Board of Education Meeting 4/8/21

001something fast [Music] pertinent and we'll be bringing back to you as well next slide you have this in front of you i apologize if the print on the screen is a little bit small this is a survey that we completed at both the middle school and high school level um this fall back in november and these are questions kind of baseline questions that we wanted to ask our students in grades 6 through 8 and 9 through 12 specifically related to their knowledge of sexual harassment issues um so you can get a sense of what the questions were there and you'll see that the responses um that i provided you is based on the percent of students that either strongly agreed or agreed with the statement so what we've been doing is looking at that data

002and looking at areas that we may want to address we'd like it to say 100 for all categories some of the one of the specific ones we want to look at a little bit is the reporting piece and making sure that our middle schoolers we want to see that score go up i can tell you that actually tomorrow our middle schoolers are scheduled to have as part of their quarterly reminders of our policies and procedures related to student safety they're going to be going over reminders in advisory tomorrow i'm specific to how to report anonymously all the different things all the different issues that you can use our student incident report to report so it's not just someone's picking on me on the bus um so they're going to be going over that and look

003and of course you you heard at a previous meeting about the new speak up app that will be students will be able to use too so they're going to be reviewing all of that um and that's part of those quarterly reminders that we're going to be implementing each year we are going to repeat this exact survey this spring we're going to embed it into our yearly climate surveys that all of our students are already taking so we'll have exit data so to speak at the end of this year and we will take that data and use that to inform much of what we want to do next year sure when you take the survey and it says you know i am clear about the behaviors are they given is that all they get that one

004question because i mean so many people don't understand you know a lot of what sexual harassment is consists right now when i take training and work yearly and most people do and maybe they don't understand like what all of it is yeah so that's been a big part of the education that we've conducted this year and a lot of the programming that we provided to students has been really specific to helping them better understand that yes yeah a lot so well we did a lot of stuff in the fall and a lot of stuff last week last year as well our hope would be that that would be i do agree with you i think that we could potentially add some more part of it is you don't want to give them the give them

005the answer either so we could look definitely look at phrasing that question a little differently the other piece is that um alicia and i had a discussion about this data that we would like to also allow some open-ended responses in this survey in the spring specifically for the last question which talks about feeling safe in school um and our thought was to allow you know an open window for students to say if you didn't agree with this statement tell us what would be things that the district could do to improve your feelings about being safe in school so we'd like to solicit more specific feedback from the students in that spring survey and again this isn't the only forum for students to share that information or give us that feedback but we thought it might

006be nice to allow them [Music] to stay more specific or ask a question or give advice so to speak about our programs okay so looking ahead um we really wanted to think about um practices that we currently have in place and how we want to maintain those um and as i've spoken and you've heard me say it already tonight one of the um one of the systems that we put in place is to make sure that each quarter of the school year we're really talking as administrative teams and we're doing that at the school level and using that as an opportunity to remind our students about important policies practices reporting anything having in general to do with student safety the reason we put that into place and the reason i'm emphasizing that is that some

007of the feedback that i received from the students that i met with last year they said to me we know that the first week of school is when you guys want to come and give us you know do the assembly and we go over the handbook and we look at all the procedures but we're we're distracted the first week of school that's really not what we're interested in thinking about we want to know who are who's in our classes we want to see our friends and that's not the best time to be reviewing those policies with us so that's where we came up with the idea when we should be doing this more on a quarterly basis throughout the year so we can make sure that information we might introduce in the beginning of the

008year isn't lost and then it's just also an opportunity to reinforce the importance of this with our students so we'll be continuing to do to do that throughout the um you know as long as we need to um and we also could be continuing the voice program which alicia is going to talk to you give you some updates about that this evening that will continue well into into next year the next thing that we really wanted to focus on next year would be two areas one is parent outreach and education um i had a presentation that i gave last year in the boardroom here there was a parent that was here and i spoke to her at the end and she she said to me you have to include parents in this and i thought

009that was really an important point um so when we're introducing these topics or discussing them in school whether it's in our health class or whether it's in an assembly making sure that our parents know that's happening and then also giving them tips ideas and means by which they can start having these conversations about these topics with their students at home so everything from healthy relationships sexual harassment sexual abuse and those conversations are going to vary by age so obviously we're going to be looking at specific tools to give to our elementary parents to have those conversations and then we'll be looking at topics or sorry resources that are more appropriate for our upper grade and talking to your teenager for example we're also going to look into doing some programs and presentations in the evenings

010for parents again specifically related to how to talk to your child about these issues and then the second theme that i really wanted to focus on next year um assemblies are great it's wonderful to bring in speakers it's great when mrs dawe gets up and reminds our students of important practices regarding student safety but what's really important is that we're also embedding these ideas and these concepts into our curriculum because we want to see that this is consistently being across the district and it's really an important initiative k-12 and it's being emphasized in our classrooms each and every day so what i'd like to suggest is that next year we'd like to bring some samples of lessons that are happening um in our health classes in our advisory programs and we're really looking at trying

011to take all the themes that we've that i know the board is working on and the admin team is working on and do a crosswalk of those different themes and how we're addressing them at different grade levels and in different curriculum areas so that would include our dei work as well and last but not least i did get a notice this week from the department of education that the office of civil rights is going to be issuing new guidance um in the area of title ix under title ix related to gender identity issues and so this is obviously a very important matter for schools to be able to address um there is going to be a guidance document that's coming out shortly from ocr and so we will be reviewing that when that information comes

012out and talking with our administrators about that as well any questions for allison before we turn it over to alicia heidi anything okay i didn't know when you were yeah okay thank you allison so as as i wait for my slides to pop up i do that last bullet that alison just discussed from ocr that because i don't have that in my presentation but i think it's very important for all of you to hear this that this year alone i've had several students approach me about um gender identity lbgtq um and they keep asking when is that going to be discussed when is that going to be come the forefront of conversations so as we move forward with voice next year that is going to be another tenant another part of voice that we're going

013to be discussing about um in just a few minutes so as a reminder i know you've heard from me a couple times this year voice is now officially throughout the schools empowering our voices that was the whole premise of voice three years ago when it started organically it is now at the middle school we started february 1st and we'll get into a little update of what we've done there yeah thank you so much importantly for this conversation i just wanted to review what we have done at the high school these are hands-on lessons that um students take part in during their task block we have extended our task block on our voice activities days to about 60 minutes as opposed to the 40 minutes that is currently in place so depending on what the activity

014is so in september we worked on self-esteem october we did an action plan for all the students to work on for their self-esteem project on the 13th and 16th it was self-care december 1st was gratitude the 15th was resilience and adversity and we set goals for that february 8th as i know you remember me discussing it was microaggressions march 8th and march 19th uh were our big days and lily i just i should have said to you stay on your toes because i'm going to be calling on you and picking your brain throughout this okay so march 8th was peer-to-peer so at the beginning of the school year um in the fall lily had approached us a couple of times and said you know we'd really appreciate if you ran something that was directed and

015guided by the students right so we said sure so finally it came to fruition and on that day on march 8th we called it peer-to-peer and we you know reached out to the students to see what interests groups that they would be willing to facilitate and be part of um some of those groups i apologize keeps falling down can i can i just can i pull it down and stand away can i stand over here with my mat please thank you okay so some of the groups that we had that day were handling peer pressure stress management i don't want to hand this out because it's an awfully long handout grit do you have it strategies for anxiety study skills navigating friendship recognizing toxic friendships time management navigating healthy relationships and having healthy boundaries conquering

016the rest of senior year finding motivation to be successful and learning to communicate with your parents so those groups were groups that students were able to choose to sign up to be part of and our students at the high school led the conversations now so of course you know a couple of red lights come up yes we had adults in the room we did have an adult in each of these groups monitoring the conversations but for the most part lily what did you what did you think of that day because this was your brainchild back in the fall that we were able to bring to fruition um [Music] hello okay much better so reaching out to the business learners especially because the majority of the it was in class so having the people there having

017people in front of you was definitely something that um made the conversation find a lot smoother right um and then the other thing is just because we haven't had a lot of um opportunities like this in the past there's a lot of hesitancy to kind of share right and open up to what we wanted to get from it um but overall it prompted conversation i think even more so outside of those groups which is really what we were going for um and just encouraging peers to share their own common experiences because there's a lot of isolation right now right and it was a risk because we put students you know in charge of those activities to talk about some hot topics um and we did speak to them ahead of time to give them some

018facilitating ideas but for the most for the most part it went well um the next one uh was the one that we have coming up in honor of national sexual assault month we have a full hour of outside presenters coming to the school students have selected uh one of the following groups understanding the impact of sexual assault and how to support survive survivors and that is being presented by mrs whitman and mrs juan how do gender roles stereotypes and the media affect our relationships which will be presented by safe futures a self-defense class presented by jorge alves from westerly going to college next year what do you need to know about sexual assault and safety on campus this is for seniors only and that's being presented by mrs school the last three groups let's talk

019about consent and understanding boundaries that's presented by officer saunders let's talk about consent and being an ally the goal of this group is for our lgbtq students at the university level and how it affects them in high school and in college and life after that that is being presented by joaquin solemski let's talk about consent and healthy relationships that will be presented by officer browning and lastly and you're going to say what does this have to do about sexual assault um understanding the impact of the pandemic and its effect on our mental health that is being presented by two gals who are phd pharmacy students at uri and myself we'll be presenting that last group and we were hesitant because you know the theme is sexual assault and i was surprised that that group had

020so many students vol who you know wanted to do the group so there was probably like 35 kids that signed up so that kind of speaks volumes about what their interests are um but i will report back to you after april 19th to let you know how the day goes but we're excited it's an hour long and we it's filled with um outside presenters so um and obviously may 10th power of personal choice and our last one will be june 7th which will be hopefully an outdoor school-wide celebration so high school what have the students experienced so far as i had discussed in the past the first two days of home base we reviewed sexual harassment policies in the student handbook um i resent those reminders via email on the following dates november 12th january

02120th april 6th those are sent out quarterly uh and say futures we have had a counselor on site once a week altern alternating mondays and thursdays we have signage on the door which is i know it's super hard to see but that's just a copy of the poster that's on the outside of the door and um one of the counselors had a great idea in december because we everybody was so sick and nobody was in the building she said is it okay if i give my email so if students don't feel comfortable coming in my office we can email and do it virtually i said brilliant why didn't i come up with that so anyway so that's on the door um i send out quarterly email reminders to our kiddos on october 9th the 14th

022february 7th and i sent one out the other day the counselor is advertised in the mayor bulletin which some of our fabulous high school parents receive every friday from mr freeze it's also discussed in our student advisory group monthly and is also discussed in our parent group monthly again this is just a sample i won't get into the title ix survey allison described it eloquently again we will re-send the survey in may but subsequent years we will embed that in the climate survey which we normally give out the kids from third grade on are so used to taking so if we embed those questions in the survey it'll be seamless um and as alison said we were discussing about leaving an open-ended question at the end so that way students could feel as though you

