001identity as an indian american student she would be called the american kid quote unquote when visiting her family in india or she would be mocked by students for bringing indian food for lunch sia moved to wilton in her freshman year and she made a mature and brave decision to enter our talent show and perform a beautiful classical indian dance in front of predominantly white student body although extremely nervous she managed to get through the dance and took second place this left a positive impression on the students and staff sia is incredibly proud of this moment as it broke down barriers allowed her confidence to soar and also allowed herself and others to start the process of acceptance and having the courage to support others sia is a leader in her clubs and activities she's a
002vice president of mock trial and a board member of model congress she is a member of the debate team and student government these activities have shaped her public speaking abilities greatly and have influenced her desire to pursue a major in political science and pre-law sia is passionate about indian classical dance earlier this year she celebrated her orangutram and performed her dances in front of about 300 close family friends and teachers it was a tremendous accomplishment and required rigorous preparation she's also participated on a swim team for eight years piano lessons for 11 years bollywood dancing for 10 years she's an active member of ecco volunteering which is an organization that funds education for rural schools in india she's passionate diligent humble inspirational creative well-spoken the list can go on she'll be an outstanding motivational and
003encouraging leader in all of our future endeavors and starting next year at the university of michigan so congratulations see you and thank you [Applause] so how do you find 48 hours congratulations bring that down [Applause] and i i know dr o'donnell does not mean any disrespect by leaving but he's second career as a broadway star and a musical that's what i needed to duck all right again so it's my turn this is one of those moments it's really fun to be a principal because i get to stand up here and brag about some of the accomplishments from about some of our kids and what i'm going to share with you is quotes or comments from all staff members and i guess it's important for everybody to recognize the two students that i'm about to present
004to you are students that were presented to our entire staff and then our entire staff made some comments about some of the wonderful accolades about these two children and then we voted as a staff is who best to represent us as cape student leaders and the two young people i'm about to describe fit every bit of the criteria that is outlined here so first i'll talk about will olmsted who's here with his mom dina and his dad will and his brother right his little brother oliver is here just to give true family love for tonight but i'll tell you a little bit about will uh first of all one of the things he did in his spare time this year is he created a website he created a student website had what about three or
005four meetings with me will something like that just to talk about the progress and how it was going uh honestly i i don't have the first clue how to make that sort of thing so when we have a 14 year old 13 year old telling you how to do these things it's pretty special and you should check it out it's pretty important that the students themselves get to see it and use it every day now to see some of the information put together his teachers have shared that all of his assignments are completed on time and they reflect his current learning as a straight a student he has a wide variety of interests he is genuine and an empathetic soul empathetic soul i should say he's a science fair winner in engineering for his development
006of 3d shoes which he was wearing when he ran down to accept his award by the way which is pretty nice bright yellow shoes he is a web leader that's where everybody belongs to committee here it's a leader of the 8th grade and also participates in ultimate frisbee he's worldly and well traveled has a global perspective that's reflected in his writing he's working toward his eagle scout and you may or may not recognize in that he was somewhat famous i think was this past summer in the paper when was it in the paper a year ago was it a year ago now time flies but he slept in a tent all year long every day and they did a little piece on him in the paper so you may or may not have seen that
007when that came out but will thinks of others before himself he opens the door for people how about that as an old soul right anything positive there's a quote from one of his teachers anything positive can now just be called will olmsted from now on he frequently offers unsolicited help he's the first one to volunteer to help he is leading the effort to raise money for people impacted by the conflict in ukraine he spends several lunch periods assembling and selling ribbons to try to raise money for them he has larger goals that he's working towards he wants to start a campaign to help keep underfunded schools safe he's developing a website that would allow people to donate donate money to do just this he's an active class participant when students are quiet or unwilling to
008speak you can always count on will to help he wants to learn and takes takes risks in his work he learns for the sake of learning not just to keep those straight a's going he's kind he's kind to everyone he speaks to his peers and adults easily he's willing to work with all students and he's a servant leader to all groups our male representative okay leader will understand [Applause] that's amazing congratulations [Applause] okay [Music] lucille's letting izzy's parents in oh perfect just to let them be able to be seen while they're so proud of their daughter for us here in the room izee kayud is in the top left corner there hi is he and i just have the distinct pleasure and honor of being able to talk about her a little bit right now
