001yeah know I know I know it took me took me a while for me to test everything have to go up and down all the time yeah yeah so like they should have something going on there hello hello testing one two three testing I can hear you very well yeah know they have audio down they confirm they have AIO they can hear me you're not what I'm sorry Rob could you mute [Music] the M yeah e e e for e test yeah uh yes for e did you put for e for e e e move for nom ni Davies is there a second thank you Lori um is there any other nominations hearing none we can move to the ballot [Music] this excellent moving forward is um the secretary position and I nominate laor bufano
002is there a second thank you heather are there any other nominations hearing none we can move to the ballot thats for Lori excellent thank you all very much look forward to continuing to all work together yes and and next draw everyone's attention to the consent agenda um the consent agenda is a um the appointment of council to the to the board in the continuation of Shipman and Goodwin there was also the appointment of the medical advisor um for Dr Christine Mackin to continue in that capacity um further is um the appointment for designation of um um Signature Sign signatories which would be um it runs the gamut G on you it's for activity account right for activities Cs and um and then in addition is the appointment of um Steven Cedar of pulman and Carley
003as the impartial um hearing officer to address matters included but not limited to student expulsion hearings is um there any um questions or discussion on the consent agenda um hearing none is there a motion to approve the consent agenda I shall move Thank you Pam is there a second thank you Pat all in favor motion carries uh unanimously um next up we have um the 2425 Board of Education um calendar this is the calendar for our um meetings um moving forward you'll see that there's just one adjustment from um for the joint Boe bof meeting from the 13th to the 11th so from that Thursday to the Tuesday which is the B's regularly scheduled meeting are there any questions about the calendar we also move the budget workshops to the evening thank you so much
004um is there a motion to approve the calendar thank you Lori is there a second thank you heather all in favor carries unanimously and then I'm just under review and discuss I'd like to just bring everybody's attention to um the 2425 committee assignments and um leaon um if everybody would just um we are carrying right now we have filled in carrying over from standing committees of last year but I would invite everybody to um take this home and look at it and um let me know what your commitments are and what you would like to be involved with and um we'll come back in the new year with a settled um a settled list um with that 7:08 I mooved to Jo the um organizational meeting thank you everybody copies um okay so now at
005um 7:09 I um move to open the Thursday December 5th Wilton Board of Education regular meeting um um and that meeting be has everybody had a chance to look at the agenda is there a motion to approve the agenda move thank you Nicholas or second second thank you Pat all in favor motion carries unanimously um comments from the public are we police as far as I know we are yes so um so the public comment the board has set aside time at the beginning and end of regular meetings for public comments for members of the public to share their views on matters involving the wiland public schools and to help inform the board's decisions on such matters two minutes will be allotted to each speaker and a maximum of 15 minutes to any one subject
006for the record please also give your name and address the board considers the views of citizens in all its deliberations and welcomes and appreciates public comment the board listens to public comment thoughtfully and with interest the board however generally does not respond respond to public comment during board meetings by offering commentary or answering questions the board also invites commentators and the public to contact the board or the superintendent directly with any specific questions or comments the board through the chair and the superintendent May respond to questions and comments offered during the public comment session or shared directly and in responding may also direct members of the public to the appropriate staff member for a response are there any comments from the public looks like no seeing none uh we will move to um the consent
007agenda the consent agenda has the U minutes of the regular meeting from November 21st and the executive session on November 21st is there a motion to approve the consent agenda thank you Lori is there a second second Thank you Pam all in favor motion carries unanimously um board chair report um I would just like to um welcome everybody back I hope everybody had a happy and healthy break I would also just like to thank Eric and Bill and their team um as you can see hopefully at home we have a new setup so our voices should be able to be heard and um faces should be able to be seen and um the zoom is now fully operational I know um it wasn't easy to get all the moving pieces together so just um thank
008you all and um I hope you know if there's feedback from the public watching you know feel free to email um the Boe directly and let us know and because we want to make sure that it's functional for everybody absolutely great just a couple more items on that so if you look around the you see there's a camera in the back there's two here in the front and then the zoom camera is in the center of the room the speaker here or the microphone is here there are also speakers and installed in the back of the room which Eric tells me pick up my voice so people sitting in the back actually hear me when I speak so that's also an addition one of the interesting features uh Eric was giving a Road Show this
009morning so in addition to this from really this room being now kind of fully state-ofthe-art there's a control center here you can see we can um control the technology from the table uh students um will continue to come and broadcast both um via zoom and channel 78 they'll be working down in the control room uh pretty state-of-the-art setup and I was interested in um our expansion capability so Eric was sharing me if we can finally get some Fiber run between CER Mill and the stadium we can actually broadcast you know games and events from there from downstairs we could do the same from Lily if we can get some Fiber there um and we'll look at doing setting up the same capacity for events in the cloon and the Little Theater so it'll give us
010some really it has the opportunity I should say to give us some really um strong additional broadcasting capabilities in a in a simple way so um I'll just keep your posted as we're able to kind of build this thing out um so thank you for that it's taking a while for us to get here but it's definitely step in the right direction yeah for sure really great the fiber has to get run by the utility company no we have fiber we would run it it's really it's a project we've been talking about for I don't know a number of years so it's requires some coordination between Parks and Rec DPW and us so have to get everybody together with the equipment to get it done as I recall we approved that money on the board
011of Select to do that a very long time ago yes that's right thank you for letting us know surprised it wasn't done was yeah it was a long time ago that's right you at least the money is not the problem no that's right so anyway moving on so good news and you know some possibilities I think and just thinking about the rumor Arrangement um I shared before um we're we'll replace the podium and we'll move the um Podium here for more formal presentations for public comment that way the speakers can be seen also on Zoom just given the location of the camera you gonna ask I was just going to say with the three cameras that we have um in the three spaces the red light shows the camera that's actually live so if you
012look back at that camera I'm speaking they just changed to pick me up um now that I'm speaking so that camera is live so they're able to zoom in and zoom out um around the room so we actually gives us the ability to put podiums or presenters in different locations and and be able to zoom in on them so the red light on the camera shows you which cameras active directly great so good to know so there you go great so a couple of other things um earlier today state senator ccar joined uh High School senior Daniel babash Tammy Thorton from Wilton go green Bill Tomlinson from Chartwells and several of our high school administrators at a ribbon cutting Center ceremony to celebrate the installation of a Second Industrial dishwasher here in the district so
013we R cutting a few weeks ago over at Cider Mill uh we just completed the installation here at the high school and so it's something that we talked about many movs ago returning a good thing um back to uh reusables right and and walking away from from disposable materials in the lunchroom and so um again this is something that's you know been talked about contemplated thought planned debated for years and so we'll finally here and so the next step will be to focus on Middlebrook and have a dishwasher installed there at some point the future and then we'll have four schools up and running and then we'll just to continue to increase our capability um what was neat about the high school project um Daniel is a budding environmentalist and kind of through his experience
