Virtual Stonington Board of Education Meeting 1/13/22

001um chris if you can williston if you can please um help me promote some of the attendees to panelists um you have dan kelly on that side if you can move him over thank you absolutely i failed to remember how to do it all right it is 6 31. so i'd like to call the stonington public school board of education regular regular virtual meeting to order and first item on our agenda is the pledge of allegiance and i'd like to ask kyle to lead us in the pledge of allegiance if you don't mind kyle of course i pledge allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you appreciate that um we have not

002received any um well before that i jumped one so communication and recognition dr riley yes um i would like to uh to recognize our nurses they have done an amazing job actually this last two years almost but recently with all the changes that they have to deal with um they've just done an amazing job working uh you know extra time working sundays working holidays um they've had to you know accept home tests now for staff and students that's a recent a recent change in the protocols and obviously that's increased the number of tests and positives that they have to monitor i would like to report that we still have basically no transmission at school and i want the board to know that if we do if we suspect that we will notify both the board

003and any uh anybody affected by that but we really don't see that happening in in schools the positives that we have seen have come from family gatherings and you know other other events in the families i would encourage uh both board members and the community uh we post our our numbers uh on our website and and megan does an amazing job of that but we only can post the numbers that we you know the results we get from parents and so um for instance we just uh one example is um megan was notified i think it was like january 5th that that a child was positive like december 23rd so you know the numbers that we have aren't necessarily as accurate as both ledge light and the data that's posted on the town website so

004uh that that's important and i also would like a shout out to our parents they are doing exactly what they need to do as far as quarantining keeping their children home in fact what they're what we've seen is if it's a five-day requirement we're seeing them keep their children home for six or seven days just to make sure that things are safe for their own children and for other children so it's uh it's more work it's different but things seem to be seem to be working well i the positive cases that we've seen with our with our students in the last five days district wide we've gone from 46 down to 17. so that's very very good news we're heading in the right direction and again our nurses are doing just an amazing job i

005wanted to recognize them and give the board some of that information about what they're doing and how they're changing all their protocols almost daily so thank you fruit thank you dr riley and i'm gonna go as i see you on my screen so kevin you're up next sir you have anything all right thank you heidi anything i've just had uh several parents comment on the focus group that they were in last yesterday and i just wanted to commend betty oscar for doing a more than commendable job and uh so it seems to be that we're moving ahead in a very positive direction so i wanted to comment on her thank you heidi um mr kelly dan i know there's a item on the agenda later under the superintendent's report with the request from uh the

006principal and athletic director but i just like to recognize uh the passing of jerry desmond and all that he um meant to our town and i'm not i know he graduated in 76 from stoneman high school and uh coached there for years and was inducted into the hall of fame up there as well and even in even in his part in his family uh requested in lieu of flowers at his donation donations we made to the athletic booster club at the high school so um he was a stonington bear through and through and i think he bled brown and will uh definitely our town is less off today because of uh his passing that's all i have thank you dan sarah i'd just like to piggyback on what superintendent riley noted with the nurses and

007just add to that our administrative staff teachers just everyone in sps right now um things moved very fast during a holiday break which is supposed to be a time for rest and restoration and i know that for many people on this call and for many people who are not on this call it was not that at all and i just want to say i see you and i thank you for the work that you were putting forth um to to be able to uh start the 2022 school year so thank you thank you sarah chris donohue and i want to echo what's been said give recognition to the nurses all the hard work they've been doing over the last couple of years especially in the last week or so also the parents who uh have

008been very patient you know with everything that's going on and the administrators for working hard you know to make things happen you know when we're short-handed also off of what dan said uh jerry desmond was a great man he uh actually graduated with my father i've known him i knew him for a long time and it's a it's a true loss to storington and the community so yeah that's what i got thank you chris uh craig thank you craig kyle do you have anything for communication and recognition uh yes i'd like to recognize mr freeman who agreed to get paid at our winter rally in a fundraiser that raised uh 700 for a holiday bear project anything to raise money we appreciate that all right and uh i i i can't tell you how touched

009i am by every uh sbs staff member their hard work dedication and i appreciate you and uh i can't tell you how proud i am to be part of this community so thank you for everything you do um jerry was a brother and a friend and uh he touched me deeply and i know there's a hand risen out there to talk about him so we'll get to that in a second but that's all i had thank you so um we have comments next on an item on our agenda is comments from citizens regarding items on the agenda um please raise your hand i'll call you as i see you on my screen i'll call on you and chris uh wilston will help me bring you on because uh and i'll call you as i see

010you on my screen so mr lewis you're up first how's my audio perfect all right good i just uh i appreciate your comments on jerry desmond i know we all feel the loss in different ways because he as uh chairman uh rajab said he touched so many of us in so many different ways but i'd like to quickly if i can um just reference the jerry desmond memorial proposal that i know is on the agenda for later this evening and uh on behalf of uh former chief erskine current police chief um darren stewart and bob mitchell as well and myself um i just really am grateful and appreciate the efforts you made uh chairman rajab specifically to get this on the agenda and also the background work um in addition to those gentlemen i named

011with the school with the school system dr reilly and marianne butler were instrumental i spoken with them and and shared emails as well as mark freeze alicia daw and brian marone um who were also very helpful in putting this forward to the board for your consideration tonight um and so what i'll do is if it's all right i will stay i will stand by and when you get to that uh agenda item later if you have any general questions i'll be here and certainly i can re-raise my hand then and try and help you although we are in the early stages of this i do have some preliminary details laid out um how's that sound sounds great we appreciate you and just one other thing chairman if i may um i'd also like to take

012this opportunity just if i can it's i hope it's appropriate but on behalf of jackie's uh wife jerry i'm sorry jerry's wife jackie who i just spoke with um i just want to say uh what a wonderful i mean the support from from the school system um and and it goes from the top on down those of you whose names i just mentioned as well as peter anderson and scott howard and his crew at the high school and how the wake came off in the gym um it was it was as though a uh a form of head of state was lying in the rotunda at the capitol i heard that from a few people uh and also in addition to that and i know chris has been with the fire department for years and

013and so many people perhaps watching are and i spoke to jeff holy today the borough fire chief but i mean the tribute um the fire personnel and the vehicles and the town uh highway department and their their personnel and vehicles i mean i was in the procession from the funeral home over to the church uh on monday the day at jerry's funeral and uh i mean it was uh it was a sight to behold and i think we all know it was uh for a very very worthy gentleman that we lost far too soon but anyway i appreciate everything that everyone has done um community-wide and i will i will mute myself now and stand by and look forward to your discussion on the proposal later thank you thank you for your comments mr lewis

014next on the lineup i have greg howard thank you mr chairman uh i was actually tuning in just to watch the meeting but uh and and i will just take a minute to express my support for for naming that desmond way i think it's uh knowing jerry as well as i did um the desmond way is is really just perfect and he was a he was a great asset to this community and certainly a terrible loss for all of us and if it's already with you just uh in the opening statements uh i just want to comment on two things that i heard that piqued my interest i want to say to what heidi said about dr um excuse me dr osga i had an opportunity to speak with her and she was extremely impressive

015and what an outstanding job that you've all done in choosing her full confidence that she's going to help our community move forward after dr valley's departure and also uh to dr riley's point about in school transmission i just want to take an opportunity to share with you that as many of you know i've been following data out of massachusetts as far as in-school transmission i was curious to see how that data would be affected by this new variant and i am happy to tell you that the new data that came out today which goes through january 9th in massachusetts shows a five percent positivity rate among close contacts while the the pool positivity rate uh jumped to 20 as it has been doing so um very promising data to to show that uh in-school transmission

016remains very low even in this omicron variant so i'll i'll continue to monitor that if i see a change because you know i watch it so closely i'll be happy to let you know and certainly um if there's any questions or anybody wants me to send that data i'm happy to do that and i thank you mr chairman thank you representative howard we appreciate you uh next i have adam lennicus thank you mr chairman and thank you to the board and dr o'reilly for just a few minutes to speak tonight before i get to my main topic that i had jumped on for tonight i do want to echo heidi and representative howard's comments around the experience last night with the parent focus group i was able to be on and it was it really

017was fantastic betty was very very very transparent with the process and certainly uh instilled us with a lot of confidence that the the right selection will be made as we move along so uh i also wanted to take a few minutes tonight and read a statement on behalf of the dei uh parent advisory committee so uh just bear with me here the parent advisory committee was founded on the principles of promoting diversity equity and inclusion within stonington public schools and our community as we enter a new year and welcome new board members to the stonington board of education we wanted to take the time to introduce ourselves share our mission and seek the support of the board to continue the very important work ahead of us to create a more diverse equitable and safe learning

018environment for our students diversity is the representation of different and unique identities characteristics experiences and perspectives equity is giving every person what they need to succeed by increasing access resources and opportunities for all especially those who are underrepresented and have been historically disadvantaged inclusion is a welcoming culture in which differences are celebrated and everyone is valued respected and able to reach their full potential diversity equity and inclusion represents people of all ages races and ethnicities abilities and disabilities genders religions cultures and sexual orientation our committee is dedicated to supporting ongoing efforts within our schools creating new ideas and events that are school and community based to bring more awareness and education surrounding dei working with our town leaders in various groups within sps such as anti-racist anti-bias committee dei site leaders team alliance for acceptance

019and the anti-racism reading circle our committee is comprised of many citizens of pawtuck and sterlington we are educational specialists town employees teachers social workers small business owners paraprofessionals volunteers coaches students and most importantly parents of students or students attending stonington public schools as we continue to meet and work together to create positive change within stonington it is our hope that we have the full support of our board of education and that together we can all set the example and standard for embracing diversity equity and inclusion in our beautiful town i'll be submitting this for the record as well afterwards and i thank you mr chairman thank you adam next is mrs toe ashley hello can you hear me awesome so um i just um i also had the opportunity to participate in the parent focus

020group um last night with dr oscar and it was a great opportunity for parents to kind of feel out the process understand what's going on and give some input so i do want to thank her for that opportunity and she does seem like she has a really good grasp on what stonington needs moving forward with our next superintendent um she last night indicated that we should have a superintendent um decided probably by um april 1st and i saw it on the agenda that we're starting a search for a new high school principal and i just thought that maybe that that's a process that the new superintendent should be involved in um one of the big things for parent feedback last night was that they were looking for somebody who has some unique recruiting and ability

021to unite the the staff as well as the parents and the students um and they're going to be the one working with this principal so i just thought that maybe that the timeline for finding a new principle seemed kind of rushed and pushed in um very quickly since you know his um the current principles resonation just came out and i think that with us hopefully having a superintendent by april 1st that maybe we could think about including them in the search for a new high school principal and i also noticed that the final interview um and assuming that from the final interview the person to make the decision would just be one person or possibly two i'm not sure who the district principal is but um they said that person could be an optional person