009she too is an excellent student straight a's and participates well in all of her classes she too is a web leader again where everybody belongs meaning one of those leaders that takes care of orientation for our sixth graders not only over the summer but then uh throughout the school year she's very well-rounded she plays soccer she's a singer does theater and enjoys writing she accepts additional challenges and get this as a middle school student she's saying a constitution song with a friend for extra credit in social studies do you remember that is he yeah she's also assisting teachers with workshop for peers and she's very good at using some of the school tech platforms and always willing to help she writes music additionally she's an extremely good singer i think she's very glad to be
010coming out of the protocols tonight right is he to be able to go on the the trip tomorrow uh she takes voice lessons she performs uh shows in the wilton singer in the wil children's theater uh this fall she was the wardrobe in the beauty and the beast as well as for wire mill academy she sings with our eighth grade chorus and middlebrook singers and she's an extremely motivated musician and actor she's honest she's friendly to everyone peers and adults alike she helps teachers remember to open up the zoom for students in fact that was kind of a running joke this week when she's had to be out where her teachers were looking for izzy to be that little reminder in the moment to you have to open up the zoom to let izzy in
011she's a very attentive listener and note taker in class she helps others specifically other students understand concepts during small group and partner work she has a nice balance between school academics and friends and get this she works out with her dad as a girl dad myself i think that's pretty cool works out with her dad she actually happens to be one of those anomalies in that she's been on the yellow teams all three years at middlebrook and in the beginning of the year in the team survey she described herself as musical funny and caring i present to you yes exactly so uh izzy um i know izzy's parents are watching at home congratulations we're so very proud of you uh mrs lowe and i will find a morning either next week or early the following
012week we'll meet you we'll said that we'll meet you in your office for pictures okay um okay thank you all right we can invite your parents to come and do a little photo with us but congratulations we're very proud of you and congratulations [Applause] so uh mr higgins thank you mr keating thank you thank dr o'donnell but he's on stage at this point um folks uh you do not have to stay for the rest of this meeting so i know you guys have some studying homework to do um but we appreciate you being here for the first part and celebrating with us and uh please know just how proud we are of what you're doing and all of your congratulations you don't have to stay either congratulations is that a graduate a graduate yeah all
013right it was adorable when he was four and three two he's adorable still well they all do so much i mean i'm tired but those are her great leader ambassadors so thanks for letting us know about that um okay that brings us to comments from the public we don't see anyone excuse me in the room is there anyone online nobody raising their hands okay thanks um is there a motion to approve the consent agenda thanks jen second second thanks ruth all in favor okay we did the student leader awards my report is very short i want to thank the wilton voters who came out to the town meeting and the follow-up voting for supporting the budget we are incredibly grateful we have our resources set for next year also like to take a moment to
014thank everyone along the way who attended various meetings and voiced their support and finally um thanks to superintendent smith and his full team for developing and shepherding the budget process so thank you and um onward i know we have about five minutes until it starts all over again but it's already started yeah [Laughter] anyway thanks for the community support so thank you uh superintendent's report i have a number of updates um this evening i wanted to start and take a minute as i'm sure you are all well aware there was a terrible tragedy in a community just north of us that untimely death of a young man jimmy mcgrath since 17 year old who's attends prep lives in shelton was killed very tragically last saturday night i just want to say and join so many
015others jimmy was a multi-sport athlete who played in clubs as well as his youth teams and school teams but those those sports worlds particularly the lacrosse is a very small world and so there are lots of cross-community connections and so there are a number of students in this community who were teammates of jimmy over the years and so um you know we joined so many others in uh just taking a moment to think about him to think about his family and to think about so many who have just been devastated by this unnecessary tragedy and so i want to just start there and just recall them for a moment thank you a couple of other things on a seriously brighter note as you heard dr o'donnell is on stage or about to be on stage
016so our spring musical has kicked off it kicked off last night our students are putting on legally blonde it'll run tonight it'll run saturday night and then it'll run sunday at 1 so if you haven't gotten a ticket you can at wilton theater.org i think you can find the link on our website but as you know we have incredibly talented students all over this district and so this is definitely a must-see so hopefully everyone can find some time to go and just experience the wonderful actors that we have here in our community on the note of invitations it's also noted on the back of the agenda we have a big night next tuesday six o'clock down in the zellner we are hosting our second uh wilton public schools hall of fame induction ceremony and so