014at the high school had developed this concern so um kind of unbeknownst to me he had gone and done some research and reached out to um Senator Mark and proposed a grant and you know was kind of working with her she was able to FASTT trck it as the um legislative session was closing out last year so it really um you know kind of stars aligned and we're able to get it done really quickly it was great so congratulations to him and to them and um again just one more you know kind of small piece I think that is in keeping with the ethos of this town and the school district so and but it carries it on through when they get to college and when they get to the workplace if they are demanding
015it then people will continue do it so if we don't start them now the longer it takes for everyone else to catch up yeah well said so um so that's good news I tomorrow night at 6 PM um our PTA jointly and the PTSA will be hosting the second annual PTA Reflections award ceremony last year it was in the Clon um tomorrow night it'll be here in the library learning Commons um and so we'll celebrate some of our student artists who participated in the PTA Reflections contest this year that's a K12 program so available for about an hour six o'clock please come by the doors will be open and get to see some great student artwork just the last um this week when the board of Selectmen uh met they approved additional funds to replace
016the elevator at c m this was a project that was I think bonded two years ago um was delayed um for a variety of reasons the um cost escalation you know got in the way and so there was funds available so that project um is good to go and will take place this summer excellent great thank you um first up under review and discuss is an update on digital learning communication task force and the artificial intelligence task force so we have that's right we put together a presentation for you basically cover even more than what you say we just wanted to give an update uh on all things digital learning and information technology um I'll just start off by thanking all of you for having us and we really appreciate that and as I'm getting
017to know some of you more I'm getting more and more excited about starting here so I again I appreciate the time and the attention that you've given me um I just thank my team too I've work with some incredible people in the library and through the tech instructional leaders at the web Masters and uh Eric and his team are awesome too just all the attestment everything they're doing is all the work they've been putting into getting this particular system working and again getting to know these guys and working with them every day has been a total pleasure so um just a quick round of and of course to hel who keeps us all running hel Walker who we couldn't do anything without her um so I just wanted to take a moment to do that
018and just a brief introduction of myself um Ruth got to know me during the interview process and I've spoken with some of you um you know over the last couple months just getting to know you um but my background is that I've worked as an IT manager and in marketing before I entered education I taught middle school and high school English in West Harford and Simsbury where I became uh a department supervisor for English so I I think that helped make me imly suited for this job because I am um working with the library team but also with the text side of things and ultimately um I want to make a big contribution uh with my team and I to help to improve technology education here in Wilton um so we're just kind of laying
019the groundwork for some of those things now and fr did such an amazing job before I got here and all of you worked so well together that um I was able to kind of slide in and learn some things and hopefully we can bring things forward especially in uh Ai and Communications which are kind of our main topics of discussion um so um I just really love working with you guys and sharing all the stuff that I've learned and that I wanted to help to to contribute um this is a ridiculous image of uh what Chad GPT thought the AI task force looked like in Wilton I don't know how much detail you can see but there's a lot of handless people typing sometimes on a computer sometimes in just the thin air um trying
020to learn more about Ai and its rule in education um I think we've done more work than apparently these people have uh and I can share with you so what we've done so far um I started onboarding with the technology ISS and with Fran and with the task force over the summer um we put together um a student facing document which I'll share with you in a moment um and started to talk about some policy which I know Kevin's shared with you a little bit and working on that as well um so that was kind of the groundwork that I was able to get in on um we did have an AI task force meeting in October um in which we uh decided we want to initiate a magic school and a school AI pilot
021um and these are two different AI apps that are made for Education um I'm not sure how familiar you are with them but the quick Lowdown is that um they offer all the Privacy protections that we we require um and unlike kind of an open edit model like gemini or chat GPT um they're made for student facing applications so for example if um you wanted to make some kind of chat bot to help a student plan out an essay uh you could divide that and um you could set it up so that it would not write the essay for the student instead it would just coach them and ask them questions about things on the rubric or and it could help without with proof reading and things like that um whereas with some of those
022open-ended type of platforms you can't necessarily structure something like that for a student so that's just a really quick example of that um and we're trying to get the pilot going this week they're in a couple snags but hopefully this week going next week teachers will have access to paid pilot versions for both of those um because when you don't when you don't get full version it it definitely doesn't work as well as I just described there's more hiccups and you have to fight with the AI a little bit more to get it to do what you want it to do um so we're going to test that out and ultimately decide which we prefer and make a commitment uh to probably one of those um in terms of um what we want do what
023the Pilot's done um we did add Gemini just a few weeks ago for teachers um and um we have that it didn't it was no cost it was just through Google Suite so we already had it um and Gemini if you're not familiar is basically Google's version of chat GPT so um you know I find that some sometimes Gemini does better with some things and sometimes chat TV chat tvt does better with others um but it's nice that we're able to provide Gemini to the district and to the students I'm sorry to the teachers free of charge we're not providing it for the students yet um mainly because Google hasn't worked out all their privacy features yet but that is something that they've talked about and the states talked about so it may be um
024available to students age 13 and up at some point in the future but just hasn't been all hammered out yet there's a lot of work going on with that behind the scenes um there's another uh product called notebook Len which we've uh been exploring a little bit but we haven't enabled that for teachers yet yeah and that that we're actually U we're going to we've applied to be a beta test site for Notebook LM as they release their Enterprise version so we're we're waiting on on to see if we're actually allowed in to the program or not I think we should I hope yeah um and then just uh obviously we're trying to put together some PD for teachers as we launch into this pilot um and one thing that excuse me um that we
025created was um a Google Chat where teachers can share best practices and their thoughts and ideas as we kind of learn all this stuff together um and um we'll def through the school AI pilot for example there's a whole training program that they have built in so teachers can learn how to use it they don't have to necessarily start from scratch if they don't have a lot of good familiarity um so we'll be rolling those things out too in the coming weeks and months do magic school and school AI do they run on proprietary llms no they're both um just tied into open open eye yeah um but you you'd be hard pressed to know it sometimes because they're they're graphical us interfaces are very different right um a lot of people kind of say
026for better worse Magic School looks like it's for elementary school and school AI looks like it's for secondary um they function similarly in some ways but um what I found through making assignments and and we all of us practicing using it is that magic school tends to set up multiple agents which could guide a student through a process but they need a little bit more coaching and then School AI tends to just let you package it all together like I could like that essay example I could just go to one chat agent and it would walk me through it um but I think there's use cases for both so we really want to get teachers hands-on experience they don't have the nerfed version they can figure out which one they think will work best and
027then we can make some consensus uh toward the end of the school year so that's that's the rough outline of what we're trying to do so far with AI um and again I know that some things like uh the student def facing document might be new but I know that you guys have seen some things as far as uh you know guidelines and and policy and things like that um a couple other things we're talking about is um the student uh guidelines which actually is probably really hard for you to read so I got some paper copies you mind just passing that around thank you um so we put this together and ran it by the AI task force and um made some edits and students have been seeing this primarily in the LLC classes
