one covet related and the policy revisions pertain to limiting or prohibiting school visitors in accordance with our health and safety plan and the last policy that we have for first reading is number 913 regarding non-school organizations groups or individuals and this particular policy i'm going to stress this it only pertains to non-school organizations it doesn't pertain to our students and it also

163seeks to delineate what are non-school activities and what are non-school materials we will come back and bring another policy policy 220 that pertains to our students but we'll bring that back at a later time uh dr granty said we had 16 policies that are also ready for second reading this evening and i want to point out all of the policies except policy 808 are exactly the same way we presented them for first reading but 808 did change several of the provisions that are within that policy based on the public comments that we received so dr grandi that concludes my section thank you dr palmer for that introduction and so um we will vote separately on the policies for second reading versus first reading so let me start with the first block of 16 which appear

164on the first part of the policy agenda under item a again policy number i'll just read the numbers you can see them on the agenda 123.2 137.1 151 251 340 626 803 805 805.1 806 808 810 810.1810.3824 those are the ones for second reading um and so do i have a motion uh to approve those policies for a second reading no move was that you marilyn yes okay thank you marilyn uh do i have a second second thanks jen uh any discussion all right miss figueroa can you take a roll call vote mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi mrs walkman hi miss amino hi dr huff aye dr grandy hi motion passes six to zero thank you miss figura um so then that takes us to the policies for first reading which dr palmer just

165uh went through one by one so i'm not going to repeat those do i have a motion for those items so moved thank you kelly do i have a second second thanks chapin okay uh any discussion okay miss fagor can you please take a roll call vote mr sullivan mrs walkman hi miss amino hi dr huff hi mrs lentz hi dr grandy hi motion passes six to zero all right thank you miss figure that takes us to a curriculum uh there are four items uh in curriculum this evening are there any on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest i would like to separate item c please okay so we will start with a b and d uh which i will read um a is the approval of a 2021 2022 related

166services provider contract has stipulated a b is approval of tuition contracts as listed in the agenda and d is approval of the adoption of the k-2 literacy programs as stipulated and described during the focus topic this evening those items are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion thanks marilyn do we have a second second it's your friendly neighborhood second tonight it's hard with the microphones you don't know where it's coming from um any discussion okay miss figueroa can you take a roll call vote please mrs walkman aye ms amino hi dr huff hi mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi dr grandy hi emotions pass six to zero all right thank you miss figuera so it takes us to item c which is approval of an agreement with edmentum for ed

167options licenses as stipulated in the agreement subject to solicitors review do i have a motion for that item so moved thanks marilyn do i have a second i'll second again it's shaping thank you chapin uh any discussion i have a one question and then a request and the question i have is whether postponing a vote on this would put us into a difficult position uh moving forward with any option in a time frame that's necessary to be up and running in the next school year i know that was a question that was asked of our team and i believe it was denise who had responded that she would really like to have it approved as soon as possible so they could begin doing the work on it okay if i recall i'd um ask denise

168about that and you know they want to make sure that the planning for next year can proceed in a way that is systematic and methodical as opposed to feeling rushed toward the end of the school year and also making sure families have enough time to think through their options as well okay could i offer then um and then i guess in it i think they're maybe still here that would be great yeah thank you i'm just trying to paraphrase your answers so it's better to come from you the question um was does it put us in a difficult position um to be prepared for the upcoming school year if we were to postpone the vote on this particular item this evening yeah i mean it's the opinion of the administration that we need as much

169lead time as possible we really are looking at starting up a school that we've never started before we have not gone into a virtual school space where we've been in charge of the administration of it we've not done enrollment for that we want to properly communicate to families we want to be able to hold our information night if we're talking in mid-july enrollment every week matters so it's it'll tie our hands a little bit and make things a bit rushed thank you then i guess a request in the see the provisions required is conditions for approval and there's multiple conditions laid out in the agenda can we add a provision around the contract itself and including provision edits to that template contract that would put performance standards in there around the availability of the platform