023know it's anonymous and they could add whatever they needed to add that they they didn't feel was included in the survey and obviously that guides our decision making moving forward uh safe schools online courses those are just quick little snapshots of what the interface looks like for our students and staff those are the courses that they have taken we had three specific covet courses um october what was sexual harassment what is sexual harassment uh but that's a sample of the the account so what i was hoping to do is create another classroom i will be the instructor and i'm going to invite the whole board of ed to my class and i'm going to assign the classes that our students take and our staff takes and i'll make it non-gradable so you can just take

024it and i won't see your results but i think it's important that you see exactly what the kids are seeing and what our staff is seeing that's really important so i think moving forward like over the summer you'll get a little invite from instructor dawg and i'm going to invite you to these classes and i promise i won't grade you or i won't share your results with one another okay next i do like dark chocolate and starbucks okay all right uh our student advisory group has met several times this year we have had presentations from the youth officer in the fall and in the winter it took much longer because we had to do it in double sessions throughout the whole year and we due to um being out it took a little bit longer

025but uh sexual consent think past friday sex trafficking sexting all everything that i've discussed with you since the beginning of the year parents received information about voice the second week of school our parent advisory group has met monthly um on the 19th and i think allison was talking about it we did have our first virtual parent night discussing all the issues that we have been talking to the students about was officer browning and i um it was great and mr school and we met with our student shs graduates since this summer and that actually was a very organic springboard for dei uh we met with our former graduates and they brought up all sorts of topics that they felt was very important for us to discuss that's a big tentacle of dei what can we

026do better this we have voice google classrooms for our students and staff all the title nine research this is important all the title nine resources the youth officers contact information the ability to contact student personnel are in the google classrooms why is that important and why do we have it there it's because every monthly activity that the students do in voice they have to get into their google classroom there's no avoiding it so it's there uh in our surveys again uh we already talked about that so we'll move on i'm not gonna be with that all right school staff they've had pd for voice we have created voice google classrooms just for them uh we have age-appropriate activities during test block and i'm still happy to report we had 13 teachers who jumped like this

027when we asked them to participate in our monthly activities so i'm really proud of that um elementary school both west vine and dean's milwaukee's mccurdy both started um all on board with our voice um it's been happening twice a month very proud of it thank you elementary teachers because i know it's been an absolutely crazy year so i appreciate your flexibility um and stonington middle school february 1st mr smith is thrilled we can tell we started voice at the middle school he couldn't wait um but honestly they have been extremely flexible um with their schedule and we started and i do have to say our high school students all of our students k through 12 are amazing okay i'm going to say that my prophet sex i know i'm getting taped our high school students

028when they did the middle school voice day i sat there and and mr school and i were popping in and out of the google classrooms god loved them i i came into their classrooms the next day and i said i love all of you what you did during voice with our middle school students was astounding so hats off to all of you and i appreciate everything you did so there are topics for the middle school responsibility and power of choice building people up importance of decision making and importance of your voice and transitioning from the middle school to the high school and we currently have 40 high school students simply volunteering with just our middle school students so we have 40 high school students just working with our middle school students and just a reminder

029we have been doing voice for three years we've had over 150 high school students mentor students at west vine and currently this year at dean's mill and please remember that this slogan was created to be a voice not an echo and that was um that was strum up by a student three years ago who has since graduated topics covered at the elementary school this year including all self-care perseverance teamwork communication empowerment in the community and model respect and i think that's it any uh questions for alicia heidi i just have one this is all wonderful thank you so much congratulations progress um this was from lily's report which she said that she talked about the available safe futures counselor which you referenced but she said that not everyone is familiar with who they are or

030what they do and students may be aware that this opportunity exists but not familiar with when they should use it how can we put this into a voice when we yeah it's in it you know it's funny heidi because i would say like two or three months ago i went outside their office which is it's used in the credit the credit union which is high traffic right so i stood outside the credit union like as if i was at a car wash and i took the counselor and we stood outside together put my arm around her and i had a big sign this is the counselor this is when she's here come meet her look we're you're not going to meet with me you're going to meet with the counselor and i stood outside during

031passing time during our first and second block um it's it's tricky because like i i think lily and i were talking today and i said you know what what what am i missing you know we've sent out so many emails so one of the things we came up with today um is starting when we come back from vacation on monday the 19th um we're going to incorporate that into our morning announcements just a little blurb that says as a reminder our counselor is here on site from 9 to 12 mondays it hasn't changed mondays thursdays 9-12 and she sits outside on the bench right outside the office so you know but we're trying everything but they do have business i will say they do have business and she just like any counselor i can't go

032to strong into human services i can't go to save futures and say so who did you meet with today it's totally anonymous so she does have clients does she have a lot heidi no but she has some is there a menu of examples of things samples of things that kids could do it seems as if they're not quite sure how to use this resource it's advertised as a counselor so they could go to that counselor for anything like that's how it's advertised you know what i mean like they can you they can go to the council for anything whether it's um you know harassment relationships abuse drugs alcohol divorce anything yeah so just really quickly i wrote that in my report because i was talking to a couple people and they i mean they saw

033the email we don't really check our emails very regularly just because you need to check your emails just google classroom now sends notifications every time an assignment is posted so it gets monotonous i'm telling this is what it is in practice i mean ideally we check our emails we see what you're sending but in practice um i i only check my email for very specific people so um this is for for many people sometimes the third or fourth time you send an email is the first time they see it so um i think that the save futures counselor is a really really good resource it's something that i'm i i wish i knew it was there sooner i think it's a really good resource um i talked to mr and mr freeze about this um

034i'm a big proponent of it i just think it's not being used as much as it could be and so i also um told ms daw just because um we're also planning on doing the the sexual assault month and digging into deeper and more um triggering topics so just making the specifically targeting the um advertisement to allow for the counselor to help with kind of those um topics of voice as well so to bring it up when we talk about sexual assault to bring it up when you you dig into deeper topics and just let them know that there's an anonymous and outside of school resource for them to go to and i think dovetailing that on the 19th when we come back in our morning announcements that hopefully will be in everybody's head right

035before we actually launch into the april session so i think it'll be a good idea maybe every monday that we advertise it they're going to listen to you more than me you have the power lily you know what i'm saying okay any other questions for alicia thank you junior project you ready okay um can everyone hear me all right um i'm just making sure everyone in the room can hear me am i all right yes we can hear you all right okay thank you good evening everyone my name is dylan griskam and i am a current junior at stonington high school each year the junior class begins a project in order to give back to our school community this year in a time of unprecedented challenges we decided to harness our efforts in helping to

036reduce the global footprint of our school building through water conservation efforts in order to do so we plan to purchase rainwater collection units my name is lauren gable and these units will help to reduce water consumption as they can use filtered rainwater to irrigate our environmental science gardens and the beautiful flower beds around our school as seen in the photo on the left there are often flowers or plants that are planted in the beds around the building but don't survive because there's nobody to water them in the summers these units could help solve that problem and help to keep our beds and gardens lively and productive furthermore the units would be a great outlet for education of the students who participate in our environmental science programs these students would have the hands-on experience of conservation

037efforts and techniques these units would be a real world application for many students at shs my name is mia lewandowski and our plan to accomplish our junior project was to first reach out to mrs whitman to confirm her interest in using the rain collection units in the environmental science garden after confirming interest we reached out to mr anderson the head of maintenance to receive approval for these rain collection buckets then we reached out to stonington human services to talk about funding our project our next step was presenting to student government and now to present to our plan to the board of education after our proposal we will move on to ordering the rain collection buckets and hoses and painting and installing the units hi my name is kyle lowry throughout this project we've had many

038resources and advisors first mrs gang shiwelli and all of student government who laid out the parameters and the deadlines for the project name mrs whitman who's the environmental science teacher who runs the garden picture on the right she was super supportive from the get-go and has helped us out in kicking with election units then mr anderson the district facilities director who supervises the flower bags in the front of the school who also gave us his support and mrs king and mrs hollings who are our contact points at human services who have helped us with funding and fundraising for the project hi my name is kiki longo for materials we are beginning we will be getting water collector bins from amazon that are uv resistant and include water filters that will remove large particles that can

039cause blockages we'll also be purchasing hoses from gardeners.com that have small holes throughout them that allow for constant irrigation without the need for human attention we also plan on getting paints and paint brushes to paint these to make them look prettier in the gardens in front of the school hi my name is ivy goodman in order to get these water collectors we realized we would need help with funding after we chose the water collector that worked best for the high school we calculated the total for the five that we are getting each one costs 91.95 for the total so the total for all five units including taxes and other fees is 488.95 each host costs 14.95 and that total comes out to 97.5 cents including fees all together the total is 586 dollars we contacted

040mrs king at human services who brought our project to the attention of the president of human services and they told us that they would pay for two of our collections we have created a fundraiser selling shs merchandise and we have already met our goal hi my name is captain glenn we plan to con i'll discuss our timeline for this project we plan to continue fundraising with our online store until april 17th when it will close by then we hope to have enough money in addition to the goal that we've already met to buy all the hoses and all the water collection units we hope to also buy some exterior housing paint and paint brushes to make them look prettier in the gardens we plan to remain in contact with maintenance to secure plan for the

041use of the buckets once we purchase them and as soon as we have the phones from our online store we plan to purchase the materials so that we can get them before the school year ends and install them sometime in may in june depending on when they arrive my name is brendan cohen and i'm going to explain how our project fits into stonyson high school's four c's the first c is convinced why is this project useful to the high school by installing rain barrels we can help the school school decrease water usage by using rain water to water the flower beds and gardens we will also be able to help decrease the burden on the school staff currently tasked with watering them the rain barrels are virtually self-sufficient with only periodic periodical maintenance needed the

042next c is consider what is the purpose for these barrels the use of rain barrels will help decrease water usage and help promote environmental conservation throughout the school the barrels are a simple cost-effective solution to help the school the third c is communicate what does this project involve to complete this project we will purchase five rain barrels and five hoses to help water the environmental science gardens and flower beds throughout the school campus the barrels will water the beds and gardens automatically over time the barrels are also uv resistant with screen stopping blockages meaning that there will be little to no maintenance required by the school the final c is connect how is technology used in this project we utilize technology to connect with human services to secure funding for this project as well as

043to connect with staff in the school to get an exact amount of rain barrels needed finally we are currently using technology to run our online fundraising store which will give us all the additional funds needed to complete the project hello my name is sophia fernholtz thank you so much for listening to our presentation and considering our initiative i can now take any questions or comments that you may have any questions or comments from the board i used to run the rain barrel program in the city of kentucky for a couple of years so i know this is a subject that's near and dear to my heart and i think this is a great idea we actually the westerly car wash has 55 gallon buckets or drums that are are used for those if you don't