028that they attend um but it's available so um you can kind of introduce them to what AI is about remind them about the importance of privacy um and give them some guidelines on where when and how do use in class um and always with the teach teachers permission so we we've put some of those things into place as far as when it doesn't work as smoothly as I just described um we have um academic conduct policies being updated um that's right now kind of being drafted by schools and departments but I'm hoping to bring people together during our next AI task force meeting in January and try to think about that a little bit more together and maybe put some more concrete things together based on grade level and assignment the policy committee has a
029draft um academic Integrity policy that addresses you know some facets of the use of AI so yeah I think building out some regulations underneath that would be you know for that committee so yeah so far like for example the the high school Humanities teachers were able to share what they were thinking and um you know we've been kind of working with that a little bit so you know just on our side of things we'll continue to try to put some ideas can we do we have the ability to customize the like rule set Logic for either School AI or magic school to say kind of tweak like if a student asks it to do something that's outside the bounds of what we want what we feel is appropriate to allow it to do can we
030kind of toggle that logic or does is that set at the school AI level and it's one- siiz foot all you actually have a lot of power to do that again at least with the paid version um so and to go back to that ESS say example um don't par me if I pick on you but if I'm the teacher and Eric's a student he's he's trying to get the thing that's write the essay for him um you can generally program it so that it will deny that and ask more follow-up questions or help the student plan something out again if you you go through the paid version you get a lot more power and flexibility with that um some teachers have been experimenting with the the free version and having a little less success
031um but you do have quite a bit of power in how you structure that now with that being said the technolog is evolving and students are smart and crafty and they like to try to beat the system so um if anything sometimes it's kind of fun to see what they come up with um in a way to try to get it to to manipulate the agent to do what it want like a hackathon almost kind of yeah but that's not always bad because then we're all kind of learning together um and then um with the both products but especially scho ey is strong in this you can see Trends and highlights of what's happening and you get a full transcript of the chat um so again if Eric's saying hey I got to write this
032essay about why Thanksgiving is nice um could you write it for me I can go back and see that and be like oh Eric you know maybe we should talk about this assignments more you know and try to coach them so you can attach like the the the the transcript to the actual submission of work it's actually like a separate um well you could but the teacher has access to both and can look and say if something doesn't look right they can go back and reference the transcripts yes to see what the interaction is yes and then there's tools through Google Docs too where especially in secondary you know um you can see how the document was edited and things like that for and again I'm sticking to this s example it's just the easiest
033to explain but there's so many other things you can do um in terms of um having conversations or brainstorming sessions or um i' I've seen teachers use it for book clubs as like an extra book club member or kind of the expert off to the side um so there's a lot of other things other than just things that create an academic product it has good to it really is it's very cool but are the teachers all right with all this I mean this is a whole another thing for them that's something we're trying to help out with so um some people rolled up old sleevs and got really excited about and got to work other people have a little bit more um a little B more trepidacious about it and again totally understandable because as
034a society we don't know how we all feel about this yet either um it's not an easy answer so you one thing I found when I got here is that we're already ahead of a lot of places I think a lot of places are kind of sticking their heads in the sand um or hoping that it'll pass by or they're trying to regulate it out of out of existence and um I think it the open openness and flexibility that I found here was really nice that it existed so now I'm trying to build upon that yeah feels like it could be a great asset to help have a more personalized teaching experience like going back to the essay example different kids need different prompts to help get them back to center of what the actual
035request of the assignment is and I would respond differently than Pam or Heather yeah which a teacher can't do dynamically it's a great tool it's like you have you know 25 teaching assistants in the room with you so as a teacher just through my own experience and the coaching I've done um it's it's an amazing tool because I might be working with Eric on his Thanksgiving essay and the rest of you guys don't have to sit here and wait for me to finish with him um you know and then you're just goofing around or you're getting distracted you're doing other homework like you could just stay on task and keep working and then I can get to each of you and help you with your work too so it's a really neat tool for that
036I would assume that there's a way that you can also back into to like it's the like an assessment tool as well like kind of you know knowing that you know each each kid might be absorbing the information differently but they all have they have different types of command over it and being able to figure out um an assessment piece and making that piece easier for our for our teachers it actually really it could really help so um if you were to give some kind of a especially for formative assessment this is really useful where students are just uh you're learning what they know and they don't know in your coaching it's not like something that necessarily gets a grade um or or like a a big grade in the Gradebook um it could be
037really useful because um the schoool ey platform I'm a little bit more familiar with but what they do is they'll group kids into like how well they did or where their strengths and weaknesses are on a task so you could say you you know strong like strong written response need some help maybe didn't understand the prpt then you can go and talk to those kids so you know if I'm working with students I could visit with um somebody and say hey um you're doing great good p on the back maybe you can proof free this other kid's work and then I can go back to Eric and start from scratch I'm sorry that's all right have a great essay yeah so so that's the goal uh so yeah that actually really is a NE tool
038that can help with those kinds of Assessments um as well and then teachers can work on the back end it can help them create assessments um which is helpful um especially if you're like with all the testing and the prep that goes into that you can have it craft AP style questions or you know dbqs for um apus or you know different math problems or help drill math facts so um I know teachers are often scrambling to find things that you can individualize for a student and you could you could write in you know me per for example in elementary school could have really used help with some of those math facts and um you know maybe my teacher could have said oh you know he doesn't really understand the 12 table can you make
039something for them and it could could help me out I know they don't teach math that way anymore but that's just how I hope some of us might remember it too so um yeah it's I could talk about this all night no sorry to get you off no I appreciate it no um any other questions or comments before I move on to Communications is the pilot um being equal equally initiated in all schools or is that more useful at the high school than the Middle School level um I we're gonna enable it for everybody and kind of see where it goes by you mean to cut you up goad I was gon to say one of one of the really nice pieces about working with Bill and his team though is when we have meetings
040on the AI task force we start talking about Pro you know products and applications we're able to really quickly put those into the uh pilot mode and make it accessible to the staff and students so it's been a pleasure working together with him and his team to really take this from just com you know concept into application and it's across all four schools yes it do yeah and to go back to Pam's question maybe not everybody's goingon to want to participate um but I know there's at least a 175 people that have the free version of Magic School for example um so hopefully most of them will want to try it you know and we can go from there so Kev what were we gonna say I'm sorry just two things I would add one
041um for the board we're in the midst of planning our next long range planning session that'll take place late February early March and so building on the work of the I AI task force and the presentation the long range Planning Group had last year with Matt mvis on AI were there remember it was an introduction to the tools and just you know for a lot of folks me included kind of mind-blowing um possibilities which I'll come back to in a second that was amazing it was really super powerful so this next session we're inviting u a group that represents higher ed business industry um experts you know across fields to come and to talk to us about the impact of AI in their respective professions and so we want to know you know what are