017that'll be in the zellner and so as we've shared previously we are inducting four new members the 1962 wilton high school graduate john g core who was very well known here in this high school he was a soldier in vietnam who was killed in action in 1967. we are honoring uh 1985 wilton high school graduate retired air force colonel jennifer fulmer who is just an absolutely wonderful person to behold she's had a very very lengthy and successful military career and then when she left the military she started a not-for-profit up in maine to help soldiers transition to community life so we're looking forward to recognizing her one person who is near and dear to our hearts is another 1975 wilton high school graduate and very long time teacher i think the numbers 43 years of
018service mr paul schletz so we look forward to celebrating with paul next tuesday and then last and not least another person that has a huge heart and a huge personality or a long time golf coach who has just you know inspired so many of our young men and women both on and off the golf course who's a wonderful community member uh jack majeski and so look forward to celebrating jack so please mark your calendars and um we will um celebrate those four uh with a really prestigious ceremony i'm gonna go off script for a second and you just never know who's gonna show up at a board of education meeting and so a few minutes ago before the meeting started i was like where's everybody um you know we usually have two or three camera
019folks here and then in walks a young man i have to have you step outside just for a moment so max bombartel is a um 2020 wilton high school graduate uh who was you're 2019. i see i'm 2019 2020 yeah but so max was one of the um one of the architects of um wetv so i'm going to put you on the spot for a second um your hair has gone long yeah a little bit a little bit yeah i understand that happens i used to have long hair in college so two questions so where are you three questions okay how's it going and um how well did wilton high school prepare you uh i am a uh well now in the summer going into my senior year at rit up in rochester uh i
020am on the rit baja team we just came third place in tennessee um so i'm doing pretty good i'm a product design major uh so that's gone pretty fun and i feel like wilton high school did a pretty good job uh preparing me i came more from the engineering side of things whereas some people came from the art side i didn't take that many art classes here but um i feel like having the strong engineering background is really helping me so it's really going really well yeah thanks and thanks for letting me put you on the spot congratulations on being so successful and i just i love like these guys never leave they just don't like they keep every time you know right about this time of year we just see um you know numerous
021alums thank you for pitching in tonight of course yes thank you for having me yeah welcome great so just a few a few other updates uh we had kindergarten our first in-person kindergarten orientation rue thank you for being there uh yesterday and the day before so we're looking forward to welcoming welcoming over 220 uh new kindergartners that two registration orientation days were terrific so hats off to mrs kuhn and her entire fabulous team who rolled out the red cutlet as only they can and really made our new kindergartners and our new parents feel really welcoming at home so um thank you for that that's great well there she is all right i'm so bravo and so last update here we learned about a week and a half ago that we have two national pta reflections
022winners both our students at the high school so rajna niranian earned the award of excellence in visual arts and jordan huff earned the award of merit in photography so congratulations to those two for making it all the way to the national competition thank you i'm all sad good committee reports teaching and learning two or one i have one you want me to go through so we had a very engaging and quite long teaching and learning committee meeting we started out with the mental health and sort of where we are with that and so we definitely seem to be overstressed with kids and lack of resources and then we have the screening tools and we have the determination at risk but we have lack referral references and we certain grades are are really more impacted than
023others so there was a big concern that we have kids that are just sort of in limbo as we try to navigate through resources that we can help them with and so we we have a lack of resources right now and we don't have enough people to really help in an appropriate way and there are many obstacles to that there's insurance problems there's providers there's wait lists so we need to kind of think about how we can do this better because it was clear concern that the kids aren't getting the help enough and quickly enough we have some issues in the lower grades the many kids did not go to school so their social skills are are struggling should we say and so we have to kind of you know that's making the classrooms hard
024to manage with kids that obviously have had the experience of a preschool or somewhere else or been in kindergarten somewhere else and kids that have not been to school at all so i think the mental health staff as andrea said in the meeting was that they're working overtime they're they're beyond their contracted hours because the need is so great and we you know that's something that i think as a team as a board that we need to think about more carefully we have kids in crisis in different at different levels and in the different schools and we're probably not seeing all the ones that are potentially going to bubble up so i think it's it's something that i think every school district probably is worth struggling with and you know we're not the only one