022in the decision process and i just feel like the final decision should be more of a panel uh maybe some people from some board members or it just shouldn't be one person or um maybe two i'm not sure who the district principal is either so i just think that maybe some adjustments should be made to the to the decision on who's going to be our next high school principal and if there's a way that we could get our future superintendent involved in that i think that'd be really great and beneficial for the community and for the the future superintendent and the future high school principal to create a really great working environment for everybody all around and i think that's all i had for tonight thank you ashley thank you next on our agenda we

023have the social media and mental health presentation by kevin ignello and alice in van halen so the floor is yours thank you let me just make sure i share the correct screen did i share the correct screen does that look right to you yes we're all good all right um so i am very excited for this presentation um i'll start off by thanking allison and her for her assistance for some of the information and willingness to participate um the mental health of students is an extremely uh important and timely topic and i'm very excited to discuss how the board can be a part of that conversation to the betterment of our students uh but before i get into a lot of that research and data i want to be extremely clear about my intentions and

024goals with this presentation what this presentation is is an overview of the body of literature around adolescent mental health i present a working theory among some prominent psychologists around the country that social media is one of the driving factors behind an alarming increase in negative mental health outcomes of adolescents generally my goal here is to provide the parents community at the board of ed with quality information that pertains to the health and safety of our students what this presentation is not uh is my opinion i did my best to break down what i'm seeing in research and it's not my opinion nor is it my political agenda or a policy initiative i'm merely just presenting information as i have come to understand it uh so with that let's take a 10 000 foot view of

025exactly what i might be talking about and that's how adolescents view mental health among their peers the data that you're looking at here is from a 2019 pew research survey of uh it was about a thousand 13 to 17 year olds um the respondents here uh 97 of them rated anxiety and depression as a problem among their peers and 70 of them rated it a major problem they rated a larger problem than bullying drug addiction drinking alcohol poverty teen pregnancy and other things that schools tend to be focused on adolescents see anxiety and depression as a bigger problem than those other problems so school-age children think anxiety and depression are major issues but is it and how big of an issue is it so let's look at some research here the first study that i

026want to talk about here uses the national survey on drug use and uh national survey on drug use and health which measures major depressive episodes or mdes the survey follows dsm-5 which is a diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders which defines mdes as an episode where someone experiences five or more of these nine symptoms now these nine symptoms are not mild symptoms either so if you're experiencing five of them that's a pretty serious condition now this survey is given annually so you're able to compare year-over-year changes in the trend uh what you're looking at here is a chart of 12 to 17 year olds the red line is girls blue line is boys the green line is both of them together and this is data from 2005 to 2011. and you can see the

027trend is pretty steady here about one in eight girls and about one in 25 boys we're experiencing major depressive episodes from 2005 through 2011. but watch what happens when i add 2011 to the current year there's a dramatic shift in the proportion of 12 to 17 year olds boys and girls that report experiencing an mde and those that's experiencing five of those nine symptoms in any two week period so take note of how obvious the timing of this change is sometime between 2010 and 2012 somewhere around there here's the same data set but i added 2020 data and there's a little bit more current the orange line is girls blue line as boys so as of 2020 over 25 percent or one in four of teen girls report experiencing a major depressive episode so to

028summarize so far we have almost 100 percent of teens report that anxiety and depression are issues among their peers and we saw a 108 increase in major depressive episodes for teen girls from 2008 to 2020 and about an 80 increase for boys over that same time period and remember that shift was really dramatic starting around 2010 21 2012 so you might be thinking all right fine that's just one study but are there others of course there are so here's another different data set different sample different method of measuring the depression anxiety but same result beginning in 2010 2011 2012 somewhere around there there's a dramatic shift in rates of depressive symptoms among teens particularly for girls but also for boys here's another one same story different data set different sample different method of measuring this

029uh this time it's just anxiety though but same result beginning in 2010 11 12 dramatic shifts in the rates of anxiety among teens this chart here is just girls here's another one this one overlays self-report instances of anxiety and depression with self-report instances of self-harm suicide ideation and uh suicide attempts and the latter three follow a similar trend and timeline to the shift that we're seeing with anxiety and depression and one more study similar story so this is again showing the differences in the rates of self-harm and depression among girls and boys this compares 2005 to 2015. the rise is alarming again particularly among girls but it's present for boys as well okay so now you might be thinking glasses five studies are there others that say similar things here's seven more you can trust

030me on that one and here's four more if you don't trust me yet okay so i know you might be thinking again all those metrics so far are self-reporting maybe it's just become easier and acceptable uh more acceptable for students and people in general to openly discuss uh their mental health state and there are more resources there it's easier to seek help awareness has been raised year over year there's it's just much easier to to report these sorts of things um now that's certainly a valid hypothesis i even link to an article here that talks about that very thing so you can't ignore that hypothesis but that point is far less relevant to behaviors like self-harm and suicide particularly when those behaviors are measured by hospital admissions which are obviously not self-report here's a 2017

031study that looks at exactly that metric this is hospital admissions for non-fatal self-harming girls ages 10 to 24. there's a 75 increase between 2009 and 19 and about 150 increase for girls 10 to 14 years old so again to summarize this quickly where we are so far we have increases in anxiety and depression increases in self-harm as measured in a multitude of ways in a variety of samples in different studies all of that is very well documented the increase seems to be happening or starting around 2010 11 12 somewhere around there that change is very consistent across studies so that begs the question what happened around 2010 2011 2012. around 2005 i call this humble beginnings for social media facebook is still in its infancy it's only available to organizations and colleges at this point

032myspace is the number one social media platform but less than 50 of teams are on there youtube is available but features are limited you can really just upload videos followers weren't really a thing on youtube quite yet so really there's just one main social media platform at this point in 2005 and it's not used that much for teenagers jump ahead to 2008 facebook steps up in 2006 facebook became available to the public and it grow uh it grows in popularity among teams in 2008 the like button was introduced and your more modern facebook begins to take shape in 2008. jump ahead two years facebook active users increases 500 percent in two years at this point upwards of 70 of teens are now on facebook twitter is also starting to become mainstream jump ahead three more

033years we have even more options now in 2012 facebook acquires instagram instagram is now having its day jump ahead a couple more years options options options for social media this is 2018 tick tock becomes mainstream teens are now interacting with facebook twitter tumblr instagram tiktok plus others and not even noted on this chart here is the most popular social media platform for current teenagers which is snapchat so in a little over a decade social media usage among teens grew from less than 50 usage on one major platform to now over 90 usage on multiple platforms so to summarize where we are we have self-report mental health episodes and self-harm have increased hospital admissions for these reasons have increased social media usage has clearly increased so where's the connection here's some research on the relationships of

034social media screen time and mental health the first one screen time on social media was more strongly associated with self-harm behavior and depressive symptoms uh low life satisfaction low self-esteem than video games and tv it was more serious than girls and boys which echoes what we've discussed so far the bottom study uh tested hypotheses for why social media may lead to depressive symptoms in addition to whether or not it does in the first place and it found that the leading hypothesis uh for the effect of social media on mental health is that it tends to create an upward social comparison among users again particularly among girls so talking about bullying really quick here for a minute you'll see why how else might social media be leading to depression we've come to understand bullying trends quite

035well over the last few decades generally bullying peaks around 9th grade girls tend to use social forms of bullying and boys tend to use physical verbal victim victimization excuse me via reputation destruction name calling teasing peaks at ninth grade but it continues through the high school years before it starts dropping in your late adolescence and young adulthood those social forms of bullying are much more common in girls than boys social media exponentially increases opportunity for bullying particularly for particularly the social kind it's difficult to physically bully on social media so social media enhances reputation and destruction name calling teasing promotes those upward social comparisons more so to the detriment of girls and boys and again this echoes what we saw in all those charts earlier social media doesn't just have a psychological impact while you're

036physically on it either think about what happens after you post a picture you put your phone down you wonder i wonder how many likes i might have did anybody comment on it yet did sarah comment on sarah commented on bills why didn't sarah come or you know why didn't she comment on mine so on and so forth it is a constant psychological struggle here's some more research that hints at the relationships between social media and depression anxiety so the theory goes summarizing again social media uses among teens ramps up in 2010 around there self-report depressive episodes ramps up around the same time more recent research continues to suggest that social media enhances bullying if you come to understand building trends in teens and adolescents altogether so it should follow that increases increases in depressive symptoms

037along this timeline are generational are they here's a chart from the very first study i showed you tonight this breaks down the major depressive episodes by age group the increases are only seen among our youngest age group this aligns directly with the building research i mentioned and social media usage that i mentioned so presumably the older groups are more mentally mature for social media than their younger peers after bullying grades taper off after high school and sentences like these that lead to some initiatives that you may have heard of uh to this end so i can i call this three levels of remedy um there's no order to these three i'm not suggesting one is better than another i'm just putting out information the first that i've heard of maybe you've heard of too um

038no phones altogether it's gained attraction as a wait until eight they call it a parent contract or a parent pact that parents can get together and decide to do this with with their families all together where they will not provide their children with a smartphone until 8th grade some of the psychologists that i've cited throughout some of this research suggest number two where phones are fine but perhaps you should wait on allowing your child on social media until at least eighth grade they choose eighth grade because of those bullying statistics and again that's a parent pact or a contract social contract and then three the third level if you will workshops and strategies to teach healthy use of social media which i believe um allison bennett and we'll talk a little bit about how the

039district has done some of these things already so is this happening in stonington this is where i'll kick it over to allison i assume she has microphone access there she is yeah i'm here good evening thanks kevin um so when kevin approached me after the last meeting to express some interest in this topic i said well this is ironic because we had just formed a small in-district committee to really talk about this comment this particular topic with social media and our students and we're seeing it not just as a mental health concern but obviously social concern we see it with discipline issues um we see it as obvious as a distraction which we all know also throughout the school day with our students so we were getting together as a group along with our youth

040officer carrie browning and starting to bring some ideas of um and i think again as kevin said how to work with social media and make it a more positive influence with our students um so we started with a very informal survey with our sixth through twelfth graders to try to get some insight um from them and they were reporting on themselves here not on their peers so that's a little comparison to some of the surveys that kevin referenced but um and and we do plan to do some additional surveys kevin's going to help us with that he's hired for now permanently to be our survey author um but this is just some interesting information that we collected so far and we did have 25 percent of our students that did indicate that social media had

041an impact on their mental health and you'll see that some of the most common responses because of course when they responded um with yes we asked them to give us some additional details about how how that and what to explain the impact um and you'll see that the comments these were the most common um comments that we received and they're very aligned with the research that kevin shared so that fear of being left out um that the body image distortion was a big one i compare myself to others and just in general that there tends to be negative tones and themes and in terms of how we treat each other and those issues around you know as kevin referenced how many likes do i have and how popular i am compared to my peers so

042i thought that's interesting that our student shared a lot of that same feedback that the researchers had shared and we wanted to talk kind of quickly about the district resources that are available to students in general and while we are focused on social media i wanted to also take this opportunity tonight to talk a little bit about some of the other mental health initiatives that we're working on district-wide that aren't just related to social media and online safety but just in general you know we wanted to remind families and students and staff about the resources that we have within the district to help support our students um we have school psychologists social workers um at all schools we also have guidance counselors at six through um 12 and got some guidance counselors at our elementary