042you seeing what are you experiencing what are the disruptions to the extent they exist and what do you need from us in terms of preparation as we continue to think about our students curriculum and you know what they need to have as they walk out the door U so I'm expecting you know we'll have a really robust panel and um hopefully a well attended session that'll continue to inform our work um the the the potential that we all see with this um I've told the story to some people like nine years ago um Office Depot Office Max showed up and they had just um entered into an exclusive partnership with IBM Watson and they were looking for beta sites and so we volunteered to be a beta and the at the time the promise with
043that technology was um of personalized education and so the idea was you could feed all kinds of information into Watson and you could customize learning plans for kids um that project failed nine years ago because the technology wasn't ready um what they learned quickly and you know we experienced in the pilot was that a lot of our information was still on paper and there wasn't a meaningful efficient way to get all the information on paper into Watson and so with the um New you know large language models that problem's been solved you can take a picture of something and upload it instantly today's problem for us as we're thinking about personalized learning is around Safety and Security data and so how do we work you know that the term dour is Walled Garden so how
044do you work inside a Walled Garden where you can upload um data you know that might be you know sensitive or tied to individuals keep it secure and get the full power of a large large language model to really get to work you know doing some you know predictive production um in service to kids and learning and so I think you know I suspect that you know developers are working on this now but you know to me that's where the the frontier and the real promises sting stuff I think it's kind of ironic to some extent though that it used to be the fear of AI was like the black box but now if you have the black box that's de identifying everything that kind of takes that it gives you a little bit more
045flexibility in terms of what type of information you can feed it if people can't get can't get into it so you know as the technology grows the concerns you know just change I'm curious though and maybe this is too philosophical of a conversation but as more and more information and data gets in there like is that potential for garbage in garbage out kind of concept it to me is concerning because it it takes essentially an algorithm of all of this material and bases it on the frequency bases it on how many eyeballs bases it on the topic and is there ever any are there stop gaps in place to put measures in to allow kids to have an authentic experience of of of what is true that gives them a um s sighting sources right
046like figuring out if it's actually a legitimate source and and how are they able to do that if if everything that they're looking at is coming essentially from One Source I have a whole slide about what we want to talk about with digital citizenship digital digital citizenship and digital literacy so that fits under that very well those are the skills that they have to develop you know that the other term that I learned related to this that's popular is hallucination so you know these things spit out garbage I had some personal experiences here in the last year where I was just playing around and you know I'll give you a silly when I was looking for I was getting ready to um give a speech to the National Honor Society so I wanted to know
047from chat to some really notable um honors National Honor Society alumni that were great public servants the first one that came up was Margaret Thatcher right so you had to know that wasn't gonna work so to to Bill's point and to really to the curricular implication here like we need to double down on some of those digital citizenship skills yeah and I always use the analogy like as as Educators we dropped the ball on cell phones um we all put our heads in the sand collectively about that and now you know we were not sure what to do about it you know and we have all different ways of doing it and obviously our district is handling it one way others are handling other ways but just as a society nobody quite knows what to
048do about screen time because we never took the time to learn about it when it was first being announced and and rolled out and then we never learn those skills so now we have to learn them retroactively my my vision is that at least here and in suround communities where we can all kind of work together um we won't do that with AI we can give kids a foundation where they can use it effectively and not fall into some of those pitfalls So yeah thank you so all of the things the magic school is school AI notebook LM they're all we're using piloted or potentially piloting things for free is there for minimal cost um Gemini is free well it's built into Google sweets we pay for it anyway but it's not an additional cost
049um School AI was able to give us a really good price to get their training module and then strangely enough however they're marketing it right now you pay for the training but then you get the free product so I wasn't going to complain um so we got that and then magic school's been a little bit different in that um they were looking for more of a commitment so I'm trying to get that straightened out so we're working it out but and Gemini is part of our paid Google services so it's included with our paid Google services I guess I was just wondering if there's down the line of budget implications or gonna cost more money or you we're looking to make space for it which we can discuss more another time I also shared with
050Bill that his predecessor was a master negotiator so the I'm trying to learn learn the ropes yeah for sure so but we're doing we're doing all right and we'll make we'll make room for it by looking actively looking for redundancies and other things um that we can look to reduce or cut and make space for this stuff good question any other AI stuff or do you guys want to move on a bit right again like if you let me I'll talk about this all night so just I just want to go so right now we're at the point where the teachers are playing with it but the kids aren't correct well I mean I mean the kids are on their own but in terms of like we're not providing we're not providing any we're not
051providing a tool for no yes no they're not not at this point yeah yeah they're not creating things like in that way right um it's not that we're not allowing it necessarily that's what these guidelines are for we're just not providing it for them no that's what I'm there was a seman that's what I meant to ask that we're not providing an active tool for them at this point all right um so as far as Communications task force goes um we had a meeting Rec uh recently um and I had mentioned uh I had looked at parent Square um surveys from last year from the from the community um and then I discussed oh it's it's in our our plan that Fran and you guys put together that we would start moving toward using parent
052Square as the main Communications piece in the district and it didn't sound like everybody had known or was ready to talk about that yet so I administered another staff uh Sur or I'm sorry another survey to the staff to see where they were on this because the only missing piece is that um staff isn't really using parent Square to communicate directly with parents they're using it for um announcements and for organizational pieces and you know Mass mailings and things like that but they're not using it for day-to-day communication I don't know if that's where ultimately we're going to go yet but I'm trying to gather some information so I can talk about it more with the commun communications task force and we can start to make some decisions U but staff's getting back to me
053about it I've seen some of the survey results um some people requested a meeting so I'm trying to meet with them personally so we could talk through some of their questions and concerns about maybe deping that move I also reached out to some other districts um I'm from Meridan I spoke with my counterpart Meridan um who had a lot to share about how Meridan recently moved over to parents Square fully which is something I experienced on the parent side of things so now I'm learning about more from the administrator side of things but um we'll have more to share in January that's where the next meeting is um as far as the website goes I think we had a pretty productive session where um we kind of workshopped what the site currently looks like I
054know this has been an ongoing thing that we've worked on as a district um so um we had different groups and they gave some specific suggestions and feedback about different parts of the website I brought that back to the web Masters and we uh did our own study of some of that work um that was shared with us and then things that excuse me we saw in um other other District sites that we might want to model and we're actually starting to work on that we'll have a meeting next week and one of the impetuses to get this going sooner rather than later is that we're currently um hosting our site with gagle I'm sorry not gagle um Gabbert um I talk a lot about gagle too but that's for another time um and uh
