Tolland Board of Education: August 24, 2022

001the um august 24th meaning to order at 704 for the please rise for the three pledge allegiance [Music] um we don't have the acknowledgements or any changes to the agenda so we'll move to the rule of the minutes for the august 10th if you can add move more approve the august 10 minutes okay any discussion on our names all those in favor and say aye aye and right now for public participation um obviously everyone is online so if you would like to participate online please raise your hand you will have two minutes uh doctor will put the timer up if you could please list your name and your address for the record i will go down the list of hands um rebecca risley hi thank you good evening i have a question about the recent

002censure of miss lord can you hear me okay yeah could it be clarified if the laporte family reached out to her or if she took it upon herself to reach out to them and if so why she would do that against legal advisement uh from the official minutes of the june 22nd 22 board of education meeting alexis laporte thanked a few board members who reached out to apologize to her and christy laporte said she knows what happened behind closed doors because some members reached out to her if miss plourde was worried for a student's mental state as she's claimed how was contacting the student directly the appropriate course of action shouldn't that have been referred to a counselor or a therapist for follow-up and not handled directly by an individual board member and with a

003mental health issue that really could have actually made the situation even worse in her opening statement at the censure meeting miss plourde said she does not deny that she met with a former student related to her complaint against the district she refused to acknowledge that doing all of this outside of public session contributes to the lack of transparency as well as the loss of trust from the public and she didn't apologize for making an error in judgment instead stating instead that she will wear her censure proudly as a badge of honor what example does this set for our students thank you very much um can you please see your address for the record as well i apologize 103 mountain spring road okay thank you at this time um any other members like to speak if

004you could please raise your hand or if you would like to come up they will pick you up if not i will close up a public participation i don't know how to raise my hand but can you hear me this is deirdre goldsmith go ahead um we'll start for two minutes and if you could please list your name enact us okay thank you deirdre goldsmith 21 marlboro glade uh based on the censured board members self-congratulatory statement at last week's meeting that should wear any consequence for her behavior as a quote badge of honor i have no confidence in this person's ability to maintain confidentiality in executive sessions or even with any sensitive information that pertains to our students unique educational profiles going forward i also find it unnerving that another board member expressed wishing she

005had the courage to do the same thing over the past 20 years during which i've paid attention as a parent i don't believe there has ever before been a pattern of unethical behavior on the part of the talent board of education members some i'm sorry those members i look forward to getting past this so that attention can be again focused instead on the best interests of our talent schools and staff thank you thank you at this time would anyone else like two minutes seeing none i will close out the public participation and we'll move on to correspondence all right so we had an email expressing dismay over miss forest conduct an email stating concern over waiving confidentiality of executive session author fears this will prevent board members from feeling comfortable expressing their true thoughts during

006an executive session in future an email asking that the district has looked into year-round schooling an email expressing concern that multiple board members spoke with the family involved in litigation with the district author asks if the censured board member will still be allowed to attend executive sessions an email thanking dr willow for continuing the school meals through the smart program an email expressing this approval of the recently centered board member with calls to further action an email requesting help with at home academics development resources an email expressing disapproval over the conduct of the century board member author suggests that the central board members should pay the legal costs an email expressing disapproval over the conduct of the century board member an email expressing regret that the author had to remove her students from tallinn public

007schools over the removal of the religious exemption for vaccinations by the state thank you very much at this point i will close with the correspondence and we can move to points of information and then you remember at this time would like to speak please raise your hand and go from there um this is going to go this is going to be a minute's correction for the august 15th minutes but that's not going to get shipped out but because it's relevant i'll just address it here and then make a request to change those to the next meeting when we do approve them but in my statement the sentence about whether or not i approve of talking to boardvent or people who have litigation with the district um just came out a little bit unclear so just

008for the record um what i said was i do not approve talking to people involved in litigation with the district um or associated obligation of the district um further on the paragraph i explained why i still did not feel like a censure vote was appropriate but i just wanted to clarify what that stated sentence meant for anyone who might have read the defense any other notes from any other board members did you um dr want to talk about the smart program for quickly because i know it's not on here at school starting dana well so a notification went out to make it very green in the superintendent's bulletin um so basically lunches will be free probably through but i'm going to make a conjecture here the halfway point in your problem in december the district

009received funds to provide free lunches soft funds to provide free lunches uh abby custom harnett is the food service director does an amazing job she had the meeting frequently on this um so to the halfway point launches will be free and then at that point those who have filed for pre-introduced launch will receive that benefit those who do not will then be expected to pay the cost of the lunches again thank you i'm sorry can you hear me yes yep okay um i just wanted to respond to uh miss risley's question about other members that reached out to the parties at hand and i just wanted to um state and i stated in my in my statement at the meeting on the 18th that i did not have any contact um with any family members

010regarding the litigation or any of those family members at all and that's all thank you thank you anyone else at this time okay um let's close that out and we do not have our student representatives yet so let's move into the superintendent's report local transportation video number one so for those of you you know coming in i'm going to try to open this up just a little bit sometimes i can't see the other stuff presumed when i do but um if you take a quick look at this uh we or i had stated that i would provide a transportation update you know as we got to the latter point in the year or in the summer we are headed into um our negotiations period um with the uh with the transportation company and uh we

011are putting together a team of people who will be doing that we can add anyone to that that you want um this gives you an idea of the generals the statistics for the last uh last six to six months of um junior birthday martial and engineer the six months of last year and so um you can get a perspective where there are certainly some things going on that impact those bus routes but that in general you can see that the the performance was you know a little low in some areas of the year certain months and then in others it rebounded to the upper 90s again with respect to the number of buses on time reported for each week so the criteria here are a number of buses on time the percentage of time the

012buses arrive at school and at home stops on time uh delays the number of buses that were delayed in that week due to personnel covert or logistical issues breakdowns the number of out-of-service buses so these are the ones that go down you see them on the side of the road and they're not going to have to swap them out another just you know another yard to get them back in operation while they get fixed and then route hours if you take a look and i'll scroll down uh to the latter part of this item and board members have access to it the last slide in the first student slides talks about the number of hours tollens last budget um last negotiation with them had some pretty decent financial elements but part of it was that

013we have more hours um other surrounding districts actually operate for less hours so we get some efficiency out of that but it's fewer buses running more hours um and so you know there is a financial benefit but that also means that you you got more wear and tear on the bus that you do have and so when you do look at a contract in the future you can change the variables you can change how new the buses are you can change how many you have so that you're cutting down on route time things like that but when you do that that comes with an associated cost no matter which you know which company you would use so that's something that just to keep in mind that you know in thailand you know we benefited from

014having that run time the six hours but it also has some drawbacks in addition it does you do have some terrain issues in thailand uh some towns are kind of flat other towns are more more hilly like this town and the roads are a little more narrow and so what happens is you do really need the buses that have the engines um the front i don't know the technical term for these but they have the the engine cat you know uh cabinet extended out of the front it's not you know not flat with the um with the you know underneath yeah yeah with it underneath the driver and that's because these roads the ups and downs and ups and downs you need the more high you know high-powered buses to do that and have that

015stability on these roads that's another factor and sometimes you'll go to the other towns you'll see a lot of flat front buses tallinn can't have a lot of flat front muscles so these are all pieces that you know that um come together in a picture about it but this um you know this gives you an idea of generally where the strengths were and where there were some clips in terms of performance if you look into the time of february that was a time of a lot of coveted identifications for us you can see the delays for them were about or eight when it talks about logistics we did have a lot of bus drivers just you know unable to perform their duties um the bus drivers are amazing people and they're very dedicated um but

016kovid did impact our fleet as well as our staff so as we were constantly dealing with how to deal with shortages with respect to kobe so with the bus company and when they had a blip up and that type of thing they had to struggle to find drivers sometimes uh routes had to double up that type of thing so i think you know the the helicopter view of this shows that the performance you know is a reasonable performance um overall but that you know we did have some real impactful blips you know and that that had a combination of having just a lack of uh you know lack of stats sometimes covet impacts sometimes and that extended to the maintenance yards we don't have a maintenance yard local to town any repairs have to be

017done at another maintenance yard you know at a distance from here so those those buses sometimes that go down it's not as easy to replace them unless you have a local maintenance chart that also is a cost um you can have a local maintenance chart you can have like mechanics or things on site but if we do that often you know you can contract in the contract that's going to be more expensive too so there's just a variety of things to consider with respect to that when you don't have those things in place then sometimes we have to deal with you know a bus that is you know that is um that is out of commission and taking a little longer to replace and having to combine buses or combine routes to accommodate that um

018so this is up for you to look you know not just now it's not snapshot but you can kind of process it you know over the next week or two as we head into the process that we're going to have with first student down below there are some slides with respect to per student i mean these are some of the you know the new things that per student is adding um and it's some you know more recent contracts and so i'm not going to just go you know read word for word here but you can see the products that they had to um you know to to districts that can uh want to have uh and the last one here is parent view so the parents can see a bus where it is you know

