New Britain Board of Education - 10/4/2021

001[Music] [Applause] the new britain board of education providing students with a high quality education good evening i'd like to call the new britain board of ed to order at 607 and um start uh with the pledge of allegiance and miss dawkins can you lead us today yes i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all [Music] here mr anthony kane here mr joseph listrow here miss annie parker miss diana reyes here miss gail sanders college here ms tina santiam here okay we have a quorum and let's now have a moment of meditation okay and do we have anybody for public participation tonight uh we have one phone number that's called in that ends

002in a one two we have somebody on the phone who phone number ends one two who'd like to speak for public participation all right [Music] i believe they'd they'd spoken up already briefly so i i don't think it was an issue with that i don't i don't know they may call that okay all right so let's move on to uh new business um motion to go into executive session to discuss uh item 2a which is ratifying the local contract between the new bread board of education and the federation of school administrators with ms sarah attorney engler and um mr kane joining us all in favor aye aye okay we will go into executive session i am on the line for some reason or another i was bounced out but i called back okay okay um

003so um you need to come back into session um so we are now back in session let's hear uh from the caller if you could uh identify yourself and uh you've got uh three minutes well my name is charlie smith and i have some concerns about the business okay go ahead smack it tell us one more i'm sorry you go ahead and tell us a little bit more oh okay well my concerns begin with um i understand reports have written they're submitted to the um the supervisor for the consolidated school district i want to say his name is richard but um what i like to know is from seeing and hearing from the students they make such statements if they don't care if they're written up they tell other students oh i've been written up

00425 times nothing happened and then the other issue is the students are disrespectful to the drivers and the other occupants on the bus it's like there's no true bus etiquette even though you try to explain to them what's required of them being an occupant on the bus and i do understand that safety and health are the major requirements for transporting these students yet they want to stand while the bus is in motion and you tell them not to they're extremely loud and they distract the driver and it prevents her from hearing or him from hearing the dispatcher on the radio and then also with the mask the middle school students and the high school students are the the major violators of that the elementary they're pretty good you know the kids are i mean they're

005better than those and the higher grades and what's happening here is they're putting everybody at risk on the bus so someone can tell me what happens with the reports when they're written and what are the consequences because there's no sense in writing these reports that there's no consequences um if we get your email address we'll uh get you an answer on that okay my email address is s-m-i-t-h c-h-a-r-l-e the number 2121 outlooks.com okay all right we will uh the superintendent will respond to your questions mr can you give me an address address can we also get your address typically we ask my address is 243 l-a-w l-o-r street number three c in new britain zero six zero five one okay great thank you for uh bringing this to our attention and can i just um

006gather your name i'm meryl gay i'm the president of the board okay mr merrill bay i'm gonna disconnect from the call okay okay thank you for your time and have a great day everyone thank you thank you okay so yes i'd like to make a motion to go into executive session to discuss item 2a the ratification of the local 51 contract between local 51 and the new britain board of the consolidated school district of new britain board of education um and with mr kane ms sarah superintendent sarah and attorney angler second okay one favor hi hi hey so it is 6 59 and we are back from executive session mr mercer a motion to approve the contract between the newbern board of education and new britain federation of school administrators local 51 for the period

007of july 1st 2022 through june 30th 2026 a second from dale any questions concerns comments just that's inertia i just wanted to say thank you to the administrators the attorneys everyone who worked on this it was a lengthy process i think there's a number of changes that will benefit or benefit our administrators i also like to i personally really like to see that we're moving towards more equity on parental leave and all of that those are good things for the district and i think they're just the right things to do um but this i think this is a very fair contract going forward anyone else um the tuition reimbursement that was listed as a change and i don't have anything to compare it to outside of those two that we just got um but how

008does that compare with our other contracts as far as tuition reimbursement is there any way to find that out i mean it's he's trying to comparing to the teachers or other contracts how does the the tuition reimbursement compare um teachers parents whoever so like we just recently had 1186 i just wasn't i just never there was tuition reimbursement including that i don't remember the numbers that's something i just was curious what the number was because if we're going up with administrators we should have gone up with them too we can get back to you on that i mean the contracts all happened um okay just um i i'd also like to add that like especially with things like that too part of what changes get negotiated depend on what particular unions bring forward to the

009table and what their proposals are and request so for some unit unions that might be a priority where they're making requests for increases there other unions may not see that as much as a need so there's always that give and take in the negotiation process so something another union may not consider an issue at all may be the most important issue for a particular union that sort of shapes the negotiations too any other questions comments all right we have a second admotion all in favor say aye opposed miss santana any abstentions no okay all right motion carries we'll move on to board reports go ahead superintendent europe superintendent okay um i i'll be brief in the interest of time i did want to provide you with an update from new britain high school we also

010had our town hall last wednesday night which was uh well attended i believe that said over 400 came and came through it which was which was nice you'll see some positive trends down in terms of students in the hallways and and some of the next steps as well we did have our first super saturday uh just this past saturday we started small with the anticipation of of going bigger um we had uh the middlers uh were at the boys and girls club and the elementaries were at roosevelt lincoln and gaffney um and so you can see that i put the uh the two the uh enrollment down below too also a little bit more about the deadlines and they're they're trying to recruit more students we do have elevate cycle one which starts next tuesday

011the 12th um we currently have about 350 students registered for the elevate around 208 little ones and our middle and high we have 157 which i'm really happy with um that's a good number and they're going to be doing more recruitment efforts as well i wanted to keep you up to date with transportation you know we we don't talk about it much but we are impacted by some some driver shortages as well and we are still seeing some of our runs running a bit late and i just beg patients from our families because i think we're doing better than other districts um i did have a round table this morning with all the other superintendents in the alliance districts as well as the commissioner of education and um in terms of a knock on something

012here but we're very much better for student and uh specialty are really responsive we have uh some of our drivers doing like double runs as soon as they're done with one they run and they'll do the next one for us as well so um and they're they're actively recruiting as well can i ask a quick question on that just based on um miss smith that called in are we short on the bus monitors too or do we have enough monitors well i can talk to rich about that um yeah and we'll talk to rich about that but they they are they're quite expensive they're not our employees they they are no they are not they are the bus company's employees and they they come at a premium i look at the contract okay right so

013no and so i would imagine drivers come before monitors in terms of yeah like what what they're choosing others right so anyway sorry um no that's okay that's okay but definitely i'll i'll call that mama or reach out to that mom i wanted to just show you our registration um i'm on page three now uh we've had you know since september we've registered 445 kiddos um and a hundred 106 high schoolers um our our uh homeschooling for requests i give it i want to give you the historical just so you can see um you know we went down a little bit so far from 150 to 154. um but but it is up from 2021 and our our student enrollment is at i had it in there jeff and i just i don't know where

014it went 9 500 9600 i had it 395 at the top very tough 9395 oh no yeah it is thank you mine's on the bottom of that page sorry just a little bit different so um 9 395 and then we have 300 pks um you know totaling about well it's 94 and 390 700 so we're down a little bit and you can see the homeschooling has gone up a little bit so we hover around ten thousand ten thousands too historically so we are just a little bit down question gail even from are you talking about student enrollment yeah i'd have to go back okay what student enrollment was in 2019. it's largely been pretty consistent yeah i mean in those numbers i think yeah that kind of thing largely stays pretty consistent i think it's

015because we take in a lot of new enrollees from out of state and things of that sort as an offset without coming you know um the registrations we saw in september we know generally are these kids moving within stages moving to britain are they moving from other parts of the world i can get that information i didn't ask for that breakdown but jeff now that you're here that'd be great can you just and we'll provide it for um i can we can just shoot it too in an email yeah it's just simply because they're right there people coming from not from within state but from out of state or automation this is a trend that could continue with immigration crisis and other things that are happening around the world and then again another issue that's

016not unique to new britain is vacancies and filling or vacancies um one of the common cries among all superintendents on the call this morning was you know they're everyone's actively recruiting so much so that the you know our own teachers our own admins every single day are getting job offers somewhere else and people are are offering sign-on bonuses and um you know we passed on an article yesterday to our administrators around just the amount of fatigue already that our staff is experiencing it kind of reminds you of how you feel just before thanksgiving break and i think um again not unique to new britain and that was affirming today to hear um other superintendents say as such and they're having similar struggles in terms of um people resigning to go to another district and how

017can we how do we work together so that stops happening and provides consistency for kids um again uh the governor's executive order 14 uh the the gist is um until february 20 uh february 15 2022 mask wearing is mandated in the schools and i just attached a few of our varsity sports schedules um i want to talk a little bit we we uh we're doing a bigger push with hispanic heritage month um i just put a couple of really nice pictures in there and some of the things that we're doing right now um but there will be more to come probably we'll be releasing and i think that's about it sorry if i could just just be recognized yes so um first and foremost i know that i internally have sent an email off about

018what happened with my nephew where he was dropped off at my old address um no phone call no nothing and was later recovered by the police in our neighborhood um one so i was just curious kind of what the procedure is what um the follow-up is because i know in the immediate what the follow-up was was the police picking him up and that was wonderful that they found him you know you know obviously still a good burden but we were able to find him so he i've always treated him like a little kid because he developmentally is between four and five enemies in the pathways program so just making sure that at least going forward there is some sort of communication back because from that very moment on i didn't hear anything at all i