043level as well and they all obviously have specialized training to support our students with mental health and and social issues and um i know they'd be a really interesting group to get some feedback on the social media piece from as well since they often end up being the first line in dealing with social conflicts that our students are facing the second piece that i think is really important as we educate students about mental health and awareness online safety social media it's really important that we not just address those in isolation in a guidance counselor's office but those are embedded throughout our curriculum and i want to credit marianne and her curriculum team because they've done really a thoughtful job of making sure that all of our students are getting an education when it comes to

044understanding the importance of health and wellness um and we have this these themes embedded through our recently renewed health curriculums we've really ramped up our advisory curriculums i know you've we've talked to you before about our second step social emotional curriculum which we're now um have k through eight and then we also have our safe schools training platform which we started um about two years ago and that is we actually have a student platform for our students in grades 9 through 12 with a whole host of topics um related to mental health online safety um etc and then the other obvious piece is looking at opportunities to provide special presentations and assemblies to our students and i know many we've had many presentations over the years specific to social media specific to online safety i

045know that our high school in particular spends a great deal of time on this as well as our middle school so just to kind of highlight some of the initiatives that we have moving forward both again related to internet um social media safety but also in general some of our mental health initiatives moving forward certainly we're in a time where social emotional learning and the mental health needs of our students are really really important as we know um so several years ago we did have a wonderful presentation by our the state police dare officer she presented for families at our district office which was then pawcatuck middle school and we are um anticipating an additional presentation from her coming this march and she does a wonderful job of for all those parents that feel uncomfortable

046about social media and understanding apps and how to um follow what their child's doing on social media how to understand the what's on their child's phone she does a great job of helping parents to feel comfortable with that and also under helping to understand um problems that our students could face with regard to online access and social media so we'll be getting a lot of information about that out to families kevin and i have talked a lot about we're going to be asking for the board's assistance and really helping to promote those programs when we offer them when we have guest speakers come in we'd like to get as many parents to to come out for that as possible so we'll be getting more information about that um we are looking to have dr greta

047francis come back and she was a presenter that presented several years ago two parents um and she is specializes in um adolescence and anxiety and she gave a very popular presentation several years ago we had a packed house in the boardroom uh we have unfortunately had multiple um covid and cyber attack related issues that have caused us to have to cancel her twice now and now a third time with our change of pd so at this point we are um aiming to have her repeat her parent presentation and so we're going to be offering that again to families in spring that will be yet another activity that we'll be looking for um support from everybody to help us to promote if you talk to families i would not be surprised that families that went to

048it the first time will actually want to go to it again um so it was really well done um i did mention just briefly the second step curriculum i know we've talked about that quite frequently you can see the different topics that are addressed in that curriculum and that is taught through our advisory programs k through eight and you'll see those really key topics healthy relationships cyber bullying resolution and then recognizing stress and anxiety so again an example of how we're trying to weave those mental health goals and initiatives into our curriculum for all students um this year you we presented this um this position to youth when we were talking about our esser funds and the positions that we were adding so we did add an additional um specialist position at west mine street

049school this year and we have a school psychologist who is really our family liaison specialist um and we have assigned her to work with you know specific students and families who need extra support her the intention is to really have her wrap around the entire student and the family to provide just not the student the resources they need in school but to assist the family with additional resources that the family may need that's been a really nice addition to the team at west vine and so we're looking to potentially model that same idea in some of our other buildings in the future the next piece is a really exciting piece but i do want to caution everybody that we have a couple of legislative hoops to jump through before this is going to happen so

050i'm just going to give you a very brief um intro into some future possibilities and partnerships that we have with child and family agency so the first is about a year a year and a half ago we started to talk with child and family agency about the possibility of having a child guidance clinic added to the pakatak area and we they approached us about potentially using our district office as a placement for that so we've had a couple of meetings and some tours of an appropriate space at district office um we've had uh representative howard at some of those meetings and and i know senator summers isn't is aware of this as well and some board members um along with peter anderson and our rest of our cabinet team so um we are in the

051initial stages of looking at the possibility of that partnership the next step is when the legislature reconvenes child and family agency is going to be working and moving forward on getting some of the fees the funds i should say that they need to get that up and running so when we know that they've secured those funds they have told me they're happy to come back and they're going to speak to you about what that child guidance clinic would look like but that would essentially be an outpatient clinic that would be off that would offer therapeutic services to not just our students but to our to adults and families throughout the pocket up community and what they loved about our district office site is that it's so accessible to families and we really have a shortage

052of those outpatient providers in the pop immediately in the pakatak area so we're extremely excited about that possibility of partnering with them and the second project with child and family agency is you all are aware that we have a school-based health center uh through child and family agency and that provides both nursing and mental health services to students and right now that that school-based health center is at stonington middle school and with the school-based health centers which we have throughout the region they only provide services to the students not to adults and to students who only attend that school so i was approached by them uh right before vacation about the possibility of they are also looking at receiving um funds from the state to open additional school-based health centers and so um we have

053we have started very initial discussions about potentially opening a school-based health center at stonington high school the school-based health center would include an aprn which would be wonderful for our athletic clearance and helping our school nurse there and it would also include a social worker who would provide additional mental health services to our students so again in the preliminary stages we've expressed our interests we have to wait until they get more information about their legislative funding and we'll be getting more updates to the board on that uh the last piece just on this slide is our suicide awareness training so that is a state requirement for our staff and our staff actually just completed that training last week but that's certainly really relevant in terms of our times and looking at our students with anxiety

054and depression that training focuses really specifically on helping teachers so not people who are necessarily trained we have our clinicians who know what to look for but it really focuses on helping classroom teachers who spend the most time during the day with our students recognizing what we call risk factors and warning signs for youth who may um be considering suicide so that's an important piece that we just completed and kevin i think we're sharing this one aren't we so i'll do this yes yeah you got the first three um so just in terms of kind of what's next um i did speak with um kevin in our committee and we'd like to pursue doing potentially some additional surveys with some of our students and i think part of um i know i know kyle um

055is prepared to share some feedback too as as mrs dawe took some time with our student government and with kyle to review the student survey so i think we're interested as a committee and looking at not only providing you know different additional programs but maybe doing some additional surveys and also maybe targeting our middle schoolers a little bit more um the feedback that we're getting from our mid team is we are seeing um quite a big impact on our on our middle school students with regard to social media and as again i mentioned we're going to be having some presentations and looking to provide education and resources to our families um and continuing those student surveys and then lastly so i know the board is playing to set goals very soon and i think something

056related to student mental health should be included there but more generally in speaking with allison about how the board can really help with this is to assist in the advertising and attending of the parent-focused district programming um but even less than that the main goal i had with this presentation was uh to stand firm to the belief that student mental health concerns are all of our concerns in the community um and that includes the boards and our involvement does not need to be policy or political driven we should simply just be present aware involved um and i hope this presentation helped achieve that uh so again thank you for giving me this time to share this information with all of you um and uh that concludes the presentation for now but i'd be happy to

057answer answer questions make this presentation available and make all the research that i've included available thank you thank you kevin and alison this is really incredible we i appreciate it i know that many people appreciate it so any questions for kevin or allison no question but i do have a comment since this is uh hopefully an ongoing conversation um to expand the scope just a little bit and you don't want to expand scope too much but to look at the role of narcissism as a particular moderating variable on this um jean tweeny's work if you look at her 2009 book generation me it's it's a game changer and thinking about how narcissism uh plays it could possibly play a role in what we're seeing so i would encourage that with future surveys or studies and

058we collect a little data on that as well um so yeah that's it yeah and i want to uh actually echo what sarah said uh that's that's a very uh valid point about narcissism because there's not a lot and i mean there's more awareness now than there used to be but um empathy is a huge thing uh with children and i'm sure you know you guys found that through your research teaching kids empathy and um caring for the other uh their other classmates and uh yeah it seems like you guys are making some good headway on what you've done so far and i just want to know what we can do to enhance these programs and and to continue to move forward oh and kevin just to follow up with what you said about making

059this a goal um i'm hoping that within the next month we'll be able to um confirm with the goals and i'm very enthusiastic about making sure that that mental health chuck the children's adolescence mental health is primary so i really appreciate this and how do we get your this presentation so we could look at it again the the statistics are um so impressive i'd be happy to share maybe include that in the minutes that's available to everybody perhaps what does anyone have any other suggestions i have a concern or two um mine was like you know the trends obviously since 2010 of uh continuing to climb and i know most of these programs that we've done in the workshops and everything else have you know happened at the same time and i know we're looking

060at a couple of new things but i just would hope someone can can find uh what else we can do and um to put a stop or to bring that trend downwards instead of upwards uh i don't know where that's going to come from if it's going to come from the house of the parents or the children or if it's going to come from our schools i know and i think i've said it the last meeting was as far as the school goes i think we need to have a stricter policy on the use of cell phones during the day in the schools from class from the classroom and i think that's incumbent i'm on the central office administration as well as the each individual school's administration to crack down on cell phone usage amongst

061the students um you know i consider myself i hate to compare it but i was on the front lines at the middle school up until the middle of october and i lost not that i was there to have any friends or fans but i i had a lot of people in the column that said mr kelly he's mean because he makes me put my cell phone away and you know i just think that's the policy that's got to be enforced and backed up from teacher to teacher and paradipera and anyone else that's in the school system that i know the policy is you know initially was to have them in their backpacks or in their lockers and some teachers have cell phone copies that their students put their cell phones in [Music] when they enter

062the classroom before they leave and i know there is some cell phone usage when they're using certain apps on their phone when they're taking uh you know practice quizzes and practice tests and and what have you um but i just think it's incumbent upon everybody in the school starting with the leadership down to to you know step up because these statistics are as we saw mind-boggling and very very uh depressing you know to see all these and yes we're making concerted efforts i just think you know what else we can do and uh i just wish we could step it up thank you i just want to briefly touch on the uh three levels of intervention mentioned in the presentation um as you mentioned we have a focus group of sorts it was the student

063government executive board along with the advisory panel which is a group of selected students in the school one of the major the major consensus was that in 2022 we really cannot deny the existence of social media and that students are going to use it so i really would suggest that we focus efforts on number three and make sure we're educating more about online safety um using a private account only interacting with people that you know because that's really the only one that i see as a practical um option i know we will all agree that with no social media those numbers would be better but i frankly don't think that's possible um and i just want and i also think that um by not denying social media you create more of an opportunity for students

064to come forward if they are having a problem versus if we treat it as a um taboo of sorts thank you thank you kyle i really think of this as a as the start right this is a starting point for us as a as a group as a team to move forward and and continue to talk about this very important topic i believe it's relevant and it's important for the mental health of our children in the community um so kevin keep it alive keep reminding us i know you're good at that and i know you'll uh you'll keep it uh as a life topic and i mean it would love when i say you're good at that you're good at reminding us and keeping us alert so um it's a starting point right so let's