019whether it's on schedule for the route um all of that information that's included in the first student context contracts the only thing that i question about something like this is that you can have something like this but if you don't uh if you have high run hours and fewer buses and buses that are older and you know and not a yard local then if a route does have to double up this doesn't help you because you'll be looking at it and it's going to look think it's on a pre-programmed route but it will be delayed because it'll have to take on another route or something like that so you know apparently this this thing only really helps us um if we haven't you know enough of a fleet and we have all these other factors

020kind of in place too and some districts went for the additional expense and replaced all the buses with like 20 22 models you know i know one district that did that close to it of those kinds available other things happening um maintenance yards on site things like that they can all make a difference so parent view is included in the products now when first student or the contracts in person comes out i asked the corporate office first first student to do a basic chart they did this it pretty much reflects this um you know the data up here although albeit i think that chart you know any kind of um graph like that it's a little less precise but it's it's the same general trend you can see um you know there was some trouble

021you know prove it hit us right as everybody came back things got a little bit better coveted hit us you know around again that right after that break and into april we were down at the lower part and then it went back up again so you know we saw that in our own staff um we saw these blows and hits uh interestingly enough you know we probably will still have some of that going on because um the the isolation period stays the same so there's a lot changing now a lot more freedom a lot more things we'll talk about when we get to the pandemic plan that you know we're re-upping for the supervision time but what remains is that isolation period so if you get coveted you still have to go isolate for five

022days your return on the sixth day you would have asked till the tenth day and what happens is if you get a couple of people that are hit together um there they go and that's a couple of us the same thing for us we scrambled you know building classrooms you know all of that kind of thing so we weren't they weren't immune to that and we weren't doing into that either um this is the this is a little bird from them um about what what affects rates so as we go into our conversations with them ultimately they decide you know whether um bid things like that um these are the kind of factors that will play no matter what no matter who we're talking to and again the market you know there are a couple

023of players in our market but we're not a huge market here in poland um you know we're not an urban market where there may be a lot of people competing for that there's a couple of players in this market and so you know you'll get a sense of that whoever wants to be a part of it you'll get a very good picture of like what the market is um and then what the factors are so that's this is generally it i just wanted to give you know again this is an update um give some information about her student his products um you know some of the data about where it's at and what the experience was overall um and then we'll move into the next phase here which is starting to begin the process um

024we have a year to do it we don't want to start it like september that's direct over to get it lower but i had a couple questions on this because you have the information from january through june but what about the september of the junior yeah couldn't they didn't have them because what about the sports teams too well i think we have three or four sports buses of a certain age and so they they fall into the same general category of all the sports that we have because talent does have a robust sports program you can you know they dispatch to these locations but if they break down they you know there it's the same general problem that you have to the replacement bus isn't going to it has to come from another location another

025town we don't we don't have enough to do it to send out our own it has to usually be from another place that comes and grabs you know grabs them so if we increase the number of buses we have on standby that problem becomes less but you know without that then you do have to get your backup buses from other first students in the surrounding area that's where you know you can run into a time delay like some of the ones that we see and what year are the buses that we have um it's it's right 2014 through 18 or 19. i i have that i can put that up for the board dashboard if you want um i thought at one point i had posted it up there but i i'll go find it

026and put it up again it's uh but it's it's mostly for 2014 and mark like that but still those buses have many many miles on them and again we are we beat up our buses because our roads are constantly like this a lot of brakes a lot of a lot of having to you know to push the engine to get up the hills um this is a this this terrain is a high wear and tear terrain you know versus a place like millington which is mostly flat you know hartford mostly flat you know a lot of these other ones are kind of lucky from that standpoint um but we have we have a lot of does and this is just a curiosity question does first student consider what we put down on the roads in

027winter um in return is that it's not lifted as a factor you know added costs you know whatever but is that a factor that you know say coventry they put down dirt or sand however we put down any erosive salt does that sort of impact that decision making you know you know i don't think so no i mean i think what you do have here is um i don't think it's the material that bothers anybody there although something more corrosive will lead to more wear and tear right over time for any of our vehicles but um like this hill over here if you drive straight over here sometimes i take this home you know um i know what is it you continue 195 take a left past um you know past the town senior center

028and you go up that hill that hill is a real tricky one when you have a bus coming back over it so tollen may have to use a lot more stuff on that you know and it might be a state brother whoever's doing that has to use a lot of stuff because that road goes straight down and turns and this is one we worry about with the buses all the time you know but that's an example of what you have is terrain and pollen that maybe you have to use more stuff because you got a road like this you know and whereas some of the town even the time that i'm in there are some modulations but there's a lot of flat areas too and they're not using as much so you might see a

029lot more and maybe more potent stuff used and that that does have some more and terrible time too i just want just to justify why i asked because this was a conversation i remember what we put on our roads i remember this was a conversation in town recently i don't know remember when i don't remember where it was the wells as well bingo and so there's multiple there's multiple impacts you know i'm not going to get into the science and details of it because i don't know it um but if that's something you know that would spark a conversation between the board eventually and the town council then that's that's you know another step we have to take but if that's not a factor in what if they don't consider that you know truly fully

030even um then i don't think that's something we have to take another step for i think this looks good so and thank you for this information dr william more than i absolutely want to be part of those conversations because i you know i i questioned the accuracy of the number on me the numbers on this chart and you know you can look going all the way to the end you can count your texts i'll bet uh if you look at the the last couple of months of school and you know from the birch grove perspective and the view at the end of my driveway 98 on time doesn't feel right when we and and i recognize that you know that's just a small subset but when i go back and i take a look at

031the contract with her student and we start asking questions like enforcement of the contract and looking at the specifics what's considered late you know they talk about a child being dropped off what is it one hour after the end of the day all the children will be dropped off and you know again speaking personally it was multiple times a week that we exceeded that on the front end where we're looking at only one or two a month delays according to this chart the bus would show up at my house plus or minus 30 minutes from the time that it was it was supposed to come so there was there was no consistency there was it was late um looking at the incredible accurate incredibly accurate source that is facebook i wasn't the only one seeing

032these you know these type of issues it was a frequent thing so and you know after you and i spoke and we talked about you know that there's a there's a process you know we communicated to here it goes up to mr mclaughlin i think somebody that was doing that we started making sure at least within my family that we were calling and that you were putting that information in there to show again that ultimate question what is my child and then we look at data that shows they were only late once so i've got some issues there i've also got some issues when we talk about it and looking at that contract and we're talking about the you know the reports that they're supposed to give the district in the morning at the beginning

033when we're talking about the buses and the maintenance that was mean that was going to happen uh with the sheer amount of efforts that your staff was having to do to keep things moving when we contracted that out so as we move into this next contract and as we look at this data which you know looks like it's a really good thing i just don't believe it so i think those are great points i can understand where you're coming from and i can only offer this as an explanation and honestly it's my it's just the way i'm conjecturing about the situation um you know again i i think they provided what we asked for the data and that's reflecting it but i think there's and i made a few notes just so i wouldn't forget

034because i'm getting old um there were probably three factors that contributed in particular to the the way things were perceived and again i have no you know skin game all i want is to be able to run the district with you know as few issues as i can have because i as you know as you said i can't do 50 things it has to be this has to be working so i can make sure teaching and learning is working so um but i do think it was fair for me to say that i think that the availability heuristic has part of it right so we like in the news when we see an airplane crash you know the way that it comes out sometimes we think there's a lot more airplane crashes than there actually

035are and so i didn't do first student any favors this year because i reported everything i mean in the past you go back pre-code there was not like update after update about where we were but with covid and people getting sick and routes having to be combined a lot of times it was the same it was similar routes it was very similar routes that had to be combined and so in order to expedite that and again this is you know in order to expedite that i couldn't do targeted messages because it would come to me very quickly and it would take me much longer to do a targeted message than a blast if i did a blast the people that it didn't pertain to could ignore it if my kid's on bus 111 and this

036blast is not about 111 i see the specs it's not about me but because i had to use that system because of the expeditiousness of it because when i would receive this i could be walking between schools and i would receive information on my phone i can turn it around and do a blast to everyone but it's much harder to target a population like you know 70 kids on one bus out of 2 000. so what happened is people saw that repeatedly all the time and everyone saw it you know every other the way it used to be done in the past is the kids on that bus would be the one who received the message that because that we had more time and there was more you know it was less ridiculous because of

037coven and all the other things and combining environment so the availability heuristic has something to do with that that's why i think people would say well wait a minute i was seeing these all the time part of that was because it was a blast to everyone but he's really limited to a certain number of buses in a certain number of problems so that's the first thing well let me let money's over because i get what you're saying i just want to and i think it's just for me again no skin in the game i just feel like i should try to provide the most broad perspective i can because i do think you know again another issue here is when we do this process you'll see the other players that are there but talk to