019actually reached out to rich and just said hey listen we just need to be able to do this better what can we do going forward and you know there was just some you know like we'll get back to you we'll let you know can i respond please so i did talk to mr valerio and he stated that he helped you upload that he had asked you to upload you were struggling to upload and if if if you don't upload the information that was needed which which rich said he didn't mind helping you but you didn't reach out to say i need help so that was the disconnect um just giving your right information to transportation so listen you any parent if they're struggling to upload do what you did you called rich i actually do

020have the email to support that i had provided the information ahead of time and so i'm just trying to make sure that going forward it's not just my own child's i do have the email that i can forward to that part of it isn't even an issue because i did confirm with donna sweeby that she had seen it um and i actually confirmed that the day of my son's ppt just so happy that we just so happened to be on the phone and i just saw it on the zoom call and i just so happened to confirm she had in fact seen it um but the disconnect was in what is considered verification of student residence correct first i had been told that it was a complete list that a lease that needed to be

021provided and then it turned out that you can actually provide um an electric bill so in saying that you can you need verification of the children living at that address versus a utility bill with just my name so i have a follow-up question and again hypothetically speaking um if you weren't sure did you did you upload that first thing and then no one no one called out to you you know actually no because i had let him know that i was getting the copy but i provided him with the information and i understood that they needed the information to substantiate it but what they stuck to was that it needed to be a lease i said okay not even a problem i'm going to order that that's what i'm saying we're even in that moment

022of you know that a child is lost at least calling the parent back and saying hey listen you know is the child safe do you know is everything okay all right we're gonna deal with that on this end that didn't sound like that was the first request but we can talk about this often because i think i mean i don't want to take up too much of the fourth time but but uh understood that mr valerio responded to you within minutes minutes i called him he didn't call me we well i don't know and that's fine because it's semantics but that wasn't my my only concern wasn't just that one and i appreciate the you know i'm not trying to take too much of the board's time either so then subsequent to that my son

023was assaulted at state we offered okay yeah i'm sorry this is not um something that the board can hear it's not really fair to the board uh to the staff because they can't reply to things about a individual student's records without and and this falls under it without violating ferpa so it's not really something that is appropriate for a board for a board discussion i just want to make sure that at least going forward whenever something like that happens that that i get content i respond yeah and um so and again closely involved with all this missing panda i i i am um and semantics is important right um if i have a student playing out on a playground hypothetically and they're friends and they're playing and one head butts another student we never write

024up like a disciplined referral and call it assault we don't do that because it gives you the appearance of there was some kind of altercation and that's all i'd like to respond now mr gay okay i appreciate that all right so let's move on to the are there other questions from other board members about the superintendent's report all right um we have committee reports um finance um so i know we accepted a grant for 25 000 from the community foundation for um preschool readiness and i thought there was another one but i can't i apologize i didn't take my greatest note but um another thing that i've been on the consent agenda that i just want to put out there we're actually refitting a few buses for preschool yes like so we can transport our

025preschoolers safely right like they get the little harnesses and all that stuff so instead of the small buses they're going to be the big buses get more of those kiddos in school early i think the other grant was uh manufacturing technical manufacturing yes yes yes yes also from the community foundation we thank them for that for equipment for the lab any um other issues that you want to know you're actually going to see a very cool presentation i think on um the cameras at new burton high and how dearly they need to be replaced but it's actually pretty cool stuff it took me a while to get on board but i'm there okay um paul's video uh there's a number of things from policy on the agenda for tonight um including removal of some policies

026that in our review just work outdated including expired graduation requirements a redundant smoking policy that really was wrapped up in another policy very very similar to it um so just cleaning up those things and a couple other uh revised policies for discussion that are on on the agenda and i can speak more to them when those come up okay and curriculum didn't meet okay all right and uh board reports just really quick made me super excited to get like the activity calendars right like this is real we're actually getting back some activities it's made me happy any other board members have uh others i've i've been to uh now a football game and got to see um the band and other students in the 150th parade um you know and similarly just great to see

027the kids out and about and doing stuff and they're excited and practicing and protecting their um non-academic activities that are like such a big part of our school spirit okay any other i just uh want to recognize the great attendance from gaffney elementary school i was able to witness ms fazio go into the dunk tank from one of the classes that i got the best of times okay and i had the pleasure of going to uh the roots garden tour and seeing the hydroponics set up at the high school and the hoop house that slade that was great to see all right any other board reports okay let's move into our presentations the first one is the new burton high security system kevin you're on good evening kevin dion director of facilities um we presented

028this to the finance committee about a week ago and uh the problem is that it's so important that you come to the full board to see the same presentation so you understand what we're discussing tonight i have hard copies uh there were questions there was a quote that was missing last time so i thought i would print out hard copies for the board i hope you don't mind thank you so much um but then you'll have a pocket and we can just probably keep things going quickly i'll help you i guess since you're an electronic copy if anybody wants to do the electronic version thank you i can forward it to everyone if they want an electronic so the camera system has been in the news we've given us some uh we've had a lot

029of issues with it over the past year we've looked at our current camera system that is aging out it does not technologies have changed and you're going to see the wrench changes that are occurring cloud-based systems are the way in the future we have two companies with us tonight they're going to explain what this new system that we're proposing we got bids from three companies um the companies are in there you can see from the bids that ava security we had johnson controls and adt last week when we presented we did not have adp's quote that is in that packet tonight for you ava still came in lower and if you look at the summary you'll see that there's also no three year licensing such as johnson wanted us a monthly fee uh probably was

030a thirty five hundred after one out but that fee would go into perpetuity until we decided no longer to use their system it was a 32 55 as a monthly fee for monitoring maintenance and licensing this is not included in the system this is a one price so the price you see for 100 cameras does not include any sort of monthly fee for license it's a three-year license we won't pay again for another three years and the cameras and all the hardware is ours it's an open source system as well so if we went to someone else we would just flash the cameras and you'd be able to reuse the hardware that we're purchasing for this project so it makes sense what i'd like to do is do a quick presentation because i know time

031is in the essence when you look at those three quotes we needed to baseline um all the companies because there are companies of different size and different options that they may give us so it's kind of an apples and oranges so we asked for them to give us 100 cameras change over what that would cost us with the software and the support behind it and that's where you see those quotes so that was where we were the baseline there was a discussion with the finance committee what to just do the whole high school over so 100 cameras is not enough for the high school so on the very last quote though you'll see an updated quote um on the camera sections you know data quote from ava and this would be if we were to

032go ahead and convert over all of our cameras and that can't that amount is for 451 641 that's for 200 cameras and it's a weekend cut over and i want to stress that ava will speak to that it is a friday night shut down monday when we come in we have 200 new cameras and a new system up and running and recording so if you look at the johnson port it was monday through friday eight to five and anything outside of that is additional money this quote with the 451 and there's the other quote for 100 cameras as well the 209 um that's a weekend cut over as we call it so that's that's excellent they've committed to that and they've done it in the past the naval will speak to their experience but they've

033worked with fortune 500 companies as well as school districts in the past so the other thing that came up this weekend i want to speak to it quickly at the end is our key card system this we've been talking enterprise system and we presented last monday we spoke specifically the camera but over the weekend and there's a couple of emails in there from people speaking to our keycard system we've had multiple failures of that that's our key access system where our staff gets into the building the system the data is being is corrupted due to age we are running our xp system with our staff id it is no longer supported uh we've gotten a quote both that our variant license which is our current camera license this came in over the weekend we got

034this on friday at 4 407 pm from our vendor it says the current licensing of our baron expires at the february baron as our camera system throughout the entire district that expires february 2022 so we are up against having to buy another license through them for our camera system of a failing camera system that isn't working um the hardware is past the juice for light and everything would you like with the system configured the cost can vary this is direct quote from our vendor also says the variant system needs to be upgraded um as the operating system for recorders is using the date in 2012 for the servers so we are behind the times in our technology so when you look at the 450 it's a large quote but understand that quote gets rid of

035our servers uh it allows us to go on a cloud-based system with cameras having the it will explain how it's what happens if power goes down it'll be a question but we'll explain how how this system is all compensated all in the cloud and we don't need to update any of these systems that our vendors spoke about over the weekend but they also said that our other system which is our key card is not being supported anymore they're recommending an upgrade you see that email in there so there's more capital more cost expenses that we need in order to keep our key card systems going so what i did was we we ran a quote because the system that ava is going to talk about also integrates your key card system and you can have

036a seamless integration and actually it's limitless what we can do with it as we know privacy and security as well as reliability are really what we are fundamentals of what we've been discussing and i'll explain how that's accomplished and what we're proposing tonight but there is a quote at the very end for sixty seven thousand um sixty seven five twenty five ninety eight that would include us with a whole new key card access system for the high school so we wouldn't be getting the failures and ultimately the rollout is to look at and have stability at the high school it is our largest school has the most activity largest amount of students and staff at the same time so we're starting at the high school but i would like to roll this out district-wide also