025but it would be wonderful if we could kind of think about ways to address this because this is sort of not going to go away i don't think so that was a hard one and we talked briefly about doing a clinic but you know that's going to take money and resources that will be true you know that will be hard for us to manage but not something that we should not try to think about then we had a recruiting and hiring practices so i i had asked that for because i know that this is the hiring time and i knew maria was kind of like struggling with not even struggling but you know i was curious as to how this operates so she talked about a profile for a candidate with metrics covering compassion innovation
026affirming and collaborative and we talked about you know whether people want to be teachers anymore you know especially after covet but apparently they do because we had 700 applicants for 35 positions and she went on about how great the staff is and i certainly agree with that you know and we have people that are coming into the teaching as a second opportunity for a career and that kind of makes them more focused i would think and so we have cello players and chefs and people that have we value their life experiences our retention rate is about 90 percent we have shortages in bilingual math and speech and language and we're upped against a trend that where teaching is not a particularly valued profession at the moment there are other opportunities and so people are not
027taking the not thinking about being a teacher as strongly as they used to and we've had you know and there's definitely a shortage of a diverse staff and we're and maria is working very hard on that to create a diversified staff we had a quick quick meeting about coaches and um then we generally ran out of time but it was something that i think we could have a workshop about so that a lot of us could understand the process more um i mean i i i think i do but i think it it would it would be interesting for us to watch it in action and that we we went on for about an hour and a half so it was a long interesting meeting for sure that's it we also had a meeting in
028april uh that we haven't talked about just yet um we talked about the genesis program um andre was there to just kind of give us another update it was on the heels of our meeting here in person so it was kind of short we just talked about the bulk of the student body as 7th and 10th 7th to 10th graders and that we really focus on social needs and academic needs and then it's really nice that the upper grade kids help out the younger great kids so it's nice that they all seem to get along together and it just kind of is a mutually great experience for all of them we talked about accelerated learning that it was designed to address unfinished learning um and that it would take some time to get going but
029the most important part was making sure that we had everything in place so that when the need is present we're ready to go we also talked about the rest of it was a lot about the math program um i know we'll talk about this more in depth later but i think the greatest challenges to the math program right now are unfinished learning and at middlebrook it's the ongoing scheduling issues and not having enough instructional time to you know devote that they would like to um trudy went over a bunch of different things just talking about how we had changed the sequence and where we were with that whole process and our sixth graders that when we started the change are now only in eighth grade so there's not a ton of data to really kind
030of go to kind of check and see how that all went especially because we covered in the middle of it she went over kind of what the requirements were to place into different groups um and then kind of talked about how we're measuring success um and standardized testing came up as well as tests and quizzes um and that is pretty much it we've kind of been reaching out to the high school to kind of determine whether or not our other classes are prepared and ready to go and then there's no question about what is prepared so something else for us to kind of keep talking about and i know it's an ongoing conversation um but there's a little bit more in the notes that we wrote but that's kind of just okay okay those are
031thorough reports thank you can i ask a question related to the mental health um part of the teaching and learning community one of the action items i think i listened into and heard was um you going kevin going to see lynn vanderslice is that on the books yeah i did i reached out to lynn and so um she's tied exceptionally well tied up in the next several weeks so kim is going to start with sarah heath so i shared with sarah with lynn the slides that were shared at teaching and learning and then so kim will go to sarah and then we'll go from there can the whole board see that stuff of course yeah and they're probably up already and i've missed them but thanks and i know business operations has not met since
032i last reported and i know policy you're about to take over the meeting so we'll wait on that i just have a quick update from paige every once in a while they have a chairs sort of zoom meeting and i only want to highlight that in relation to the mental health issues that the legislative body is working on several bills one of which if the governor signs it um will end up surveying all the schools and doing asking about staffing levels and utilization the need and then having a grant program so that's that's i think that's good news um also um trying to you know extend training and there's even a bill that has a an idea that's just a germ about trying to extend um certification for mental health providers they call it human
033service permit so that needs a whole lot of study obviously there's lots of parameters around that but it's a concept of you know is there any way to get more people um trained at least for certain pieces of it so i just wanted to say that we're not alone in that problem and that the state is i think putting some money and effort uh behind it so hopefully that will get its share yeah yeah and then the last thing well there's a lot of things from kate but the last thing i want to note for the whole board is for anybody that likes data and information even though it's old some of it's newer though test scores are old but other stuff is new is their ed site has been revamped and it's really kind