038if you talk to other towns there's no perfection here there's other people have other issues with other companies so i just want to make sure we don't jump out of the boiling point or whatever into the buyer right so the other piece is um bgp's schedule was extended later so anyone in the pre-k 2 zone that structure changed when we had the new school built to allow all buses to go around that thing so what happened was in order to get more class time and less time taken from teachers that bus schedule that schedule was extended kids were leaving there later than they had in the past which pushed those buses out later they may have run into more traffic too because they were out later than maybe other factors but that was a piece

039of it was that those schedules were shifted so that we could get more of those buses in at once and then we go to one school and then the next rather than split-flopping which generally cut time out of class and cut teachers on so when the teachers are using that time to organize for classes for the next day or for students they were able to get back more time but that pushed those schedules out and that's number two and then number three sometimes what we perceive as a bus issue can be a student issue like there are issues with children on the bus that require the buses to have to do some kind of alternate route or they have to take action about a situation on a bus that's not really the bus company's fault

040and during covet the frequency of those kinds of things plus overall just general behavior as you hear and see on social media and everywhere else generally the behavior has been a little less optimal than it was pre-code we've had a lot more challenges a lot more behavior challenges and those have seeped into the buses and we've had a lot of bus disruptions with respect to that um so that also it's not a mechanical issue it's not like a time but that will delay a bus um if that kind of thing is happening and that is happening um i don't know how the bus drivers manage 72 kids looking backwards you know that's amazing to me to begin with um but that's a factor too so i would just respectfully suggest that again and no skin

041in the game i'm not i you know i'm not as skeptical of those because i i feel like i have an insight to some of these other pieces that are part of the picture um and i think if i can do more targeted messaging this year it'll help the parents that need it but it won't look like a constant flow of things coming out all the time without the bust because when it comes down to it um there really don't seem to be as many breakdowns as there was a perception that there'd be that type of and all your everything you're saying there makes perfect sense and explains isolated and explains you know if a bus is late this week looking at you know going with your first point about the the notification and i

042i worry a little bit when we say the best way to make this look better is to not tell everybody to tackle i know that's not what you're saying there but you know if i look at that may be clear that that is not what it is okay it might have been here but if i if i look at that first that we won uh on the bottom month there and i've seen 98 percents going to cross so if every school had a 98 on time then you weren't having to send out a whole lot of messages but my point specifically is looking at it from an individual you know the end of my driveway there i'm not seeing 98 i'm seeing three or four times a week now i fully understand uh what you're

043saying about the the challenges you know seeing it i couldn't imagine trying to to deal with that many kids if i'm standing there looking at them let alone driving a half ton piece of equipment down the road but that's also why when we put a contract together that company says to meet your requirements this is how much you're gonna have to pay us and when i hold up and i look at the contract that we have the drop-off comes the the plus or minus on pickup times those individual elements weren't happening and they weren't happening frequent enough that it's difficult to call it an anomaly now recognizing that that's what's happening in no way am i saying that we go back and say hey give us something no but what i am saying is that

044it is a problem and as we go into this next contract we have to hold our requirements firmware to understand how they're going to deal with it and if they can't what that response is because ultimately it can't be mr swanson out there every day doing that stuff it can't be you answering printing parents calls every day it's got to be the company that we pay to do this handling what they say they're going to do and i think your route throughout the iran was one of the ones that they're talking about and i mean so to that point i can understand where where you're coming from and experience that you've had i can tell you and again i i it's really just a matter of balancing and then we can you know look at

045the data as we go into the next stage here um but i didn't have to close schools once that is not the experience that some other districts had and that there was a lot of cooperation to keep that going now i don't know anyone personally at first student i'm not married to anyone at first student and there's definitely no you know um you know home style no nepotism with her student um but what i would suggest is just as a as a guy trying to keep the district flowing that was pretty amazing we did not shut down any schools because of the lack of bus drivers or that we did a transport people bent over backwards um to try to make that you know keep the schools in session and going the team thing from

046the first tune all the way through so again you know i get it i mean they're not taking anything with me you're saying i say i think we just it's the good with the bad right there's a mix of things here there's a mix of events and so when we go into the next stage here it's just going in with going in sober you know some routes were horrible um others weren't actually so bad and you know what are the reasons for that well there are some logistical reasons for that you know there's some bus issues we have a six hour run time more than most others you know we have you know 2014 buses we can invest in new ones um maybe any you know the different players we'll put some things on the

047table and we'll see what comes with that but it's it's been a difficult two years in a number of ways so just throwing it all out there that there's some bad you know some stuff we wish was different and then there's some stuff that was pretty positive through the whole period of time and here's some of the rationale for maybe some of it i mean the whole thing i'm not talking about just just one slide right yeah okay um i have a list going on here i just had a couple quick questions too as i'm looking at this because you have tis in birch grove and separate homes but they're both on the same buses and like i'll tell you i'm with tony i mean from my seat as a parent there are definitely times

048that that bus has did not so i want to know what the parameters are for them saying that it was delayed this is like in hours it's 30 minutes plus like what is their okay figure versus because like i said there are i completely agree with tony i mean as a parent you know with the change of time from birch grove that really impacted the drop off time because that used chief to get home you know 3 45 now the new time was like 4 15. so then if you have a delay of any factor then you're talking like 450 that's before she gets home so that's a long time on a bus so i i completely understand where that comes from like that is certainly as a parent you think about it you're like

049that's a long time for a kid on a bus go ahead i mean it's just there could be a couple of reasons for that one of the things in thailand that's interesting at a certain point in time you have certain thoroughfares that have to be clear or your time is greatly extended like this this stretch here this thing shuts down the buses have to round around in a series of ways and and so if you're if your time pushes a little back because we picked up instructional time or picked up whatever then they hit more of what's happening here that can affect it too so i mean for me i think we're we're in a position where there's some frustration right and i just want to balance that frustration with a couple of factors here

050not to say that anything is wrong which is to say you know we've got to go into the next part of the process sober because it is possible to exit that process in a worse situation it is actually possible for that to be the case so we just want to make sure that you know we know go in kind of knowing what the various factors could be and then you know decide what we want to do when we see people throw their offers whatever it is you know the other superintendents their stories i'll tell you and i call around you know and talk to them and different names but other stories you know and that was encoded you know so it's it's just something that i think the board will it'll be great to have

051a member or whatever is part of the process whoever wants to do that together oh i just i was laughing only because i can verify that i saw tony at the end of his driveway so he was there um thank you doctor what he said i do think it's a really important point we didn't close schools and i'm sure all of us agree this is not about bus drivers because i mean i love my bus drivers always have and even the complaints we heard online like i think we still heard no one was blaming their bus driver um but you know i do to i do also back up tony's points um and one of the interesting things is just this data is about the bus company's performance from the bus company so i guess

052there's not there's some of it we can't control but one thing we could control possibly is we know when the bus has arrived to our schools and you know having a son that took advantage of breakfast every day there were days that he missed having breakfast and you don't know that when you go down to the bus stop that they're now going to get to school and not have breakfast because their bus was late so i just wonder if there is something we can do on our side to kind of cross-check this data going forward well the tracking software should allow us to do that but for one of the products and whether it's true of all the companies or not the first student that has the product where we can actually track it in

053our own computers so that should make it pretty straightforward the problem again though is that doesn't really help us if we don't have enough buses and enough new buses so if you have to combine routes you know one of the it'll be even more frustrating because the computer will probably be programmed with the route that it's supposed to follow but you'll notice like you never you ever would hoover not to attack uber because uber is a great company and i would never spare you just a little statement but you know how sometimes the in the city something can happen and the uber looks like it's two blocks away and it's going to get there in five minutes but then it starts routing around in 40 50 you know different directions and it takes 25 minutes

054um that can be what we're looking at at the parent view if something goes awry and you know where we get more frustrated because we're like what the heck is happening with the route that i'm expecting but i think the software will make a big difference because you'll you'll see it we will see exactly what is happening with that box but um and that's a feature that first student does have i don't know how many of the other ones do sum up the other student not all of the others i think there's a couple of companies out there one and one other one that i saw in the past but first student will have the only other thing and you probably don't have this answer but um and thankfully my children will be just where

055they have fallen so i can track them that way if i recognize that that's not the case when they're younger are there safety concerns as much as i love being able to have a parent view and being able to look at where the bus is is there any safety concerns with that about people who are not parents being able to look at where buses are well technically you know frankly i don't know what the access controls are to that app that would just be i would say that the way school listeners publish their routes and their stops i don't know how much more of a risk it is you know than that but but but it's a good point i don't know who has access to the phone you know there's a lot of people