037there's a mobile component to all this and they'll explain both through using your phones to actually use it as your key card no longer carrying the badges if you don't have to if you forget it as well as being able to look on a snow day everybody can see what the parking lots look like those that have access to the system not everybody but those that are given access to administrative rights concede and it helps in making other operational decisions not always in investigation based on security so there's other operational uh needs that can be met through a system like this so this time i'd like to bring up ava representatives yes so do you have yeah i'm gonna do yeah i'm gonna [Music] is going as that goes so my name is eric gutierrez

038i'm with ava security so i work directly for the company that makes the software solution we've partnered up with new york security solutions greg they're the implementation team so when it comes to the implementation that's great i'm more about the the bells and whistles of the platform so um what i'm going to do keep it very short there's a lot of stuff that we do there really is a ton but what i'd like to do is just really focus on like two or three really high level points in like two to three minutes i'll try so you get a rough idea of what we're talking about here so uh i guess to preface it so the big core of our platform is to be proactive right so i know there's a lot of there's challenges

039that you know jessie and kevin and the rest of the team are into at the school and we encounter right we have east providence high school which is a brand new gorgeous facility they just put in 400 cameras very similar issues that they encounter and their big thing is you know they have a decent amount of guards how can i be proactive right it's great that they're walking around but how do i get alerts when there's a group of 25 kids out behind the school how do i know when kids are walking around the building and that's what our solution does so every single camera is intelligent it has analytics we're not doing any sort of facial recognition there's no ferpa issues or anything like that that i know are a big concern this is

040all done and i'll show you a search um this is all done based on using kind of the likeness of the person what they're wearing how they're walking so when the team you know someone like jesse is doing a searcher or one of the officers they're able to search footage in two or three minutes versus two to three hours depending on whether so i'll dive right in so we put in we worked with mis to put in just a couple of cameras for a proof of concept at the high school so we actually had one of the officers walk around and the first thing i'll point out is so these are live right yeah so these are four cameras that we put in in the high school we spent the last weekend doing it just

041so you can actually see a live example of what our high school looks like what these cameras are yeah so a couple things here so if you look at this you know think of someone using a system if you look at the timeline down at the bottom i know you're looking at the video at the top here we're able to identify right when someone is in the field of view so obviously it's dark in that area but somebody was walking through the school i'm not scrubbing through hours of footage our system knows there's a person there right and it automatically goes ahead and finds that that blue little blip our system identified person the sensors turn on the lights now i go here this is probably ozzy walking around so we set up a rule

042and somebody tripped the rules somebody was walking around i set up a line right here in the middle somebody crosses that line in either direction i get an alert so think about setting up rules at your doors right when students are leaving the school we don't need to you know you could and i think we're talking about card access but you could have a line and when somebody exits the door during out normal hours you can have a certain officer get a mess you know an alert on his ipad or on a phone so now you can be a little bit more proactive right you decide how invested you want to be right or the security team well they can use it if they cannot use it but the idea is that the functionality is

043there the other piece here so that's kind of what we do here in the video view you can certainly do multiple cameras multiple screens all that fun stuff the pc is searching through video i know that's a big challenge today if there is video so what we're able to do right i can go and search by a person what they're wearing uh gender all that kind of stuff i can't even upload a picture if i have a picture of them walking away and they were wearing something i can do that again no no database no names no faces anything like that this is just a way to augment right the human that's using the system so i can go in here and i can look for for example let's go to main entry and i

044can look for anyone that's been in a certain area right so i don't care about the office let's go here all right so i want to see anyone that has crossed this box so basically that doorway through here just this small section of the camera for the past let's go to today a little bit earlier i don't know we'll pick something there right and and you we're going to get a ton of results because there's probably kids in school at that time maybe but we get results instantly right so i got 32 examples of people being identified in that camera's field of view right so that quickly i can do that this is greg right when we were walking out of the school so i didn't have to search through two hours or two and

045a half hours of video the system said i saw a person and i i want to show you where all those people are you can hover over and play back right that's cody walking out so i'm not spending hours fast forward 4x or eight times i'm able to hover over see is this who i'm looking for yes or no and then start building a case do that big thing here is this case management so if i want to share this with a principal or security team i can do that without exporting video which is what you do today so there's an audit trail right we know who's playing back what who's retrieving video who's exporting video full visibility into what goes on if something ends up on youtube or whatever from the security system we

046can most likely find out who did it right who's playing what back at what time if we export video it needs to go to court all digitally watermark all that fun stuff so that's kind of the highlights there's a lot of stuff with maps and things like that but i'll let greg talk are there any questions before i jump away i can let greg talk to implementation so just real quick to kind of reinforce what eric stated um one of the nice things that i like to point out to people is that your data is still yours it is in the school with this platform you get more control over it so essentially the control that you have right now your data your video is not leaving your possession anymore um if you look at

047your current system if you need to share data with let's say law enforcement you have to put it on a dvd put it on the thumb drive as soon as that leaves your possession you lost control of your evidence you have no idea what is going to become of it where it's going to go whether it's going to end up on social media with this you can control all those factors you know one thing i wanted to add because i know it came up in discussions with miso we are a cloud-based platform we're still reporting locally on the camera so if you lose internet at the school we still have footage so you don't have to worry about that we also have cloud backup so let's say cameras walk away or something happens on site

048as long as we were able to upload that footage to the cloud you will have that for however many days you can that can be flexible so let's say there's critical cameras that you really want four months of video you can pick and choose those things so you have a lot of flexibility there from a cyber security standpoint we have fortune 5 customers that are using our platform we've been through that process we're more than glad to work with anyone at it to provide additional info and then we have references that are very similar you know in size and scale as you guys know so and in terms of uh let's say how do you deploy something at this size in such a short period of time well it's actually because of the technology the

049lack of complexity what's really incredible about platforms like ava or the access control which is phoenix in this case is that what happens is these two companies do a really good job of taking something that is terribly complex which is something that we're used to working with in the security industry it's fine it's complex a lot of the tasks are very difficult to do these two companies do a great job of taking all those complex tasks and essentially making them very simple and very efficient to perform um that right there transmits into every single component of a deployment like this it makes the installation go faster the setting of the cameras is more efficient the programming of the access control is essentially automated the panels automatically check in with the service the camera is automatically

050checking with the service there's also no more single point of failure so the biggest issue with the system you have right now is should you have a problem with that server and this is all traditional systems you have a problem with the video server you're losing your video evidence and the security team is losing your live video with technology like eva on the video site and phoenix on the access control side there is no server to rely on anymore so when a piece of equipment goes down let's say one camera goes down it doesn't take your entire school down in this particular case with your current technology one device fails in that room your entire system goes down printer stops printing card readers stop reading cameras stop recording um so essentially that is right that

051technology is part of how we are able to actually deploy something like this so quickly in such a short period of time i know that a lot of people think the heavy lifting of a project like this is the physical component surprisingly it's not the physical component it is the programming and the configuration and with these systems it becomes so complex that even though you see an installer like myself come into your building and he puts in 200 cameras and you're like oh you walk in and you see all the cameras and you're like oh well we must be up and running and then you go to the guy and you say well how are we doing it goes out we're about three weeks before we'll be up and running do these records no not

052yet but they will right with this technology that's not what happens the day we put this up is the day it's recording is the data it's functioning same thing with the access control the day that you hang that panel on the wall and plug it in is the day that it starts doing its job so it's a very different scenario okay no i think you're good i mean um i guess at this point we talked if you look at the last page that's the key card access with quote request and i think it's because these systems between phoenix and enable are so integrated um and we're having so many issues at the high school one of the things that also phoenix would allow later on for us to do again was is using your cell

053phone rather than some students for student id student actually checking in they actually have a what we haven't gotten here but they actually have a wireless keypad that you can actually just put on the wall and that would allow you so you could put them in all your rooms and as the students come in they can actually badge in and take attendance so i'm in science i'm in math and you would know instantly instead of having to take any sort of attendance physically if as long as they all sign in at the wall we would know where students are in the building it's also useful for fire drills where students were marshalling in different locations we can use all that for an attendance space it's not always just security and investigation there is operational educational

054uses for this as well so these are the things that these systems would allow us to expand on in the future and discuss but for now what we're talking about tonight is mainly getting the camera system at the high school updated and running and getting our key card at the last quote there is to get the key cards up and running which means for all staff and all students at the high school we would have one integrated system we have two systems right now we have a staff system and we have a student system both those are having multiple issues we had issues with printers for the past two weeks in the student system we have a corrupt database that keeps failing just this morning i had another school go offline there is a sheet

055new york back here that we've compiled for the past year it's a little small i apologize it wouldn't print off properly but this shows all the issues we've been having for the past year this didn't just start all right this didn't just happen uh say as of august this has been something ongoing our vendors are recognizing it uh the vendor of our current system is telling us we need to put money into it my recommendation is that we don't and now we do not go with this system because we are keeping an antiquated system alive unnecessarily which is not giving us the operation or the efficiencies we need and we go to a new system both with the camera and the key card for the high school yeah so sorry it's this is the key