170right now it um only puts a performance guarantee in there for 48 consecutive hours of outage that's it so if it was multiple instances in a month of not 48 consecutive hours it's not included as a provision it does not include any provisions in there about latency of the system and accessibility of the system from a latency perspective it also does not conclude any performance standards of any kind that i could see related to the availability of their staff their commitment to actually delivering on the hours of in person are direct i'm sorry direct instruction so i didn't see any of those types of provisions in the contract and i would want to see them in there to be able to approve a contract of this nature could i ask mr berman maybe oh go

171ahead i just are you are i'm not sure are if you're looking for specific amount of hours that are listed in the contract it does indicate that there will be live hours and there will be live instruction but are you looking for x amount to be laid out i would want a commitment about the things of that nature things around like if we're going to have a student reaching out for support what's the expected turnaround time that they're actually going to respond to that request it definitely gives me pause that particularly in the older grades they could be assigned as many as 500 students to a teacher yeah i think that you'll find that that's going to be true in any one of the places that we would go with i'm glad that you mentioned

172that i'm obviously commenting here with absolutely no experience whatsoever with a cyber environment so perhaps my expectations are way out of line um i acknowledge that might be true i'd still like to at the very least see this system um uptime like that that's a big deal to not have any performance standards in there around the um the system performance um yeah and i would like to push to see what we can get on their you know their commitment to delivering on the availability of their teachers all right so to be clear the material my understanding is that the bullet points that are here in the motion are not currently in the contract and that the board wants to see these items incorporated into the contract as specific terms as a condition of entering into

173the contract and that's fine it's my understanding that what you're trying to do right now is amend the motion which is what's written here and you want to add additional terms so what i'm i think what we're going to need is very specifically what terms you want added in or at least if you're not going to say what specific terms you want then at least the area in which they would be so that you can have a valid approval of the contract at this point and somebody has to write it down it's difficult to do on jurors would you like to well and perhaps we should recess for a moment to draft this um may it's getting late may i ask if others are feeling the same way um do i have to make the

174formal emotions what you would do is you'd make a motion and if p if it fails it then you know that they don't okay so maybe helpful let's just focus in on what what key items you would like in there is it primarily around the uh performance of the it infrastructure itself correct um yes the the i.t infrastructure a provision that says 48 consecutive hours of something that's entirely within their control is it's not an acceptable performance standard they should have redundancy that even if it was an outage that wasn't in their control they can still be up and running and they said they can um so i would like to see that in the contract whether that means it's difficult to you know what is the number of hours that isn't acceptable um i'm

175not sure how to do this from the floor uh but my suspicion is that it's it's just difficult because we don't know what is reasonable in this circumstance and i'm not sure that doing it from somewhere other than the floor would be all that helpful and i frankly don't think they're taking the recess to it's not going to the language is going to do that it's not going to solve it so i think that maybe the best thing to do is that that's what the i mean that's a large part of why i'm concerned about what's on the table and so i'm going to withdraw the uh motion to amend and i'm going to let it go through and we'll we'll vote can we leave it to the solicitor's discretion to try and negotiate provisions

176that would address your concerns uh yes because i i share your concerns on availability of teacher when i heard those student-teacher ratios and some sort of minimum number of hours of live instruction i was less worried about the redundancy and system downtime based on the answers they get so essentially we have a they lay out a series of specs in terms of what they're saying will be delivered by them is one of the concerns a lack of consequences were those things not to be delivered and maybe that's the solution that that might be a very good solution i mean there needs to be a performance i i would like to see a performance standard that would have a financial penalty for not achieving those standards so could we ask mr berman to negotiate a financial

177penalty for failing to meet standards yes if i might ask is that a condition that you're putting into the contract because i certainly can try to negotiate to get that but i need to know whether if i can't get that or they will not agree to that is this a contract that you're agreeing to and that was why i worded it as a condition of you getting it to your discretion all right that's already in here um it's essentially a review of language um so i already am going to be working on that and getting guidance as to what the board is looking for in particular will be helpful in that okay so i think there's a desire for some teeth to failing to to meet standards does that need to be put in as