044want to buy them and i just got one for free and i i spray painted it an ombre and it's outside my house and i drilled holes for the chain coming down from my house and for a hose i got a little spigot and came memory so i just wanted to suggest you could you could do that i think it's a great project um the other thing we did for the city was we had um painters come in and paint them and then we auctioned them off um to raise money for the next set of barrels that we were sending out so that was a really good thing because we raised money you know it kept it going on in perpetuity so you may want to reach out to the art department and see if

045they had some suggestions on them yeah that's a great thank you if you need any help let me know because i said i've installed hundreds of these thank you so much any other questions or comments i have a question actually um just because i'm not as familiar what how do we keep the water safe like is there a treatment that you use in the barrel what what kind of treatment is needed if any to the water inside the barrel so i think the barrels have a mesh green on the top that prevents any mosquitoes or larger particles getting in so it won't become any sort of breeding around for mosquitoes and stuff especially since we know that we've had tripoli in the past so that was definitely something that we wanted to make sure of

046and also the water is constantly flowing through the barrels so there's not much time for it to stay stagnant and there is some maintenance that's needed which they could probably use a nice yearly cleaning to get out any bacteria or leftover things in there and mrs whitman and the environmental science department has committed to taking care of that minimal maintenance right well i had a question about the mosquitoes that you answered but i was also curious um how how is the water getting into the barrels exactly is it drainage from the roof yep so the barrels will be placed under the roofs gutters there is a uh unit on the roof right now but it's a different sort of unit so these barrels will be either placed in the open where they can just collect

047free falling rainwater or they can use the gutter system to collect water you don't have to worry about them overflowing or they like a normal sink has they have an overflow valve in them so they any excess water will come out and they also the ones that we picked out have a block on the back of them that'll set them away from any foundation so it'll prevent any sort of damage to the foundation any other questions or or comments okay i think it's a great project good luck let us know if there's anything we can do to help you thank you so much all right moving on communications and recognitions uh we'll stop reporting tonight anything i'll just say um you know for back to school i'm in the uh west vine pickup and drop

048off line as well as uh um at the middle school and things seem to go really well i mean i know there's a lot more flow a lot more traffic and just acknowledge what everybody's doing to make that happen because i uh you know i dropped the kids off uh four days a week and there's not much weight at all really soon they're going well thanks thanks courtney um i just want to acknowledge the administrators for their hard work to keep our schools open i know dr riley have shared with us a number of call-outs due to you know either second does or you know quarantine but the team has been doing a great job and dr riley has been communicative about this so i just want to say thank you for all your hard

049work keeping our kids safe staff safe and keeping our schools open anything will you say anything jack heidi lily anything on your end dr reilly anything you're gonna wait are you good okay all right next item on the agenda comments from citizens um how this works is raise your hand i'll call on you you'll be unmuted and you'll be allowed to address the board just state your name and address for the record if you choose to speak anybody like to address the board first up is paula garcia can you hear me board members we can thank you um so my name is paul agassi i'm at 613 north stonington road um just a little background i have my doctorate degree in pharmacology couple points i wanted to bring up so cdc just released more information

050on surface transmission um so basically what it's saying is we don't need to do the deep cleanings anymore on wednesday which is a prime opportunity to get our kids back in class i counted there's about nine wednesdays left we really should take advantage of it to get our kids caught back up after so much time was missed throughout the school year um and another thing i like to bring up is i noticed that um the close contact quarantine guidelines in stonington and ledge lights health district are not being followed from the ctd ph guidelines nor the cdc guidelines um what i'm speaking to is right now legilight and stonington are following a 14-day quarantine rather than the cdc recommendation and ct dph guidelines of doing a 10-day quarantine or a 7-day quarantine with a test

051out for those close contacts the biggest takeaway from this is the difference between a 14-day and a 10-day with that difference being if a the difference is a 1.3 difference quote-unquote risk in the medical field 1.3 percent is clinically insignificant um in a real-world perspective to show you if you had 100 students quarantined due to a close contact they would lose 400 school days 400 because of a close encounter and that would only capture one student becoming positive from a close car one student from my perspective the risk is far greater keeping our kids out of school this policy is actually actively keeping our students out of the classroom i would like to see stonington i urge the board members to follow the science follow the cdc guidelines and to keep our kids in school

052safely thank you thank you paul anyone else wish to address the board okay seeing none we'll move on next item on the agenda is the consent agenda there are four items two sets of minutes checks and bills personnel report and the ida i d e a grant um typically no discussion on the consent agenda unless you remove something what's your pleasure there's a second all in favor all right opposed motion carries next item on the agenda is approval of 2021 2022 healthy food certification statement and food and beverage exemption for special events so this is on every year you can see the back up that becky and gary put together there's two items one is for healthy food option and the other is for food exemptions and we would appreciate the board's approval of the

05321 22 healthy food certification any uh questions for dr riley hearing none i'll entertain a motion well it has to be specific to the language right so i'll entertain a motion pursuant to connecticut uh general statute section 10-215 f the board of education certifies that all food items offered for sale to students in the schools under its jurisdiction and not exempted from the connecticut nutrition standards published by the connecticut state department of education will comply with the connecticut nutrition standards during the period of july 1st 2021 through june 30 2022 the certification shall include all food offered for sale to students separately from reimbursable meals at all times and from all sources including but not limited to school stores vending machines in school so is there a second all in favor all right opposed motion

054carries and then the second motion for food exemptions the board of education will allow the sale of students of food items that do not meet the connecticut nutrition standards provided that the following conditions are met number one the sale is in connection with an event occurring after the end of the regular school day or on a weekend two the sale is at the location of the event in three the food items are not sold from vending machine or school store an event is an occurrence that involves more than just a regularly scheduled practice meeting or extracurricular activity for example soccer games school plays and inter-scholastic debates are events but soccer practices play rehearsals in debate team meetings are not the regular school day is the period from midnight before to 30 minutes after the end

055of the official school day location means where the event is being held so what you made is there a second motion made there's a second all in favor opposed motion carries next item on the agenda is the second read and approval of the curriculum items a through g which were discussed uh during the committee of the whole meeting are there any further questions or clarification that the board needs hearing none i'll entertain a motion motion to approve the curriculum as presented motion made is there a second motion there's a second any discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor opposed motion carries next item on the agenda is the second read approval of policy student health services school district medical advisor that was also discussed at the committee of the whole meeting any questions

056or further clarification needed by the board hearing none i'll entertain a motion motion to approve the student health services school district medical advice motion made is there a second wish it made there's a second any discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor opposed motion carries next item on the agenda is the update on board of education advisory council on return to school um at this point i'll turn it over to gordon who is the chair of that advisory council thank you frank um yes we had our first meeting um i guess that's probably about three weeks ago now um we had um it's a diverse group we have medical professionals we have business executives we have a para we have a teacher assistant principal um um who else um yeah so i think

057that that sums up who we had in terms of diversity all all parents of kids in the district we started off the the meeting by talking about what the council was and was not um and what it really is about is is taking providing input reviewing what dr reilly and the administration has for the back-to-school plan for both the spring as well as the as the fall so um we spent quite a bit of time it was the first week back so we spent a lot of time talking about some of the great things that happened some of the challenges that happened there are a few ideas that came out of it that we um we said we would we would discuss um moving forward um there was some discussion about summer school as part

058of the recovery plan and i know that's included in the uh the recommendation for the cares package so i think that was some really good conversation um dan kelly had recommended the idea of actually hosting the meeting in one of the schools and um we think that might be a challenge um just logistically so one of the things we talked about was actually taking videos or pictures so that parents and the rest of community can get an idea of what the new normal is like in school so we talked about that um we have our next meeting on the 20th and that will be in person at the high school and we've actually invited um ledgelight to come and attend that meeting um and as part of our discussion or review where we are because

059by that time we'll have everybody you know back in school and we know um we have um some some vocal medical professionals in in town so we would like to to make sure that that opportunity is presented to uh to ask any questions that they might have and the representatives do that on behalf of the rest of the community so really encouraged by that we haven't heard back yet from from ledgelight but um alice and i are working on that together um and yeah we'll just continue to review the plan see how things are going and adapt as we go but overall i think you know the the teams are great um everybody's been very respectful and mindful of what their role is but also just everybody else so everybody's been very very courteous very

060thoughtful and uh you know in in their time so i want to thank everybody for doing it and uh look forward to the meeting on the 20th any any questions from board members or comments heidi anything you want to add in your part i'm sorry heidi i forgot to mention that we had another board member there as well my apologies you're you're part of that group too anything you want to add no i just i didn't know how far we got we talked at the end about having the videos of classes because that's one of our tenants transparency and that's our effort so i didn't know how far would happen yeah i honestly i will have to look into that because i don't know where we stand on that right now but i will look

061into that for sure was that was that it heidi or anything okay any other comments or questions for heidi or gordon okay thank you superintendent of schools report uh dr riley yes thank you very much um i would like to start out with the recovery plan that's in front of you you have a hard copy it's also on your on your computer i'd like to thank marianne in particular our leadership team we have spent many many hours putting this together and i know that our principals have spoken with their support staff their teachers parents and others to you know to get ideas about where we need to go with this this is a very complex situation obviously and you'll see as we go through this we've tried to match our funding sources with our both

062our academic and our social emotional needs i've also met with town recreation twice met with ness we plan to meet with como aquarion and others as far as summer programs and what we can help help with next year as we move into the fall so if you look on the second page there the introduction i just want to point out that i think we've heard this many many times we're looking at academic issues looking at how we can accelerate learning academic learning for our students particularly in the area of mathematics we're also looking at the social emotional needs of our students we have a number of students that are receiving counseling and additional mental health services this year much more than we have had in the past so we have these two really important issues

063that we need to address with this plan i pointed out the funding sources the sr1 that cares money was 280 435 we have spent that appendix a you've seen that a number of times every month i think since last fall and that really is how we have spent the that first round of funding sr2 is the 1.243 million dollars and this report tonight is focused on that we have a plan that has been developed that each school will look different because they are different and they have different needs and the principal and the staff at those different schools have analyzed their needs looking at the data that they have and come up with these recommendations so tonight really we're going to be looking at the esser 2 funds the american rescue plan funds that three

064million dollars will be presented to the board in may we haven't even applied yet for the sr2 that's due i think april 19th so we're meeting um our cabinet's meeting tomorrow to finalize that we don't even have the application in yet for the arp funds but you'll get a taste i think when you look at how we're going to spend the sr2 funds and what we might be able to do with the other with the three million dollars and we'll be bringing that again back with recommendations to the board next month then if you turn the page to request for board of education approval this approval not right now this hold on to this uh this motion will i'll ask you to approve it at the end of the presentation but we're looking for you