056cards and the cameras or do you have is there another there's two right but i mean is it online is it part of the actual packet or just the quote no it's just the one that gave us under that just the people it's not in the so we're not voting on the key cards tonight if you wanted to we could go with the key card system um if you want i offered that as a potential because i thought there might be a question about the integration when they come in to do the cameras for the weekend we can do the key cards as well and we're having as much difficulty with key cards as we are with cameras and this system ultimately if we go to this camera system we're going to want to go

057to an integrated keycard system as well wait yeah we'll just maybe next month yeah the question so right uh what do they use now versus what are they going to have after when they're going through the door as staff and students i know that right now they have an id go through the doors and check in your id and you keep it moving what do they have now for staff i'm sorry when they go in so they have the same thing they will maintain the same thing our car readers will be reused we're not buying new card readers at the moment because we're not looking for the remote functionality of our phones that is potential down the road that's one of those things that's an add-on if we decide we want to use it for

058attendance right now the only thing we're changing is the hard the head software the licensing so we're getting rid of the xp system we literally have a computer that runs xp in our security suite which is failing not supported anymore we would be getting rid of all that going to a cloud-based system but for the security side maybe one of you can speak about the nice integration between key cards and cameras and how that works operationally so essentially there is a very very tight connection between all the systems um it's kind of a process of checks and balances so i i understand why somebody would say okay at this time maybe we shouldn't vote on your access control and maybe we should hold off um but really what's what's really really important about this is

059the experience right the the tying of the two systems together the meshing of the video event with the access control event also the ease of being able to print badges i myself have come here on two occasions and on one of those occasions nobody prints a badge in school right that right there that's a problem right that is a problem for operations for you guys and if you can't have continuity of operations and what's the point of having a specific system right it's not too old it hasn't been kept up to date and now you're in this boat but now something has to be done about it because now it's actually affecting the way your business operates so sorry i was looking for more clarity on what we were voting on based on our and

060what we have on our packet that's all so i understand what you're saying with the key cards coming second it's just not on the agenda for tonight so i'm good so there's two quotes if you want there's two quotes right now the 450. i'm going to put my there's the 67 525 that's the key card access they're both from new york security um also something i'd like to point out so it's very frequent in our industry where somebody will come in and offer you a product and you'll see something and you're like wow that looks really good well thank you um it's optional in this case with these two companies the reason why we uh work exclusively with these two brands phoenix and ava is because there's no games like that if eva should develop

061a new feature tomorrow there is no border there is no hey you're going to have to give me another 500 if you want that feature you get it no question guys it's consistent inundation as they innovate right that goes into production you get it same thing goes with the card access consistent innovation new technology constantly going into production it's now hey your system is outdated you're on 5.1 but you need to be on 5.3 and it's a thousand dollar upgrade to get to five point three none of those gains are going high here which is exactly what our other vendor was saying to us that up your continuums on xb12 you need to actually upgrade to the new system and that's costing you additional 3000 licensing plus another fifteen days so yes and other companies

062do that they do that they'll say to you well you're gonna get this but you're not gonna get the mobile piece so you can't look on your phone that's that's an additional module that you have to buy so you have a question yeah um just just for clarity and correct me if i'm wrong but as i understand what's on our agenda the item 6a the 451 000 and change is the current uh bid waiver purchase order for the camera system this additional 67 000 if we wanted to pursue it the board would have to add this to the agenda and take it up as an additional item and uh through you to mr dion with the access system have we been in contact with other potential vendors as to what it would cost i know

063that we have this quote but you were mentioning our current vendor and what they said it would cost to upgrade um so our current vendor is a closed system which means we have to stay with them whereas these other controllers are not so okay right now they we just got a quote what started this over the weekend was we got to pull for our esports room um and they started telling us about our infrastructure for our key cards are failing um so that's that's the concern is that now we're all our controllers are aging out so we have to go ahead and replace the controllers but how are we going to do controllers with a closed system or something that is integrates more with our you know that's it's common you don't usually get as

064you can see we're with them now our controllers are with the same system with our cameras they all talk to each other to some degree uh but it's just an antiquated system that's a closed system which means you pay more this this system is much more open so no we've only looked we just started uh if we ford decides to go with another key card system but you know we have to decide whether that makes sense to have an independent that doesn't integrate with our cameras and give us the functionality so because of that and it was questioned about our key cards i presented the quote tonight if you want to pursue that quote or a fully integrated system what we call an enterprise system at some point these systems actually will talk to our

065alarms as well that is future down the plan as far as our alarm system so using your key card uh if you have authorization to be in the building at that time you would actually be able to shut the alarms off and the alarms would talk uh into zoning certain parts of the building it's part of a master grader plan but right now our cameras and our key card are the main priorities in the future i'll be presenting with our alarm systems uh we'll be doing district 5 it's very very uh complicated and a very large project right now the school the high school needs those upgrades in order to operate [Music] just out of curiosity um going back to the quote for the full surveillance system if i can for just a minute what

066if you get there and you find that you really can't use the wires because you i know you keep celebrating antiquated so let's just say you get there you have to rewire the whole system so that go above and beyond what you've submitted right over here so we've planned for any sort of situations that may arise what i can tell you is that in a situation like this you kind of put your money where your mouth is um and if we do run into a situation where the cabling is not up to par then the onus is on us to actually follow through and give you a full turn key installation what i can tell you for sure is that at the very minimum half of the school is on a older more legacy antiquated

067ip camera but the cabling is good um the reason why we know the cabling goes the cabling is good because the cameras work on the other side of it we do have the older analog system but that is using twisted pair cabling there is a chance that some of those lines may not be working may not be functional and we'll have to address those one at a time i highly doubt it is more than 30 lines out of the 200 cameras and i know that based on evaluating the system that's currently on site there is there's about 30 cameras that are out that no longer produce a video picture so we're going into this assuming that it's either the camera or the line in this particular case but if it does end up to be

068the line then we actually have to take the initiative to replace that line that's simple i appreciate the answer okay so then so there isn't going to be like a surprise later now the key word is turn key you know when you say something like that you you either put up or shut up okay other questions right there not a question but i'd actually like to motion to [Music] amend the agenda to just take item 6a next since we've already discussed this it makes sense to vote on it before moving forward second second motion any questions concerns about that all in favor of amending the agenda to move this item up say aye aye any opposed mission carriage yes uh motion to approve the purchase order and bid waiver for the replacement camera system at

069newborn high school in the amount of 451 000 is not going to 641.50 changed so locally i don't know originally said yes sir but there's some discussion with the art money possibly not being qualified we don't know right now right now okay because that was going to be my question even though we it was half for finance yes and then we have the funds you know we talked about before so okay i'm sorry it's going from esser security to what to local funds local funds okay mr k um i just had a question on the original quote versus the updated quote what was the can you explain the change from the 100 camera original quote to the 200 camera the 200 camera there's 100 additional cameras as well as because it's decreased amount we and

070we want a friday monday it's basically change over turnkey uh there's additional staff and support so those additional basically what what happened was eric uh graciously spoke about uh school that he's currently working on in rhode island and that school happened to have a very large camera count and that school also had a uh simpler square footage for the high school so if i'm not mistaken i think the birth spell yeah the groups yeah the smaller school the group felt that that the original number of a hundred may just be a little light for for this project so they decided to request that we actually up it to 200 cameras and 200 cameras is is is right on par with what we currently need here considering that when you add the existing analog and the

071existing iep we pretty much hit the same number so we're right on par with what need uh for the school so security-wise that we really need to absolutely you'll definitely have adequate coverage uh throughout the grounds as well as the interiors thank you okay i'm sorry what was the full amount that you gave it was 400 400 it's the it's in the package 450 1 641.50 650. any further questions on this just back to kevin's point is that the correct funding source the 1010931-2600 [Music] all in favor say aye aye opposed santana any abstentions can't just make commitment to the opposition because it's failing we have to replace just absolutely yeah no no i got that because he even said that it was a licensing that was coming up february 2022 absolutely um but we

072did also raise the question the last time about the three bids and i'm just saying the other one now okay next item we have is a presentation from dorado school thank you [Music] that's you i know [Music] thank you for having us [Music] so the first couple of slides that you're going to see are slides that were presented before i'm going to go very quickly through them but i just wanted to emulate on the importance of the description supporting the leadership of the district and the lord supporting the dual rounded program and that continued support through the planning the implementation and medical campaign and support when the program is actually up and running and that we should share the core value that this program is for all students it's for students who are english speakers

073only for students who are just spanishly personally for students who may be bilingual for students who speak other languages only and also for students with disabilities it's a program for all students and we should have the following we should be in agreement with the following principles understand that language is a resource it's an asset a lot of students bring that with them that learning in the student's first language accounts for cultural and industrial identities and that high quality will talk necessitate constant commitment we need to ensure that we're going to support the program through the planning process at the beginning of the program [Music] so um but most importantly what we need to keep in mind is that the dining force for closing your chinking [Music] a little bit different type of support where we