178a measure okay all right okay all right any other discussion on this item all right miss figure can you please take a roll call vote miss amino hi dr huff i mrs lentz aye mr sullivan aye mrs walkman nay dr grandy hi the motion passes five to one all right so that takes us to finance uh we have 13 items for approval and finance are there any on the list anyone would like to separate from the rest okay first we have approval of approval of an agreement for the property located at two todd morton lane in rose valley studying the assessment at 995 000 for tax year 2021 second we have the approval of an agreement for the property located at 506 georgetown road another providence township setting the assessment at 390 000 for tax

179year 2021 the approval of the third food services renewal contract with the nutrition group we have the acceptance of a donation of twenty seven thousand dollars to establish the pete and nettie's celine scholarship of approval of the econ service agreement for the district-wide phone hardware software maintenance for the 2021-2022 school year we have approval of the dell financial services lease proposal dated may 4 2021 as stipulated final document subject to solicitor review we have approval of the contract renewal notice with blackboard incorporated we have approval of the renewal contract with powerschool for its performance matters analytics platform for the 2021-2022 school year not to exceed ten thousand dollars of approval of the contract with powerschool for its performance matters assessment platform for the 2021-2022 school year not to exceed 18 000 we have approval of

180acceptance of the 2020-2021 title one grant and the amount listed in the agenda and amendments of the 2020-2021 general fund budget to allocate these funds as stipulated we have approval of acceptance of the 2020-2021 title ii grant and the amount listed in the agenda and amendments of the 2020-2021 general fund budget to allocate these funds as stipulated and we have the approval of acceptance of the 2020-2021 title for grant and the amount listed in the agenda and amendments of the 2020-2021 general fund budget to allocate these funds as stipulated and then lastly we have approval of a service agreement with the dciu and the amount of 6879 for providing non-public services for the 2020-2021 school year as required under the federal title 1 and 2 grant for non-public students in schools residing in the district's

181title 1 and title 2 eligible residence area all items in this section are as attached or described in the agenda do i have a motion so moved thanks kelly uh do i have a second second thanks matt any discussion okay mr gore can you please take a roll call vote huff hi mrs lentz hi mr sullivan hi this is walkman hi miss cimino hi dr grandi hi motion passes six to zero all right thank you ms fabora all right we're getting there so that takes us to other on the agenda which is actually um moving to fill the vacancy from region two on the school board um i thank our candidates for being patient this evening and uh waiting for us to get to this on the agenda we will start with candidate introductions the

182format is that we will ask each candidate to take approximately three minutes to introduce themselves any relevant comments they wish to make related to their interests and qualifications for the position the board already has the materials that each candidate submitted and those are also attached to the agenda for anyone who wishes to view them following candidate comments if board members wish to ask questions we'll entertain questions at that time and then following introductions and q a with all of the candidates we will vote to fill the position as is evident on the agenda we have four candidates this evening and again i just want to say i'm grateful to all four for their willingness to volunteer their services to our district and our community we have mark carroll rachel holbert robert kelly mary jo witkowski

183smith and so i thought we would just go in alphabetical order so the first person would be mr carroll so just ask if mr carroll's here if he could come around to the podium good evening thank you mr carroll if you don't mind i just have to for each person we just have to confirm eligibility first so um i'll just list those things real quick and if you could just confirm that these are in fact the case you're a resident of region 2 a resident of the district for a year prior to appointment so today at least 18 years old at the time of appointment a u.s citizen and registered to vote and that you do not hold any other local state or county elected or appointed positions correct okay thank you so go ahead

184first and foremost i'd like to thank you all for the invite i'm sure we're all a little tired especially working all day so i won't take too much of your time um first and foremost uh my name is mark carroll i've been living in the nether province township for about 32 years uh graduated from strathaven high school in 2002. my oldest who graduated last year um you know we have uh a nine-year-old a three-year-old and a four-month-old three-year-old will be coming up here soon nine-year-old will be over at north penn hopefully sooner or later we'll be coming to the strathaven school district soon and the four month old um he's got a little time but you know my little football star my wife who i met here at strathaven um high school sweethearts um lost