065let's move from here forward and and make this a mission of us as a as a board to to uh you know hold hold the the administration accountable to what are they what are you doing about mental health because it's a very important topic to all of us and you know we i represent the parents when i say it is important and and i you know i agree with you kyle i don't want to deny the existence of social media it exists and you know we're on it i'm on it you're on it i know many other kids on it but um yeah that's the truth um terrible with snapchat but i'm good with others but like you know like so what are we what are we doing but before we get to that point

066of that's you know before we get to that high school level like well how we can do and how can we partner with the families to to do more and to do better and to educate i think educate is the key word here is how we can educate the community about the effect of that social media and the starting point is this presentation because i i see a relevancy of the the sharp increase of if you know of mental health situation and relevancy to social media starts if there are no other points i'd like to move to the next topic and i want to thank kevin and allison great great work really appreciate it and i know how passionate you both are about this topic next on our agenda is uh consent agenda yeah so

067if any of uh items you like to be removed for discussion or would you like to vote on the consent agenda as a whole no items to be removed ask for a motion to accept the consent agenda so move paragraph zero any second second thank you any discussion on any item all those in favor of accepting the consent agenda please raise your hand say aye aye all right that's the unanimous vote thank you consent agenda is accepted mr chairman real quick it wasn't a point of discussion just a point of uh privilege where the checks and bills is now much easier to uh to peruse and look at i appreciate if peter or whoever else was able to make that accommodation thank you thank you thank you uh marianne for i think marianna i talked

068about it we kind of figured out i think gary helped scan it to somebody scanned it right so thank you thank you dan for pointing that out uh much appreciated uh next item on our agenda is the report from the superintendent of schools dr reilly i move the floor to you yes thank you very much yeah i would like to to thank gary gary's the one that oriented those uh reports to make them more more easily viewed so there are three items on here the first one is the process for the selection of the high school principal um i sent you a detailed outline and as you know it is the superintendent's job to to make the hiring decisions in in the district we don't make hires by by committees but i think it's really

069important particularly well in in a lot of situations but when you're looking at the high school principle to include students parents staff members and i've invited some board members to to serve on the the committees too the ideas of is to get information from those those constituent groups and then to use those to help format the the interview questions and any other activities we might want to do with the potential candidates and then during the interview process to also get feedback from students parents staff and and board members in this case to help help the superintendent with the decision to to to move forward i know there's been some question about the timing it's very likely we'll have one or more internal applicants and if there are that that could cause a domino effect and

070the longer we put that off the less chance we have of a pool for those replacement positions we've always tried to to have any kind of interviews or any kind of selection process start earlier than other districts so we get the top candidates we've done a teacher retirement notice incentive so we know in in early january february who's going to leave so we can get those announcements out and do our hiring in march in april to start in july and we absolutely need to do the same thing for administrative positions so that's why the timeline may seem tight to you but um really it it's so if there are domino effects we have the best candidates filling those positions too um the other thing uh i planned on meeting with groups of students staff and

071parents because of the covet situation that may need to change to to surveys asking for qualifications experience etc so i'll be working on that next week and kyle i'd like to call on you to help me with the getting ideas from student groups as to uh what you would like to see in your in the next principle i'll also do the same again with parents and staff in putting together uh interview questions and those kinds of things um the second item is the covid update um i have quite a bit of information on this i do want to thank you know our staff members our our transportation department and thank the board for your support we've been able to open our schools um it hasn't been easy it's not been as smooth as anyone would

072like but we have been able to uh to keep things going we just heard today that their montville and perhaps a couple other local districts are going to have to close because of staffing issues we have not had to do that yet and we hope we not with that trend of our students going from 46 positives five days ago down to 17 today we think we're headed headed in the right direction um i have shared with you that also every day or every couple days the number of vacancies we have in in staffing um i sent two copies of very interesting reports some data that by week it shows for for the teaching staff and for the paris staff that's in the back of that budget packet that was sent out today the number of

073absences the number of requests for substitutes and then we call it the fill rate how many of those requests for substitutes were able to be filled and you could see on the teachers it's been between 40 and 50 and what that means is if we have 30 teachers out we've been able to fill with with substitutes you know 12 to 15 of those that's not perfect but it's but it's been able we the principals have done a great job doing that even filling them themselves having counselors reading specialists interventionists and others feel in the difference so our classrooms are still running the concern are the peras obviously we had about an average of a 10 fill rate so if we had you know 20 pairs out on a particular day we've only been able to

074fill you know a couple by two of those positions it's really it's really been tough um but and we've done we've raised salaries we've done we've done things that we feel uh might help keep our current employees working we've raised our teacher substitute rate up to 125 so we're right at the top of the of the comparable districts around here i must say that even though we did that we haven't had an influx of applications nobody has this is a nationwide issue but i think by doing that it told our current subs we value you and so they're they're staying on so that that's been very important there was a suggestion let's raise that to 150 you know putting money incentives into either hiring um it doesn't seem to have worked i i'll give you

075a couple examples some other districts have provided like thousand dollar incentives to to to hire certain positions and just in in anecdotal discussions with other superintendents they don't see an influx in in applications and i hear this from even our business friends people having are having trouble hiring everywhere and and putting extra bonus money into that does a couple the other example is first student offered a 5 000 signing bonus and so far they've had zero applications so that tells you it's not the money it's people are either interested in working or or not we try to make it make our classrooms make our schools um as comfortable as possible and trying to keep the people that we have going but um the other thing that i've heard for those districts who have had a

076an incentive say for a para position is the the current employees say wait a minute if you have this money hey we're coming to work pay us the money don't give it to somebody else just coming in so i mean there's morale issues there's financial issues for us simply to raise the teachers sub rate from 125 to 150 for the rest of this year would cost us between twenty and thirty thousand dollars that we don't have budgeted um so you know there's a lot of we're doing what we can the real way to help help us fill these positions is to relax the qualifications we've worked with uh senator summers and representative howard i've sent letters to the governor other superintendents have copied that letter and sent a so so we can have terrors that

077don't have to go through such qualifications that even substitute teachers don't need the qualifications that they used to have had i know that again senator summers and representative howard have suggested using the connecticut national guard for both drivers and teachers and other positions that's not been met with acceptance by the governor and others we're looking at ways to to get other types of individuals than regular people wanting to work particularly in the para positions the sub teachers and the bus driver situations um but again we're in competition with everyone else and other school districts are closing because they don't have the same type of uh of the sub base that that we have i would like to say uh this hap this afternoon an announcement went out until the board received that to all of

078our parents that as of tuesday we're adding back a number of bus routes and again i would love to be able to go back to where we were we're not quite there yet we don't have the drivers no one has to drive no district has the driver but we're able to add the equivalent of two full bus routes district-wide so these students that have had to walk excessive distances to to get to a hub according to peter working with first student the most a student would have to walk is about a third of a mile and most of the the walks are a lot less than that so it's not perfect parents have been driving their students to school which really helps it keeps the bus ridership down it allows us to open up some

079of these other stops for uh stops for students so they don't have to walk so far we'll continue to try to add back but we're we're kind of at our limit right now but at least we can make a big dent in the issue starting tuesday so those parents will receive the new stock the list of bus stops tomorrow and be able to plan for tuesday but we're very pleased with where we're able to to go with that the other last thing with the uh with with the uh kovid we're picking up a new supply of test kits i believe we get 15 more cases along with hundreds of new of masks we'll divide those up for we have certain test kits for parents for their students and we have some for staff members who

080need them and we'll have enough masks at each site so we can supply all of our staff and any students that need masks with with with free masks so we're doing what we can to keep schools open it looks like we're going to be you know gradually making progress with the with the bus situation i'll keep you updated uh it's usually a daily or every other day report as to where we are with all this um but um we're pleased to be able to to keep school open with the cooperation of our parents our our bus company and our wonderful teaching staff so before i go to the jury does any questions on the first two items dr riley i understood that the governor i think it was either today or yesterday gave a directive

081to bring back retirees from five years back has that impacted your hiring at all have you had any sort of you know we talked about that we haven't received the one request from a retiree and that's that's common knowledge now i mean to retire we've hired retirees either as subs or part-time we've already done anyone interested we probably have four or five teachers that are retired that are either working part-time or and if they want to work more that's great we have not seen any kind of increase in our applications or interests with that with that move other questions i have a question about the first item the principal vacancy uh i'll start off by saying that the hiring of a principal is one of the main responsibilities of the superintendent of course and typically

082the board of ed plays an extremely limited role if any role at all in that type of decision um however these times aren't typical we're in the process of selecting a new superintendent so looking at the plan set forth uh in our agenda here i'm appreciative that there's board representation um however i wonder why more specifically there is no consideration being given to our eventual new superintendent um because according to the principal search timeline for example final interviews will take place early march according to our timeline for our superintendent search provided to us by dr ozga uh we should have our finalists for our new superintendent by mid-march officially signed end of march but we should have one selected mid-march and we are uh we're right on schedule with that timeline so far um and

083then further um as board liaison to dr ozga and the superintendent search i asked her opinion on this matter specifically whether or not it'd be normal or acceptable for a selected superintendent about to start a job to participate in a principal search and she said that's totally normal so given that selecting building principles is one of the most important jobs for a superintendent and given that the timeline for our superintendent search has us selecting our new superintendent by mid-march and given that the current principal search timeline concludes early march um i'd like to better understand how it's not in the board of ed's in the district's best interest to do everything in our power to merely extend the principal search by two to three weeks even to give our new superintendent a say in the

084process somebody has to be responsible for that selection if you want the new superintendent to be then that person should be involved with all the meetings with the staff and the interview questions and and the entire process if you're asking you know you want me to do that process like i typically would do and then at the very end have a candidate that you're talking to about a contract starting in july you how would you you want that person to make the selection or me or i mean if that person's not involved with any of the process because they can't be because you don't want to wait until june and july to make that selection then who would be responsible for for that individual at this point i'm your superintendent you put the timeline for

085that person to start in july i just see that could be an awkward situation for the new person too they haven't been involved with any of the any of the process they don't know any of the issues with parents and staff and all that and you're asking them to walk in and on what april 1st and have have a say i just don't see how that would be helpful well just my responsibility i guess as board liaison to dr ozgo was to ask her opinion whether or not it would be acceptable or considered normal for a superintendent select if you will to participate in a process like this she suggests that it's normal i feel it's my responsibility to share that with the board and it seems like the timelines are pretty close and uh

086i don't see a problem with going through the entire process finding principal candidates and giving a superintendent uh a selected superintendent two three four candidates just to get their opinion but that's all would that person then make the decision and be responsible or would you want me to be i mean somebody the way the system's set up is you have somebody responsible and that person makes the decision so if you want someone else to do it then we should look at the timeline and let the new person do it after july but i don't that's going to be up very very awkward so so dr riley could could the new superintendent be i cooperate with you and just obviously not make the final decision because you've worked up to that but could they be a