034of cool uh just the times in terms of information [Music] and a lot of it's visual uh more than in addition to just the charts and so there's some new information there they added the college persistence rate from the national clearinghouse up there so you know as we kind of go down the road and we have questions about how are we doing compared to whatever or what are other districts doing there's a lot of information on the state from everything from funding to performance to staffing to diversity to percentages of this that and the other they are however refusing to make it easy to do dirt comparisons because i asked the question and they basically i was sort of what is it the skunk at the garden party it was like no no we don't
035want to talk about that so you can find it you just have to dig for it that's all okay thanks um okay uh covet update dr smith well i'm getting tired of talking about code because i think we all are yes um and that your whole face is the theme so it's been a tough couple of weeks as you know right the numbers are numbers of increased week over week um if there is any good news this week it looks like at least from monday to today numbers are waning again um and we'll see where we are tomorrow and next week but i think that you know the gestalt i think is this um just in terms of our practices we continue to remain in very close contact with our medical professionals we have bi-weekly
036calls with the state department of public health at this point we're not changing practices or protocols there's not a recommendation to do that we took this step this week of recommending masks at larger group settings so kindergarten orientation the musical etc people always students or adults have the option to wear a mask if they so choose in our facilities i've noted in the last seven or eight days a pretty significant rise in mass squaring you know among our students especially here kids have a lot of end-of-year events and so i think people are just you know taking as many safety precautions as they can to protect themselves um that i you know again just the the indicators that we continue to monitor in addition to just local case rates um we watch the activity on
037kovadec now the state department of public health continues to update the town by town website every thursday and uh no surprise you know numbers are up and so we are in a kind of monitoring phase now that we encourage people to um you know if they're eligible get vaccinated continue to test we have boxes and boxes of at-home tests that we can provide people if they need them and we just encourage people to continue to monitoring symptoms and stay home if they have any symptoms we're gonna hope for a downward turn yeah can i ask for one question or ask one question about all that yeah or one request maybe for our students that do have to quarantine some of them reach out to teachers but then teachers aren't allowed to immediately start allowing them
038to zoom in until it has been confirmed with the nurse who then notifies the administration who then funnels it down is it possible that i'm assuming we're doing it just to check so that not everybody can just call in yeah is it possible to allow those students to do that immediately though and then if we find out that it's not been verified to pull their request yeah i'll talk with the administrators i mean it's happening quickly but the kids miss like the first day yeah so it's just kind of and it's not that big a deal with the younger grades but i think at the upper grades it's a bigger deal because it's then a class that you only meet every other day so now you've already missed and then it's trying to make up
039work yeah i mean i'll raise that tomorrow morning i have a hard time believing there's a whole lot of fraud about that going on let's just not even yeah i mean yeah i'll pick it up with these guys tomorrow we can just talk it through i mean you have to you know the the larger context was you know as we were trying to sort this out in the start of the year uh doesn't have enough practice and it's not so many kids that i think it would be overwhelming so i imagine we could get some flexibility um and the um can you update us on the request for uh you know for daring to use a tool that was readily available and easy to use uh well i won't conjecture logic um here's what here's
040the update i forwarded to you um i reached out to mike mckeon who works at the state department of ed and i had several questions one was has the commissioner made a recommendation yet on our request the answer to that is not yet we are uh scheduled to be on the agenda june 1st um so i will go and um as soon as i learn something else i will let you all know but you're welcome to join me um one of the questions i've been waiting to answer is whether or not we need to do any additional lobbying on our behalf i was waiting to see what the disposition of the commissioner's recommendation is going to be but i think you know just in the meantime i'm going to reach out to the chair and
041the vice chair of the state board of ed and just you know follow up with them directly my kids suggested that he didn't really have any insight that this was going to be a state board decision and so hopefully they will see the wisdom in our request is it worth putting in a letter to the government's office or another's office in advance of that yeah just playing it on the radar i don't know i'm just thinking about it i just yeah i don't know what it would hurt yeah i mean the decision-making body is the state board of ed okay okay yeah but i think you know we have uh as i mean you know this is what we're not asking for anything unreasonable or illogical um or permanent are they allowing public comment i