185contact and uh met up on social media and now we got beautiful kids together she supports my uh little uh community outreach and uh working with the school board hopefully soon um a little bit about myself my wife and i owned a restaurant about an hour away from here um due to covedo unfortunately like many restaurants we had to close down my oldest she uh she went through some struggles like a lot of students here in the in the district mental health um hung out with the wrong individuals but we truck through it um so i can relate to a lot of parents here in the community um i've had personal experience with loved ones who struggled from opioid addiction um so again like many parents around here i can i can relate um what

186makes me the best candidate is that i don't look at politics i look at people i look at the children we need to do what's best for our children we got to put politics aside it doesn't matter what side you're on we got to just make sure our children are safe mental health uh health is is number one a lot of students are are getting beat up by bullying opioid overdoses i've seen it so much in my life and it's time for me to get back to the community to do my part with my personal life experiences and bring a wide variety of ideas to the board um that i've experienced personally um but yeah so that's just a little bit about me um been in the restaurant industry for about say about 15 years

187i currently work at uh caliber collision which is an auto body shop i kind of steered away from the restaurant industry a little bit due to covid i figured it's not really the the promised land anymore so i went from a 14-hour you know five six day a week nights weekends holidays to monday through friday 30 to 4 30 type shift so it gives me a lot more time with my family and and everything like that so it's time for me to give back to the community especially the school district the school district's been great to me um you know i've i've cherished a lot of memories here as well as my family so and that's just a little bit about me if you have any questions thank you let me ask if any board

188members would like to ask a question sure mr carroll thanks so much for coming tonight is there anything in particular that you would like um to see changed in the district i mean you spoke you spoke a lot actually about um mental health and i couldn't agree with you more that that's a major concern um anything um aside from that that you would like to see the word work on absolutely um i think when it comes to the children i think there should be more workshops for you know not you know besides the children but the parents the parents are are dealing with the battle too um i couldn't tell you how many sleepless nights that i've had personally and you know it's just research after research google after google and just reaching out to

189individuals who've been through there just like i have and i think the school district if they offered programs for the parents to cope with these these things i think it would help them a lot um and they could pass that on to their children who are going through it um it's really about the tools you know giving the parents and the teacher or the the students the proper tools to make them you know better it's it's an illness and it's it's a struggle it doesn't go away um you know and it's it's a shame that that these kids and parents have to go through it and i'd like to take my personal experience and and help others with it any other questions i have a question mr carroll region two encompasses the feeder basin for

190another providence elementary school do you have any familiarity with another providence elementary or the that community i do i do um went to that went to another providence um my kindergarten teacher god rest her soul betty anne wilson best teacher well i can't say best teacher i've ever had but she was one of them one of them because i know there's a lot of teachers watching um god god rest her soul god rest her soul loved her to death but yes i'm familiar with the nether providence elementary school basin yes yes um it's a great school i learned a lot from the may day field day um my miss wilson's alphabet letters uh the the alphabet people but yeah i'm very familiar with another project so much thank you all right uh you're reminding me

191of those alpha i had those alphabet people too i was in kindergarten that i forgot about until now with my three-year-old i actually had to had to google it and youtube it and it was weird seeing the the grainy video of it and it was like like i said miss wilson used to play it on a record player that was you know memories it was it was great it was great i loved it i loved it well thank you for jogging my memory any other questions or comments all right again i just want to thank you uh for your willingness to volunteer yes i i thank you all i i thank you all take time and and the invite absolutely thank you all right um so again just going in alphabetical order um that takes