065to approve the plan and the sr2 funding as presented understanding that specific details and strategies change what happens in summer school might cause us to be more of something in the fall and we'll be bringing those back to you every month i think this like we did with opening in the covid it'll be important for the next year or more for the board to hear exactly where we are with these funds what has changed what new data do we have how are we doing with hiring etc so at the end of our report again i'll ask for approval of this and it's important tonight to have this approval because every other district in the country will be hiring the same people that we want to hire i talked to a friend out in the uh

066the other state um this afternoon actually and there's they're a district about a little larger than us they're gonna hire 30 teachers starting next week and that's just one little district everybody's gonna be looking for teachers math teachers mental health workers interventionists tutors on and on and on we need to be out there right away that's why the having this approval is so important and again this is just for the sr2 funds it's not we'll talk next time about the uh the three million dollars so i put on your future updates um summer school is going to be important like gordon mentioned we're looking at the days the times who's going to come what are we going to teach what it's going to look like all that and we'll be presenting that in may i'd

067like to present an update on hiring assuming that you will approve this plan so we can get started on the hiring uh here's the no you'll see the positions that we're looking at and where we are with the hiring are are there issues problems hiring certain positions and what we're going to do about it then you'll also have some a presentation on next year next fall there's some scheduling ideas that we have and i'm not ready to discuss those tonight but i think we had some ideas about perhaps changing some things with our instructional schedule and lastly of course i've mentioned the arp funding recommendations and then monthly from now until a long time from now you have a recovery plan update to the board every month and with that i would like to ask

068marianne to cover the next section please good evening and happy spring break eve see i knew i get some response i have never been so happy for spring break since 1982 when i was in college we made it so good job leadership team thank you for all your help to get us this far we're at the last five yard line here um i i have two requests of the board of ed right now before i start to give you a very high level of view of where we're going with this recovery plan number one is to put all your paper away until i tell you to take out your paper and the second one is to actually question any assumptions you have about how you went to school and how our operational model looked last

069year pre-coded because we're going to share with you some ideas that might not sound super classic and might challenge your thinking about what's best for children this is the same kind of activity that we asked the building principles to engage in when we shared our thinking about next year and ask them to to kind of look at their data and think about creative ways that they want to address the students needs both social emotionally as well as academically so the first thing that we did collectively as a leadership team is to define what the problem is that we're trying to address as a well-defined problem is one that is half solved and as good teachers we always like to use guiding questions or essential questions in order to do that and so our question or

070our problem is how might we strengthen school communities as sites reopen by highlighting solutions that reconnect people and enhance collective well-being teaching and learning there are two tenets that we're going to hold true to with the plan as we move forward and they are holding true to predictability for children and connectedness within our community both of those two concepts are really linchpins and everything that we've done thus far with our practices around student engagement and we believe that they will if we stay true to them they will improve not only student engagement social emotional well-being and also academic outcomes so um what did we do we took a look at our data before we went anywhere we've shared a lot of that data previously with you it's linked in the the document that we have

071shared with you thus far everything from our benchmark assessments to our attendance our chronic attendance we've actually started to look now at our caseloads and mental health what does that look like at each building and what does that mean in terms of what resources are needed and what practices need to be in play next year at each individual level most of that data has been shared with you in addition to that data i have also linked into your report next year's draft assessment calendar i know many of you have questions about well how are you going to know that anything you do is going to make a difference we're going to use many of the measures that we have historically used to measure out student performance and growth many of those will be reported on

072to you as we have in the past and some additional measures will be there as well i've also included in that document just a little bit of a cliff note version on what each of those instruments actually measure in case you're not from familiar with a lot of those tests that we use um at the various grade levels so that might help you kind of interpret what we are actually measuring at any juncture so based on this plan we're actually using our current data but i want you to think like scientists we know that our data will change with more information that we get over the next few weeks and over the summer the resources that we are currently thinking may actually get deployed in different buildings or within different programs we have historically done

073that at the district data team level it's why we look at our numbers we don't believe in admiring the problem we believe in finding solutions for the problem so we may see this these resources become very dynamic over the next course of the next year or year and a half or two years we have seen some common trends among all of the buildings as unique as they each are there are some common threads that we have noticed there's an increased needs for social emotional supports most significant at two out of our four schools we now and i want you to think a little bit about you've heard me talk about rti response to intervention before typically when we're talking about kids who need an academic help or social emotional help we want that population to

074be capped off at 20 max that's the max beyond that something's wrong with the system something's out of whack and so when i report these these numbers to you you'll see right away where our needs are so currently at dean's middle school we have less than 11 of the children receiving ongoing mental health services that's anything that might be uh scheduled into their ieps or their 504s to group uh kinds of sessions or other services other counseling services that are available at west vine street school we have 20 21 of the population receiving similar services so we're already over that cap threshold at stonington middle school we have 33 percent of our students engaged in um receiving those services and 15 at stonington high school so that gives you a little bit of idea on

075when decisions are being made about how we're going to deploy specific resources and the principles for making some decisions about challenging their assumptions uh that you'll see as we unfold in some of the decisions that they've made we know that the area of mathematics like the rest around the country but the rest of the schools around the country is one that is in need of more support than language arts but i want you to think about the key the key points um that we mentioned as far as mathematics and as far as social emotional needs that some of these uh interventions or resources or staffing decisions may not look traditional so just pause your disbelief for a little bit i'm going to go through some high level talking points again school by school and then

076we'll go through that chart so you can take a look at each one's of those positions and if you have any questions about the recommendations that the principals have made i can either try and answer them or we have our experts right behind me here as well so at west fine street school west vine street school was strikingly the most the data has shown us that it's the most in need of the support significant supports over the next few years we mentioned the of the students actually receiving mental health services above the metric that the rti model uh suggests it's the highest need for staffing and resources in sel mathematics and reading it is across the board in need of more resources than any other building and you're going to see that reflected in the

077bottom line for the resources that we're recommending to deploy to that building because of the size of this the school the classes unfortunately they've had an um a bumpy history as far as being able to departmentalize at the upper elementary grade levels we know that there are advantages to the teachers being able to focus on specific content and become specialists and experts in their particular field whether it's math and science or whether it's language arts and social studies unfortunately that has not always been the case at west 5 street school and we've seen it the folks at dean's mill not get out of the park with that model so even though the class sizes are smaller at west vine street school we believe the data supports the absolute critical need for those uh additional staff

078members i believe it's grades one and four uh to to even out so that we can actually departmentalize and uh those i'm sorry is that great cathy craze three and then an additional teacher in grade one to keep the class sizes down gotcha because we had a huge kindergarten this year um we're also asking for additional interventionists and tutors both in mathematics and reading and we're going to ask for something rather unique and looking at a teacher coach position next year at west vine street school to make sure that the trauma sensitive practices as well as content pedagogy including the the equi protocols are maintained and implemented with fidelity so that we can get the best student outcomes possible at that school we're actually going to uh revisit having the kindergarten camp for those children

079who have not had a preschool experience uh we can use this district-wide so if there's any students at dean's mill who would also like to take advantage of this camp they certainly can but we know there's a significant population probably about 15 students at west incoming incoming kindergarten students at west vine street school who have not had any pre-k experience we like to set up a six day program for them so they can come in and meet their teacher learn a little bit about what the building looks like form some relationships and learn a little bit about the routines and practices that go along with being a kindergarten student give them a head start we also are going to be housing a summer school program at west vine street school that we'll talk a little

080bit about more as we go forward as dr riley mentioned we're also working with the town we're exploring some ideas it's very very much in the developmental stages about how we could possibly provide some incentives for those families for those children k through eight uh to lure them into taking summer school and perhaps taking advantage of some recreational wrap-around services that would take them beyond the days of just the four hours of summer school and fill their afternoons with other opportunities for recreational activities that would again support this social emotional growth and and health but again stay tuned on that our next building that is showing some uh serious needs in in is our high school uh we we noticed that we have a significant amount of uh d's and f's that is of concern

081to us uh mr freeze and mr are establishing two really interesting uh structures next year called the bear academy and also the learning hub uh there are new and improved versions of previous iterations of those uh those models uh the the bear academy will be in a very intensive uh recovery for those who the children who are are at the most risk and having the most difficulty passing their classes although we you'll notice as we go through the grid that we're asking for some certified staff both in general ed and special ed to provide interventions and academic support for that population of children the learning hub will be somewhat similar but for children who are only failing one class and instead of letting them fail that class we're going to catch them in real time

082and uh prevent credit recovery being necessary and so those children will be released back into the wild once they complete that work and their their masks they've mastered the content and have completed their assignments i'm very proud of mr freeze for actually listening to me once we came up with this idea i actually borrowed it from a neighboring district but i'm really really excited about this every year we've done a program for what we call our super eights mr smith um identifies for us children that he he thinks will have the most difficulty making a transition from eighth grade up to the high school it might not be an academic difficulty it might be a social difficulty and we have a program that we actually run usually around may june and uh the children actually

083go up they they're busted up to the high school and they have some experiences with the high school teachers academically and then you know again with the counselors and the whole idea is that they're they're more familiar and they have a heads up with the the whole environment of what it means in the environment and the expectations of what it means to be a high schooler uh because of the environment we're in this year we thought you know what let's try something a little different we're going to try a super 8 or almost 9 credit acceleration program so we're going to work with mr smith to i identify students that would come up to the high school over the summer in august and actually earn high school credit in a in a topic or a

084content area that they will eventually pursue in a lengthier fashion at the high school and instead of those kids coming into high school with a deficit thinking model they'll come into high school with a quarter credit of high school credit towards graduation in their hip pocket so we'll have a jump start so we'll build success by by giving them that experience of being successful high school students before they open the door is actually open so i'm pretty excited about that and then the high school again will will kind of run their traditional summer credit recovery program uh with some certified staff supporting online learning through the virtual high school another the second time mr freeze listened to me which is go ahead and when you know play the lottery he's looking at working with ms

085prince and taking a look at the media center at the high school and making it more of a contemporary learning and working environment think starbucks you know our kids have been at home working but also when they they are not in a pandemic you'll often see them at starbucks or out and about working much like our young adults in the work environment they're uh they're not working in silos we don't want them in silos we want them communicating and having opportunities to socially engage as well as engage in academic discourse so we're looking at giving the the libraries at both the high school and the middle school a makeover to look do i dare say more finnish stonington middle school again will have an unbelievably high interest summer school program probably week themed offerings they