056get dropped off at daycares and so you start with you know are you providing the live into your daycare provider and so on and so forth you know that's my only concern with that yeah no it's reasonable oh you haven't realized that all right i have i have two questions some doctor when you said there's when there's a breakdown another bus has to come somewhere so i'm assuming another driver would have would have to come from somewhere usually what happens is it's the managers that will get in the vehicle and bring it there if they can and then they find another ride back to their into their office which is on kms but they try to you know they'll try to get it out there as fast as they can but a lot of times

057it is coming from somewhere else and whoever else brought it hasn't been arrived back or sit on the bus until they get back okay so my question would be is there an additional cost when that happened because you've got another drinker well i think they don't charge us because it's usually they're not going to say hey our bus broke down you have to pay for it it's all party oh part of the goal yeah plus i think they're trying to to help with the frustration that we all feel there's a boss sitting there in the box um so no generally they don't charge us for their for those kinds of things and my other question would be um you really seem like the go-between in the dissemination of information with regard to the buses is

058there any way that our student can say or do the blast well you know i'd love that i think that they suffer from the same thing we do it's just finding people to be staffing that we're going to do that there was a person that i thought might be able to do that she left me you know so they just they just don't have a staff person who can do that right um but we're working on it okay there's a solution i'm trying to find where there's a person who can do that thank you um so i'm going to repeat the point set ashley tony and jen mate i think that i am a little skeptical with those numbers you know i know it's anecdotal what we've received but um as far as i know

059i don't think there's a vast anti-student conspiracy in town so we're getting all these emails about it and discussion i think there's something to that i just curious what what are they considered late how are they calculating that and i think that the next step for these discussions is to ask that follow-up question and try to find some sort of common ground in terms of data that we can agree with maybe maybe there's nothing wrong with it i don't know but i i think that we we absolutely need to do that and then you know just as far as steps to proceed i think once we do that then we can start talking about what is needed in terms of infrastructure and power to rectify the situation and hit our targets um so let's just

060let an adder to my two cents up to about how we perceive that anyone else at this time just one last thought you know what jen said just a little bit ago really hits home it's and i want to be clear it's not the drivers i do not have a problem with the traps i have a problem with the process i have a problem with the system i have a problem with you know having to track rather than having this buses show up uh there was a point you know in in late may where i had enough it was quicker for me to just go wait in the line and pick my daughter up and bring her home than it was to sit in the driveway and wait for her so i told her you're

061not riding the bus anymore i'm driving you to school and she came out the next morning and said papa i think we should give and she told me her bus driver's name another chance she's trying real quick you know this is from the mouths of babes so i i do appreciate what each and every one of those drivers is doing uh i just think from a management perspective we have to help and i was just going to say through conversation and discussion would it be possible that the school the school system suggests a parent saying hey you know granted this isn't everything that maybe we all want i get it um but we use this year as sort of a research i guess you're in store okay today i see they're gonna go home in

062five minutes okay i'm waiting got home 312 or whatever the time is and even once a week or something what what can we do as a school system to provide parents um i guess it stinks because parents shouldn't have to but a way to sort of self-store data if we can't track anything like that how you know and maybe that takes some time to think about and come up with solutions with a group or with your staff i'm not sure but um is there is do you think off the top of your head there's some sort of remedy where parents can you know track some data and send it into the board event so that this can be used for you know next year the year after that whenever the contract is so we could

063but to do that effect we would need to do is segregate the reasons right so if it's a mechanical issue that would be one very if it was a student issue another variable a traffic issue another variable um those types of things i think the calculus on this would demonstrate that i think it's an excellent point you're making the bus drivers are great and so you know we don't see 27 buses broken down every day the bus drivers are great so take that out of the equation and as we subtract certain pieces of the equation i would respectfully offer what you're going to see is six hour route runs 27 bus fleet um 2014 buses let's go into negotiations let's go in and let's have some paid and let's see what's out there you know

064so let's talk to people let's do some talking i got six or seven contracts you know i'm trying to do a crosswalk for you i just have time to do it now um let's do some talking you know and let's see what's out there and let's see what the covet situation was and how that impacted things i'm not saying there wasn't stuff that's frustrating i'm just saying there was changed schedules there was throughout you know things later times pushing into other traffic conditions really awesome drivers um just when we do the calculus on this it's probably not going to be it's going to open up perspectives and i think that would be good um for where we can go with it yeah i mean we can it's just i think what we find is after

065a whole lot of effort and energy put into that because we would have to disaggregate it um we would come up with a almost similar line up here's you know here are the reasons for some of the stuff you know plus everywhere i've ever been you know you do have some unique pieces here in town this is a different terrain it is very it is different than some places so i know i'm kind of repeating myself at this point so i think it's just put a period on this but um i i i am looking forward to going into the process and trust me i mean what there's some magic thing out here that's gonna make everything go 100 all the time i don't that that's but we're only getting what everybody wants you know

066but i think it'll be good to have whoever if you want to be a part of that process so we can all see the same things hear the same things you know and again just justifying why i'm asking that because again this is not perfect nothing's ever going to be perfect but if there are steps being made and it's sort of it's proven that steps are being made um then you know i think as a board we are fulfilling our responsibility in making steps and strides toward helping this process you know be a little easier on families however the process isn't done and so i think we can all acknowledge that um but i also appreciate what the superintendent what first student is willing to do in order to you know put this together although

067nobody knows how accurate it is obviously but we're moving in the right direction moving in a more positive direction with the bus next item i2 legal fees board members had requested chair and others that we um do a compilation of legal fees rated related to the censure proceedings um this and work in conjunction with shipland goodwin was what i could get to this point in time point of order that the august statement with the august states is not helped yet so i had to work with the billing department on what was felt would be where they were at but it may be that we don't get the august statement until um september you get the statement like a month um the same you get has the data for a month behind so this is accurate

068to this moment in time i don't think there's a massive fluctuation gonna happen here but this is not this there may be some pieces to this that just maybe a little higher than what you're looking at um but this is what i could get you know this is what i was able to get up to this point we were working all the way through today some people weren't available you know that type of thing they were very cooperative and i appreciated that but we really were working all the way up to today to get everything from ours so um so that's let me just try to blow that up a bit um so i'm going to put the period on it it's it's 837.50 for 21.2 hours with the information questions a lot of books

069um i have one statement and one question so i i had asked for this from dr willett on july 22nd i asked from june 1st to current date um i believe we got this a half hour ago so i have not actually had time to review it so i'm not going to comment on the numbers until i have had time to review it because i requested this for the ffc meeting next week and was originally told might not get there but i'd like to see it today at least and my question is after the june 22 meeting when the laportes spoke the chair or the vice chair reach out to all the members of the board of education to ask about the comments or did you immediately call jessica who then referred you to tom

070mooney without discussing this first with the board so that's that's i can answer that um that day when they came and they talked uh we both looked at each other and we said we need to do something and so yes we did reach out to jessica and actually you talk to the board oh we just talked as leadership saying we need to do something about that so you didn't reach out to each board member and say do you know what the libraries are referring to did you talk to the reports what's going on you immediately went to the lawyer is well my question i i did reach out to my caucus okay we don't have a caucus well but i i can state that i did reach out to then there was a large communication

071gap because we my understanding to jacob who is our republican representative on the leadership was not involved in those discussions so there was no caucus or there was no way to have a caucus discussion because jacob was not informed about this until i believe it was june july 22ndish when we got the first special agenda meeting so i'm just curious if anybody feels and i happen to watch tony get a little on the meeting last um last week that i missed i watched that whole thing there seems to be a communication gap going on whether it's leadership to the republicans or just leadership to i don't know because i'm not sure what was said as far as tony's um the mental health course but i do think that this is a huge issue that we

072racked up eight thousand dollars in bills but nobody decided to try to find out until we went straight to the lawyer so that's my concern is could this so this 8 000 have been avoided if we had a conversation and a commitment communication seeing that this was a legal and still pending legal matter still to this day there's still an evil matter with that feeling i think the attorney was the best decision to make to talk to them okay so that was your decision to go straight to the attorney understood that that's my question okay that's everything else you if i could just because i think the way you presented this which i appreciated in perspective is that you put it out july 22nd uh within a couple of days time we talked you remember

073that conversation that was july 22nd i checked my phone what was happening when i called you and we touched face verbally about it i actually reached out to you to talk to you you weren't available you called me what was happening he's special well what was that i mean i responded to you very very quickly what was happening when we did touch base when you called me back what was the situation i don't recall something you're getting out to say it i was sick with coping i think you even said how sick i was so it's true you sent that but i was i was out of commission i was sick with calling it your request was much bigger than that originally which i think you'll admit you refined it august 8th um i went