042believe they do yeah that's a um i think it's a standard item on their agenda like that we could zoom in um i'm not sure if they're running higher things have to be in person um okay we can find out yeah you i mean because if we don't have to be in person then i'm sure there are plenty of people in town that would be happy to stop or even if they wrote would hurt they wrote it okay some people will write it i also brought it up at cabe and i said anything happening on the legislative side because they were doing a legislative update they said well there's a bill for k-12 use but under certain circumstances beginning in 24 20 24. how long does it take do you really want to use logic
043so yeah so there's some i don't know i'm not sure why this is so controversial difficult but it seems to be um but okay so do you should we draft a letter to the governor because we kind of need to agree so i can show you all the draft yep okay i got consensus there and we talked about in a meeting if we should drop it out it's okay yeah all right great can we have our kids i know i missed this conversation at the last meeting but i mean can our kids write in their writing classes can they write something and we can send all the letters i haven't um i haven't pushed that um i think i want to think about how to structure that you know it's certainly an opportunity and um
044you know frankly i wanted to to give the state board the commissioner the opportunity to do the right thing before we filled their inboxes i'm all for filling their own boxes there's a hefty hefty price tag attached although although if they grant this i mean first of all they should say yes to counting the day but then as you know kevin has the backup plan of saying well we'll take our 180 first day next year and counting as counted as our 180th day this year right so that will avoid the financial burden but they have to approve that too the yes i think you know the my sense is just i went back and looked at some old agendas in some other districts for different reasons had made similar kinds of requests and they were
045all denied and so you know i'm not anticipating that the state board is going to honor our request even though our circumstances are different um what i'm hoping is that they'll at least look at the um the reasonable request of counting the day for next year since it's in our calendar and that because of the financial implication right i mean that's like the biggest and like 12th graders it didn't affect them because they went to school that's right and we'll be here so they can't use that as an excuse right no and we we exceed the minimum number of you know required hours of instruction so and there have been other situations where the state board has granted that mechanism i think danbury was a situation the year we had all those storms four or
046five years ago they just ran out of well again we're not going under the 180 days that's it's just that it's not in person right okay all right thanks kevin um sr-3 plan yeah so i just wanted to take a couple of minutes and i know we've been through this information uh several times this year you know we're required at the federal level just to periodically review the sr funding and you know it's easy to lose detail so i thought i'd just take a couple minutes tonight and repeat with you primarily around the two large grants the s or two and then the rp3 grant again how we have spent the money and how we plan to spend the money so you have in front of you on that nickel size piece at the top
047of the page you can see we dedicated all of these two funds the 371 193 to a half-time social worker and a full-time math interventionist so those two positions were covered for this year and they will be covered for next year so they're in for next year this grant expires at the end of next year june 2023 and then reading down the rest of the page we received eight hundred thirty four thousand two under thirty dollars for the sr-3 arp grant and we distributed disburse those funds in a number of ways we covered two classroom teachers at miller driscoll for this current year and we'll cover them again through this grant next year can i ask a question it that seems low so thank you because i asked marianne the same question and she said
048we these are um the two teachers we hired are masters step two um one of them has insurance one of them doesn't so this was about the the least expensive pair of is that correct marianne that is correct okay therein lies the difference when you hire masters 14 and above and masters two and below okay yeah it's funny to say because i have the same exact questions i was looking at that you know we invested a fair amount of those our best funds this year in academic interventionists and we set people up on these kind of 0.4.45 constructs the rationale there was just to try to stretch the dollar so we were looking to avoid having to provide benefits so of the six that we hired for this year um five of those uh we
049will not have next year we're only funding one of those positions next year um and that's at about fifty one thousand dollars that's it um miller driscoll as we've talked about before we had hoped to engage in a contract with family and children services to provide additional social work staff family children's aid was unable to hire and so we're just not going forward to that contract rather we're taking some of those funds and we're going to hire an additional half-time social worker for this current school this coming school year we ran reading and math summer intervention services obviously we spent about 58 thousand dollars there that was ka and a little bit at the high school we are running the k-8 program again this year we also ran specifically at the high school an sat