086are under development as we speak and when they are ready for publication i'll be happy to share them with you again we have 33 percent of the middle schoolers that are engaged in supports on an ongoing basis for various social emotional reasons uh mr smith has identified a rather innovative practice and that he's looking to hire an sel coordinator next year to really support work that has had started started and then been interrupted around restorative practices remember that stonington middle school didn't even get a full year of operating in person to establish its culture and its expectations behaviorally and academically for kids in person before the pandemic hit and so it's really important for the culture of that school that got off to such a positive positive start to to kind of have that support

087when the the situation is rather fragile at this point and that person would be responsible for the continuation of norm setting both for adults and students the the kind of clear expectations behaviorally academically and and kind of building that sense of community responsibility for the kids in addition our scores at the middle school are showing that we need math support and we're looking at adding an interventionist there so that we'll double our power as far as being able to provide acceleration in math for all students no matter where they are at the performance level we're also going to explore the use of a tutor with some flex scheduling there may even be a possibility of having a tutor that is a remote tutor we're not quite sure yet but in conversations with folks around the

088country and around the world it is not unusual now that folks are hiring people from out of state to do some of that uh remote work and again innovative spaces both and the library space as well as some of the the space downstairs that used to be the tech room in the art room so that's that and then finally dean's middle school is looking at having a super flex camp which is a really kind of neat idea in that ms mccurdy has the the vision to actually gather the kids who have been full remote learners this whole year and bring them together to kind of reacclimate them socially uh and behaviorally to get back into that school environment anticipating that after a year of not being around their peers they might have some anxiety issues

089they might have some questions or trepidation about returning and so that again would happen in a summer school fashion in august before the children come back it's very clear at dean smile that mathematics will be a prime primary focus of their work next year again looking to add an interventionist that will be able to teach reading if necessary but the primary focus most likely will be on mathematics and both of the elementary schools are interested in reinstating the stem position that was cut last year due to the budget reductions and they believe that that's not only a neat way to get kids involved in high interest programming and project-based learning but also a sneaky way don't tell them to support science and mathematics in a in a very interesting in a different way than the

090programming offered by eureka so with that in play if you want we can kind of walk through the chart that is provided to you both starts off with summer school and then it goes into building by building the the positions that we are asking for and as a service to students the measurable outcomes and the costs associated with that i will tell you that some of the the asks if you will do not have measurable outcomes it's really hard to to give you a measurable outcome or how many students are impacted by a hall monitor that's almost the absence of data of referral data that would be a measurable outcome but we did our best to give you an idea of how we're going to be looking at the impact of our investment as well

091as whether it comes from the position would come from general funds or from the s or 2 bucket so summer school the elementary offerings we have the dates for our kindergarten readiness camp that will be at west vine street school ms irving tells us we're probably going to target about 15 of our little kiddos who have never had any preschool experience to come out and ride the school bus meet their teacher meet the administrators walk around the building learn how to line up look at their cubbies see how their classrooms set up we have seen amazing results with that simplistic model of avoiding serious meltdowns on the first few days of school so it sounds very simplistic and elegantly so but it's very effective our elementary program will run the same days as the middle

092school program and the same days as our extended school year program from 8 30 to 12 15 from july 6 through august 5th that will allow us some actual financial efficiencies with buses with nurses with administrative coverage and such again we'll be looking at some pre and post data to see what we we're going to notice about social emotional impact of that programming we're not expecting academics to be enormously accelerated this is as much an opportunity to get kids back interacting as with one another as it is to uh to cover some academic content the same as goes with the middle school we're actually trying to um we're looking at a a an assessment actually that might align with our second step curriculum to assess the growth and social emotional learning um be happy to

093add that uh into the assessment calendar once we identify that again the dates for stonington high school we're looking at 40 hours of work for that super 8 acceleration program and that may be mostly it might be split in in school and split out of school as far as the design goes we have several teachers that are interested in working with our kids on this it will be a standard based assessment on how they are awarded credit which is a really great way for us to kind of ease into that way of assessing children at the secondary level and then the credit recovery program which is our kind of traditional credit recovery program that runs in the summer time we're targeting about we think about 30 children will be enrolled in that and again with

094some certified teacher support we spoke about the incentives that we're looking at we'll let you know whether that is going to fly or not but that's pretty much what we're looking at for our summer school offerings do we have any questions about that before we proceed into next year and what that will look like [Music] any questions on the summer school offering from the board uh just the question why the decision is made on some items to be used by general funds just based on the what we have as as available funds for things that might be in my budget as far as added teaching or curriculum materials farouk versus and also how far we can stretch these particular grant funds if need be because we're again we're approximating we haven't sent the survey out

095yet for for instance summer school and how many kids kiddos might actually be interested if it goes over what we're estimating we can certainly dip into that three million dollars the third bucket of funding that's coming down the road but this is our best guess right now any other questions any other questions from the lord i guess mine was so mine was a little bit where peru was going just in terms of you mentioned that the you know there was high in high summer school interest so how do we know that but it sounds like we don't know that yet we don't know that we might have a lot of people going to cape cod we just don't know yet we're going to send that survey out after break we didn't want to send it

096out right yet right and we we have surveyed some of the teachers we've we know that we have staff in order to run the schools so that's that was number one um and then we'll see we'll see what numbers we get they may be very low in some grade levels and very high in others we don't know i'm hearing him expects i think a lot of people are saying i'm headed to the beach right for the summer so that's why i'm just glad to hear that we're going to do some type of data analysis to figure that out we're trying to keep it really flexible too in case their kids and family or families wanted to come two weeks or three weeks especially at the middle school level it will be easier at the middle

097school level because it'll be in themes so it will be a more discreet end but we'll take the little guys as long and or as short as we can get them let me mention also that in talking with the wreck department the town recreation they run a full summer program um eight hours a day and they it's 675 dollars for the whole summer no matter which day you you go so students that are in our program in the middle of that for our five weeks three hours a day they still have to pay 6.75 that program is already full they're they're at their limit so there is interest in doing some summer programs and with this uh in summer school incentive what we wanted to do it's 15 000 maybe we don't know how many

098students are going to show up but what we want to do is say if you go to our summer school will offset your record and you're also in the recreation we'll offset that by a hundred dollars or a hundred and fifty dollars got it which is an incentive you know that that way they here they're getting the incentive to come to school too and they you know the child care part that the parents leave with the whole rec program they've already paid for it so they're full and wreck is interested you know if if they get more kids they'll expand it i mean we're going to encourage that and the other just on the side the recreation program is going to be held at the pavilion behind the high school it's going to all be

099outside we might have to peter might have to put a tent or two back there to help out but at this point if they get 200 kids instead of 60 we're gonna have to open up to school but again they're just looking at what their needs are going to be this summer too but we're working very closely with them and we think that incentive might certainly help some of our our families that need that in order to attend the rec program in summer school just an example of another way of innovative thinking breaking away from practices in the past thinking about how can we leverage some good some good for all in the town right yeah i think so that was i guess the other and i can hold that question for later was just

100like there are some things that you've talked about already that you know like i love the idea of you know you and i actually talked about this i think in september about you know transforming the library into something that's more of like a smoothie center i mean we can't i mean i love starbucks too i mean we don't want the high schoolers you know you can't just start yet you can't do a lot of careers but maybe you know smoothie protein bars like i love that idea but one of the things and i you know i know this came out yesterday and i appreciate that everybody spent countless hours i just think one thing i think the administration needs to realize is this is a lot to digest um i honestly really just got to

101look at it today just with work and everything so so i know there's a lot of pressure to make decisions now but i also want to make sure i'm educated enough to digest this and one of the things that jumped out at me and again tell me to stop but um is it feels very resource intense you know to me 70 of the 1.2 million is in in heads that i just wonder you know if we jump ahead two years um how do we fund this longer term right so that's that's a major concern for me so let me address that first of all this is these are these are not intended to be full permanent additions okay in other words the idea that this is a pandemic we know that we're behind in mathematics

102we need supplemental resources in order to accelerate learning for all kids right so the idea is that these supports would go away after two years time when the funding can support that these aren't these aren't forever and ever and ever the other piece is it may be that after next year and it wouldn't surprise me at the end of next year if some of these interventionists aren't going to be needed again like even after a year we really don't know and that's why i mean you have to kind of suspend your your your assumptions about these kids and i i asked the board as well as i asked the leadership team continually don't go into next year with the deficit mindset kids will surprise you they will meet our expectations you know will we be

103where we normally would have been without a pandemic i don't know probably not maybe so i don't know but i think the idea is that this is these are resources that are kind of uh embellishments if you will that we hope we want that to be tempted the intent is that they are temporary okay um and that's why the money is being given to us is that the government recognizes we're in a unique position and we need additional funding to do this work for kids i'm just wondering though is is knowing that so let's say the resources go away in two years something like that media center that you know mark's talking about that's that lasts a lifetime right so to me when you start looking at things you know and i have that and

104it worked now right i asked for things and you know we have some extra money you know in the in the business and they say hey what can we do to fund now that will last but it's not part of the operational budget moving forward right that's just you know financial mindset i have a struggle getting out of my head but i love ideas like that and what are the other things that we could do and i just wonder are there things that we could do you know and maybe you guys tell me you can't do that with teachers and unions and everything but maybe is it per diem is there something we can do where that becomes more of a variable cost so you can spin that up and down and give a mark

105freeze more dollars to you know create more spaces like that like i love that so i'm going to push back a little bit on things that will last about the the smoothie bar and the in the finish uh media center or whatever uh the children will last so we're investing the children in their in their performance and their social emotional health and their academic growth right that is that's more important to me than any any right so so i just want to push back on that this is our one chance to actually use our funds in a way that is is going to take us beyond what the target has traditionally been in this in this state i think we need to set the bar higher for our kids than the traditional bar has been

106we were on a great trajectory before the pandemic i think this will this will afford us an opportunity to be even better and and uh and outshine other districts to european nation so the other the other thing to uh i'll go ahead sorry but i just want to make sure you're understanding this correctly this is this is planet for three years the the funds will be the three buckets of funds could be expended over three years now that doesn't mean we're going to have this all of these positions for three years the the intent right now is to have these positions for next year and what our thinking is right now is that they would be there then the following year but that again could change come the winter's benchmark data next year we might

107we might be looking like we're really in good shape and we can get rid of you know a math interventionist or it might be like we're looking at our caseload mental health case loads and they may be going down or they may be going up we don't know correct correct correct this is again that's what i'm saying is we're using the data we have right now but you know the really principles will tell you even after the end of this week they're seeing some behaviors that they didn't expect to see so quite so soon with the kids so you can just imagine next september or next october our data whether it's behavioral social emotional or academic is going to look we will deal with it [Music] the buckets bleed into one another it's a little