074back and you know i said i couldn't get this done until august 31st based on all the stuff going on that was narrowed i went to do it and even up to today i was getting information so i just i just want us to be transparent and very upfront about how this portrays it's not that i didn't respond quickly to you because i did within probably a couple of you know days if not hours when you called me back i was sick with covet at the beginning of that process you told others that you thought it was very sick when you talked to them um and so i just want to be clear i you know it's not that you were waiting for that point in time you set a date of the 31st or

075we did and i was able to hit it even sooner than that because it came up and other people came so what i was saying the preamble to that was was sort of uh uh i talked about it like a month ago and nothing happened it was kind of the preamble of that so i just wanted to provide context for the situation because i thought it was black challenge um my original questions last statement is that our executive obsession with tom rooney was on july 25th so that's not included in this number i would assume that would be a large number for that meeting um i guess you know based on the conversation that we're having you know it's still confusing to me as to what we should be talking about at the board over

076email or personally that's allowed we're supposed to have our meetings in public we're supposed to be together so i guess the way that i saw the executive session meeting with the lawyer was that was our chance to have a discussion and support that's what i looked at what just what happened what are the rules what what was broken here if there was anything broken where did we go from here and how do we all feel about it and i think we did have a great discussion in that room about how we felt about it um and that's why you guys don't see emails from me because i don't know when i'm supposed to send an email to the board if i'm supposed to reply all i thought you were never supposed to reply all so

077from where i sat that was our gathering time on july 25th for that meeting why not have the special meeting though without a lawyer we're allowed to do that in my i'm sorry in my i totally recognize what you're saying what you're thinking i'm not taking them away from you but i'm also saying if we all sat down i'm just trying i'm trying to look at this situation from what i would have done if i was in the position and that's all i can do and if we all got in that room and started talking about it how on earth were we going to know what was right what was wrong what was legal what was illegal what was unethical which pieces of the of the code of uh the policy of the yes that

078we were looking at so i i see where you're coming from i just i didn't view it that way i viewed it as that was our time to come together as a board and talk about it with the person in the room that was going to tell us but you were aware of it beforehand that's what kind of my point sophia said that you guys were aware of it because you had caucus sophia asked us if we had talked to the courts that i thought you had a so you knew what this special meeting was about before you got to the special meeting no oh okay okay i just that's good though what i took from that is sophia checked in with us first of all all of us just talking to see if we

079were you know we were okay and you know it's never easy to see a family in distress and then just saying did anybody you know then all of us said no we didn't sound a little important that's fair that's fair but i'm just saying we didn't get that we didn't get that check-in and that i think is part of part of the communication problem i also think that you know there are definitely meetings that were missed the the situation that arose during our meeting there were a lot of members that were not here you know people did not show up to the executive session so i think it all if our pieces of the puzzle and yes we did need to talk to legal about this because it is a pending case that's what it

080needed to happen yeah i was just gonna again the last third day i kept it at the surface level i have to continue to keep it at the surface level the point of could have could this have been avoided it keeps being asked to keep being asked you're darn right it could have been avoided and i think we all know how it could have been avoided this hadn't happened in the first place so i think this conversation i mean we're seeing the numbers we're reviewing it tonight we're talking about it i i hope this conversation doesn't continue because again i said to you at the beginning of this that's a lot of books and pencils and that eight thousand dollar number that's what we should be talking about books pencil students staff it's frustrating that

081we have to talk about this because not because the chair is forcing us to not because of the vice chair or not because the superintendent no because of the actions of a board member i just want to make sure that's very clear this is this is nobody wants to be doing this right now especially i don't want to be doing this right now i what can i go tell my little eager that that i'm a health cheaper nothing i don't want to be doing this don't look at me and yell at me i'm not yelling at me i'm not i promise i'm not young yelling looks a lot different but i just want to say this could have all been avoided absolutely it could have been a boy a lot of people have been avoided

08218 months ago yeah it could have been a void point of order jayden's trying to talk and i'm i'm it's his turn to talk yeah my last sentence is again i'm going to keep this at the surface level this could have been avoided i don't know about that 18 month number what i know from my 9 10 months as a board member which i'm not supposed to know before that what happened in the executive session that's how this works this could have been important absolutely could have been important thank you so i just want to understand the process a little bit i mean because policy certainly says that if something happens and there's a quote-unquote emergency the leadership can make a decision uh on their own the implication is they then turn right around and

083notify the board as around the side and so when i look up there and i see you know call with board leadership uh related to dot dot dot uh i can see that being that type of situation something happened he needed legal advice made the phone call came from coordinator back what i don't necessarily understand is then you know when we keep going down we we look at some of these uh analysis and attention given and you know the things that aren't called with leadership for advising are each of those initiated by board request or does shipwren then take i guess did that call then spur ship when to do a whole bunch of other things which are other line items down there every legal thing that we have been requested by board members are

084all part of that memorandum the foia requests those all these are broken down for every time that someone wrote and said well i want to see xyz all the uh you know confidential information between the attorney that packet we got 328 pages that's 300 an hour for dory to go through so all those things add up so you see all the line items for each voya each memorandum i had to send out because i make sure i got my eyes across my t's and listen to what our legal has so we do do anything wrong so that's all what ends up happening i guess are we skipping steps and if we get in a big hypothetically if we get an email saying i want to see document x if we have that do we attempt

085to provide that or do we immediately take that request and check believable to make sure we have to oh when it's actually written in an email as a foia request for legal information you have to do all the steps make sure that there's no student information if it's a more detailed question i can answer i'm not sure i understand some of the questions here so you'd have to give me more detail i can answer it in like yourself i've certainly become an expert on employment and other things i'm not just trying to understand you know if if i look at those rows and i count the rows if each one of them was a request from the board to the lawyer or if there was a request and then the lawyer did lines two through

086five in response to that request does that make sense yeah i mean i i think in the in the history that i've been here it's no matter what your situation is the chair is usually interacting with the attorney on aspects of board business and that can take the form of a meeting that the lawyer has with the board and scheduling it and getting it ready but as you know i don't know if most people know there's maybe sophia you you know lawyers you know generally bill on a certain like 0.6.2 or some kind of cycle there's even software for this yeah so yes when you get on the phone to ask about a meeting you're on the clock and that's just the nature of how it works so you know in order to address an

087issue you know um that that would immediately be reaching out to the lawyer and that would be in the conversation and that would be part of it and i think that's probably what's there too um when christina made a request in july a lot of this hadn't even happened again and it was for fiscal year 22 and 23. human voices brought and that it narrows obviously thank you but there's things that happened even after that so you know in order to get to where we are today you know this is everything shipment that i could find with them but there may be a few more but it'll reflect the conversations around it as well as what was scheduled for people to prevent coming thank you thank you anyone else i just want to say that

088i think it's really unfortunate we had to spend eight thousand three hundred and thirty seven dollars and fifty cents on legal fees i think we're all disappointed and saddened by that but um this was a really serious thing and i stand by how this unfolded with regard to the legal team i i think it was handled correctly and all the steps that were taken i think were absolutely necessary uh dana can you hear me thank you thanks tony i saw your thumbs up um i want to say i mean i want to reiterate you know a little bit of what sophia just said i mean it's it was a decision that needed to be made timely based on public participation from a family that was actively had said that there was multiple members and engaged

089them so the board's job the board's leadership job and that's chair and vice chair and what they're tasked to do is to protect the board and make decisions on behalf of the board and they have that autonomy um but that executive session as jen had said um we knew as much as that title was that was on the agenda so and sophie had reached out to us to make sure that we could be available for that meeting uh or for whatever dates there were i think that what have you um and that was on the 25th so of july which is not even on this spreadsheet and i think it's important that when it's something that is this large of magnitude on all party sides it's our job as as board of ed members to

090not only be guardians of education and support our students and staff and ensure the available resources for education pens and pencils that jayden was talking about and social emotional well-being and support and providing those resources for that social emotional well-being and that support i think what we're what we're standing here discussing and we're talking about tonight and nights for months for a month now and change has been because one board of members thought that they knew more and were more educated than our than our lawyers we had a board member who thought they were more educated from our counselors or our social workers that are in our schools that are there to assist our students um and a board member that went on their own their own accord to defy direct direction from our from

091our from our lawyers so nevertheless um policy says that leadership can make decisions on behalf of the board and that's what leadership did but i want us to circle back i think that right now we're we're doing smoking mirrors and such what it actually do what did sophia do as our leaders and that's not really what the problem is here the problem is someone took it upon themselves to do something that was unethical and inappropriate and our board leadership needed to make a decision and move forward in the proper protocol to handle this situation appropriately and do the best that we can do to ensure that we're protecting tall and public school systems that'll as a whole that's not one student that's not one family that's not one faculty member that's the entire community of