055Gabbert is owned by U parents square and parent square is migrating everybody in July over to Smart site so um admittedly this is my first year there's a lot going on um I was hoping to kind of lay the groundwork but we're going to move a little bit faster now and I think that's probably for the best um so we're actually going to make some of these edits and changes sooner rather than later so it'll make the migration more smooth um we won't have to fight with another third I guess this will be the third migration in thir within like maybe five years five years yeah so we'll be able to um make that happen more smoothly by making some of the changes that were suggested to the website now and Lucille and I actually
056went uh to parents Square to to a conference to go over a lot of the backend changes that that the system needs needs needs in order for us to make the migration so with the front end piece is very very important because that's what everyone sees but new and I were able to work on some of the back end pieces in the integration yeah and um I've just been making a point to find other districts that use Smart sites and I know it's all template based and plug andplay you don't have to know a lot about website design to make it look good and it shows I it's it's a I don't know as much about the product as you do yet but just the Aesthetics of it are nice and that was one of
057the overall feedback pieces was can we make the the website you know a little shinier but more over reorganize things a bit improve the copy make it easier to navigate things like that so um the the templates and the work through smart site should really help take care of a lot of that yes will you guys be able to Port over all of the parent Square profile user profiles on the back end yes those are those those are all and one of the very nice things is that the parent Square um what you're what we're sending out in parent Square actually can go into calendaring and can go into the website directly um as well as we can start leveraging some of the social media uh applications we can choose which ones we want to
058leverage so the messages we're sending out with parent Square will not only update the website but also some of the social media sites that we have so that's part of the sorry you're going to get into the communication consolidation but that's it it integrates with the overall Vision it' be nice to have it all housed by the same the same vendor so the same app developer I should say cool any other questions about communication stuff at the moment so I think I would just I know that you're talking to staff about moving you know over to parents square and you said you as a parent too and I think that one of my always the Curiosities or concern is I know that with parents Square it becomes like an email function but there's also a
059text function and so I just want you know and I don't know how guidelines are set out but understanding like responsiveness and expectations around responsiveness and not feeling like I don't want it to make it a more of I would like to make it something that's easier for our teachers but not for you know teachers to feel that now they have to you know automatically um be responsive in the moment or in the second especially if you know when texting starts starts happening you start doing it at odd hours and odd times and just to be great point you know just kind of to have an understanding about that because that communication piece can you know kind of make for um having clear understandings helps I think in the in the relationship between parents and
060teachers and students and teachers for sure um the parents survey that was administered last year that I reviewed made it sound like parent Square was their their preference for going to parent Square would be to consolidate everything so they wouldn't have to search through multiple email inboxes or anything that just have it all in place it's a very powerful tool for that um the teacher's concern was how can we make sure our availability is set up in a in a good balanced way um and I don't have all the answers to that just yet but um you know I just from my own experience as a parent I've sent an email through parents square a message through parents Square to a teacher one of my son's teachers like at a late hour just because it
061was in my mind if I didn't send it I was going to forget it and they responded within five minutes and I even wrote back you don't have to respond that quickly I just didn't want to forget when I went to what I wanted to ask you um so there'll definitely have to be some some training around that some expectations so I'm glad you mention that so is theion that all emails between a parent and a teacher would go through parents square and not the will PS potentially if that's what we want to do um again um I'm not sure I haven't figured out like what the response is yet I haven't been able to speak with all the parties that I want to um but I know that that was kind of the intention
062when I got here so I at least want to carry that part through and find out if that's what we still want to do so we we'll get to that decision when we're ready I think I think I covered that all right excellent all right so just as far as digital learning goes this is kind of where we'll start to wrap things up um to speak to um Heather's Point um digital literacy and digital citizenship are more important now than ever even outside of AI um society as a whole is having trouble dealing with the amount of information that we have every day and just what is going to help you make good decisions for yourself and your family and and what is distracting um so we're trying our best to teach students more about
063this um all through all all our schools all our grade levels um so part of what we do is just kind of the basic academic skills um you know typing using Google Suite setting up email know but also more important kind of higher level thinking tasks you know um in terms of conducting ethical research um making sure that they're sourcing their information from good sources and from and presenting in in a way that will help build build understanding of topics rather than um necessarily get distracting in terms of just opinions so just those and this is a cross disciplinary thing but it's definitely something that the LLC is especially suited to teach students um we're also obviously talking about AI use as we mentioned um and especially in the Middle School um we have our
064cyber Civics curriculum that does talk a lot about social media and media literacy as well um I've also participated in a few panel discussions about about Online safety at Cider Mill that's something that they've really made it an effort to try to share with their um families this year we did it at open house we had a separate um thing and I think that was a really nice um way to just kind of expose parents and other community members to excuse me um just everything that's out there to try to help maybe people who don't aren't as techsavvy or don't know as much or just have concerns learn more about what they need to know for their students um I mentioned um the AI part a lot already and the academic skills of media literacy
065um but just highlighting what some of the things are happening at Miller dri school um they're learning to use Chromebooks through typing.com which is an app that we pay for that helps them improve keyboarding skills but also overall Computing skills um they're reading a lot of digital books through epic so they're exposed to that sort of text um and they're actually publishing some really NE neat narratives on Book Creator and those are some of the things that the teachers have been sharing with me they're very proud of I wanted to highlight um I did mention some of the stuff about uh Cider Mill but one thing that they have going on that you can kind of see to the right is uh the students starting to work on hour of code um which is um
066just something that I participated in just for fun you know even as a as a teacher uh with my students and then uh in my own family it's actually really neat if you haven't heard of it it's just challenging kids at different levels to to spend an hour coding learn a little bit more about how it really is kind of a poetry and a a type of digital language that can be really immersive and instructive um and uh you can kind of see Mark Zuckerberg in that picture um I'm not sure if she's talking to him or she's just reading about him but that obviously you know having kind having code icons on there is helpful too so that's all kind of part of the program is that the hour is that an a paid
067application or is it a uh no hour of code is like a nationwide thing where you can participate there's different websites and and um teachers can kind of sign up their classes for it's not a good thing pretty cool part sh experience through the library thas so can we all can so I can go home and sign up and is it a separate program from what are you doing it all right I'm behind well I have my kids are older than you they'll send you the information yeah no but we should I don't how many other parents know about it like yeah cool to know do two hours of code one at home one at school well exactly yeah I much rather do that than watch the iPad for another hour that so if I