108bit like some of our grant money so so the first bucket's gone because we use that for ppe and custodian and all of that so this second bucket will bleed over into the third bucket so they we can start spending both of them the this bucket the second bucket and the third bucket as soon as we get the knob let me just jump in for a second if you look at appendix b the last the last page what i was going to hold off on this but i think this will help answer these timing questions what we're asking tonight the essr 2 funds will fund everything we need to do this summer and all of these proposals for this coming year that's that's when these funds if ever if we are able to hire everyone

109that's when these funds will run out what i'll propose to you in may is the next round which is the three million dollars and if you look at the very bottom right if we mirror in 2022 what we did this coming year we will have spent about half of the three million dollars so and we probably won't need to do that you know we will we'll have to see that we need all the interventionists and tutors etc but that frees up about you know 1.4 1.5 million dollars that we will be able to do some of the things that will be lack of facilities types of things that will help with with ventilation they're long-term things but they also address some of the needs we've seen with the with the coven and again we're trying

110that's that's to me there was more than we needed to talk about tonight tonight we're looking at the 1.2 let's get this to get the kids back academically and social emotionally that summer and all of next year and then starting in may we'll look at the what happens after that and what types of things do you want to do to help with things are going to last for 20 years so we'll bring that to you in the may meeting but again tonight it's the 1.2 million that will get us through the summer and all of next year step 1.2 dictated by pspss funds or by us telling them this is what we need it's we get this amount of money from essr we have to put in an application in the next week but that

111we are told we get that amount of money as long as we turn in the application so we'll take this list of all these things we're going to do put them in the right boxes and it'll total 1.2 billion dollars so we'll get that the the 3.08 billion we think that's what we're going to get we don't know that they don't even have an application yet that's what we're told by the state that we're going to get but really to me that's that's next month you know it'll take maybe even a few months to even get an application but i think that's when we can look at you know this whole ventilation issue and fresh air and some some long-term facilities kinds of things to augment what we're doing academically emotionally with the students so

112fruit the the allocations that we get on each of these are linked to our title the title one formula that's so here's a method to the madness from the feds that's how that that's that amount is determined i guess just one other on that though is so we're if we're getting 1.2 now in 20 21 22 we're gonna spend the full 1.2 but we're we're not we're not planning for the 3 million yet but we're it looks like we're still pulling 1.2 out of that for 20 23 right am i reading that right or no well in a way that's we're not you're not approving that tonight it was put in here so you could see if we do the same thing the following year which we're not asking you to even consider tonight we'd

113still have a million and a half or so left got it so i don't think you know by the time we get to you know fall or next year we're really looking at how much do we need to repeat the following year that could go way down it could go up differently but i think again in may there's some things we need to do with our ventilation hvac systems that we need to get going on so we need to decide the board needs to decide okay of the three million how much are you comfortable with spending now you know or as soon as we can on these particular general air quality issues that we i think we need to spend some of this money on right because we won't know the academic needs for the

114two years out for a little while but we need to set some aside for that because we're going to need something but how much are you is one and a half or 1.3 or what you know what are you comfortable with so we can get get going on some of these projects that we need to do so how does kathy hire a fourth grade teacher though next year and then that not be part of the you know a longer term plan like i would hate to hire a fourth grade teacher that's listed on here right and then have to say well we don't need you anymore you know like you'll have to be a fifth grade teacher the following year because the it's where the bump and the kids are this is something we do

115every year it's based on enrollment okay we're also we have very low class sizes next year because of all this and we do this every year we like to see where can we you know where's the low class can we you know have one less teacher here or there so there's only a couple things in here that if all the enrollment numbers stayed the same we would need to do that but they don't sometimes they go up sometimes they go down we might have to hire another fourth grade teacher without any of this money that we'd have to re-prioritize things and yeah but that's what i'm just looking at between the you know what what's the operational longer term that kathy needs to do that versus like in here just one time one time dollars

116right so i just want to make sure it doesn't spill over to the operational the really the two the first grade and the fourth grade are things that might need to continue and if they do then we'll look at what's the fifth grade and what's the what's the high school what's the middle school where can we if we need to find two teaching physicians we need 200 000 is it out of a teacher or out of a maintenance or out of a whatever that's what we do all you know starting in october each year for the for the budget okay okay so dr riley just just to clarify because i have a similar concern to boardings what are all of these positions that we're hiring are they getting a one-year contract how is it going

117to be differentiated because this again this this money is one-time funds and i am very sensitive to the fact that i don't want to be in a situation three years from now i won't be sitting here and some of the people around this table won't be here another board of ed is having to deal with a decision that we make tonight so i just want to understand how that works and i've checked with our with nick on this if we hire an intervention a teacher to help with math that teacher we cannot hire a one-year teacher that teacher becomes part of the teaching staff our 200 teachers and if in the future we don't have enough you know retirement say in a year we don't have three four retirements then we would have to reduce

118staff there's no other legal way around that we can't just say you have a one-year contract and it's over i think we we talked to teachers about that we talked to staff if we're hiring you in as a mental health worker we may you know it we hope it continues on some and may retire or we may have to let you go in a year or two that's just legally that's the way it is we have no way around that according to your point that's one of the reasons we'll be reporting to the board every month so that you'll have the idea of what how dynamic this process is what are we seeing academically what are we seeing behaviorally so you can see if we're saying hey you know what we've got we've got a

119need at dean's middle school we're going to move a resource from one school to another that's how it's going to work absolutely we know peter needs you know it's a big concern in town about you know the dairy mission right i think that's a no-brainer we've got to go look at that but you know that's a fixed capital cost we'll start looking at pictures you know we're talking about people i just sensitive to [Music] we do that with our own resources now i think it was a couple years ago we had a situation with math performance we moved services to a different building because that's where the need was so it happens now this just is on a grander scale because there's more bodies that you're looking at at one point when we had that

120situation a couple years ago we did a retirement incentive and when we have 12 i think teachers take advantage of that you don't want to do that every year because then people will wait for the next one but if something happens say in two years that we needed you know we didn't have enough regular retirees we might you know the board might have to do something like that again hopefully it doesn't come to layoffs it really since i've been here we have very we haven't really needed to do maybe a couple of but you know it just really depends on your year in enrollment and what what our what our needs are and we just can't guarantee all these 20 positions they're going to keep on going forever i mean they be higher knowing that

121that's not going to happen and somebody like the tutors a lot of these are retired teachers you know and they're hourly and they can you know i was talking to kathy and jen about they may not even start these tutor positions in september they may wait and see and start in october or they may get a language arts person for a while and you know they have x amount of hours to help their students and again a lot of those are just hourly when you don't lay them off you just hire them as long as you need them but it sounds like retirement is probably filled with the plan a little bit but i do think if we were to look at something to say hey we've got a couple of retired teachers of matthews

122you know if in this role that those people quicker we can advertise for these positions the more choice we're going to have in we're hiring as well so just on page six i'm just going to go through um pretty quickly just the positions and again this is set up to give you an idea of the measurable outcomes how many kids are going to be impacted by this particular resource what the measurable outcomes are that we can report to you on next year there will be additional measurable outcomes as well but this is our thinking at this point so at both elementary schools you're going to see you're going to notice that there's a need for an academic interventionist again we're saying academic rather than mathematics or reading just so that we have some flexibility we're

123hopeful that we can find folks that are well versed in both disciplines to meet the students needs and again gordon to kind of uh you know address your point is you know there is going to be a fluid fluid needs we know mathematics are what the data is telling us right now but there might bubble up something with reading comprehension or whatever so we want these to be very dynamic the same thing with tutors uh a literacy or numeracy tutor uh the super flex camp which is unique to dean's middle school only a very low budget item and then the return of the stem specialist which is a shared position half time at west fine street school and half time at dean's mill we're again looking at that position not only helping us reach our

124district improvement goals but also uh supporting science and mathematics achievement was fine street school again with our significant resources the internship the interventionists rather again is parallel to what uh west fine uh what's in teams bill is actually adding for the grade one and grade four again with uh increasing uh class decreasing class sizes for grade one and also uh helping departmentalize in grade four again an additional literacy tutor at west fine street school we know that the foundational skills are something that we are struggling with right now over there so we know that we're going to need some extra hands on deck at those early in those early grade levels to help with foundational skills and again a separate person to address numeracy mathematical foundational skills the instructional coach again is going to help

125with student engagement we we have our data from east con that is showing district-wide that we have an average of 33 percent of uh time that students actually are actively engaged by responding in class we need that metric to move up to at least 50 percent of the time it's not over that not drastically over that as a goal because we recognize that there are times in class where direct instruction is appropriate and other times where stu more teachers are actually delivering directions on how to approach a particular task so we were looking at moving out the east con metrics k through 12. you know that the uh the mental health demands at west vine street school uh really warrant having an additional mental health staff person is couched uh broadly because we're not sure

126whether or not once kathy starts to advertise whether she's going to land on a school psychiatrist or a social worker or a counselor so we we've made that kind of very broad right now to see what she's her what we get when we advertise but also um what the talent pool is like out there and then based on allison van netten's recommendation the addition of a behavior tech to work with a very small percentage of kids who need uh significant help with their behavioral support plans that may other otherwise without this particular staff member uh be alternatively placed which has a much higher uh price tag to it than thirty thousand dollars so a very wise investment there at west vine street school on our stingray tank at stonington middle school again a math interventionist

127to help tina eisenbach out who's handling all the math intervention right now an sel coordinator again to help with establishing and reestablishing what had started to be done at the the middle school early on before the pandemic hit with work around restorative practices and building a strong culture of community there and again that person will need some training and restorative practice that that will coming out of general funds and then the two different alternative learning spaces again we'll be taking that that furniture and movable bookcases and such out of general funds we'll need a paraeducator to help with supervision again in some of those spaces to help teachers that will be instructing for those project-based learning opportunities and team-based competitions and a math tutor again that will be an hourly rate um and then a

128very small amount of money for sixth grade orientation this year and the reason why that's there is traditionally that happens during one of the professional development days and the sixth grade teacher the teachers of sixth grade are not um available to participate in professional development they're actually meeting with their students we want to take that out of the mix of professional development this year so the teachers can fully participate in that and also that the the uh the students will have an opportunity to have a full day at the middle school to again transition them when we know that this is an uh exceptionally fragile year for those transitions that are going to be a little bit tricky and then finally our flagship school stonington high school they're looking for a hall monitor they're having

129some these these new programs are going to be populating uh area of the school that is uh not as frequently used as it is now and so they're looking at some support there to maintain traffic uh and anybody who knows uh secondary students understand that they get into trouble in unstructured kind uh times of the day which are changes of class and so the hall monitor will be helping to move traffic along and such again the two different um entities the learning hub and the bare academy those are the positions that are needed to actually house uh instruction in those particular environments and we're also looking for a para educator to help with the learning club and as well as the uh the bear academy the district-wide programming this is something that is very very