092tallinn public schools so we can go back and forth and waste our time and waste dr willett's time and waste the public's time listening to us in our bickering and our banter and cutting each other off which is juvenile and disrespectful or we can talk about what we're supposed to do as tall and border education board members and that is support our students and staff and provide them with their resources and move forward i applaud our leadership i applaud what they did they they handled this by the book and they did what was supposed to be done am i disheartened and saddened that we're here 110 because it's our job and it's our charge to support the entire community and that's providing them with resources and that's 100 percent providing them with resources for mental

093health not just one person and one or so one teacher and one or one student it's the entire community of telm public schools so these pencils that we buy the books that we buy the resources that we give that's where we should be focusing our time not this back and forth banter we need to move forward we need to handle this this is disgusting that we wasted eight thousand three hundred and dollars 337.50 plus that we could have put in a part of books educators paraprofessionals um folks said we can put it towards our busing companies we talked about bussing being a problem what can we do to assist i'm just saying that these this eight thousand three and thirty seven dollars was necessary because of a decision that one board member maybe two boarding

094members had chose to take and that's all i have to say thank you i ashley we've reviewed this enough and let's just move on to the next number three okay well this will excite you all um so some good news things are getting less restrictive i think everyone can celebrate that um and essentially what what i did was really stripped out of this a lot of the stuff that was all the regulations rules executive orders all of that um so all of those types of things are gone and what remains is the state's new program launching in to hell now launching into learning basically yeah i know somehow so i i think it's supposed to be launching into learning somehow it helped in there i think that might be straight from the actual title though

095and um you know anything you see that's particularly proposed here is really from the state of connecticut i'd love to take credit for it most of the long long limited pieces of this are strictly state of connectivity so more most most directly impacting us is test mask and so dphd i really want everybody on the test mask go piece and what that is is you know if you're feeling sick test every day get our antigen tests you can get them free from the district if you're feeling sick and you've got a fever test every day you know if you're testing negative you're you're able to go right um when you test positive it you can't you have to put on you know go into the isolation for the five days wear a mask up to

096the 10 days so the thing that remains with us is really that and really to make it short if you get covered you do the isolation and this is student staff and you do the math until the 10th day um the rest of it people don't have to wear masks at this point it's optional um and that's really the long and short of it the rest of the document updates are just trying to bring things in alignment everywhere else in the document where it talked about this and they have to have multiple references and links to the cdc relevant cdc information uh the respiratory disease prevention information that was also put out and that type of thing so i'm not going to go verbatim here there's a lot to look at the state's documents are

097single spaced hate fun and massive so just take a look at them if you desire but really what it comes down to is if you're covered positive you're out for the five days return in the sixth day you wear the mask to the tenth day and then most of this is now open and more promising um we are not going to have people report to a forum now they're going to report directly to the nurse like they would with any other illness um so as you recall they were sending parents to the form tracking it all like that we don't need to do that anymore so they're going to be calling the nurse like they would for influenza or any other thing staff may still put in the form because uh it might be hard

098for nurses to handle both students and staffs and taking a little weight off our nurses so they can focus their energy on making sure that you know the kids which is their focus are um you know are getting the response time to their questions and calls so it's not going to be informed anymore it's going to be directly to those people so i'm still working out the logistics of that piece but this is also the obligation under esther 3 that we review this plan this is the third of six reviews the final review will be in the summer of 2023 or the final one that we're required to do underneath so another reason why i'm gracing you with this today otherwise other than just updating it myself and sending out a note um is that

099this this is part of the essers so that's that's also good we also have a handy dandy little chart here that lets you know when you test if you have a question thanks to paul firearm our great nurse coordinator um and the rest of it is what you'd expect it's just the hand washing the mitigations we take in the district our air filtration systems um you know who our team is all that we also don't do the covet team meetings anymore that had board members and everybody else that's that's going to all be internal school staff at this point i mean if you really want to be anyone wants to be part of it you're always welcome but at this point we don't need to do that that way anymore so now um i have

100operations meetings on tuesday mornings and it's the nurse coordinator and all the you know people that are doing this stuff in the district um anything you need to know let me know and you can do that this is just planned use the funds it talks about how i used s or two to reconfigure that for the k position partially um and then other changes scroll down in the appendices there are no longer any restrictions on anything like field trips sports so really in a sentence or two it's if you're covet positive you isolate five days return on the sixth mass to the ten [Music] report to your nurses if you harvested and we have many many kova tests and here is also the process for parent guardians just let us know you're coming and we'll

101make sure the step tests are set aside um we have a lot of tests and i'm picking up more um so parent guardian so last time i went down there with the van we have i mean there's so many that we're getting we should be okay any questions so i'm sorry if i missed it but what did like when do kids and students and teachers need to test like what's uh well so what this recommends in the test uh what does it test something go um basically it gives you the parameters good questions tomorrow did they actually cover it you know here's where here's where yeah if you're starting to feel a little gross you know you can come to school if you're beaver-free you don't live with anyone who has covered you know et

102cetera et cetera and you have a negative test um in partnership with parents we are not auditing that the parent we trust parents you know you have that we can make guests available to you please test your child if they're feeling sick and if they're not positive and they don't have a fever and they're not growing up everywhere they're free to come to school like they have been in the past the only time that they get a little bit more edgy about this is if you see that if you have a fever that's a bit no no but that that would be a no-no anyway you're not supposed to send kids with fevers to school that's a pretty cool thing so it's really really coming into alignment with everything but you go but the only

103difference is we wouldn't normally ask people to test their kids at home for your average cold and that's the difference any everything else here is pretty similar because we don't want kids with stomach food coming to school you know we don't we want them to get better and then come back and you know we don't want kids with beavers coming to school because you spread the fever and that's no different than what we were pre-killed big difference is if you have some symptoms like allergies they're asking you right that's that's good to hear you know i made this point earlier luckily it's been a little while since we've talked about coke which i think is a nice thing in and of itself but um you know the big concern is how much is this taking

104up our our staff's time in interrupting learning from what kind of benefit that we're getting and i think it's great that we're starting to go back in a very real way to to the important over the common sense procedures of course but you know reaching the coated line yes and you know the only other thing we can't expect to have a blip in um you know absences as kids come back together normal unless we'll do that and hope it will just add to that so we'll still have a little bit of the disruption but nowhere near what we were doing you know experience and become just another one of them other things you have to worry about yeah okay so uh curious on there with you know where it says if you've got those those

105symptoms that you should you should test and if the test comes back negative then the kid can you know your child can go to school um i guess my question is does the parent need to provide the school with evidence of that negative test or if little johnny is sitting in class isn't going to get sent to the office and testing well it depends i mean because yeah we're not going to ask for proof like we're not we we don't that's the point of not not requiring parents to fill up things anymore and upload anything we're just trusting the parent but if a kid if a child looks visibly sick in a class and it's not been well established this is a typical thing but it's you know if you're sneezing and taking burning you've

106known the child from doing that for one time they may get that information and be able to say that the existing condition all that and a lot of times there'll be some medical information about that because that won't whether you're talking about covid or not a child who's visibly sick in school is generally not supposed to be in school anyway so typically they will establish you know if that's allergies the nurse and family has a relationship and yeah that's well he gets a fever and you know he's kind of scenes about 25 times every day and that's just part of it right but he has a fever we've talked to the parents there's a med on file they got a doctor's vote for that it's like whatever it is but if the child looks visibly

107sick it's really no different than cold they will probably be sent to the nurse yeah anyone else okay thank you next celebrity so really good news um this is a great event i don't know if um many of you have likely have been uh able to participate in it and um usually the school will have a booth um and thanks to the many community members who come and make this it's a fun day for everyone um and you know we will have little chocolate from the school system there's food we kind of help set up certain pieces of our school-related area all board members are welcome i welcome staff i can't require them but i welcome them to come and meet a couple of principals yeah and then they're doing they'll come they'll hang out

108you know it's a fun day and my own kids i used to be able to drag them there not so much anymore but it is it's just a lot of fun and so um i wanted to i have to scroll down because this is a little farther down in the agenda but i wanted to bring people's attention to it just promote it and plug it and also invite board members to it it is saturday september 10th noon to 4 p.m um and it's just the glutes and the food and the fun high school kids are there the eagle is there walking around and full of fire um you know fox four guys four people to do that they're just amazing my son won here yeah um but it's one of the most fun things i

109think colin has so i invite everyone to come board members i want to thank you i'm very aware of it so you come and um it would be a good time i think i hung out at the booth with you last time yeah gave away swag it was good it was fun it's funny to see what swag goes to which what's the most popular swag and it didn't change it's from year to year what the kids like that was funny it was a bear-shaped pencil shape gone and then there was like yeah i mean this could be a don't take situation i don't know i'm still recovering um you don't go for anything go for the rage robotics robot that is putting the tony across the table very i am so looking forward to that