074need to develop um ensure that the dual language program are part of the district goal to do the deal on this program we have to come up with policies that support the program and then continue the long-term planning and that equities especially with following that equity and economy and i have to tell you that having said that i've been telling you that during the first year we begin now our second year planning so during the first year we were able to create a team of leadership team that was comprised of building admins district admins coaches and teachers and community members and parents we began meeting dianies and we partnered with and we delved into the negative data to ensure that the program that we were planning when we were proposing was something that was good

075for our community of students and the other thing is actually who is now um part of her a good chunk of her time is working with this program to ensure so like i said before um the two-way program really [Music] this program serves university and evergreen of students and um with no less than one third of no more than two-thirds of the student population will be monolingual predominantly [Music] thank um um so as you can see on your screen there uh mr was referring to the buckets um that mave has given us this great graphic to just sort of demonstrate that the blue language program is successful because you have the interaction of students through language and you want to ensure that you have a third of students who are a dominant english a third

076of the students who are dominant in this case spanish and then you can have up to a third of students who may be dominant both of those languages and or we as you've already heard and as you know the board you have been committed very much committed to the to the success and the successful planning process for this important program at colorado so we you as a board share core belief about english language learners and equity social justice on par with what the school itself is committed to doing as well and the end goal being eliminating biases that are inherent in schools and ensuring that we're honoring and um valuing the linguistic diversity of our student population not just at the loretta but throughout the future so what have we been getting down so last

077spring there was a retreat that mauve organized we had a significant number of teachers and administrators participated with the loretto staff and from that was a very detailed action plan lots of questions and material that needed to be created and designed in the summer and throughout this year so that's essentially the action plan that i've been working off of since august we received that detailed document from phyllis harvey over the summer and in addition to that that meant that i was able to participate in leadership on network series and the coaching series in the summer and more importantly one of the big goals of the district from the support of the superintendent in the office of talent management there's a partnership with aces so that we could look within our cadre of teachers here in

078britain to access their bilingual and or esl certification through the arktel program so we had between 35 and 40 teachers in september there was a presentation done by the aces gentlemen and so we're looking for our current teachers accessing that certification so they can be either part of the dual language program eventually and or supporting our 600 district any other schools so we have lots of uh things in the works for our outreach to families where i will be working with obviously alex ortiz and lori butterfield and edward garcia the admin over at the libretto and the pta we're going to be doing an outreach uh november and new year's conferences with the current um families i've been in touch and working closely with mike cannada and christine we're putting together a bigger promotional video

079we were taking this week at hilo um and through that i was able to contact over eight former dual language students alumni that are in wonderful careers um and experiences throughout the world so we're going to be tapping into speaking of testimonials what was that program like for them and what are they doing with that language so that's going to be very exciting we'll be able to share that with the board towards the end of november which it's about a month and a half and then of course we're going to be doing outreach through the current de la redo kindergarten families we're going to be doing surveys to see if we can hype up the drum up some enthusiasm not only for pay next year but possibly the first grade that's what i'm striving for

080um and then we'll be then also doing outreach through the school readiness program we would have spoonhop and terry turcotte to do the outrage in november december to all of the prepaid families in the brain so we want kids from throughout the line um and at the school level we've continued with the meetings and school committee defining the details of that program and my curriculum and the instruction so the biggest push is working with our coaches at the school to just define the details of the spanish literacy what does spanish reading instruction look like okay we're doing a thorough inventory of all the resources that already exist in the district i ready illustrated math and your literature and uh resources that the district has already purchased and is using already existing spanish so that's a

081good good plus deloretto in its actual building has a ton of books too so we have that resource in that inventory and most importantly it's your senior consent agenda we're tapping into ma bay again phyllis hardy is going to be providing customized technical assistance not just for the committee for the teachers who will be giving the spanish uh literacy instruction she will be training them with her team so that they're fully prepared to hit the ground running in august preparing for those um does that that doesn't change any of like the kids that are already enrolled in the school correct like just the kids who are applying or correct so we'll be adding in kids what we're gonna see is current kindergarten kids who are there which which of those current families would be interested

082in the first grade and based on those numbers we're going to do something and we may be able to take in some first day students okay are there questions just out of curiosities it's almost like um you know like years ago they used to have the lopensie program that did like the what was it like chinese or the other teachers come i'm just saying in that sense where you're basically taking that catch population and saying all right we're going to teach you a little bit more give you a little bit more support not saying in another language but just a little bit more support in and they have to spanish at a certain level into the program so how is it going to work forward so the only reason we'd be assessing and looking at

083students is just so that we can determine those buckets because we want the classroom to have the right balance of language so that when the students are interacting and learning through play um and through their work in class that we have enough representation of those spanish right because they're going to be learning from each other so that's the only reason we'd be like just to qualify because we will be doing the lottery and we want to make sure that the value so this would be very much like the old thi loretto yes when we yes when it was a dual language program yeah yeah to that end so i'm i'm thrilled to see this i'm sad that my own children did not get to um you know actually have the the real dual language experience

084but at one point um this district had a model dual language program um and it was dismantled first by one superintendent not using it correctly and closing down some bilingual programs um and putting the children in there at different grade levels and so as you can see now like you build the program from the ground up and you know families are committed to that model and you know it's a whole thing right it's not just any old like oh you're learning spanish it doesn't work that way um research tells us this is actually um the gold standard in bilingual education so dual language really is a tight it falls under the umbrella of bilingual education it's just a lot more palatable usually to communities because monolingual english speaking students benefit from it too right so

085we have kids and there's there's relationships that are building between kids from different backgrounds absolutely and that's the strength yeah no the benefits are enormous not only to language like it is the true language acquisition because language acquisition does not happen in two years or three years no matter what laws we write saying um that that's what we want for example and so um yeah so bringing that back to what once was like i said where one superintendent sort of used it incorrectly and then the next just dismantle it completely um for in favor of english only type uh approaches and so um this is amazing for our community like i said i i you know i wish my kids got to take advantage of it but as such a multicultural community a community where

086literally about half the population is spanish-speaking this is affirming and you know a commitment to understanding that uh you know not not the achievement gap but the opportunity gap we know the long-term effects um are actually higher achievement than counterparts who do not participate in dual language programs um and when the program was uh sort of in full effect in the in being applied with fidelity which did not happen later um i got to see those kids at the high school i taught spanish at the high school and i would have children for example who were trilingual students who spoke polish at home english through the schools and went through dual language and were literally fluent in spanish sounding like a native speaker and so it's just such an amazing asset to our already multicultural

087community and i'm so excited to see it and i will definitely um be supporting the process when i'm not on this board when i am wherever i am you know you will thank you and again i just want i want it it takes board commitment right this is an oh let's do this and then two years this is i mean every time we do that we upend a student's educational career right where we're kind of promising you know a second language for them so anyway it's a long-term investment with huge payoffs that's the first and and again we can explore we've talked about this later later having different um tracks in different schools as well not making it just de la reno but but having those offerings in some of our other elementary schools as

088well if we have um hopefully the responses that we're hoping to get from our families yep as one of those parents who had a monolingual english student who went through this i had sylvia as a her fifth grade teacher uh it was a wonderful program for her uh my daughter uh ended up being able to go off to chile and uh as a year abroad and uh was well equipped with uh the foundation she got at dilorado almost been sylvia it was [Music] um so one problem all right any other questions yeah you made me think of something else when you mentioned your daughter so um you know on top of like the just the equity piece and what it does to our students here in general so districts with um less funding like new

089britain where we spend so little per pupil that there's nothing to to cut from all the time right we've cut languages at the elementary school we have languages at the middle school you go to our surrounding cities west hartford and all around and students are learning languages from kindergarten on because they can afford that and they can have those teachers um and so this is so supportive of our students sort of being aligned with some of the access that other students do and and they tend to be monolingual english high income communities and that leads to an elitist bilingualism rather than tapping into the asset that our community already has with another language and uplifting it okay that's it for real okay good all right so it's just back to my original question so it

090really is saying we're taking these students being able to like create a pocket eventually you'd like to expand it district-wide so that that's where i was just going for the beginning so you're just taking as long as the families are going to be supportive and have that interest and would also have that as well okay thank you thank you all right on to our consent agenda does anybody want to take anything off of the consent agenda yes please okay item t please item t all right any other things to come off the consent agenda i just lost my space i'm sorry [Music] you're looking for i just wanted to look at the notes from a special meaning but i will leave it on okay all right so um [Music] everything besides item t is approved

091we'll add yes motion to approve bid waiver and contract between multi-state association for bilingual education made and the consolidated school district of britain for the new dual language education uh program planning year two and the amount of ten thousand six hundred dollars second discussion you don't explain why you're staying you can ask me any other um any questions about this item okay all in favor say aye that's funny and and the reason you're staying in english too yeah i'm not standing because i'm a board member of uh mabe and i although i have absolutely no financial benefit from this i just want to avoid any conflict of interest okay and that is the appropriate use of abstention okay let's move on to uh new business experience so we already did a correct correct motion to