192us to rachel holbert hi miss holbert if i could just um run through a quick list of eligibility criteria if you could just confirm that you meet those eligibility criteria the first is a resident of region 2 resident of the district for a year prior to appointment at least 18 years old at the time of appointment a u.s citizen and registered to vote and that you do not hold any other local state or county elected or appointed positions all of those are true okay all right if you could just go ahead and introduce yourself and take it away okay thank you dr grande and the rest of the board members for this opportunity i applied to this position because it's an important time in the district and i'm interested in helping welding for swarthmore schools

193retain their high quality even during this or even past this tough year we've been here since our sons were in sixth and ninth grades and like many families we came here for its academic and extracurricular strength and we found it here this this school district is the heart of this community and i want to help all the students and parents here love it like we do my older son played football and wrestled here and i was active at that time in booster clubs and i was president of the all sports booster club um during his senior year he is now a junior at ithaca college and our younger excuse me our younger son is about to graduate from strathaven high school and he's going to go to temple for engineering if appointed i want to

194help wssd remain one of the top rated school districts in the state that means that i want to i want to help the district improve in you know rebuilding trust and improving communication with the parents and the community after this year and i also want to ensure that the academic and emotional needs of students are met despite continuing covet challenges and i also want to ensure that there's continues to be financial stability in the district over the next several years i also want to support dr marseille as he starts his new position as superintendent i'm very excited about his coming on board and i have to say that i know of people who are in his current district and they are honestly heartbroken that he's leaving which i'm sad for them but is also a

195good sign for us i guess um finally i want to make sure that the uh the dei effort that started formally last year is continued and strengthened i want everybody in the school district to feel safe and respected regardless of race religion class gender identity or learning or physical differences this includes not only the students but also the teachers staff and administrators i think i bring a set of skills and background to this board that complements the work that boards do i have my master's in public administration and my master's in public health and i've always been interested in public service by trade i'm a program evaluator and i have worked for a variety of governments non-profits and universities helping people think through what works what doesn't work and why um for for you know

196using taxpayer dollars um part of a board's work is to provide accountability and oversight and that is what i do at my job every day mostly the board needs to be focused on whether the district is moving in the right direction and whether it has the people and policies in place to ensure its success in the future i'll just stop there and say it would be an honor to serve on the board and thank you very much thank you let me invite board members with any questions you may have i didn't realize my microphone was on that whole time um i'll ask the same question i asked uh before that region 2 encompasses the feeder basin for another providence elementary school and so do you have any familiarity with either another province elementary school or

197the general community in that region that's a really good question now we moved here after um my kids uh we're done with elementary school so i have to say like i am non-partisan in that uh way i know that there have been a number of people from region 2 whose kids went to west um so that i understand that where that question comes from in my familiarity with um the mpe area really comes from my my younger son's friends and he has a number of friends down in putnam and the garden city area they all went to npe i also understand from teachers uh current and former teachers that they consider mpe to be like a hidden gem and um you know it may have somewhat different needs than some of the other schools each

198school i feel like is um you know unique and it's not in their own ways um but i i've heard nothing but good things about npe and actually since you bring it up um i was hoping that when you know if i if i'm appointed to the board that um i could take some time like two mornings a month since i do work from home um and spend time at you know one of the schools and get to know get to know it a little bit more intimately and my choice was npe just because i i'm a little bit more familiar with it thank you i'll just comment and say that that's one of the more enjoyable activities as a board member is to visit our school buildings and dr palmer has been great with

199scheduling time for us to to visit our buildings which is always a fun thing to do any other questions or comments all right well thank you again for your willingness to volunteer for this position and congrats on your upcoming graduation it sounds like in your family yes thank you very much all right all right that takes us to uh mr kelly hi mr kelly good evening good evening um if i could just quickly read off the five eligibility criteria and have you just confirm that these are the case uh resident of region 2 resident of the district for a year prior to appointment at least 18 years old at the time of appointment a u.s citizen and registered to vote and you do not hold any other local state or county elected or appointed positions