087part of it just to hear your thinking see how it has evolved and um that you could incorporate his his thinking can you see how that could possibly happen if all worked out it could be just fine if it doesn't if there's a conflict um it it may not work so i i don't know i don't know what the uh who's going to make that determination you're saying i think you're all saying i'm still the superintendent until june 30th so i need to make that decision but to include the new superintendent like like we are board members if couple board members will be involved with committees and have a say as to qualifications and they prefer this type of individual if that's what you're saying then uh we can think about that but i can

088just see it causing some some issues if things aren't working like we think they should but that's a you know if you want me to to look at a way to do that we can we can but i don't recommend it i'm of uh the opinion that the new superintendent will have a certain philosophy and vision for the for the town school system and i think that person the charter school the i haven't been able to think of the word that the high school is like the the showpiece school of the system as far as you know accomplishing that vision as you know the kids start in kindergarten and make their way up through high school and graduate that the new superintendent in order to really get their vision philosophy and um vision accomplished i

089think should have a major role major stake in appointing uh the next principle i appreciate the fact that you reached out and um involved some board members and i know how the the early incentive had worked out as far as the teachers go um that worked out fantastic and i commend you for that but i think with the um the new principal i would love to see uh the new superintendent have her um hand involved one way or the other in the decision making whether we have to wait till she comes on board full-time or uh you know is able to work you know hand-in-hand with you over the the remaining months of uh your tenure so i'm in favor of the new superintendent having the ultimate decision on the obviously we're not handcuffing you

090now but you know you have the authority now to do that but i would be in favor of letting the new superintendent do that one of the problems with waiting for the new superintendent you're going to you're going to push off the hiring until a less opportune time you're not going to get as good candidates or less likely to get as good as many candidates in the fall if you do the search then um it's just normal cycle people are uh their contracts end at the end of june and they're more inclined to leave and they're looking to leave and um in terms of you know involving the super the new superintendent before uh in the earlier part i think there's an issue possibly there with i mean they're already doing their job somewhere else

091and to expect them to be able to put the amount of time in that they might need to to participate in the search earlier i i don't know i mean um i see downsides i mean i see i see obviously there's upsides too but i see a downside as well as the putting off the the hiring um you know in in a normal situation the new superintendent would inherit uh the principal anyway it wouldn't have a say in it so i i don't this is just sort of a strange fluky thing that the two are happening together um and i sort of favor doing the hiring as soon as possible um and if we want if we if we have a new person which we don't even know we will because we don't know how

092that search will go um it's possible we won't have something in place um which is also possibly true of the principal search but i would be inclined to run the principal search as soon as possible and if we do have a candidate who's willing to you know look in on the process i think that's fine but i think we should try to move ahead with it as soon as possible from uh from from right now i gotta agree with uh kevin dan and heidi um i think the new superintendent we should look into a way where they can be involved in um picking uh the new principal or helping to pick the new principal because i mean they're gonna be working with them uh hand in hand for years to come so i think it's

093definitely something we should take a look into getting the new superintendent involved in the process and just to clarify i'm not suggesting that we push off the principal search outside of maybe extending the final two to three weeks that's all i'm suggesting i think we should go ahead find candidates do the whole thing as outlined but the timelines between the principal search and superintendent search are pretty close and they could certainly overlap at the end i think what i heard and the word that dan was looking for is the flagship so the high school is the flagship school we have in our district and um i think the the the ask dr riley is not to stop the search and i don't think um the ask is that the decision is not yours i think

094what i heard i heard originally the thought process that was laid out is that we start the search now uh this is a flagship we appreciate the involvement of the community and and the board in the search and this is you offered it to us and and i shared with you prior to this meeting that uh thank you for uh involving us and we you recognize the important role of that principle managing running that flagship school um however i think the ask is towards the end if we if we do have and that's that's the if that craig is bringing to the table because i i brought the same if to the conversation prior if we have a selected candidate for the superintendent is uh use them as a consultant as part of your uh

095cabinetry and and you know have that have the opportunity to discuss and review the final two candidates with that person and and um use that opportunity to kind of like use them as a consultant um you know ultimately uh the decision has to rely in the hand of one person right so and we recognize that and i personally recognize that but i think the ask here is to um you know kind of like if we have a superintendent at that point or we feel like it towards that march first timeline right where you are saying this is the timeline you're giving yourself we're saying if we and it's very close to the timeline we're giving ourselves is to use that use that person as a consultant to you and in that final process that's that's

096the ask i heard originally and and i kind of like uh suggest is you know that the the final the final control is in your hand because you are our superintendent and we uh support you in that mission in finding us the right candidate you've been an incredible leader in finding a brilliant candidates to work in the stonington public school and we believe and continue to believe in your talent in that we just ask that you involve that new superintendent to be if we find that superintendent to be by that timeline into that decision process yeah i'm okay with that i i heard a couple board members say that the new person should make that decision and i hear what you're saying uh chairman that the decision is mine in consultation with someone if you've

097already selected and i'm okay with the latter if you're asking the new person to actually make that decision then you need to wait till july that's all i would say i'm i'm okay with consulting with the person talking with them sharing the rationale for the recommendation and see what he or she has to say i i don't think we can afford to wait until july that's my opinion i mean we you know like you said there could be internal candidates for that flagship school and if that if there is an internal candidate that could create a domino effect and if we create a dominant effect we might have to bring somebody from outside to that position then we are into 2023 and you all have to recognize that fact in your ask so you know

098i i i think if you are all in agreement we you know we can go back to dr riley he can come back with a um kind of like a scrub proposal that include that final piece i'll do that thank you i saw i saw not so i i guess you're all agreeing with me i'm not you know okay sarah yeah you're good all right uh dr riley next uh item on here i actually want to add uh on on the on the covet part um i wanted to see i wouldn't want to be i and i i want to make sure we're uh getting uh prorated um by the bus company uh for you know they're doing less services now i i want to you know recognize the the staff and administration for working

099hard to make sure they're still school and everything like that but i'd like to if we can um you know take a look at the negotiations with the bus company and make sure that you know there's some sort of um refund to them not delivering the same services i understand that we got covered going on but i wanted to see you know what that entailed um and i also was curious i know you say we're going to get a few more stops on tuesday uh do they have a projection of you know with people coming back when we'll be back to full uh staff i know it's kind of hard to tell but i've just been getting some concerns from people in the community about uh you know the pickups and where they have to

100drop their kids off and and the walks home and all that this increase in uh in stops next week is based on the the covert related returns of the of the current drivers for us to to add further they're going to need to fill some vacancies and again they're at their at five thousand dollars they're doing they're trying to pull from other bus companies they're doing all these things and for us to move further we're gonna need them to hire you know these are based on vacancies i'll get you the exact number how many vacancies where we are um to your first question gary did a great job in negotiating the new contract when last year i guess it was and now we're paying per route so there will be less cost um i don't

101have that again tonight because we're still you know how many routes are there kind of thing but there there should be some kind of savings in the bus routes for this in the bus in the transportation cost for this year so we'll get that to you we'll bring that to the finance committee chris that you're that you're chairing next time how's that yeah thanks doctor i appreciate that for the next report the next item is the jerry before you move on i had a covered question as well talking about the staffing levels and and thanks for the um information that you provided as far as the vacancies the fills and the percentage um and the numbers you have i know the the first uh transportation the five thousand dollars was uh for them to grab

102cdl drivers from who were already licensed cdl drivers and i know they offer paid cdl training and licensing um it hasn't worked uh but when we talked about the peras and the subs and other vacancies in the school system i think we started out with uh existing vacancies already in those things i i know that one of the questions i asked is how many people do we have on the on our sub list that are just on the list and and never volunteer and have we reached out to them to find out why they don't sign up to sub for stonington are they subbing in other towns are they content in other towns um and i know uh you said that you know our 125 is comparable to other districts um but i think we

103we we haven't done enough obviously because we're still in the same situation um we're in the same situation every january february in the school system where we can't find subs um we're in the same situation i think year-round we can't find enough paras and um i don't know if we've i i know we haven't done enough to to resolve those issues and if money throwing money at the situation resolve it do we need to put a sign up in front of the high school or in front of the uh central office like the the gentleman in rhode island did the story i heard earlier today um to attract people to come work in stonington um we haven't done enough and one of my suggestions earlier this week to the board was that you know if

104everybody else is paying 125 let's go to 150 is that enough i know of subs that they restrict themselves only to um teach in elementary school pe what can we do to incentivize that person to to teach other classes in the elementary school or to teach pe classes at the other levels i know of uh pairs that are intended to leave for various reasons can we throw an incentive at them to say hey you know you stay on for the rest of the year come june 20th you know it's gonna be worth a thousand dollar um stay on incentive we we need to do something we can't have yes we're getting the kids to school and we're doing the hubs and we're doing that but even when they get to school the um the pairs

105that are supposed to be working with their assignments are being pulled to substitute teach reading specialists that are supposed to be doing their reading specialties are being pulled to substitute teach regular teenagers are giving up their planning periods in order to substitute teach and we're putting multiple classrooms in the common area at the high school to have because we don't have enough uh subs and personnel to watch them in the classrooms and they're being monitored in a group um we haven't done enough and that's why i suggested and i will propose tonight under new business to do some financial incentive um to encourage people to come to stonington to courage subs to you know they only like to work one or two days a week well let's you know if you work 75 percent of

106the remaining school year this is the brass ring at the end um for paris the new pair is in existing paris to say hey don't leave the don't leave the district stay here come to stonington this is what you're going to get um we need to outdo the other districts in order to to have a better fill rate dan would i just came from uh this morning from a learn um regional uh meeting and all the districts seem to be having the same problem and i i really think it's it's a combination of uh covet absences and a shortage of people um and so i don't again uh everyone is tr is trying to incentivize people that come and work from them and it hasn't seemed to have worked i just don't think um it

107doesn't hurt to try out there to do the jobs uh especially as i said you have a shortage of workers to begin with and then more out through covet so i i just don't know i'm not saying we shouldn't try something but i'm i have some skepticism about if there's anything we can do that's reasonable that will really have a significant impact again as i said i heard from many other districts they're all everyone seems to be having this problem all right i think dr riley you can move to the uh jerry desmond memorial yes you heard the support from several board members already and from dane and others this is a wonderful opportunity to recognize a very special person i know talking to mark and alicia and brian at the at the high school

108they all love this idea i fully support it i think it's a it would be a it's some somewhere where people will see his name all the time and be able to remember what a fine person he was and what a support for our community in our school that he was you saw the the proposal um if i get the nod we'll move forward with it um i i think it's just a wonderful way to recognize a very special person so i would support this and ask for your approval to move forward so i'm going to ask for a motion to approve uh the jerry desmond memorial as well moved right second second second by chris and uh any discussion on it any questions i would just add that you know this the way the

109structure looks because of fire access and it may may change a bit but we'll certainly make it a lovely lovely um memorial for him and and dan is you know he's he's still with us here if you had any questions also i appreciate you mr lewis for being here uh hanging in there but if there's no questions or discussion all those in favor please raise your hand say aye hi um i think that was unanimous so the motion passes the board of education approves a sortington public school to erect that memorial for mr desmond's late mr desmond thank you next item on our agenda we're still with you dr riley with the 2022-2023 budget review sir yes you have received the uh the budget documents there's two documents for your review this evening the first