092approve the chamberlain project uh refurbishing furniture and equipment and technology budget in the amount of nine hundred twelve thousand five hundred forty seven dollars and fifty eight cents this is from the chamberlain project okay i got lots of questions on this one all right i apologize that's the beat right because okay go ahead so forgive me i thought these typically go to the sbc is that they they do so let me just start these have been approved by the last sbc meeting this is just one of the other steps when we get to this phase the ffp and technology phase okay it went before the spc it goes before the state there's a discussion with lscgr that's already happened as well as so the board spc looked at it they approved the amount now the

093board met it's just the checks and balances that occur with reimbursement for projects like this so this is just where the board reviews it looks at it agrees with the spc and then from there uh it'll go back up to the state with a signature from the president of the board as well as a superintendent just with us so they're going to approve like new mops lawn mowers that's common practice because i don't think we've ever seen this level eligible there's a comprehensive list there's eligible any eligibles on there yep um so things will fall off um they they changed something with this this year where the computers were eligible right chuck will be here so we found out that computers that are connected to projectors in the classroom are eligible whereas a computer that

094is used for a principal or for a secretary is ineligible so that actually allows us to move over any classroom teacher computer so this is a list to outfit the whole price this is what it would cost for the f50 and the technology for the project the actual eligible versus ineligible will then be discussed later on with the state and that'll give us the exact price so this is always your worst case this is what our cost will be the actual cost of the district will be determined later but a lot of these items are eligible they're on state um contract you haven't seen anything for this level before i have not i've never seen the like uh the blowers and the lawnmowers yeah well no like sorry so those aren't some of those are

095on state contract there's state contracts that we can get these items off of and we can apply it to the state foreign just for information to the board i believe in the past for some of our building renovation projects these things have come before us but it's often been just a one just a line item item not all the detail of what it is so that is um i actually have really appreciated over the last several months the amount of transparency and providing this with multiple you know all the bid information and all that it you know adds a lot to our packet but it's you know there's a lot that goes into a school no i don't know i know yeah i just i just put it out there i didn't want to cause

096any more friction that it was coming to us i'm not going to ask someone to make sure i haven't been able to no right on i have the forms here actually for the president the superintendent to sign it has uh chair tim stewart's signature on it so it's already been reviewed by the sbc this is more procedural than if you have any questions for what we're buying um and again sometimes i give too much information but i think that's right no this is actually no this is actually good because then i just have one teeny one more question so the items that are ineligible is that something that later on can come out of our local budget it's like 31 656. is that the possibility like if the state says possibly come out of there

097or come out of the project the total project okay so that'd be an spc discussion um but yes it would be paid that's what it would be paid here at the local level how it who it comes out of would be discussed they approved it in future discussions okay right now we care most about the eligibles and when we present these items to the state we ask them you know overall what yay or nay and then they'll do an audit as jeff said there's nuances to what computer is acceptable and what's not what's eligible and what's not okay and i appreciate the state contract all that stuff in there i like it thank you okay any further questions yes yeah i think i'm still on the same one um gail maybe just started so i

098thought the council voted to remove the board as approving any svc stuff so that's at the local level but this is still by state statute that because this is a reimbursable through the state as a priority project certain items there are certain phases that will still come before the broader all projects the board event will still have to vote and agree to just your design development you know your uh programming phase there's about three or four and then your closeouts would still come to the board so so although the council decided that it would be cleaner to not have us involved the state actually requires right local law can't supersede the state sometimes sorry state there's milestones in the project let's call it yeah there's milestones within the project that will still have to come

099before the board they'll still have to go before the common council as well okay i was just going to bring up that okay because this is a state-funded school building project there are all of those check boxes in state law and the state's processes so it's not okay right and yes um as a follow-up this is one of our projects that will be reimbursed at the new higher correct percentage 95 which we're like the only ones in the state right thanks to our state delegation but it's of eligible costs of eligible correct so then any of the things like whatever these 45 pencil sharpeners or whatever that say ineligible [Music] uh whether it be you know we have to follow a bid process so it's questionable about going through a big process and the overall

100total amount of that but then having the ability to put you back on state contract das contracts you know you're still getting the lowest price so there are our reduced state contracts so this allows us to get the lower prices on the items even if we're not going to get that level of reimbursement right we're still getting the best pricing we're still as you can see we're going through the cut sheets and there's something to say eligible they have some state contracts at the bottom of one of these sheets um so we're going through that and we're still going to get the best pricing the question is whether we get the 95 reimbursement uh and what percentage do you pick up is that yes no that's okay sorry is there something along the lines then

101to make sure that we get so for example this project was 56 million could be so somewhere over 20 million and as a city we'll be reimbursed 95 through the state um if we have ineligible things like is that being calculated to that amount and then we kind of missed out on some money we could get reimbursed or will there be other things so eligible and ineligible is a trap but some discussions come up during the audit process so when you close our project when the project is done you discussions with the state going along but also at the end there's an audit that's done to make sure that what we said was done here in september or october of october 2021 when the project finalizes in january february 2023 you start seeing the state

102audit coming you want to make some things may change so during an auto process some things may fall off some things may come on so we really won't know the total eligible costs or facility audit until we're fully done and make sure ensure that what we're telling them today we actually did it's just it's a fluid project if it's a long-term project right but this is a worst case these prices have come off stay fit this is the worst case scenario what we're up against and then everything that's eligible just basically be 95. right i'm just i i'm asking more like are we making sure we're taking advantage of eligible things so we can get the maximum reimbursement because i would rather see like things that go to a classroom and are reimbursed right we're

103pushing hard with all the eligibles okay we're making sure that we follow all das which is the file state contract or do an rfp process ourselves we want to make sure that we are following that so when it falls in the eligible list it doesn't fall off for another reason such as we just we just didn't fit it out probably thank you we're tracking all that okay thank you any other questions all right i'll just call this state realizes the importance of having a little bit of oversight so all in favor say aye aye aye aye any opposed any extensions thank you kevin motion carries all right uh notion that the board adopt the board position statement on diversity equity and inclusion that is included [Applause] yes um this is just a a statement that

104you know aligns with sort of the work that we've been doing the vision of the district and it just explicitly states um some of the ideals of the school district um this was way back in june i believe the policy committee discussed this and it just didn't come up on our most recent agenda um but you know i think this just is very much in line with a lot of our policies that we've adopted and it's not a specific policy it's a position statement is sort of one of those guiding principles similar to how a district adopts a mission and a vision this identifies the fact that we really you know diversity inclusion equity is an important part of what we do okay any questions we haven't had a position statement in the past so

105there is no red line correct this is this is a new position statement that we did not getting between the top okay any further comments i mean just to read it very quickly because i think it's important to have it on the record um what it says and so that people at home know what we're discussing but it says the newborn board of education and the consolidated school district have been bringing together the district value diversity of backgrounds beliefs and perspectives and are committed to promoting an equitable inclusive educational environment all students regardless of race religion color national origin ancestry alienage sex sexual orientation marital status age disability pregnancy slash parental status gender identity or expression veteran status or any other characteristics characteristic protected by law have the right to to access opportunities and supports

106available throughout the district's educational programs the district recognizes that societal bias discrimination intolerance and other forms of discriminatory practices practices have created barriers to student progress in public education the district is therefore committed to working towards identifying and addressing barriers and inequitable practices i believe that's supposed to be that lead to such disparities among various groups in the school community and enhancing cultural competence throughout the district's educational programs the district is also committed to promoting an equitable and inclusive educational environment and seeking to provide all members of the school community with opportunities resources and support that support that facilitate learning and growth to that end the district seeks to increase its cultural responsiveness as a means of facilitating student progress towards becoming lifelong learners and socially responsible global citizens there was a moment where you

107stopped there was there a typo in a draft the rainbow in the draft uh that you know is yeah in the second paragraph it should be uh inequitable practices that lead to such just uh that lead to such disparities among various groups there should be additional that you want to amend the motion i would motion to amend to include the uh type of planning between practices and lead is there a second okay any questions about the motion to amend uh all in favor of amending the motion hi are you opposed any abstentions all right motion is amended now we will complete the further discussion on the amended motion all in favor say aye aye any opposed motion carries okay next new business of policy committee moves to approve revised policy 6144.1 exemptions from instruction in

108school activities it's from committee doesn't need a second okay discussion yes just quick under release religious religion religious should it be amended to say of a student or their parents instead of his her parents thank you that is a very good catch thank you motion to amend all instances in case we missed any others in this policy of uh so motion to amend all instances of his slash her parents or his slasher in general to read there and directing the clerk of the board to additionally make any minor grammatical changes to accommodate such amendments for a second second okay any discussion all right all in favor the amendment say aye aye aye any opposed motion carries okay um just to clarify uh under the section for uh religious amendments what we're looking to do here

109is just make it so that it is more in line with actually addressing the concerns of the parent rather than just making it you raise a concern you don't do this entire course because it's not like the subject of say history or music or something like that is necessarily inherently against someone's religion but there might be activities or practices or elements to that that it within the course so the way it previously was written you almost would end up excluding a student from an entire course over something that could be a specific activity and this just made it more in line with what the practice is it also puts in more in place an actual process so that the district really understands what the issue or concern is and works with the family to address