130much under construction our friends at the state department of education uh have met with various superintendents and stakeholders the unions the state of the the state level union leadership and are exploring the idea of having a virtual learning academy at the state level in other words they may forbid us from having any remote learning at the local level next year and take that over at the state level so any family that would be opting to have their child learning remotely next year for whatever reason they would be participating in a state school virtually rather than a stonington school we're not super happy about that it's not definite we're pursuing some conversations with regen regional partners to see if maybe we can be proactive and keep our kids with our teachers uh not having our teachers

131teaching a hybrid model but maybe some of our assignments would be for those children who would be opting for a virtual program again we have no information from the state at this point about what those parameters might be for folk families who would might want to opt for that whether they have to be a medical kind of situation or if it's just totally at their discretion we have no guidance at this point on that but we did want to make you aware that there are conversations about those children being uh taken over through a a state remote learning school and then finally the custodians and para educators that's an expense that um you know obviously through the pandemic we've had to absorb extra help in that particular those particular arenas and that's where that figure

132comes from so that's our plan i don't know dr riley if you have any parting comments [Music] i understand how this is a big deal and you need to as a board understand the nuances here but you can see it it is going to be dynamic even through the summer you know we're going to be working on these things um as we use the data we get back from from our students but again i think you can tell the detail that our principals have put into trying to do what's best for their children for their students at their particular school typically if this were any other time i'd say let's bring this up next month that's fine let's you know look at it ask me questions but i i think you can sense the urgency

133um of our hires there are two there are teaching positions or mental health positions in here um and that's i think gordon what you were referring to i mean what happens in here frank what happens to these positions in a year or two um if we're hiring if kathy's hiring her fourth grade or say her interventionist that that person will have seniority over who else we hire after that person yeah to do so maybe the kindergarten teacher leaves we hire another kindergarten teacher after we've hired an interventionist so when kathy's hiring the interventionist she makes you know that's a math expert that said you know that may be the primary goal but also understanding that person may bump somebody or someone else retires and will go into a fifth grade class or a kindergarten class

134or something else in in a couple years um having 12 12 positions we've done in the senate before and 12 was was the magic number so i don't think we're pushing out too far as as you know hiring people that we're going to need to lay off we just haven't had to do that and again with the retire looking at the number of retirees we think we're going to have in the next couple years we're going to probably be okay anyway so i would you know be how we'll answer any questions you have but the getting this hiring going and getting the survey to parents and teachers for summer school those are things that we really need to do yesterday so we you know again if you have any questions we'd love to hear those

135otherwise i would ask that you approve the motion that was in the packet go ahead jack thank you for all your effort uh putting this together um i was different i was concerned uh the number of students at the middle school that are receiving mental health and i'm curious this social emotional learning coordinator is that like a guidance counselor or is that a teacher that's going to receive special training or [Music] to make sure and then marianne maybe if you could speak a little bit to a concern i have this is an opportunity actually to try some we have some money here to try some very interesting perhaps creative um ways of improving our math scores reading literacy have we is hiring all these interventionists and extra staff members is have we exhausted all other

136alternatives i mean have we looked at other school systems that are performing perhaps at a higher level than we are in mathematics to see what they are doing so we have you know um an opportunity to maybe try something different or is it a matter of just hiring more people and providing more support uh what which speaks my answer is more information together for example publishing practices and content hearing practices for all of the teachers here's how we're going to operate this year um the data to answer your question about higher performing districts we don't have any scores or you know i don't reach out to them to ask them about their benchmark assessment but i do know that the people who are in my contact area who have their ears to the ground and

137you are we'll be meeting again after break [Music] i don't have any specifics right now right now we're looking at actually just don't think you're kind of magnifying what we are in affected intervention practices we have seen at the middle school that we've gotten a nice bump in bellwork and around the idea of using games and set up games to practice sound problems so there may be more things like that that we can do it doesn't necessarily have to be a new math program but it could be short and straight practices that give us a little bit of a bulky kind of reinforced skills that may have been maybe adjusting gaps things like that we're also looking at some other um assessments tools that might be better than unless we have to really drill down

138and figure out where the kids are missing particular concepts your skills so how does it work right now or how will it work with these additional interventions well the students having difficulty in math do they just typically get referred to um they look at it specifically at their school levels on the great leg grade around these particular measurements they also look at them uh class by class and so when we have a situation where the teacher the class of teachers find an intervention intervention in tier one or even in tier two there are two interventions happening in the class the classroom teacher does that and they say you know what i'm out of my bag of chips i've tried this and they bring their gut into that team that's full team like this is not

139wrong yeah i only bring it up because my own kids you know leave this topic but they had probably the most success um with actually just going online i think it's khan academy and that usually was the ticket for them um is that do you find that to be the case with all students or we need is that not enough yeah virtually it gets very frustrating for parents we want to probably experiment a little bit of you know what that might afford families as far as for as well as students as far as supporting that particular content area we'll probably start small and see you know one of the magic hours [Music] counselors um the sel personnel knew personnel being added because of all the problems that have occurred during coving it seems like a

140very healthy bunch of sel shouldn't couldn't we um because we have pretty confident current mental health people extend some of their responsibilities and help motivate to enhance their skills if i don't i don't know what all of them you know i don't i sort of understand i understand a behavior technician but i would have thought that we needed one before coded and um an interventionist what what has happened here that has caused so many of these um that we don't have the staff to and in the mental health to address that whatever my response is but when we look at those case numbers at the middle school they can double so what you see is that 33 percent that is available from what they had last year so what's the what's the conclusion i would

141say that it's the trauma that's been used by the pandemic socialized exploitation isolation um you know we don't know what's going on in home lives or whether there's been job losses like that but we know that there's been an enormous increase in um activity to a language counselor or a mental health provider model and while there is overlap it's really universal classroom instruction that is trauma informed and supports dispute social emotional growth it's really instructional practices not mental health support per se so that's why we need just like we have the math coach working with the math teachers on the best ways to have effective instruction and we have our life department teachers working with the teachers we need i feel we need a dedicated person to help all of the classroom teachers build community

142in their classroom that supports the needs of all kids their instructional friends so it's it's more than just having a counselor uh meeting with kids it's the way to build the capacity to support kids senses of belonging and all of the adolescent drivers to meet their needs because again long term you have you know 1.4 vegas counselors servicing 400 kids you know the capacity of the classroom to be a better environment for all kids than those needs to get that meant like more providers because everyone's on the same page in approaching construction what we have to realize is we have a new culture that we are dealing with that isn't the the normal culture the old culture it is a brand new culture so right a school like rmms had an sel program called responsive

143classroom that all teachers were trained in and they had the same common language dealing with student behavior and behavior specific phrases to teach explicitly desired behaviors and support that so that's that's really more with this messy development is that mental health you said something a few minutes ago i i do think the endemic has exasperated anxieties and stresses and depression and for adults to address each of those as well just just like the the activities that we could sign up for for our april voice the focus is on sexual harassment but the majority of the kids signed up for mental health awareness you know it's just it's fascinating do i think it's going to be a perpetual problem as as if yours go on no i just think we need to address what has what

144has been exasperated in all of us i'm just going to use this moment to put a plug in for my familiar concern when i was reading this i understand that there was data that was compiled from east con proving that the area of our student body that requires the most extensive support what you were saying um was towards academic excellence was the social emotional learning um and then it was further explained that active engagement is the best medium measurement for successful social emotional learning so obviously one way for active engagement is to have students actively engaged and so east con revealed that the district's current average of active engagement is 33 here and we should be at a minimum of 50 percent so this isn't obviously a area which we need immediate attention so i

145just wonder what the plan or what is the plan to is there a plan or is there consideration for a plan to actively engage students for four and a half to five days a week after spring break um thus increasing that engagement that we are seeing is so crucial and so critical um in our school right is now specific practices that we have been working on at various grade bands for different amounts of time high school the longest amount of middle schoolers the elementaries have just started working tomorrow we know that student engagement is an indicator of social emotional health if kids are actively engaged that means they're ready to access the content right but we're not looking for like 80 percent of the measurement or 90 percent of the measurements being that the kids

146are engaged actively in the sense that means the teacher's not doing anything okay so we're looking for a soft spot around like at least 50 percent a little bit more than that but we have a balance because to answer your question about what we're doing we're going to be working with each time baseball again next year um back in uh hopefully you know a lot of kids actually being in the classroom again they had to retool their training this year to kind of work around what does that look like in a blended model um so that that's that's that is the average of student engagement right but there still is a crisis about um about the social emotional learning and and engagement was a something that was pushed i know the new york times this

147sunday had an article there were 14 governors mandating that um that schools now open five days a week i know i had something they were in washington the governor um declared a state of emergency related to child and adolescent mental health and banned fully virtual instruction so said that they now have to be um the five day a week in person so i thought that was interesting that this seems to be an alarm that was going out around the country not not just here district average [Music] heidi and um i don't want to misrepresent your words but i think what you're asking is about is is there consideration to go back five days a week after spring break at some point that's what i heard so dr riley do you want to address that i

148think we can uh we can discuss that we're at this point where you have everybody back for four days and we are quarantining 47 students today so we're you know we really haven't we want to get through the spring break that's really um what we're thinking of i know that there was uh an email that went around it and community speaker this evening said we don't need wednesdays to disinfect the classrooms anymore um one of the issues that you heard of you heard from teachers i heard from teachers about this wednesday was they are our teachers are doing an incredible job teaching in two modalities every day they're teaching their institute in class students and they're teaching remote at the same time and unfortunately some parents will or students will say oh okay i'm supposed

149to be in school today but i can just be remote so even teachers don't always know exactly who's going to be remote but it's it's really difficult to have to be to have to teach that way and one of the one of the reasons well certainly disinfecting wednesdays was was important for us the other thing was to give some teachers some time to collaborate and to work together and to plan for teaching two different things at the same time that was every teacher i've spoken to said that this is difficult doing both things and they needed that extra time this goes way back to september when we were first looking at what to do with the hybrid at the hybrid two days you know monday tuesday and again thursday friday and what what do you

150do with wednesday and there was an outcry from teachers that we need we need that extra time they teach in the morning and the students do independent kind of work later so they can plan to do the things that they need to do by teaching two modalities every single day right so i don't think you should ever do that again separating the stuff in person and and i've seen how difficult it is for the teachers and they're generally back and forth so i appreciate what you're saying and hopefully next year if that if it continues i don't think hopefully i can't imagine ever wanting to do this again the two the two things if if there's a separate if like marianne said if there's a state remote school or we do a remote school and