110one is the narrative that i always supply i've kept some items in there we have new board members four new board members so i wanted to make sure that you were able to see some of the past [Music] strategies we've used to make sure that we're providing for the needs of our students and our staff but also with that conservative impact on our taxpayers on the second page is the historical perspective um i was asked to include the original superintendent proposal what the board of ed approved and then what the board of finance eventually approved and you'll see um and i want to point out last year started out really high because of the pandemic we thought we were going to have much higher health care costs that was the impact of that one but

111it ended up being 2.5 and we were able to accommodate everything throughout the year with that the four-year average that have been approved by the board of finance is less than one percent you can see that 0.95 the proposal uh for this coming year from uh from me is 2.38 we tried to keep that as low as possible so if the board of ed and board of finance and the referendum approves that amount we'll be able to meet our educational needs and still maintain a low average 1.24 over the last five years i've included some discussion here about uh impacts and identified areas of need i would like to point out there and we'll get to it in the in the budget presentation when we get to the spreadsheets but there are a couple couple

112personnel positions that are really important for us and those are addressed in the uh five identified areas of need but we've had and typically we present the budget tonight and then the board has a chance to think about it over the weekend get any questions to farook and to me i'd ask by wednesday so we can answer them next thursday night but the other thing we've always done at the at the second meeting is give you more detail on the staff because we are we're a person institution everything we do 80 something percent is salaries and benefits so when we look at reduction in in certain positions or additions in certain positions i think we need to have more of a discussion about that so i'll be bringing more information about that next week the

113other thing tomorrow you'll receive these two documents again plus a spreadsheet that as we go through as gary and i go through the line by line tonight we'll be making some comments about certain things we'll attach all those comments to the spreadsheet so you'll be able to look at line whatever it is and you'll see what what we're talking about tonight so you don't if you want to certainly take notes that's why we gave you the hard copy but you'll have all of the comments attached to this spreadsheet uh arriving tomorrow to you in addition to that you'll have a breakdown a line by line for every department and every school so you're going to have another pages of line by line broken down by department and by school so you'll receive all of that

114tomorrow we'll we'll bring that to your homes and we'll also scan it and send it to you so you have more information and you'll be able to look at all that and go through it and if you have any questions again we have basically you know five four or five weeks to to to answer your questions as you know next week we'll be talking about different positions and in declining enrollment and other kinds of needs and that will generate more questions for the following meeting um but with with that um the narrative simply gives you a background and some highlights as to where we are and then we get into the spreadsheet and again i'll ask gary to start this out we'll be going through the spreadsheet line by line and talking about increases and

115why their increases are decreases and tomorrow you'll get the same spreadsheet on the right there'll be a column with the comments that we make tonight so you'll you'll know why we went up or down with a certain item so with that um let's i'll ask gary to come on and we'll look at the at the spreadsheet that you have in front of you well thank you dr riley and good evening board of education members i'm going to share what you received today that we delivered to you and so we'll we'll go page by page obviously we'll start with the administrative salary you see an increase of just over 59 000 which reflects the administrator's contract and other administrator contracts in the district the next item is the largest wage item which is teacher salaries you

116actually see a decrease of just over 428 000 this is the result of five teachers being reduced in this budget two at the high school two at the middle school and one teacher at west fine street school also included in here though our teachers under actually excluded our teachers under the yes or two funds so we've been able to save some money by using sr2 funds as well other areas included in teachers wages just so you know are things such as guidance and longevity payments extra days for guidance and also some teachers receive advanced degrees after the start of the year so we've included some funds to pay for those advanced degrees as well secretary salaries up just under 24 000 that has to do with conditions of employment and the secretarial salary contract maintenance

117custodials is up just under 71 000 this is per the and the maintenance and custodial contract plus some extra hours as we've just been going through with vacancies unfilled on an average day there are anywhere from three to five custodians and maintenance personnel out in the district on either vacation sick time or personal time that meant that some be buildings won't be as clean as they should be on a daily basis so we've included some extra time and some overtime in order to make sure these buildings are kept up to the cloneness that you expect them to be up to uh and on the other hand just as we've mentioned for pairers and teachers it's very difficult to find substitute custodians as well so that's what some of the reasons for the increase nursing salaries

118again just according to the nursing contract no new positions all positions are in here full time and part time appear educators behavior tech salaries and also van drivers are included in the next line item just over 192 000 during the negotiations uh surveys were provided that showed that the para educators were paid much lower for the number of years that they had been employed as a matter of fact some of the personnel were on the first step for well over five years and so when that was brought to the attention of the negotiating committee we raised some of those salaries on the from the first step and throughout the whole salary schedule for paraeducators so that represents the largest increases there non-certified professionals this includes occupational and physical therapists and the technology department we added

119one new position in the technology department of a district systems administrator this was added as of january 1st in this current year one of the the biggest reason was this position was added to monitor day-to-day operations and also to monitor cyber security and so we've included that for half of the year and obviously it's included in next year's budget as for for the whole year uh the next two or three line items you see no increase for sub teachers sub-secretary salaries a smaller increase not a large increase for part-time maintenance custodial salaries no increases for substitute nurses substitute paris salaries in the added teaching this includes items under the teachers contracts such as extracurricular and added teaching it includes added teaching in the curriculum during the summer summer school and special education summer school and

120we've also increased the summer school expenditures to reflect the need to offer students additional time to catch up for lost in-person learning in 2021 so we increased the summer school expenditures here in order to provide what we did during this past summer the other increases are minimal for general overtime for maintenance and custodians the next slide looks at various items the first slide opeb means other post-employment benefits we haven't budgeted for that in the last few years if there's money left over at the end of the year we try to help the town out here the next item as you can see is health insurance increase of just over 189 thousand dollars this is based upon an initial review by the district's health benefit consultants and just so you know we've also applied from the

121health benefit reserve account 1.5 million dollars in order to keep the increase here at a reasonable rate for those of you who don't know this year we used just under five hundred thousand dollars from the health benefit reserve account to try to keep the health insurance increases to a minimum the next three items you see no increase flex plan life insurance long-term disability the town pension uh the majority of the expenditures is based upon now an actuarial study that's done by the town of stonington and this is for employees in the defined benefits plan any new employee however goes into the defined contribution plan which is like a 401k in a private business otherwise the defined benefit plan is based on a percentage of salaries so anybody new is in the defined contribution plan social

122security fica is all based upon wages we make a direct correlation between wages in these two accounts workers compensation is up a little bit 9 000 again this is all based on salaries and the classification of those under workers comp what i mean by that is for instance maine is a custodial the rate is much higher than the teachers rate so there's different classifications in there we have no increase in unemployment course credit as well and retirement no increase whatsoever the next is student enrichment really no difference in the upcoming year professional development what we're looking for there is that we're looking at things such as curriculum budget includes focus on foundational skills early reading instruction for the high school safe future services and dei technical support and student engagement professional learning at all levels

123and we have a new request for cmea i believe that's connecticut user education association for assessment for professional development for two teachers pupil services athletic trainers uh the decrease here really is in purchase professional services to assist in evaluating and consulting for student programs in special education uh some of those funds are being used from sr2 funds sr2 funds also has a subset for special education all by itself and so we're using some of those funds force sr2 special education to offset these pupil services the professional technical service account for up just over twenty five thousand dollars there's a long list of items that's included in here such as asbestos lead hazardous waste training air monitoring final panel fire panel testing hvac services software upgrades elevator testing it also includes costs for printer copyright releases

124also includes accounting services auditing services our software for financial payroll and human resource services and bank fees and the technology department has software such as cyber managed services snap nurse software frontline central human resources software those are new software and they've scaled back a little bit for software such as stormwind parent square and carbon black endpoint so there's a whole list of items that's under professional technical services referees just what it sounds like the referees usually get a little bit of a bump each year so we don't we don't employ them in the sense it's a contracted service and the ciac sets the rates for referees on all levels and finally the police and fire services we have increase in fees for both police and fire and we also needed additional funds for the thanksgiving

125football game which will be played at the high school this year in the pivot cup which will also be played at the high school this year last year was at westerly we rotate every other year the next slide you see the first as public utilities going down 72 000 we've decreased this account over the last few years this current year as a lot of you know we've made energy efficiency improvements especially led lighting at both at the district office stonington middle school and stonington high school and we've also retrofitted the outside lights on the high school playing fields in addition the generation of electricity will go up very little we have a new contract for that and went up just a few mils so we we were happy to get that new contract so we

126expect savings this year for implementing the energy efficiency lighting it will take about a year to determine though how much savings there will be and so we believe this decrease is a good starting point for the decrease and one of the other things that we had to include we couldn't pay for all of the energy lighting and so uh eversource gives us a loan it's not a lot of money uh a zero interest loan over four years so this is included especially at the high school we weren't able to cover all the costs uh for the high school repairs and maintenance this is preventative maintenance and repair for all buildings you know such as the heating ventilation irrigances conditioning phone system support contracts repair of technology department software and hardware and also repairs to equipment

127not related to facilities at each school rentals you see basically no increase there regular transportation just over 87 000 again based upon the contract we have with first student and also [Music] since we're going to offer hopefully uh summer school again in the numbers that we did this past summer we've included 40 000 to transport those students during the summer that's not included in the first student contract that's always additional costs so we've included 40 000 in the upcoming year for that special ed transportation you'll see is down we estimated that those special needs students who need to be transported to outside schools and sites will be diminished in the upcoming year we think there will be fewer students who need to be transported and we also will be doing a little bit more in-house

128for special education transportation as well uh so we we figure that we can save just over the 24 thousand dollars uh field trips again it's uh athletic and also field trips for dean's middle school and west vine school not a large increase again based on a small increase with first student contract as well there's basically no increase for property liability insurance the communications is an increase in technology department budget which includes increased costs for telecommunications application software absences software and human resources software so we're looking at increases there advertising printing and binding no increases tuition large decrease almost 343 thousand dollars this is based upon the analysis that there will be fewer outside high cost special needs students will still have outside place students but we've had a couple of very high cost students in

129the last two or three years we don't believe we'll have those costs in the upcoming year and we we believe we won't have as many students outplaced however that can change in a day uh you never know exactly on any given day while special needs students might move into the district or those identified as special needs students already in the district so it's always the target that moves from day to day and year to year field trips and away game transportation not a large increase there just over five thousand dollars again based upon where we're going and a small increase in the contract with first student property line i'm sorry uh conferences thirty three hundred dollars uh technology is looking to send some of their people to keep abreast of software and especially cyber security

130happenings i think that's very important as to reason for doing that what happened with us this past year so we want to keep abreast of that in the future next is supply accounts not a large no increase basically not instructional instructional supplies some materials have decreased but the following are showing increases we have keyboarding program an interactive science program we move this from consumables to here we have platform for k through 2 to access assignments especially reading we have new standardized testing for math at grade 9 and we've upgraded to eureka squared k8 mathematics programming and this is a forty five thousand dollar cost to do this so some have gone down but this eureka squared k mathematics program is driving the increase uh district tech supplies there's no increasing it's a small budget uh