110that and make you know just as in line with other things making reasonable accommodations it also brings our policy more in line with state law as to what what we have to allow exemptions for um and that's most of the thrust there if let's just say you're a parent and you say i don't want my child participating in i don't know i'll just say you know use this month hispanic heritage i don't know as an example well i don't want my child learning about hispanic heritage is there like a certain amount of time that you that the person allowing for the reasonable accommodation from the district is there a timeline that's in there do you not say i submit my request on tuesday am i going to get an answer by friday if i may

111um so that would fall under administrative procedures and setting up a timely way for doing that that is beyond the scope of just the general policy uh typically the admin procedures deal with that i'd assure i i'd assume that we want it to be timely but we also do you know want to allow in that process for there to be a discussion you know for example it's to use the example provided i if an administrator has a parent come in and say i don't want my child learning about hispanic heritage mountain for religious reasons there needs to be a conversation as to what exactly are the concerns there um and that's the thing is connecticut technically does not allow for a blanket religious exemption but we felt in policy that we want to be respectful

112of the diversity in our community um so making a process where there is i imagine that in drafting admin rights they're going to have sort of a timeline or a a process that will be followed is there anything currently on the books as far as a religious example you know like let's just i don't know what didn't want your kid to uh learn about the birds and the bees that's another example yeah i'm just saying is there something that's currently on the books because speaks to how much fun they have um again through through the chair there is a statewide there's state law that allows parents to exempt their children from what's considered family life um education and that's defined that's actually section four under the policy so there are there are exemption processes for

113that it's part of i believe our student handbook that is um sent out to parents it's online yeah yeah so it's there is those exemptions um there's a couple other that are mentioned in here and we actually added at the end of this revision other state exemptions because there are times when the state has added so like for example firearm safety instruction if your district has a firearm safety instruction unit then that is something you are required to allow parents to exempt their children from so rather than constantly be chasing state law we put that language in there as a catch-all obviously if state law is on the books we're bound by it absolutely okay any other questions on this um i actually have two all right item well section two medical we're removing the

114medical piece um so dude again mr gay but uh to address that it's uh that's something that technically would fall under a 504 if there was a medical exemption for a student there's already established state law and processes there would be other accommodations so it wasn't really necessary to have it in this policy because you don't need to have a policy to comply with federal law um so that's a sorry that's a 504 plan so i break my arm i can't play jim or i came in with my brother's old splint i don't feel like playing gym for the rest of the year is that covered here or is that that's how i took this medical was like if i break my arm not a 504 plane but if i so sprained something someone's okay

115and and superintendent sir can correct me if i'm wrong but in the case that a child is issued a doctor's note that is essentially like a temporary 504 plan okay so it's still a oh you can't even write a formal one yeah it's still it may have an expiry on it okay so 504 is typically like when you get and then that would end that 504 so as as an educator i get those often so and so has suffered a concussion so and so has had this type of injury here are the accommodations until further notice and then we eventually get a notice from the nurse that is you know xyz is no longer active thank you i thought five open further questions yeah they cover a lot of things okay see no further questions

116all in favor say aye aye any opposed any abstentions emotion can i abstain or something you're abstaining okay motion carries all right in the next item yeah it's still me i'm sorry uh policy committee moves to adopt revised policy 6146.22 provides special graduation requirements for the class of 2021. their second second can you summarize for me please i was yes good in a circle yeah so in in summary this is really just extending the exemptions we put in place last year for covet through the end of this year um just because it was a request that came from the high school staff um you know as part of sort of our recovery and our focus on social emotional wellness and all of that uh the state you know the state things are kicking up we

117did ask actually at policy at the policy committee meeting about um two questions came up one was had this benefited a number of our students like make you know putting this exemption in place and there were a number of students who it really did benefit and made the difference between graduating or not but the other question that was asked is for our students who are say college bound are they our college-bound students are still being counseled and directed towards getting the number of credits that they need to enter into a college successfully so it's not like our college-bound students are going out with just the 20 credits but it did help some of those really struggling students get that high school diploma so that i know that was yep sorry and that i think i'm

118going to go back to my comment of 20 when we initially did this in 2020. of late even just recently kids who have graduated 2016 17 18 they want to go to college they don't have the credits so i think we're hindering them even though we're saying oh college bound you know what nick you really need to take these classes you know what violet you're not going to college it's okay you don't have to take it but then two years from now you want to go to college you don't have your high school credits that you need to take that you needed to take so i understand it i understand we're in a place of covid but i think we're we're hurting students who are not making that college-bound decision right now as juniors and

119seniors so that's all um so i mean this meets the graduation the current state graduation guidelines which so it's not we can't lower it below what the state says so we were asking for more than the state asked for so any student with this is eligible to attend college the credits that are being talked about for extra is like you know like my kids take ap and take some other things or you have this many years of a language and if you don't you can still go to college but now there are extra requirements when you get to college so they might say you have to take a language not to see then take the number of credits in high school so it doesn't hinder them from entering there may just be additional requirements there

120but that can happen to any of our students if if they don't do well enough on an entrance english if they don't do well enough on an entrance map you know even if they have credits okay any further discussion on this okay all in favor say aye aye the opposed one any abstentions okay motion carries all okay uh policy committee moves you straight policies five months did i skip one oh i did uh five one three one point six one smoking six one four six graduation requirements for the class of 2016 2017 2018 and 2019 and policy 5146.21 revised special requirements for the class of 2020. and that was a motion from the policy committee does not decide okay you want to explain why you're doing this uh so the smoking policy is redundant to

121another policy that actually is more expensive we noticed this when we started looking at possibly revising a smoking policy due to the legalization of marijuana and it was brought to our attention that this smoking policy didn't deal with vaping and things like that and that made my brain go wait we've talked about breathing and there was a redundant policy i think what may have happened is when we approved that policy we were looking to strike that but the motion just never got made so we're just cleaning that up because this is really just a redundant policy and then removing the old graduation requirements there's really no reason to leave them on the books as policy because those students you know have long you know they're not in the system anymore and even if they were

122it doesn't need to necessarily be something that's established in our policy for us to be able to go back and historically look at what their regulation requirements were okay quick question so you can still access the requirements in like your archives you just don't need them to be part of the actual policy right correct yeah okay okay further conversation all right all in favor say aye aye any opposed any extensions all right let's move on to the next one approved increased pay rate for employees working at varsity football games to 1700 coming from the athletic department sure so um just quickly so i back in december of 2020 the board approved um a policy to basically um generalize all pay rates for all levels of athletic defense to 37.50 an hour um and i think

123overall that was that was a good decision um but the only issue is with the varsity football games um because the time frame that the folks are working there tends to be three to four hours as opposed to about two hours which they don't really work for say a boy's basketball game or a girl's basketball game uh also they're normally on friday nights um so it's a little bit harder to find folks that come out on a friday night finally uh usually if somebody's working in a soccer game soccer game or a basketball game um they'll work a jv game in a varsity game in about two and a half three hours and that that will entitle them to make 75 um for the night so this would just this just kind of equals it

124all a little bit um so that we can get uh some additional help us get some additional staff members after football games and it just gives us some additional eyes and ears they all have radios um and it prevents a backlog of folks waiting to get into the stadium at the beginning of the night so we normally would spend um ballpark if you're paying 37.50 uh uh a person would spend about 1125 for a five game season this would uh i think up that to seventeen hundred dollars um for the whole season if you paid folks it's a sixty dollar rate so um that's just a little bit of a background if anybody has any questions i'll be happy to try to answer it thank you i have a quick one yeah so it's sixty

125dollars an hour venture paying or sixty dollars for the game because i know typically they leave after half time yeah so sixty dollars for the game we usually get to have them get there about five thirty yep um the people that take the tickets usually leave around seven thirty eight if they're working a gate there's they're there for the basically the whole game until nine thirty um so it's sixty dollars it's sixty dollars a game so not the 37 now right now it's 37.50 you're not uh but they only get the 37.50 only 37.50 it's 37.50 a game right now so this would be just moving to 60 dollars a game per person okay i gotcha i'm there all right any further questions all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed any abstentions all

126right motion carries next item item h approved purchase order and big waiver for preschool classroom furniture and supplies thirty five thousand six twenty five fifty six did not come to the committee second okay uh so we are anticipating we're opening another full uh full day classroom that will be starting in january and we need furniture to outfits uh you know it it's been uh um and the series probably on but just talking to chris we're filled right the full day is really what our families want and we still have some hard day we do um and uh so we're opening another full-day classroom in january and more to come on that because we're we're looking to stop our community as well with some of the hra and and nyw but you'll get more of that

127the next month okay any further conversation on this item all in favor say aye aye any opposed motion carries all right um and the last item partnerships where does that fall because there's no committee with me but so item i partnership's approved oh i think a motion to approve the purchase order bid waiver and contract between the opportunities industrialization center of uber and oic and b in the consolidated school district of new britain fifty seven thousand dollars second okay uh i've got sandra sanford sandra if you could i'm talking to a screen button there we go then i look here because i heard what's going on i hope everyone's doing well can you hear me okay okay um we've had a partnership for the last few years with oic working with our youth um in