200that is correct okay all right the microphone is yours thank you uh so my name is robert kelly i am currently running for school board i have run for this position in the past and i appreciate the opportunity to address you this evening i think that this school district this past year has been a challenge in a number of ways i've been up here i've expressed some of my views and concerns about some decisions that have been made but i also think it's given us a tremendous opportunity and that opportunity is the fact that more of our residents are engaged and understand the decisions that the school board makes and how it impacts them and i want to be part of that decision making process that's why i ran before that's why i'm running again

201that's why i'm before you today and in talking to residents i was over by npe this past weekend i can tell you a large number of our residents have lost trust in this board um i think that's unfortunate but i also think that there's a tremendous opportunity for us to build back that trust they understand what you're trying to do they feel frustrated like i'm sure you have on a number of evenings making these critical decisions but i also think that we can bring them in and give them through more transparency from this board and understanding of why we're making those decisions because you know this past year really has taught us um that how important school is to a community and if we make our schools better we make our community better it brings

202people together so that's why i'm running for school board and that's why i'm in front of you today all right thank you uh any questions from board members go ahead matt just one quick question to follow up on something you just said you said you think the community has lost trust in the board to some extent um and that you you would like to help rebuild that trust in part through increased transparency and i'm just wondering what specifically you would like to see in terms of increased board transparency sure so some of the things that i think you know can be done is is you know there's there's obviously pto uh at each of the elementary schools they have at the middle school at the high school i don't think it would be a bad

203idea to have a board member try to attend their you know maybe once a month once a quarter give an update because i think those organizations do a really good job of communicating out to the parents as an example is something that we might be able to do going forward any other questions marilyn how have you been involved in your ptos oh so at west my kids go to west i've got three kids in the district today um so i participated in the west pto for quite some time with my wife we actually did something that she told me the other day is no longer around we did box tops for education so for those of you that recall there used to be these little stickers or you'd have to cut them out we would

204count them for the west pto to get a discount for the schools so that money could be applied to different things whether field trips things like that okay any other questions just one point of clarification they are still around you just need to scan your grocery store so as a common uh box top cutter that is now the route you have to go got it but that sounds much better yeah thank you in the bags those little cardboard things that we have uh we've covered alphabet people from kindergarten and now box tops okay yeah exactly all right any other questions or comments all right thank you great thank you all right and moving on to our last candidate uh mary jo witkowski smith um welcome hi and thank you i just need to run through

205really quick eligibility criteria with you if you don't mind so bear with me if you could just give me a yes at the end if that all these are true if they are true um first is resident of region 2 yes resident of the district for a year prior to appointment at least 18 years old at the time of appointment yes a u.s citizen and registered to vote yes and that you do not hold any other local state or county elected or appointed positions correct okay okay mary jo witkowski smith i have lived in region 2 for over 30 years i have two lovely children and they're both grown and married who came through npe middle school strathaven high school they are doing wonderfully i'm so very proud of them in no small measure has

206the education experience that they've had impacted their lives i mean to a great degree their success has been based on the family that wellingford swarthmore is and uh so i sorry i've also been an educator for over 40 years and some of you know probably all of you that i worked here for a period of that time i was the assistant principal at both the middle school and high school for part of my uh educational career so i have this is home and uh i'm going to retire my uh service ends at the end of june so as i retire i was thinking what would i do to give back that's something important to me and i thought well this is a thing that i'm most familiar with i understand how schools work i understand

207um the importance of nurturing and challenging children at the same time then that is my personal goal for education is to nurture and challenge children um so i've been doing that for a long time and i currently work at mariana bersetti which is a charter school in north philadelphia and it is very different community than this community i it's a school of 1500 students i am currently the director of student data and assessment my position there is um making sure that all of our programs are meeting standards that we meet standards i lead our comprehensive planning in our school so i am familiar with the aspects of running school very familiar with assessment curriculum diversity challenges safety and security for schools those are all things i have a hand in with my current position sorry