131maintenance supplies we're seeing an increase of just under 16 000 uh we we're seeing an increase because of inflation and also because of the supply chain issues so we're projecting about a six percent increase because of those two things that are going on now uh transportation fuel uh just under twenty six thousand dollars the cost of diesel fuel has risen substantially in the past year uh currently we're projecting the cost per gallon of about two dollars and 65 cents a gallon versus what we pay this year 1.63 a gallon so we had a we had a bid that was good for two years and so we're projecting about a 2.65 gallon right now that can change uh upwards or downwards but right now that's where we think they will come in instructional bid supplies nope

132no change classroom books heat energy let's go to heat energy first again the cost per gallon for heating oil and more so for natural gas is projected to rise substantially i've seen some entities projecting an increase of between 38 to 48 increase in natural gas i think today we're looking at an increase of 14 just today so you compound that over a year going on 18 months again we'll be looking at that in the next two three four weeks to see if we can get a a better estimate on that but right now that's our best guess classroom books we see an increase of just under twelve thousand dollars we have i high interest books for classroom libraries now we move to k5 classroom books we have additional books for grade seven english language arts

133grade 8 social studies and encores global learning book in a day we have worldly wise grade 7 and new algebra 2 3 year license so that's driving that increase no increase in library media and really professional development you see a decrease in new equipment instructional this is mostly coming from the curriculum budget we spent quite a amount of money the last two to three years for musical instruments at the elementary and middle schools and so that's decreased in the upcoming year the non-instructional increase of 4200 is for buffing and burn burnishing machines for maintenance and custodian at the high school middle school see a decrease of 5 900 for replacement equipment less science and phys ed equipment at the middle school and the increase of over nine thousand dollars for non-instruction this is being driven

134by an increase of 9 300 for a new gymnastic floor for athletics at the high school it's in dire need of replacement the gymnastics floor dues and fees 9 300 um that is for things such as our alternative route to certification which is a new program sponsored by crec and also for dues and fees such as national association of secondary school principals connecticut association of schools associations for supervision and curriculum development knee ask learn mystic chamber and other memberships and the final one is for district dues and fees uh the largest increase here is adding it's called dark trace antigena email filtering it's to do with cyber security that's the largest driving factor there and so you see the increase for the subtotal there of just over 315 000 and then we go to our

135revenues as that goes to the general fund as you saw we're projecting special education tuition to go down we receive a special education except excess cost grant from the state and so when we project a decrease in tuition we also project a decrease in the state grant and it's an inverse relationship when revenue goes down it actually increases the budget because now we're getting less so we have to increase the budget for this the next lined item increase is 40 000 again it all goes back to the excess cost grant for outside placement so if we have less outside placements we have less transportation costs and so we have to increase the budget because we're getting less revenue for this and gate receipts remains the same so you see a budget increase there of just

1361.55 percent and as dr radley had said we've included some new positions uh decision package for a night custodian decision packages for buses for after school clubs for the elementary level uh we've included elementary clubs this is really just six new positions at 500 a piece three at dean's mill three at west vine we've included more funds for athletic trainer uh this is needed more and more for athletics and so uh we're looking at to increase the athletic trainer amount and the amount of hours that they perform for our athletes as dr riley mentioned in this narrative a human resources director and a small amount of money for audio visual support so that it can be broadcast live basically at the school level uh so if there's concerts or other things going on this is

137for an audio tech to go over and broadcast broadcast that live so bottom line you can see it 912 000. 2.38 so thank you for your time i appreciate it gary let me uh just chime in for a second a couple things that we'd like you to be aware of particularly for our new board members when you look at special ed tuition and the special ed transportation as gary mentioned that those numbers can change uh if for instance the non-public school tuition could be a hundred thousand dollars or more if we have a student that's at a private placement a non-public school an nps placement and they live out of state and they happen to move to stonington we assume that cost and without any say it's just something the way that's the way the

138federal the federal law works so i just wanted you to be aware of that that can go up or down and uh we'll keep you informed throughout the year through the finance committee if those numbers change the other thing i'd like you to be aware of is we have what's called the school or the site formula money each principal receives a base amount plus an additional amount uh for every student so the larger school will get a little bit more uh because of the of the enrollment and when you saw all those lines for uh instructional materials and library books and basically that a lot of that page is based on the principal's preference and for their needs whether it's you know xerox paper or library books or equipment those are up to the up

139to the site principles to supply teachers with what they need the other thing i'd like to to just mention this this goes back to the the substitutes the teacher substitutes we do pay we i implemented a program this past year we call it building substitutes and what we've done we've in because we've had some issues in every like every other district with uh substitutes throughout the year we've hired a full-year substitute we have about 10 of these positions either building substitutes or long-term substitutes for for maternity leave etc and i think we have around 10 of those positions right now but each each school has building sub or building subs and those are like permanent teachers permanent substitutes we've hired for the entire year to help with these issues of just not having someone available

140and those individuals are paid the base rate of a beginning teacher of 226 dollars a day so we are paying a number of our substitutes a lot more than the almost double um what we pay regular substance i wanted to point that out to you and then lastly on this decision page we asked each of our department chair our department managers and our principals if they have a particular special need to uh propose that with the rationale so they send that into gary and then gary and i we look at that we talk to the principal and we decide okay this you know we can put off for a while this we really think is important so the this last page are issues that came from the various uh principals or department uh managers the

141knight custodian this is similar to that building sub we are always short a custodian before a sick or vacancy or you know vacation time and and to keep things clean and safe peter is suggesting and recommending we hire one full-time it's night custodian but it's really a floating kind of position that can go fill in for other custodians who are out across the district and that's really important for us we don't have um like we like most positions we don't have a whole list of subs for custodians that want to come in so this would help fill those gaps the next two are from uh from jen and kathy legardi elementary we want to bring back clubs and and transportation for our elementary schools we had to eliminate some of those because of the pandemic

142and this would help them add some programs back for our for our elementary students the athletic trainer is something that i've been talking to mark and brian about for a number of years this puts the athlete we've always contracted with a uh either an organization or an individual to provide athletic training help at the high school and we've all we've had issues with who's filling and when can they fill etc what this does it moves that position to an employee position and yes it's it's costly it's more than we have right now but it provides for the safety of our athletes at the practices and at the competitions that we really really need to have the next item is this a human resources director this is something i've been talking to the board about since

143i've been here for for over nine years and i know uh frank tedesco and i we had a number of talks about about the needs for someone to coordinate our human resources efforts right now we have the the responsibilities for hr are distributed across the district office and we need absolutely need to have an individual in charge of that that can organize that can deal with some of the issues that we're bringing up tonight with recruitment with retention um what you know how to how to advertise how to keep records for evaluations when we had issues with uh someone that needs to be evaluated we've had a fragmented hr department for forever quite frankly and organizations of our size need to have a structure we're a people organization and we have instruction and we have

144people and we need to have this uh this is really important that we've been able to cut put this in the budget for the first time that i've been here but i know that it's something that you know one or one mistake and we're going to be in trouble this would help us with all of the personnel issues that we have and again finally the auto visual support is a stipend position that would help put school-based videos online like we do with something like the board meeting tonight so that is that's our first take at the uh at the budget we can certainly answer some questions tonight we typically because it's late we typically hold off and ask you to take a look at the all of gary's comments will be attached to these lines

145and you'll get that tomorrow along with each department so like peter and chris and gary all of us you'll see all those break down line by line plus each school line by line so you'll be able to uh analyze where we are with that so that's our initial presentation tonight we look forward to next time next thursday talking more about the the staffing positions the the five teacher reductions and how how we're dealing with that and the hr position and any other questions that you have between now and wednesday i just got i got a quick question for you dr riley um what base the decision to eliminate five teachers and and what teachers are are getting eliminated we'll talk about the specifics next time it really has to do with the declining enrollment you

146know what happens is uh and and i'll explain that more next time i think you'll be able to see that for instance at the high school there's two at the high school two at the middle school the two at the highest we've reduced we kept the same level for programming reasons at the high school and then you reduce and you try to keep that level of programming so you don't have the same number of students signing up for for certain courses and so we maintain and i'll explain this next week we're maintaining the program options for our students it's just so when you're down 100 students or whatever it is you don't have that many students taking spanish or taking chemistry you're taking english so you're able to reduce the number of classes in different

147areas and still keep the program options for students the middle school we kept additional staffing when we consolidated to make sure we could get through the you know first couple years of consolidation and that again both all five of those positions are based on enrollment and i'll better be able to i'll have all that information for you next time but it in which positions they are or could be we're also getting uh retirement letters in now for the end of the year from certain teachers so we'll we'll put that puzzle together but the main thing is we'll be able to maintain our opportunities for instructional programs for our students we're not saying we're cutting you know band or spanish or you know we're not doing that same opportunities just less students in classes so instead

148of having four sections of whatever it is we only need three and you put all that together and we're able to reduce the five ftes but i'll have a lot more detail for that for next time yeah yeah we can look into it it just concerns me because i know that you know the the education gap is growing since you know with covid last year people are falling behind i i mean i i figure that staff is probably one of the last things you want to cut at this point but uh we can we can look further into it um further down the line while we're talking in deliberations sure quick question and what you share with us tomorrow and this weekend um is it possible that you can share the spreadsheet version of this

149information and not a scanned version of the spreadsheet does that make sense i think we gary helped me with that if we did that i think the spreadsheets are attached to other spreadsheets that are attached to other spreadsheets um let me find out about that kevin because we thought about that we had that question last year a couple years ago and you we really can't do it because we there are a number of other as you know the way excel works there's a number of spreadsheets that fill in on on these spreadsheets so let let me see what we can do and if we can we'll get that to you thank you [Music] so that's it mr chair for tonight i just quick comment to say thank you for um the historical perspective um with

150the percentages that you provided with us that um i asked you know i didn't know we were getting it tonight when you gave us some of the percentages last month that's what what i was looking for so thank you welcome um i know it's overwhelming sometimes when you look at these numbers and you're trying to wrap your head around it as we progress in this process um you know it'll it'll start to make sense the puzzle i think uh you know i've been doing this for a few years and i still like today i'm like my head is spinning and and i know by uh by the uh by next thursday i'll have a more clarity to where we're heading so if you're feeling overwhelmed like i am this moment that's okay so and just

151so you know we get we get a lot of questions from board members and that's good and i put them all together we usually get you know 25 30 questions at least so don't think because you're not sure of something you know what does this mean why this send those in we'll put them all together and we send all the answers out to everybody and we go through them next next thursday and then the following week so any kind of question at all it's uh four of you are brand new to this and it's uh it is it can be overwhelming but please ask any questions and you all will see all of the questions and all of the answers that's the way we do it and uh you know i know from experience dr