068can encourage them to do it and they like I don't even know if they like it I'd love to hear yeah for for younger students they have um you know the the language where you can uh drag and drop and kind of create paths for your dog to get to the park and things like that similar to like the scratch Junior and things those those programs exactly and then obviously we have coding at the middle school as a class and um you know throughout the high school um students using it for other things so there's kids that have more facility with it but it's a neat way to kind of introduce it to especially younger kids yeah great cool um so that was some stuff on digital learning updates um more at the high school
069I mentioned the other three schools a bit but um you might ass suor as we walking in we have new podcasting Studios that were built and we starting to equip um so that class is expanding enrollment and um that picture actually is from a field trip we went uh kendin and I took 15 students to wmpr in Harford yesterday and um that's uh Frankie graciano who was the host of The Wheelhouse and he does a lot of sports and some other stuff about politics for them um and he gave us a tour of the whole studio we met The Producers we saw all the pro level equipment that they use we got some ideas for what we might like to have students asked a lot of great questions they were very interested and um um
070I've gotten to know some of the students and they're all underclassman so this is um you know they're all freshman sophomore so they're just learning this stuff now and uh Frankie himself said you guys were like six or seven years ahead of me because I didn't really get into this until it tail end of college so he's like if you love it keep doing it because it can really lead you places and you can you can really fall in love with the work um so it was a really neat opportunity that can organize for them um so needless to say we're having some expanding enrollment in that program um so we've got some new spaces built and um we're going to be having we had a web Grant to equip it so that stuff starting
071to be put together too um I know Fran already talked about this a few weeks ago but we have the new robotics classes um that are approved and we also are planning out the labs um Dr K is doing a lot of that work with Fran um so I can't speak to it as much as I'd like um because that's kind of their project but I know that it's in the works and uh it's from what I've heard it sounds like it's going to be really impressive students be able to do a lot of neat stuff um as far as view Sonics go um that's an example of one right there on the cart and um a lot of the and Eric can probably he will speak a lot more to how this was um
072set up but as far as um the training which is kind of more what I was trying to help out with um we install vionics here and at um the the middle school and we had a trainer come in she spent a day here a day there we trained the trainers and they been disseminating amongst um you know aisle meetings and team meetings and um ilts and things like that to try to get people to get the hang of the boards and we've also distributed digital um resources to help with that as well um so that's still ongoing um and it's kind of a learning process but having attended the training myself um I was really ous I didn't have this board in the classroom because I probably would have used it a lot I
073could do a lot of really cool stuff um so we're really looking forward to EXP exping our capabilities with theonics um I think that's pretty much everything I have um did anyone have any other questions or anything else you want to ask in high school the other day so I saw some you know potential spaces for the Robotics and seems that there's some excitement going on about that so it'll be nice when some more decision points are made and we can have that at the table and then even with the the boards just some really you know with there was first of all the school was you know a very happy chaty you know um conversent place and the cafeteria was buzzing and there was no phones at it was just it was just a
074very um it was a very lovely experience but in addition to that some kids would say oh I used to take pictures of the board or whatever but now like teachers are saying like oh well we have these boards now and we can just like grab the shot of the board and we can just feed it out to the whole class so it's like all the you know technology fixes and that and all the um I ran into a few teachers that were discovering all the the interesting and fun things that they can do with the boards so it was um it was great to see yeah they gra up to a good start um Eric will speak more about how the other schools gonna be getting the boards and S to absolutely well I
075just wanted to give a quick uh update on some of the district technology on what we've done and really on it what we're trying to do is we're trying to support the work of the district and the the work that Bill's doing in the classroom with and and all of our teachers and students in the district so we're really trying to be in the in the back end to do that support make sure the systems are up and and running automating when possible and maintaining all the infrastructure um the big projects that have gone in this year with the vonic boards we had 166 units we completed the high school we completed the middle school madris scho we have um 45 more units to go in which are budgeted for next year and then there
076are 62 left at Cider Mill uh to be replaced for next year year and so that's part of the budget to get the entire District onto a unified fonic uh system um we upgraded laptops and docking stations at Middlebrook and Genesis this year so they're all on on upgraded technology we're on a four-year renewal process with the laptops and we're really lever leveraging those the V Sonics are going to be a really neat uh tool to use with the laptops because laptops are tablets and they also have a a stylus attached to them and with the vionics you can walk around your classroom and actually work um and interact with your boards and so that's really a powerful new tool so that teachers not stuck in one location working from the front of the classroom
077they can they can move around now um we're able to upgrade two of the uh High School um uh Labs uh the Art Labs there are two Art Labs that are uh with IMAX that are the latest versions that we could get at the art department has really been lever in uh as well as a music uh program to use and then the World Language has um all new machines in there that are being used by the World Language Department as well um Chromebooks we roll out Chromebooks every year in grades three and five um and we rolled out another 570 units to all of our incoming third and fifth graders and then 40 units for testing down at at uh Miller Driscoll and then 140 iPads were deployed at Miller Driscoll one of the
078things I really want to um compliment Brian Enis and Kathy and her team uh down at mad Driscoll because as we were looking at um the iPad purchases and how they were being used what we found over the summer is that um by being a little more creative in our deployment of the iPads we were able to use some of the funds that we were we were looking at and we were able to redirect those into some of the vonic boards which were more impactful instructionally so it was really nice to be able to work with them and sort of look at that and find it a way that would really meet more of the instructional need as well as use you know leveraging those iPads so that was a neat project to work with
079them on and then for presentation spaces at Cider Mill we're able to upgrade the gym uh for presentations Middlebrook has the cafeteria and then the professional Library here we' we have um one more space at Middlebrook that we really would like to upgrade but we have standardized our presentation spaces across the district so if you're presenting in the high school or middle school or cidermill or madris it's it's a standard presentation space and equipment in in all of those areas um we're upgrading our video surveillance uh and camera systems across the district and then we have a really interesting UPS pilot program that we've started here at the high school um that is using a UPS which is a very large battery to provide battery backups for computers but um as part of the pilot
080we're working to to um connect it with Greenbank and with eversource to use it almost as you was a generator and sort of for on demand needs uh for power so that's a it's a project that actually the green bank has grant funding eate has grant funding and eversource actually has funding that they they will they will pay the district for use of that electricity um in times of need usually over the summer when there's a high heat and and they need to to do that so if you have an electric car for instance and you plug in eversource will give you funds back off of your electric bill so this is very similar to that that um uh projects and so we're in the middle of that pilot so over the next six months
081we're hopefully have some good details and and can report back on on where that project is that's great the company that we're working with Cadenza and they're a wilted company the D technology they have is incredible so a lot of lot of Promise here could that what are the longer term potentials there for yeah budget and so yeah I think that you know the opportunity because these things we'll have to do a little show and tell at some point so you can then actually see the see the the actual battery um but it's you know there's pretty significant expansion capability and so you know you could I think theoretically at least create a you know a full generator size um battery backup that could potentially power hold school and then whatever the power tradeoff would