208and um so i do i am familiar with all of those things and i thought what better way could i give back to my community with using some of those skills and some of the things that i've learned through my career so it's something that i would like to do it's something that i'm interested in supporting this community i know the community really well and uh if you have any questions all right thank you uh let me ask if board members have i actually have a question sure you guys have a question you can think about it um so your background is of course incredibly relevant to a school district so it's exciting for me i guess to think about having someone on the board with that level of educational background on the other hand

209i can imagine it might be hard to take the hat off of administrator and putting the hat on of a school board member so i'm wondering how you're seeing that and what you see the role of the school board yeah i do see that i see that you know i am going to have to learn to pivot and i know my task if i were a school board member would be to represent families and to represent taxpayers and i also know that because i'm going on a fixed income starting july 1. so i care about all of that and i do understand that but i do know that it may take me a little time to you know put on that other hat and to learn the best way that i can support this community

210great thank you other questions or comments hi i just have one um so how do you think if you were to be appointed to the school board you could keep your finger on the pulse of the current um student community and the climate within the schools from the student perspective since i think you stated that your kids have had such a great experience and they've gone through that um and how could you do that so that you could marry that along with your educational background and all of your experience yeah right and i think really some of it would be just stepping inside stepping inside and see what's going on if you know if i'm permitted and invited of course and um also what it was that i did when i was an administrator here

211i did go to the football games i did go to the performances i did you know my son was a drummer in the band you know so you know what that's about as everyone in this community is so um yeah i think it is about spending that time and i think why i didn't think about this until i retired is because this is a big job and i don't think i could be a school administrator although some are and sit on a board such as this and be you know faithful to both so i will have you know more time to support you know what i need to do to make this work thank you any other questions all right thank you very much thank you all right um so mr berman if i remember

212correctly the procedure is for uh we go through a roll call for board members to cast their vote correct on a particular candidate that is correct the way that it has been done here is that you'll call each individual or secretary will call each individual board member they'll state the name of the candidate that they wish to appoint to the position uh if you have you i will tell you that you are going to need five affirmative votes for any one board any one candidate to be able to elect so if you don't get that five affirmative votes uh with the first pass then it's up to you to decide whether or not you're going to eliminate all but the top contenders to be able to go on from there okay yeah and i would

213propose if we don't have five votes so that's exactly what we do which is to vote again on the top two vote getters matt can i just ask one quick point of clarification so the agenda lists it as appointing someone to fill dr downey's unexpired term but then the recommended action is to appoint someone to serve until december 5th 2021. i can clarify that uh because this is a vacancy where there is more than 60 days before the next municipal election the the term of this appointment is only until the next the outcome of the next municipal election which is november um or until the next person is seated in november uh and then that in november there will be an election for the last two years of dr downey's position got it all right

214so uh i'd like to proceed with voting so ms fagora could you take the roll call and ask for board members to indicate who they are voting for mrs lentz uh mary jo with kowsky smith i hope i pronounced that correctly mr sullivan mary jo witkowski smith mrs walkman mary jo witkowski smith miss amino mary jo with kelsey smith dr huff mary jo witkowski smith dr grandy well you've all made this easy for me um mary jo witkowski smith mary jo wikowski smith has received six votes all right congratulations miss witkowski smith um so can you remind me what the procedures are for seating her to the board um is there did the administration have a notary present uh in that case she can be sworn and can be seated tonight otherwise uh that would

215probably be best because that because you you okay well that yes we're going to need one of those well i just want to take this time again to thank uh we'll let them finish their conversation okay all right well i just want to again thank uh all four candidates for their willingness to to volunteer uh in this capacity um you know it's a significant responsibility and again um thrilled to see four candidates come forward with their willingness to to serve in that role um so that takes us to uh our time for audience recognition for response to topics not on the agenda this evening uh is there anyone i know i mentioned earlier we don't have any called in comments is there anyone who would like to comment for something not on the agenda okay

216i don't see any that takes us to school board reports does anyone have a report from a district subcommittee or out of district role okay uh do we have any old business do we have any new business all right that means i have to search for the gavel here hold on all right thank you this meeting is adjourned