128the high school this year there's an extension of that program it's a continuation but the extension of the program is to include our our middle school students this is a this is our third year it's paid for out of our title grant um and title four typically was the first series that we started this work on for the social emotional development of our youth as well as increasing our partnership so this is an extension of that contract to be paid out of sr as well but including our middle school students well i think maybe i'm looking at the one place it says it's coming from title four is that final four no sr is not title four no it is this is title four why we put it under partnership some of our contracts that

129when we work with our partnerships specifically the ymc boys and girls club it's our partnership our continued partnership and collaboration with them so it does come up under the partnership office thank you sir i can't use my glasses and have a mask on at the same time i just can't do it all right any questions about this all right all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed no extensions motion carries yes uh motion to add an item to the agenda the approval of one campus safety officer one admin secretary two and ten paraprofessionals second okay sorry that's just added to the agenda okay so uh all in favor of adding this to the agenda say aye aye aye any opposer's gonna say no but die yes motion to approve the edition um the new

130position request of one campus safety officer a 12-month position for roosevelt and the amount of 69 150 one admin secretary two a 12-month position at the nbeac that's our main building here in the amount of 68 000 right 896. and 10 paraprofessionals 10 month position three for smith three for chamberlain three for smalling one for advance in the amount of 580 all of these are coming from sr2 with the exception of the paraprofessionals which is a combination of srq and arp and the kids the officer that's like that yeah i'm sorry the officer is the com my mistake sorry it's the officer that's the mixture of the two the rest are all lesser too thank you second here we have second in motion questions concern that was a lot more emotion go ahead well just

131quick roosevelt is a that's an additional or new like they don't have a security guard now correct yes they do not they do not okay i didn't think so yeah that's it's not in the memo that that's the entire position yes okay my only question was actually to the uh free use of the superintendent perhaps or someone else um the roosevelt position is listed as a 12 month position as far as security as far as security so they have an option to be 10 month or 12 months 10 months there are a lot of people when they come out of retirement don't want to work the summers some do and so we we offer either a 10 month or 12 month we do have some security guards who are 12 months now thank you so

132in approving this is a 12 month we still have the option to hire somebody for 10 months or is it it's a 12 month position this is well we we could right i mean this was we we afford them the option of 10 or 12. but we could just to clarify during the summer if roosevelt campus doesn't need a 12 month meeting we do hire 12 monday to be utilized as possible so we utilized them in 1186 in the past what they do the security then helps out with the cleaning and the maintaining of the buildings over the summer months okay any further questions about any of these other positions okay seeing none all in favor say aye aye any opposed any abstentions the motion carries yes a motion to add an item to the

133agenda the acceptance of a grant in the amount of 200 sorry 25 million 700 sixty seven dollars sorry what would you say you're aware okay acceptance of a grant yeah sorry i was trying to take this absolutely yes a second okay okay so we have a second motion for 25 million dollars to accept the 25 minutes to add to the agenda okay add to the agenda yeah but okay uh all in favor of adding this to the agenda hi motion to approve acceptance of the uh of a grant uh from the federal it's a federal alliance grant in the amount of 25 million and fifty eight thousand nine hundred sixty seven dollars second cartwheel shaking okay uh any discussion on this item i do if we could i mean there is a little bit of

134background but it does state what the grant needs to be used for so was it 92.76 staff salary and benefits inclusive district coordinators admins performance coaches and teachers elementary eld sld teachers tech teachers math ell science social studies world language and business teachers climate and recruitment talent minority recruitment eo coach and admin assistant that's correct and then 2.82 attendance and family engagement this is already the breakdown or is this the breakdown that's in the let me just explain grant quickly this is the alliance grant yeah the state is not now putting new assurances in there that they want the the board to accept the grant from an online version before you receive the money so i mean you really have to accept it so uh senator stanford actually put this together today and it's really

135showing what the budget right now is so what you're seeing here is 95.96 i think we're talking about somewhere about 96 97.5 percent of that grant really is really for um positions is the ftes and the health insurance and the other two and a half percent is where we export third party vendor for uh in-service and instructional supplies so it's the it's a grant that you probably saw in the last you know half thousand years 10 years and so he actually now they're actually saying accept it i mean you don't accept that i'm not sure we're going to do it yeah so but i guess my question really was is this the breakdown in the grant yeah it is that's what they say you have to spend ninety three percent uh this is how then

136we actually had another you know i'm gonna make a number 40 59 grants this 25 26 million alliance we knew we're getting so that was part of the budget plan the state is actually saying right now we want some type of proof that your board accepts the last 10 years we've always done any way to afford that same thing but never officially accepted that's all they're doing so this is just the formality of us oh i got you thank you this is the first year that it's happened like this like in years past we get the money you know we get the i'm just going to say i got excited for nothing it's money that we know yeah i was happy we're happy yeah okay so but it is more but it is more like

137the interesting time i didn't get the 25 this is more and again this is increased by like right and this is the promise that the state has made around trying to to uh make it a little bit make it more equitable with suburbs and so they've been easing into it slowly as they start to reduce some of the suburban mural they increase the urban and so they have a plan and originally i think the governor had said that that it was gonna if we got the esther dollars that we weren't going to get this but then then all of us as alliance districts said that's reneging and so they did reinstitute it and they're following the recipe um okay so any further questions about this grant i'm a little deflated it's okay i'm sorry you

138did probably also i was happy yeah yeah okay that is so all in favor say aye aye aye any opposed all right um yes okay um motion to add an item to the agenda uh this is for the addition of tas and or bsas at various locations throughout the district second okay so we have a second in motion can i take the time to explain it can we add it to the agenda oh yes let's add it to the agenda so all in favor of adding to the agenda so all right okay all right now a second motion to approve uh new position new positioning requests in uh for 64 additional tas and or bsas at various locations throughout the district uh really quickly i believe these these are all funded through esser that's correct

139okay see your second second okay and for those who are looking in the packet it's the one that has the big layout which i thought was just a report so i missed it in my other editions i didn't get it all right so uh can i explain yes please do i'm sorry i'm taking my mask off for just a minute so i can save a little um so as i stated earlier in the day we we were really successful in in hiring over 80 teachers assistants 30 of them being bilingual 50 being monolingual we were shocked but we we and we still have a lot of candidates in in applicants which is exciting as well as bsas what's happened is because of the substitute shortage because of teachers that are going out on quarantine because

140our our building principles are trying to find people to cover and so the intent and the purpose of the teacher's assistance was for them to augment classroom practices not supplant right and we find ourselves in this position of of supplanting right now and we're not you know that was a part of our recovery efforts and so we said well we have this money and while we have a pool of applicants we're going to go back out as far as behavior support we know that that's very helpful for a lot of our a lot of our kids right now as well as teachers assistants so that we have a higher ratio of adult to student not just substituting and so we uh and this was loud and clear from every one of our admins they're just

141they're working really hard but they're running and they're trying to just keep you know blocking the dam you know filling up the dam so we said how can we help and they're like we need more bodies we need staff we need people and we know substitutes just aren't there um and so we're committed to going back out and hiring another 64 positions 38 as teaching assistants and and i and i i just have to give a shout out to our talent department i know we're frustrated because we feel like it's moving like mud in terms of people coming on board but they are processing hundreds um it's i i don't think people recognize the impact um full in which is great has had on staff it's it's critical and um by building leaders who i

142will support 100 and my my central office staff they're all running as fast as they can so we want to help them and we're putting in another 64 positions for that we're hopeful we can fill them all and it's a two-year experience for someone again we we we have it so an associates is fine too and if we can grab them and help them get into a four-year program that's part of our our on-boarding and and um just developing a pipeline that's a lot it is a lot sure um so as you were saying that i was just going through this list and i noticed that you know three four four four and then you get to pulaski and it's 14 versus slave making a request for only four is it that they didn't identify

143that they would need as much as the last year yes that would be that would just be it that would be it right and so we we had the admins actually tell us and and we said to them you know the positions that you're currently using for substitutes whatever what is that number and and you know try to stick to being honest here and uh and and so that's what they came up with i mean certainly mike um can circle back with mr verdi to say hey are you sure you know that kind of thing but um yeah okay so further questions on this item good luck yes thank you all in favor say all right all right any opposed in the extensions the motion carries thank you for adding that i'm sorry about the

144confusion oh that was that was online do you have any other walk-ins any other items i think we went through them all [Music] you got another so we had an updated extracurricular that's right the report that's just a report yeah so i just have a question when is middle school basketball david it after school not right so but is it the same season as high school let me check i don't want to answer that i will find out here so and then like let me know oh so yeah but i do want to save you that we know that all of our coaches are going to be going over and watching kids and helping and coaching so it will probably be off season okay you know what i mean it's kind of recruitment and i'm

145looking for talent but i will i will get the for later here i'll grow okay i'm sorry while you're making the list uh the hawal i'll check for you um we haven't met yet this year for um yeah thank you well let's think about that but do you know when it's coming out yeah the yeah well we'll find that out on the 19th when we have our meeting but i can ask jeff in advance too yeah no no because um as i have parents that are asking me and i'm going i vote new yeah we've just been told that we could post just wait okay further anything else to add to the agenda all right all in favor you