082be that you would give back eversource um could be Revenue generating at some scale yeah or offet I with the with the programs that we're looking at right now it looks like we'll be Revenue neutral within about five or six years on on with the implementation costs and the lifespan of the equipment is 15 years so um there should be offsets available after the implementation sorry so Heather wants to start a Bitcoin it's another potential Revenue yeah so it is it's interesting and it's kind of we had a meeting with folks you know a year ago or so and so it's taken a while to get going with that you know there's there's real potential and because they're a local group they're interested in working with us I think we're might be the only school
083that they're doing anything kind of work you if there's a good relationship that's emerging here this are we still buying electricity from the grid to power the UPS like is there any way to use solar to power up the battery um you could use any source that generates electricity to to power that um we don't have that happening here as part of our pilot um and the solar project is sort of it's It's a unique project in and of itself um so right now um where we have this UPS it's it's here in the high school um the batteries will actually run our full data center for almost seven hours um and um as part of the pilot it it also is connected into the generator so once it's fully connected to eversource eversource will
084actually pay us for the use of the electricity when we push that back to the grid um so it's it's a it's a fascinating uh concept and um if this pilot goes well we have the opportunity to put some of these in at Cider Mill and at Middlebrook where we don't have any generators and one of the the big pieces we have is when we lose power we have about 15 minutes of of power right now in those buildings and then we lose all of our switching and you say we lose the switches it's not a big deal but our phone system Our Life Safety Systems all of our communication is based on the on the switching we have our door access Control Systems so when we lose the switches we really um it can
085be problematic in the building so by being able to put some of these larger UPS's in the different closets we actually can get five six seven eight hours of of use of those so if we have an incident during the school uh during the school day school doesn't have to necessarily close so's poti we haven't brought this up at T snap at all actually no the the recommendation I made just just in the context of that conversation was to kind of take the the proposed High School generator off and like let's look at the what I was thinking about with the town was we we need to look at um you know kind of Disaster Response and Generator support separately yeah and within the context of that conversation this would figure prominently as one possible
086solution absolutely really cool we' love to I would love to see that yeah too we'll we'll set that would you yeah fine we can set that up some time um it's your convenience absolutely absolutely um and then we we put in a additional fire a new firewall in the district which increas increased our capacity so um firewall was twice as as robust as the previous firewall we had we've upgraded our bandwidth uh with Cen so we have more bandwidth now and then we have upped our wireless speeds for all of our staff and students here in the district because of the upgrade we made to the firewall this summer so that's been very very good and then for our phone system updates um we went through all of our phone lines and we were able
087to remove 47 lines and also a some um lines that were running between Miller Driscoll and and uh Town Hall um which is going to be uh enable us to save a fairly considerable sum U for the budget for next year um part of the phone system updates though is we're also looking at the town is looking to go to a new phone system um and and so we're looking at other phone systems as well as the possibility of just reusing our phone system our phone system is paid for it's working um we have I believe it's 585 phones here in the district so it's not an inconsequential cost for us to move to a new system um so we're looking at all of those options and we're looking at what the cost is to
088just bring the current phone system you know over here um so we're we're we'd still be on the current phone system but see how we can still interace with the town is that because it's centrally hosted in it servers in town hall there's one server in town hall which is the main administrative server and then we have five um Avia servers here in the district that support each of the buildings so it really would be just taking that one piece of equipment bringing it over here and just reconfiguring it so all of the Town phones um aren't routed through that system anymore when the when the project was first initiated it was a joint project with the town led by the former Town IT director and so a lot of the control um and management
089live with the town and in the last year you know we've kind of separated and reallocated responsibilities and so um you know I just think that the town municipality might be a different place than we are in terms of needs and um you know the the state of the technology at this point yeah if our stuff works great why rip and replace yeah assist and we're we're in year I believe seven in this phone system so it it does have number of years left of life expectancy and then we've also uh went through and we've looked at our copier contract one of the things we've done over the last few years is we've pulled out individual printers um from millad Driscoll and Cider Mill and Middlebrook and so um we're doing a true up here
090in January of 2025 where we're adjusting our usage and the the uh copiers and and printers that are under contract so there's going to be an adjustment in January and some credits um and we'll be able to carry that over into the budget cycle for next year and we're in year three of that fiveyear contract and so those are those are really some of the projects that we've been involved in here in District technology that um are really to support you know the mission of a lot I think it's great to have you both here so everybody can really hear and see like what it takes to make this whole all work yeah yeah pretty great really try to take a team approach toward everything so you know if there's something I can help Eric
091with um and vice first that we try to do that as much as we can great good absolutely no it's it's it's been it's been a pleasure working with you very excited to have you with us in the district thank you thank you it's great to be here and and just to put to put some of this together you think P like I've only been here since July and all this stuff's happened since I've been here so um it's really exciting um really impressed it so thank you thank you for all your work yeah yeah thank you um next up is a proposal for prepay tuition increase we just wanted to um bring this information to the periodically We R the Bern and Kathy very plugged into the preschools around wilon we don't change the
092prices annually we have in the last couple of years and then I think prior to last year might have been um before the pandemic so you see when you look down the list um we're um very intentionally competitive um as you know I think you know Pam can speak to um very thoroughly um we run a very very high quality preschool that is also very highly in demand we could add you know new classrooms to tomorrow because of the demand we don't have the space to do that um but we we could there's always a waiting list um and the program under you know bur that stewardship continues to strengthen um she's you know eyeballing a proposal now we're just waiting for the state to RF issue an R to become the local birth threee
093provider so you know she's got Real Clear Vision of how that grow strength the curriculum Kevin remind me is enrollment is anybody living anywhere eligible or is is it preferential of people who live in Wilton or is it well it's a Wilton preschool because it's so it's designated for um Wilton residents um and you know the the purpose of our pre preschool is um partially in response to our child find obligation under the law and so you know we're obligated to serve children with special needs beginning at age three and we choose to do that through this integrated preschool program years ago the model was very different and so you know we Chang in leadership a different approach Vision school program and so um you know we provide um for free through you know tax
094doll those services to children iups and then we invite typical peers to apply and those are the tuition pay for that in the and the balance is usually is there's a Tipping Point the best practice is 5050 and so we you know you'll you'll if if you watch the enrollment reports that come to the board as part of the you know board packets once a month you'll see um because um students with disabilities age into the program um so we start at a 50-50 ratio and then in some classrooms that ratio sways um just as the you know we take more kids in so we you know this year I think we started with 82 or 83 kids will end the year probably close to 100 and that's pretty typical total enrollment in the preschool
095correct because once they they turn three and they're eligible for the for with an IEP then they can go they can leave the preschool the the the the mainstream preschool and they can go to m gr school so they just have to be turning they have to turn three before they can go got it yeah so we you know provide a range of services um including like itinerant because speech services so kids will come and they'll participate in that maybe not in the full program so there's a whole um a suite of offerings that come through the preschool program to serve our kids uh it's been great and they've done you know another just they continue to do really solid programming you know in recent years they created a bridge program from the preschool into