110thing and then they've reprogrammed their competition so it can come to these type of events too so it won't just be the the parade one most of them yeah they've got the one from this last year that they set up so that they can move it around real crap that's exciting yeah about to say yeah no celebration it is fun it is nice to see i like the other trying to grow where we are but these field trips i just wanted to make the board aware of them because they were approved um you know in the process last year and there for this year so we're talking about updating that so that i let you know when they come up but just for your edification i wanted you to know that these had already come

111up prior to you know most of them prior to the most recent conversations about policies they just want to make sure your work because you're going to say oh my gosh that we have this and you know did that come before the word well it was approved before that right so this is kind of your annual update on these are the overnight trips and i'll let you know as we go along and i'll try to do monthly reports on what's what i approve going along now there's a list here geez okay um so and i don't need exact numbers just high level what what what kind of numbers of kids are going on these are tens twenties fifteens they can be up to four hundred not in the available the regional one is going to

112happen virginia beach is a lot of kids that's like the disney trip for band so that one's you're also winning 100 most probably or eight plus anything yeah the band they do the disney they alternate with virginia beach it's great it's awesome vantage of course band teachers are awesome but that's that's that's something we should give them like lots of pets on the back yeah in any case so that's just you know fairly recent but not as recent as our political discussions so i just want to thank people thank you i was just curious are these um are the dates accurate i'm looking at the of course that my eyes are drawn to the deca one november 10th is the 23rd for the regional power trip those are typically only two days three days um

113so it might be that they that that was reported as a range because they weren't sure you know that it usually happens in this range when is that so so everything else is is final except sort of the range for deck yeah it might be that she didn't know what exactly it would be when she called the paperwork because that paperwork was filed like probably many many many months ago before she might know the exactly but she'd know it sometime in november it's not a two week field trip no it is not that's a range but there that's this is taken from the forum itself so you know as i evolve this particular report i'll give you you know but that's taken that's the range that was reported so the washington dc trip that's to

114be determined that's like the makeup trip that we had discussed concepts at the high school level and it's kind of a combination of both it's it's the one for anybody who you know might have missed the one there it's also for a while there's been a conversation about trying to do one that's a little more not sophisticated but um something a little bit more that continue with the developmental age of the kids you might be able to do some more stuff and so that that has been on the radar for a little while i have a person or a couple people staff staff-wise they're stepping up as part of the process because they're paid to stipend um that would be look we'd be looking to do that you know in the in the range of

115may or something to get it clearly out of any potential back you know if the year shifted or something and so you know if you look at the paperwork for the pandemic plan if you look at the second document that i linked there in the introduction it does talk about prevalence and like what could be reimposed and this would be great to be clear of all of that and so it may help to do that but it gives us more time for all of the other people which is why yeah i just bring it up because i know we talked about in the past and you know distributing my earlier you know because of the circumstances really and i know our staff will work hard to do it but i'll just make people want to

116get recorded it really needs to be a special gift for those so i know they'll work hard to do that but i would be remiss if i didn't mention it again yeah and this one might be able to roll in williamsburg might be able to roll in philadelphia depending on you can do a little bit more maybe with it um thank you i'm excited to see these dates on the calendar so that's fantastic news um for our students to get those opportunities to go um i know that we've been struggling for the last couple years um but i guess my question would be um what kind of student or family assistance programs or grants or available availabilities to help those families they couldn't necessarily financially support this um you know talk about a lot about

117um anyways what kind of a financial supports for opportunities we have out there dr willow well um so a lot of times the the trips that are multi-day overnight trips there are some options but um you know we will try to help a family who is in a condition and say if they are able to and willing to say that they have reintroduced lunch we can look for some ways of helping we cannot ask the person if their freedom they have to tell us that they are so if that happens then we can do some things otherwise we can't we're not allowed to ask as far as how that goes so the directive would be to to make sure our families knew that they were they they should reach out to the superintendent's office or

118their principal administration yeah and ask me a few questions point them in the directions and then we do try to help people um personally uh followers have done that personally now but there's other ways we've been fine to help but it just as a general disclaimer you know um if if a family does file for pre-introduced lunch we won't i will not know that we're not allowed to know that so if there is a trip like this coming up um you know and you felt comfortable doing so you can reach out to the superintendent's office and say i you know we do receive pre-introduced lunch you know is there anything that can can happen to help us here and you know we would work with the administration others wouldn't no matter what trip it is

119to try to try to help um but but to that point we can't we're not going to know unless people call and offer that we can verify it but we can't ask it all right thank you i'm glad to hear there's some there's some options um that's all i have thank you just in response to dana and the options um i know that most of these or all of these trips have a parent meeting before um the children go so that information about the free lunch and asking for help um and ways to do that confidential confidentially if that information is giving given at that post parent meeting and in addition some of these field trips have fundraising opportunities as well yeah many of them yes yeah that's better grades for everybody i just threw

120it up on facebook and it was half the strip was paid for it was pretty good okay okay let's move on to the uh last thing you're agreed to uh the next well let's see uh oh are we at that do we have to do something no we're gonna have board action yet we're in agreed to ss update no enclosure right so social studies um this is coming off of the curriculum meeting passed um pass this up the chain to inform the board of as you know we're working through the social studies units for a while there it was kind of because of the way that other subjects were prioritized by the state and federal government aka some of the aspects testing other things social studies not only in this town many other towns ended

121up taking a back seat to just about every other subject and then in elementary school in particular it started to alternate with science and then it started to disappear and then it became like just kind of theme days and so part of it is really you know a real obligation i feel like we have to the municipality state and america to make sure that we're getting you know these things updated and moved back into a place where they have at least you know equal equal footing let's say science and things like that so you know to that end this is another one of the curricula that has been updated for social studies and will continue to work on this i work with the social studies teachers i meet with the social studies teachers multiple times

122you know a year in various configurations and uh and then try to recruit them to do work and they're doing a great job um and you know this is this is just one of many that we're going to continue to evolve and get in alignment with the connecticut elementary and secondary social studies frameworks so the links here are active um for anyone including free to click on you they'll take you to all of the resource documents so i'm not gonna you know go into those right now there are many pages but they're a good read if you're into that kind of thing and i am um it's really interesting great stuff that this day did this is um i'm trying to click on it it's giving me so uh i'm not going to read the

123whole thing you can read it at your leisure if you want anybody who wants that uh i'm happy to provide um but you'll see here that the over overarching essential questions the benz the bend is a new new terminology um you know i'm i'm like a decade old and turns two decades old from say social studies directly when i was a teacher so some of the terminology you know in terms of the foci of units is a little bit different than what i was used to and we're going to transition this into the ubd format which is the format the district uses this is on its way to that it's just a matter of getting that formatting but you can see what the essential questions are you know how do individuals and groups make a

124difference by influencing the way we live and what we have and how the culture influence place and how do people use natural resources and so on and so each of these links to the lessons and you can see that it's a mixture of both history um reading writing standards and geography standards and i love the connecticut frameworks they do a really good job of looking at the developmental level and introducing these things at the level that's appropriate for the kids and there's some really great activities in there i mean i think they did a fantastic job with that document um and so if you look at it you get a sense of you know what this is it's basically the combination you know of history geography and economy and how those things interface at a

125grade tool um and so you can see then you know they work on math skills they work on um activity you know these activities are math mapping activities and um and then deciding kind of like what makes for a successful community you know is it a combination of the economy geography and you know history and you know how does environment affect these kinds of things and how do people perceptions of a certain place uh back you know affect it and so i'm going to try to click on one of these you can see how um he's linked to some of the more you know established lessons this particular lesson the state of connecticut um contracted with defined learning and so on some of the stuff that comes off the connecticut standards they actually provided some

126support materials and tasks for so this is an example defined learning is actually a pretty great product in that it has a lot of support tasks and materials so this is like a subset of that curriculum you can see how that kind of is laid out on paper um what the project is and how they do it some of the steps in the project this sister city one the maps and mapping they do um you know they do a newscast that they put together as part of the the unit for communication and standards and they you know got another audience so you know you can look at it at your leisure but it's it's detailed there's a lot of pieces to it they do a virtual trip they do a journal it's really good stuff

127and the kids get into it they're very excited it's fun to see kids engage in these type of activities a social studies person i love seeing that so you know that's been not part of the picture for a long time in a lot of places so um so that's about it in a nutshell but you can look it through it yourself the next stage is this pops into a uvd format and they're already um they'll be teaching it this year it was really cool that they that when they did it and to their credit frankly the standards those frameworks weren't there when those things were developed and those teachers did a fantastic job developing that um it's just those were developed prior to standards and we're just updating i just wanted to be replacing something

128just as cool so that it wasn't a free experience for our students and we truly was just well you know the day on the green for instance that is an alignment with the kinetic framework so something as fun as tall and green day is going to be the kind of things we're developing for birds growth too um it's that kind of fun you know and they do they love it they get into the garb they learn about the period and you know you get to see them excited and having fun with it um that's what we're going to be developing and that's what fell to the side when that science and society started alternating and it's nobody's fault in the state of connecticut kind of pushed it that way and then societies really started taking