151have teachers dedicated to that you know we'll look at that but even before we get back to to the bears committee there's no thinking at all from any of us that we want to go back ever into a teachers having to teach in class and remote at the same time my concern with trying to change when the wednesdays is right now the pressure teachers are need that time to be able to create the lessons to collaborate to work together on what they're going to be doing the other four days and four and a half days because they're doing the teaching uh online on wednesdays uh when the wednesday mornings i think that would be really really [Music] we are difficult longer kids we have on average they tend to score per day so we're staying

152with one part of the kids still at home vlogging and that that wednesday is absolutely necessary for the future it's just as every step wednesday's still that day where everybody's in the state modality right back on the same page and just get things recorded that was the third thing it was it was the disinfecting it was the time to plan and collaborate because they're teaching two modalities and then it's the one day that they're teaching everybody in one modality so everybody's online on wednesday so teachers liked that a lot that was really important to them and it's it's going to get us through this year so to answer your question you know i think we'd have to we'd have to look at that and the impact on our teaching staff if we wanted to change

153something but i'm not inclined to to go there at this point um um i couldn't agree with you more dr riley i you know i was a big proponent of getting kids back to school in person back to school but i know for a fact that teachers have really struggled this year um good teachers have struggled to try to provide good instruction and it's been very difficult and they quite frankly didn't sign up for this but they've handled it marvelously they've done a great job um and uh the wednesday is is very helpful and um you know we've asked them to come back to school we've asked them to like dr riley said to essentially teach the kids that are in front of them and the ones that are home and upload uh lessons in

154the middle of the night and correct you know help kids that can't get on their computer um deal with the parents that are having uh issues with um you know wi-fi all kinds of issues that um you know has made it really has made their jobs much more difficult and i really believe that this wednesday is very helpful to them and so i am inclined um to you know continue on at least for now um that's just my thoughts and and i agree with what dr riley said jack i totally agree with you i you know i've talked to a lot of teachers and you know just as getting back to four days was a process getting back to five is gonna be a process and to me you know the eye and the prize

155is you know heidi what you're just talking about is is the fall and and to me it's transition it's a transition period um as much as i appreciate science there's more to life than science there's a reality of what um the teachers and the kids are going through the kids are an adjustment going back four days um you know trying to get a 14 year old girl up um at 6 30 in the morning now to go to school when she's been sleeping in a little bit longer on mondays and tuesdays is quite the challenge um and i say that jokingly but it's serious i mean the kids are going through an adjustment so the whole community's going through an adjustment um i've talked to a lot of teachers that have come up to me

156and they're they're thankful they're back to back to school they're also very thankful for that for that day i know they're not home at netflix and you know doing stuff they're working their butts off you know to prepare for those distance learners um and i see that i say i walk by all the time and i see the kids on and you've got a teacher that's teaching to you know hey jimmy you know make sure you look you know look over here um you know my son included so uh i totally agree with you jack um and by the way i want the kids back five days but um it's been a process and we have to stay on that process commit to it we're doing a lot of heavy lifting now and um you

157know i think we have to look forward to the fall can't wait all right let's let's get back to um what's in front of us uh dr riley has asked for the board to approve the plan that was presented for uh the esser 2 funding um are there any more questions or comments on this just one more frank i know again i know i've been uh wrapped around the axle on this but i guess i love i'd love to give tim smith you know 15 math tutors right to go into into the middle school so what's that yeah exactly so but i guess you know if if maybe you know the principals could talk through the logic of you know and i know i'm probably stuck on this but the the you know hiring a

158full-time teacher versus hey let's give tim you know 15 math interventions because i think the other thing we have to look at is we do have three years to spend this 1.2 million we don't have to spend it all right now right so for me um i'll be totally honest i i don't feel comfortable voting right now and i know that's a lot of pressure and you know i can feel the visual daggers right now but um you know not saying they're there but um you know i'd love to be able to start off and say okay you know you know tim here's here's here's five math interventionists you know whatever it is 45 bucks an hour let's let's try it out and we see that working let's you know put gas on it and

159double down so you know again just like you know the e-rate funding that chris gets he's got a couple years to go spend it i i i personally i feel like that that should be our approach can i can i help unwrap you because we're really just approving a plan to get a dollar a month and and then because we need it by a certain date and then this plan if you read the motion we we you know we will change based on data and based on more research from our administrators or we're gonna start posting for positions tomorrow i i agree with you 100 but i don't think i think it's like i i try to hire employees and i've been trying for three months and i'm not finding anybody nobody wants to work

160i upped my wages by 30 percent to find people to work i'm posting everywhere and i can't find people so yes we want to post tomorrow but i bet you'll take it months [Music] we have to be able to pivot and and that's part of the motion is that we will do this because things will change ideas will change the process will change and by the time we find 20 percent if i got this wrong please somebody stopped me but by the time we find 20 percent of these educators we might have to change our plan because we cannot find the 80 percent um is that unless this group decides that a way to address the needs of the pandemic is to extend the school decades next year we're at school six days a week

161one of our limitations on helping kids is school days a finite number of hours so when we're looking for uh a targeted intervention like like that so if you have a couple choices we're down for six and a half hours of which a half hour's lunch we have six hours they have to have all their classes and so if you need more math help am i gonna tell you we're gonna hold you out of heart because that's the class that we're going to sacrifice for the kids who need that knowledge nobody wants to make that trade-off it's not good for the kid it's it's you know again that's where the scl comes in it's a whole child kind of virginia who never holds back on enrichment activity like music or art to help remediate his

162reading for that so by having the extra interventionist in that you can envision a math class where the math teacher usually does a watch of the lesson in how to solve for x uh and then walks all the whole class through one problem solving for us and then typically they have a problem set that then kids with their what would call their elbow partner we never get back to that where the kids are getting sick closely so they work together next year they start working through some of the processes themselves and the teacher walks around so with one teacher in the room he's with this group helping record the other five groups of four kids in the room are working on their own by having the extra interventionist who can double up that interaction with

163the kids and and see some promised mistakes and some misconceptions it just gives more instructional flexibility more background so that's that's why it is a people it is a people solution because the time variable is fine i guess i would just think you could get a retired leader well that's why that's why it's in there as a tutor exactly that's an hourly position available every year [Music] is [Music] one of the things that i noticed when i first arrived in 2012 we were doing the hiring of teaching staff in june and july and august and i think probably craig and frank and lisa would remember we put in an early notification incentive if you're going to retire anyway let us know in december and i think you get a thousand dollars it it changed this

164district because we were able to hire our teachers in march and april i understand this is dynamic is going to change if we don't have your permission if we don't have your approval then we're looking at may and then by the time we advertise we're looking at hiring after everybody else in connecticut has hired the good teachers that we want to hire if i had to do this if i knew all this like two months ago we would have brought it up and given you plenty of time to look at it we it's it is urgent particularly for those full-time positions any any other questions or comments hearing down what's your pleasure motion to approve the recovery plan me ssbr2 funding as presented with the understanding that specific details and strategies will change based on

165new data throughout this year next second motion made there's a second any discussion on the motion hearing none all in favor opposed motion cares okay the next item is the cares fund i think we we covered that frank do we need anything else well uh you addressed it okay the next one is the hvac um update peter has provided a summary of kind of where we are with this again this will be we'll go into some detail with this at the next uh in may i know there was a question about is this the right amounts and just to remind you we look back the cip two years ago and we were looking at um the bl engineering did a estimate for the middle school and it ranged from 2.5 to 2.9 million we put

166in for six hundred thousand and that was to put in the mini split like the mitsubishi mini split systems which would not have been effective they just recirculate get air cold to do this program we are looking at 2 million 2.2 million something like that at this point we'll bring a lot more next time when we're making a recommendation but i know there was a question about that if you do peter's here and be happy to answer your question are there any questions go ahead are you still looking at the chill beam technology from middle school or changed your mind there's there's there's actually more options on the table with it so there's the chill theme technology and then there's also the brf for the middle school the biggest problem with the middle school there's

167just not a lot of real estate to take all the duck works out put new insulated dumpers in so you can have a cool air system so we have we have two really good options at the moment okay remember when i was at the uh border finance meeting the chill bean technology i know you you were kind enough to stay after one night and explain how that works to us but it was ductless correct yes yeah and then which made it a lot less expensive exactly yeah you have a chiller that gets bound onto the outside on the ground less than the traditional system it was a lot less correct originally it was around 1.9 million uh it's gone up since then with factory closures and so on uh vrf systems are roughly in the

168same ballpark too that just runs uh condensing lines with the unit on the roof and you have cassettes in each classroom thanks what do you do with the fresh air intake because you're gonna need a make up air system there right so part of the system is in the rooftop units they're gonna um up up the uh ability for the air to be developed or ventilated and also filtered so part of that is a rebuild of the existing rooftop system so we'll partially condition the air with those rooftop systems increase the volume of it and also provide for higher filtration any other questions from peter hi peter i didn't see any concern for dean's mill or west bend in your report it looks pretty grim with middle school and you seem to have a solution

169with high school but um that seems a good report about the elementary i know you wanted to put the wrap in there but you didn't even suggest that in this yeah the corrap systems are those are the room air purification systems they're targeted for you know individual areas they work really well in large areas where you can't we have a huge congregation of people um more insight into the two new schools if we were to i know we talked a lot about this either 100 open or 100 close to the damper systems uh if we change that to a variable which we can do that also that affects something down the line every change we make to any of the air conditioning systems affects something else so all of a sudden we may where we

170would do this in a temporary mode we would affect the efficiency of the building when the pandemic's over so those are kind of expenditures that are we can we can manage by increasing the speed of the rooftop units and adding higher filtration there's a balancing act that has to go on with these with these units you know and again it's really important to know that none of these systems were designed for a pandemic and none of the heating systems that each individual school was ever designed in mind so what we're doing to them is stuff that they were never really designed to do and we can use some of this funding to actually re-engineer the system and bring it up a little bit more so that we can add the necessary filtration put the higher

171rate filters in um there's a there's there is a there is a longer term expense that goes onto the filters the higher the filter rate goes the more uh particles it captures you have to change it more often and also these filters when you go from a merv 8 to a verb 13 down the higher the number the more filters you end up having to change them more often they also increase in price so you would go be a normal filter change of fifteen hundred dollars per school could be ten thousand times six because you have to change every two months or we change them every three months now any other questions for people thank you peter next item on the agenda monthly reports uh there were four any questions on any of the reports

172that were in our board packet very none we'll move on items for future agendas are there any items that you'd like to add any board comments or concerns hearing none i'll entertain them oh one second sorry stop um you know we did our board goals and um i wonder if we could circle back on that at some point actually um gordon and i will be meeting with dr riley uh tuesday to go over the preliminary um review that was designed by the committee that worked on that the goals are embedded in that so once we meet with him we're going to bring that back to the entire board at the committee of the whole meeting okay okay good any other board comments or concerns hearing none i'll entertain a motion to adjourn what you made

173there's a second all in favor opposed motion carries