096U the kindergarten program so they run the summer program that relates to that and I I think you know sitting here today um the feedback from the families the comfort that comes in the you know form of the staff and then access to the serves to just you know provide a really solid education to those kids you know in their their earliest most vulnerable years um and we're we're doing it you know particularly with the typical um peers that come through um at a very you know good bargain comparatively so we're going to continue do that so you'll see next a lot of preschools were very anxious when Miller just decided to have this preschool because we knew it was kind of coming because the state had sort of mandated that this was going to
097be down the road so all of us were like you know because they're going to take I obviously compete yeah people are going to want especially if they had siblings in Miller jisco they're going to want their three-year-old to go as well I mean it all panned out pretty well and it sort of evened itself out but at first there was a lot of anxiety amongst the directors of the other schools that this was going to just take all our kids didn't end up that way but that's where my kids went raising force is that right y it's it's a great program yeah that was amazing especially I mean even just the fact L Talent finding a program that runs till 3:30 twice a week is huge yes I mean that it meets a lot
098of needs you know it meets the IEP need it meets the modeling for the the typical it meets the times it it's just a great program and a lot of talent in that building so 100 so of the hundred kids enrolled they're all paid for in some way shape or form either through State funds or through private or the half through local taxpayer funds right just so that the students that have IEPs you know are you know it's a free appropriate public education just like it is for everybody in kindergarten forward and then for the um typically developing peers um the non students those are um you know the parents writing okay right so I wanted to make you aware I'm going to I'll have this on the um consent agenda the next time moving
099to um two policies that kind of walk together this is the another meeting where your eyes can roll into the back of your head so I will not go into the um substance of the policy if you really tonight just one and start reading let me let me just tell you what the story is so what what you're looking at is um in total four policies um we have for um students 514 5.44 and 5145 443 those are both on Title Nine prohibition of sex discrimination and sexual harassment um one set are the um regulations that reflect the from0 and then are the um reflect the newest regulations as of adopted in April of 24 and in forc beginning a and then you have the employ 41 why do you have four sets in April
100of 2024 the the US Department of Education issued the 2020t Ed 9 final rule sex discrimination including sex-based harassment with an implementation data B first revised regulations redefine sex-based harassment and broaden the scope of sex discrimination to include sex stereotyping sex characteristics pregnancy or related conditions sexual orientation and gender identity um so this broaden the predictions for um lgbtq kids and employees um in response to those changes a number of States Attorney General and other um organizations sued the US Department of Education so in 15 States federal courts have granted injunctions concerning the enforcement of the new rules by the Department of Education um and the implementation by colleges and universities um in addition Judge John brooms of the US District Court this is why it matters to us so pardon me here um John
101brooms of the US District Court for the District of Kansas granted an injunction to moms for Liberty um young Americas foundation and female athletes United um blocking the enforcement of the new title n rules in any schools attended by the children of interest groups members while the groups had initially saw an injunction that applied to every County where members lived um So currently there are 670 universities that are enjoined by the overlapping injunctions and then there are scores of um schools Cider Mill and Miller drisol were listed on the July 20 July 26 2024 moms for Liberty list that was presented in that lawsuit Kansas versus the US Department of Education so for CER Mill and milleris scho there is a Title Nine complaint we have to use the 2020 policy so that the initial
102set Brook in high school we get to use the new ones um so right now um we're carrying four sets make sense um so yes and no okay yes that's exactly ins Shane and sorry the reason that Miller Driscoll and Cider Mill was because what what was the connection to there there is um there is a a parent or multiple parents here in this community with children at one or both of those schools um that are members of the moms for Liberty Group that are um part of this lawsuit um where the injunction is in force okay so it's not just about being a member they had to be listed as on the correct correct and so but if their kids go to Middlebrook next year they have to um I'm not sure that I
103don't know if there's a a is or was a a deadline by which part or if the list can continue to grow um I I should I should look at that I it might have been as of August 1 so but there is a there's a website that maintains this and you can see there's you know I don't know a dozen lists a dozen different dates some college universities and so the list grew over time um this was the list the date that we were on the list our two schools um so that's so that's why we have um you know multiple sets of policies here with the employee policy for the the 2020 version I did take the opportunity to go back and update the language because our um former policy did not correspond
104to shipment and Goodman's recommended language coming out of that time frame um so what I've done you know just working with our council is to ensure that um you reflects their model policy language all the way through on all of them so that's the only other kind of material change you would see in inside these policies so you can read them at your usure to the best I can answer questions I'll try how do how do we typically um communicate this with the teachers and staff of the buildings in terms of how their response to a complaint or how their particular actions could be violated one of these policies and because we have two standing policies how confusing that can potentially be for teachers and yes so um per um our council's recommendation we did
105um to include a reader note okay but really if you know working primarily through Maria's office you know if there was a concern or complaint that came forward and actually this has happened you know she kind of takes the information and then you know her next call is to Jessica and Jessica directs is it you know this policy and procedure or is it something else um and then we we follow you know the it's a very prescriptive um regulation in terms of how to investigate a complaint and they're not the same and so um you know we have to be clear about which set we're following in terms of notification um these policies are contained in thees um various faculty rooms and things like that and then when a complaint comes up um we just
106you know we provide training annually to our staff the staff or the administrative staff to make official judgment about whether this is whatever the complaint may be um fall under the Title Nine regulation or you know something else a complaint against the school bullying you know generally speaking when complaints emerge it's either bullying or you know falls under Title Nine um and you know I think in 10 out of 10 times that question comes from the administrator to Maria and she can't tell you she'll call Jessica got the right answer and then that's how we'll proceed and we'll notify the complainant you know what the options are but but Heather's Point there's an annual training for staff on Title Nine there's an annual training for administrators for administrators that's right yeah and then annual notification
107and annual notification existence of the policy existence of the policy okay we have staff that move between schools too right as part of their job yeah so they could be subject to two different a single employee could be subject to two different theoretically and you know this with a change in administration this could all change again yes so that's the punch line here um and we should anticipate that problem yes that'll probably change again that's right but for now this is the law of the Lanta okay so um you know this will come back as a second read in two weeks so if it's between now and then any body has any questions you know feel free to email them and put them on the question document and also get answers future um business and
108information we have a um Thursday December 19th um Board of Education meeting and then we won't meet again until um January 9th in the new year um and then just for everybody to have their calendars um January 9th you know we'll we'll pick off the new year with the budget presentation and then um workshops will be on the 16th the 23rd and the 30th respectively at 6 p.m and um comments from the public um hearing and seeing none um we will adjourn the meeting at 8:2 thank you everyone you thank you is the thing tomorrow night recording in