152riley does not mind the challenge on the numbers so challenge him all right uh next uh monthly reports any questions on the monthly reports comments concerns kyle i read your report good job as always thank you um next item on our agenda is items for future agenda all right hearing none um did we have the goals could we um put the goal the discussion of the goals that we were going to have this week could we make sure that we have it next next time uh absolutely and and uh just briefly because i i i think i spoke to heidi and a couple of you i've had so many conversations but you know like yeah i just wanted yeah no i hard to keep track but my my my vision for the goals and the

153goals are a very very important topic um it's just been an overwhelming a few few weeks with uh covet surge uh you know a lot got thrown at us bus routes and all that fun stuff and i thought um you know social media mental health uh topic is is is very uh worthy topic and i know goals are worthy but we also have a new uh new administration uh a new superintendent uh coming so the way i envision this whole goal conversation and hold me accountable guys and and challenge me here if you if you don't agree is that there's there's there were goals that were developed by uh last year i believe sometime in june and i'm trying to keep uh you know things around and um those goals were never really kind of

154like got the rubber stamp and published and and that's why we're living in this limbo but i thought that if heidi uh craig and i can can go back to those goals that we set and kind of like uh clear them up uh and put them back on the on and topic of conversation for the next six months and then the in and you know and then the board together works on goals in the next couple of months uh with the you know or or maybe in the in the future as in in like june and in may with the uh superintendent elect the you know the administration team to develop goals for the july through june period i thought that would be a reasonable plan any thoughts that sounds good okay i'm into that

155excellent so um i'll i'll i'll ask uh heidi and craig to help me uh clean up our goals and and i think heidi is is uh i ask you to lead us in that effort because you've been uh you know a leader on the on the goals topic so uh lead craig and i and like holding us accountable in terms of like moving this ball down uh you know down the field i don't know if that's a good analogy it's a soccer analogy but uh you know keep moving forward so and and then i will make sure that the goals are on our will be ready to be presented to the entire board on february regular agenda is that fair yes so dr reilly if you don't mind just adding that to our february agenda

156that would be fantastic thank you all right board comments or concerns uh i got a comment um i wanted to thank the governor's office for what they did about giving flexibility uh to retired subs for coming back um but as in like the letter that we sent and i don't know if everyone's seen it the letter we sent about uh there's there's just some more stuff that they could be doing for us up there and um i i i hope they're they hear our concerns especially with this last uh covet issue we have um potentially maybe mobilizing uh the national guard uh to fill in as uh bus drivers because they have their cdl's and this was in our letter um you know more more testing kits more masks um not saying that we want

157to go back to remote learning but if like we needed to have a day with remote learning uh and because we were understaffed have that credited as a school day for the year uh you know so we're not uh putting dire straights with that um and uh yeah that was about it uh activate the national guard and uh for for teaching possibly as subs as well too and just you know do do do more more to kind of head on this problem uh yes the they did not even respond or acknowledge our letter so i just wanted to point that out and i think everybody received a copy of the letter because we all had feedback on it so right too bad uh danny had something sir yeah i had two points um one is

158uh and i didn't bring it up during uh communications and recognitions um were the significant uh communications i received from citizens concerning the pickup and drop off at this at the schools and particularly the three out of the four that i was talk to uh people spoke to me about in the memo from dr riley and i respectfully disagree with the summations of that that we are um good where we are before this last week the pickup at dean's mill was an issue on the public road out there if anyone's been there and i know somebody went there today or yesterday um on the board that uh they line up on the street and they block the whole street in john q public that's not picking up has to drive in the opposing lane in

159order to get by them otherwise they're sitting in that same lane of traffic for a half hour or so i know in the last week it's only gotten worse and you know there was a little revision at the high school as far as the buses go and i know that's been beneficial but it was suggested that um possibly we could have um our traffic control operator operate the traffic control red light there better to get everyone out um there's definitely some safety concerns there and the middle school too is just the the traffic back up in the the u-turns and the flow into the middle school could also use some professional help and i would like i said respectfully disagree with the memo and ask that this item be revisited by the superintendent and that

160we look at it some more um and the other one i would like to address is the compensation for substitutes in peras and whatever other positions that need it happen if we put it out there and no one takes advantage of it then it's no money spent if people take advantage of it and we spend money but we get the the subs and the pairs in the building that's the that's the goal um you know dr riley's just spoke about the building subs and that was great and you know i'm not proposing that we pay we hire more building subs but if that's what it takes to to fill our positions then so be it so i don't know what i need to do if i need to make a motion to uh to vote

161on a financial incentive for the for those positions or if we can just direct our superintendent to revisit those items and and do something within the within the you know the time is of the essence and um you know i'm more than willing to suggest numbers that we could come up with and and get this done because we need to we just can't say well everyone's having the same problem and not do anything about it we can't say that other people have done the same incentives and it hasn't worked what can we do what can we do to make stonington work yeah i think uh i think both uh you know valid concerns dan here are my thoughts and and i wanna i want you to consider my my my thoughts on this um you

162know this this been a very helpful tool you all received this right this is the that was attached the last two pages um you know and i'm a math guy i'm very proud of my math skills but um looking at this it might it doesn't it might make sense to look into based on the percentage filled or not filled dr riley it might make sense to hire more building subs or maybe subs that are uh you know committed to like district office i i don't know there has to be a formula you're much smarter guy than i am but there might be a formula along the line that dan is suggesting um you know or you know some some form of like you know and i i don't want to relate the story from rhode

163island uh that we were mentioned earlier but sometimes it's like why people uh should sub in stonington like why you know tell let's tell the story of why people should sub in stonington what benefits they might have beyond the silent bonus like why they should be here and should be working with us so i think there there can be we can ask uh our superintendent to uh go back to the drawing board on that and and you know look into ways or consideration to building subs based on these uh fill rates um you know the fill rates is not is telling us we you know in very rare occasions we go uh over the 75 percent and very often we're in the very low uh digits of fill rates which means uh we need more

164subs right and and i know that's the conversation we're having here but does it make more sense because when you're telling me that subgrades that are in building are much higher than outside the building maybe that's the answer to find these positions and you know when you look at the cost to not have them which is the cost that chris spoke about earlier which is you know our kids falling behind on education the the money is should be you know the second to the kids education in my opinion so i maybe dan if it's acceptable to you that we asked dr riley to go to the drawing board and i and i appreciate the time of the essence comment so maybe we can discuss it next um i don't know dr riley if it's next

165thursday or the thursday after but no more than two weeks with an answer to what uh the district can suggest as a solution to help not doing the same because i was uh i was speaking this morning at a meeting about habitual things you know like we do the same thing and we're expecting different results and it's not going to happen we need to do something different um and and you know so is that reasonable to ask them is that aligns with what you're thinking yes okay so dr reilly is that reasonable to ask you in two weeks to give us a response to this ask oh yes i can do that um with also the impacts on morale of current employees and legal issues with contracts you know paying people in june for something

166i mean there's a lot of other outside issues it's not just we're doing what everyone else is doing but i'll i'll come back with some ideas and and yes that's exactly what i'm i'm suggesting is that we are moving this responsibility from us to you to come back to us with your proposal to something different than what we're doing today um you know we're not you know i don't think we're suggesting something we're asking you because you're smarter than me to tell us what you're suggesting we'll come up with something um the other ask that i would like to kind of like uh you know highlight from dan's request is that you know we've read the memo we appreciate the memo but we want you to trust but verify so i'm sure that there's uh

167some feedback you received from the administration building or the administrators in the building and i trust them as you trust them but the drive in the morning doesn't hurt it's you know by you or however you you deem appropriate to see if there's a situation and if there's a situation what's the resolution what's the solution to that situation so we have a safe environment for our staff and our kids and our community yeah just to be clear that the police are monitoring every school every day and they are they have determined that they don't need to provide assistance on the morning drop-offs they have decided to cover dean's mill and the middle school after at the drop-off because like dan said cars lined up on the street and my my understanding and i can certainly

168verify it with uh what darren's stewart or todd olson that they are there at those two schools every day unless they're called you know there's some emergency and they're called off but they they are at both of those schools in the afternoon helping with traffic control so i will verify that and let us know after your verification if you don't mind sir i would uh suggest to my um fellow board members too to see for yourself and um you know i don't know how that would work it's not a you know you're not uh technically visiting the school or going into school and covered concerns or what have you but you know i know heidi drove by the elementary school yesterday i think during the half day so it might have been different but um

169you know you can just go by the schools at dismissal and um witness for yourself what's going on i rode my bikes my bike best middle school and it was even it was congested even for my bike but uh it does get hectic up there and then you know the one letter we received today the email received today from a parent that you know witnessed the um high schooler getting dropped off by the middle school and having to having to walk down a extended part of uh miss toxic is of concern so um definitely thank you for looking into it further and what kind of responsibility is in first student and like you know i appreciate they don't have drivers but their contractor you know they need to do they need to step up the

170game there has to be uh you know pressure put on them at the end of the day they're a contractor i mean if they go drive the bus themselves but you know that's their responsibility they need to do more uh than just tell us we don't have drivers oh good great because you know i i run i run a business and i trust me i i can't tell my customers i don't have housekeepers to clean the rooms it's not an option well just so you know we understand that and we've contacted other districts other bus companies legal everything else about this because we you're right fruit i mean but at this point either you cancel school or you take what you can and do the best you can with it and i don't like it

171and you don't like it but you know if if we think there's a danger in in the parent pickup and we can't cover that we cancel school because we don't have the there's no and i don't want to do that and you don't want to you know we had this discussion last spring make sure we open and be as safe as we possibly can and that's what we're doing and we'll continue to do that um so i'll check on the make sure there's the police presence at those two schools i'm it sounds like you don't trust that and you want to do that yourself and that's fine so if you see something different let me know but i'll check with our our principals and the police to make sure that that's happening the other thing

172is is i know you know in the in the fall in last spring at the middle school we did a staggered drop-off or pick-up in the afternoon and you know it worked well now i don't know maybe we can find out from them if if that's the policy now and are the number of cars just too many and can we without being too cumbersome um do staggered you know more staggered times if necessary a lot of times the parents like school gets out at 2 40. you know you have people showing up at 2 o'clock but you know after work there you know they staggered times they don't stagger you know they get in line when they want to and you can't i know what you're saying but we'll look into that but that right

173that hasn't thank you like school's out at 2 30 they start lining up at 1 30. so thank you and that's true dr riley because i did talk to a parent um today who said it's very frustrating because they've been very clear of how the of how parents need to arrive at the right time and they don't they jump it because they think that they can get there early and that's frustrating other parents so maybe we'll need police in there to order the parents ganging up against one another because they're parents that are not happy about other parents not following the rules so rules are set but that doesn't mean that the parents are necessarily going to follow them so i hear you it's um a conundrum [Music] all right um just uh my i

174have a comment and it's not a concern it's just a comment that um kevin agnello is gonna chair our teaching and learning committee and chris donahue is going to chair our finance and facilities committee so thank you both for your service and any other comments from any other board members great um motion to adjourn the meeting motion thank you is there a second second all right and all those in favor please say hi hi hi hi i think it's unanimous to adjourn all right have a great night and thank you all for your hard work appreciate it see you next week you too