129a very big back seat and turned into three beam days that was really you know so this is really getting it back which is important for all of us you know our kids need to know the history they need to think about these things i'll just say as a curriculum committee chair we've been able to talk about this and i want the two of our meetings and i would say that it's a very solid curriculum um i'm suppressed by the way that they try to talk about subjects that they seem higher level like economics and geography at the second grade level i think they do a very good job of doing that and saying thank you to our teachers that took those standards and were able to create an actual functional curriculum out of that

130so it definitely has my blessing as a curriculum committee chair it's exciting there's jamari you know bringing that up bringing that to the having it come up and the in the agenda was great it's a great stuff time we can share those new developments i think we should [Music] do you want to do curriculum yeah yeah talk about that um so besides what we just discussed uh we also did a review of the skills for adolescence court uh course uh and talked a little bit about the big subject areas that that um it covers which tied in nicely i think with some of those discussions we've had on the task force and additionally we also discussed the effects of recent legislation which banned dual instruction which in layman's term that's high hybrid learning essentially and

131i think the feedback that jaden and i had dr willett shares is that it's hybrid learning is generally not good but the way the law is written is going to negatively impact things because it kind of is too restricted there are a few circumstances where it could be useful and unfortunately the law prevent that from being possible and then also just a quick note about future meetings um because the second half of the month is quite busy we ended up canceling the september first meeting uh but we will be meeting and having a regular meeting at the regular time up in september and oh the task force um we discussed a mentor a mentoring recommendation in a potential diversity equity and inclusion task force recommendation the recommendation to create a task force to address those

132subjects and additionally the town council has given funding to conduct a survey which should be completed by november for talent residents by a firm that is skilled have been doing this this will help give us more information to properly diagnose the issues that tolerance faces and better figure out the solutions that would best suit us and we finished our discussions on regarding state meetings and dr willa is going to pull some of the top ones that we discussed um to bring to the board at a later time we'll discuss writing a letter or the actions that we want to take them with those top mandates um and then we also have negotiations um our negotiations with the administrators are complete so you i'm sure we'll be seeing that they have to ratify first and then

133we can bring it to the board um yeah we met uh yesterday yeah um in response to some of the conversations that were going on in curriculum uh we cycled around and added to our agenda the the telephone the discussion about collecting telephones as you come into the class our conversation was from the policy perspective looked at our personal technology existing technology policy and the discipline policy to figure out not necessarily the right or wrong of doing it but whatever decision was made is there already a policy framework to support that or did we need to do efforts on the basement i think the discussion was absolutely wonderful and thank you everybody intended in we actually had people that were like listening we decided finally decided that we wanted a little bit more information uh

134concerning some of the legal aspects like shipwren and goodwin's what their model policies say we want to take a look at that so we postponed the conversation will add it to a future agenda where we can get a little deeper into that we then went in and reviewed 40 70 which is alcohol tobacco in the drug free uh workplace that was largely that that will correct me if i my notes are weak uh but that was largely just some cleaning up correcting and bringing it up to date that canvas yes yes canvas is spoken about in there and vaping so that went relatively quickly we reviewed the changes it got approved out of policy so it's available to be uh put on a future agenda for the weeks and i was 47. [Music] i just

135essentially this is the last meeting before our students go to school next week as everyone knows but well i'm sure other parents as well the power school is now open so what teams with teachers what schedules are messed up so i really honestly just want to make sure that you know i really wish our students our teachers our admins that they have a wonderful year like i said i mean there's it just keeps going you know get this student that one that friend this you know when you get to that middle school level and the schedules are all different it's not just the teacher you know you get the victory with the teams and so i think it's really important for these students to just go back to school and have like you know the

136stable environment with all their friends and their teachers and they get to have great curriculum so it's really exciting at this point so next thursday starting school so i'm very excited about that it's coming quick it's much better get your clothes shopping done this week it is tax free week so thank you everyone um let's go to the board action right so uh another one that will be very exciting for all of you the surplus equipment is the you know we do have to rotate through different things this particular piece of surplus equipment as i go down to is i think 12 aed units um this is not the kind of equipment that you want to fail when uh when the time comes so the these aeds have old parts and they're not functioning particularly

137well and so they tested them and now they're going to try to hand them over to the town to see if the town can salvage them for any parts and forgive me as to try to find the word it was um so really it's 12 aeds they've expired generally when that happens you need to turn them into the company um they need batteries you know they don't guarantee that they're going to work after a certain point um and so the aed replacements have already been installed into the units and these are out of getting out of the wall units and ready to go back we surplus them to the town if the town can get anything out of them that's great but most of the time it goes back to the company to recycle these

138things okay at this point i will entertain the motion motion to declare the items listed in l1 of the 824 2022 board of ed meeting is absolute obsolete and turn the items over to the town in accordance with the board of education policy 30 40. in a second hey any discussion about this you don't have something about how much we're getting for these for town council nothing like that no i i i know these kind of things that's what we normally ask you know i think these units get turned back into the company i think when we get 80 minutes they're generally for schools there's already a special price for schools these get turned back into into the into the company because these things rely on the battery being able to do its business during

139a very dang you know very uh urgent event and so when they say that you've gone beyond the use of the time of that you just don't that's what it was like [Music] that actually answered my question so thank you perfect so there are no further questions we can do a vote um all those in favor can say aye oh that was everybody um therefore this passes and we can move this equipment to town school at this time um we have public participation and it's just kind of supposed to be to the items on this agenda you will have uh two minutes um dr willett will put that on and if you could please list your name and your address for the record okay irini rini b saw 230 grand hill road when if ever

140will the board focus on the students in this district this recent episode makes it clear that the leadership of the board is not focused on the students i have no confidence in any board member who voted to remove the confidentiality of an executive session if you promise confidentiality there are no take backs after the fact any board member who voted yes to this clearly has no integrity i'm pretty sure dana philbin just now responded to public participation regarding her statement during the board of ed executive session yet the minutes showed that the board's waiver is limited to the portion of the meeting of ms plourde's statement regarding communications with a family should dana now be censored for violating executive session information regarding the legal fees discussion curious as to who asked for this seems like

141yet another targeted attack on one board member in the name of bullying and retaliation the leadership of the board made a decision to engage counsel when this could have been an internal discussion and resolution if the chair and or the superintendent make a decision to call their legal team that is on them not anyone else thank you um [Music] oh hi kate howard bender 103 goose lane i just wanted to um wish everybody a peaceful start to the year i don't know if you got a chance to look at dr willett's facebook page there's a beautiful rainbow over the town in high school and i think that that is a really good omen for the year um i look forward to watching some more um you know concentrating on what what students and teachers and

142parents need and um i just invite you to continue to work together um listen to our lawyers and you know do what's right for the kids and the families of talland and thank you all for getting through a really difficult year thanks thank you at this time any other members would like to speak please raise your hand or you can come up to be able to choose if not um anybody else here no uh andy powell 21 third book drive uh i speak as a private citizen not a divor uh or uh elected official question i have is in regards to the surplus units or the ieds um those have been fully replaced there are no empty boxes that are there is that correct okay because having just gone through a heart attack knowing that

143those devices are there is uh is very important and um i just wanted to make sure that that was taken care of then all right thank you again okay any other comments okay i will close out the public participation and point some information do any more members go ahead yeah i just want to touch on mr powell's comment there you know you made the joke earlier normally i'm incredibly interested in making sure from a a surplus perspective that we're we're getting them what we should out of that where's it going you know how are we taking care of that but you know those aeds are so technical it's so precise that you don't you just don't risk going a minute past their their recommended battery life and you know you make sure that you've got

144enough in the right places with the right training and so i'm pleased to see us being proactive i'm happy to see that those are new ones are getting put in place that lord forbid i'd love to see every one of them get turned back in at surplus because we didn't need them if we do i'm glad they're there so i'm going to ask a question because i don't take kindly to my integrity being questioned dr willett could you possibly answer this this executive session there to protect board members from violating policy um well no the executive session is not there to to protect board thank you so there's a lot of discussion tonight about what's necessary and what's unnecessary there's a lot of questions in the public so i just want to make myself clean

145it is not my actions that brought us to the june 22nd public participation there was public participation that occurred there were things that were stated we had a meeting on it as a board with our attorney to find out what our rights were what their rights were we have legal fees from that yes none of it should be necessary period but even some of those legal fees then because of the public participation we had were necessary some of the legal fees were not necessary because they were in repetition to the things that we discussed in our executive session with the attorney i did not take actions that cost us any legal needs i did not ask questions that cost us any legal fees so if you're questioning my integrity please examine those facts thank you

146any other remember this time okay i will um entertain a motion version all those favor can say i i um