050prep course during the year and i think we were in a small piece in the summer we're not doing that again this summer and then the last piece here we invested some of those funds in professional learning about 45 500 in a contract with the connecticut center for school change and so we won't continue to fund that contract through the grant we'll probably engage with them but in a much smaller capacity and we'll use some of our professional learning funds that are baked into our budget to continue some of those consulting services that's it but wilton high school was the decision not to continue that because it wasn't well attended just it wasn't well attended and you know we were i'm specifically targeting um this current group of juniors you know as a cohort you'll
051hear probably next week or the week after chuck in the high school will just talk about some of the longitudinal data around this person they're just they're they're a group that has um struggled to you know collectively perform you know at or above benchmark and so we're trying to find ways to support them specifically all right so as we look towards next year's budget yes we're going to need to make some decisions between recommendations okay yes and that's because there is no talk of these positions these grants i'm sorry continuing that's correct no i don't anticipate so if so that and that'll be the question if we're going to retain these positions um my expectation would be they'd have to be built into the budget and so you know as we evaluate um the effect
052of some of them or the need for some of them you know that will be a question and the administrators are all well aware of that so much so that's a major conversation should we begin the budget development process all right thank you questions comments all right um summer academic intervention program that said chuck is just going to provide a brief update sure good evening everybody so we're going to offer the summer intervention program again i hope you remember the wonderful data we reviewed at the beginning of this year for those students who participated in last year's summer intervention program and the amazing amount of growth that many of those students made so i just wanted to go over a little bit about our plans for this coming summer we're going to be offering a
053program to intervent intervention students in grades k-8 unfortunately there was no interest on the part of any of our high school students who receive intervention to participate in the summer program it's going to run a full base monday through thursday mornings for four consecutive weeks july 11th through august 4th you know unfortunately with um the school year ending so late we really weren't able to get any weeks in during the month of june students may select the weeks that work for them one two three or all four an instruction will be a 45 minute intensive group session daily in reading and or math students who receive dual intervention can enroll in both summer reading and summer math if they choose we sent out invitations to the summer program to all of the intervention students in
054early march and the registration was open through early april so it was about four weeks um but we will enter new students after we review the maybach so if students are eligible to be entered into intervention at that point they will also be invited to summer we're currently in the process of sending confirmation letters to the parents to confirm the weeks that their student is registered and we'll send another letter to parents communicating group times and other daily program specifics in late may early june at this point there are a total of 104 students enrolled in cell reading 43 at miller driscoll which is about 51 of all of the intervention students 36 insider mill which represents 44 and 25 at middlebrook which is about 45 so almost half of the students have been enrolled
055in reading there are currently 89 students enrolled in summer math 18 at middle degree school which is 64 of the students receiving a convention 27 at cider mill which is 68 and 44 at middlebury which is about 40 we do anticipate anticipate that enrollment will increase a bit um you know after we review the map data for may and my expectation is that that will probably be pretty significant in kindergarten summer intervention teachers will be running between three and eight groups per day in both reading and math in each building in terms of staffing we posted the positions internally in early february and we specifically encouraged the interventionists to apply and we made our staffing decisions based on student enrollment our goal was to keep the group sizes small ideally three to five students and
056no more than six we made the hiring decisions just before the april break we are continuing to recruit and hire for a few remaining positions we need a middle brook math teacher in week four and a reading teacher at miller driscoll week four so we've hired 16 summer intervention teachers today looking to hire two more to complete the staffing needs for a total of 18. 11 of those will be our interventionists five will be classroom teachers and two will be instructional coaches and our estimated budget is about 57 000 although it may go higher if we end up inviting our students and needing to have additional groups so that's where we stand right now anybody have any chuck is questions for you to give us not right now but um a comparison number was of
057participation between last summer and the summer it's like the number of kids yes we will get that okay chuck i don't know if you heard that question i don't know um i'm thinking you lost them oh yes yes yes sorry we're going to compare we want to compare enrollment from last summer to this summer well maybe i'll mute for the time if a child is going to be offered intervention in math or in english do they do they make like the below the 40th percentile it was i think it was the 40th below yeah yeah here's the fixer other questions we can write down and send to him how at the elementary school level how long are the kids in school if they're just doing math or just doing english i think it's one yeah
058so it's a they're i think 45 minute sessions four days a week are we still allowing kids to zoom are you having them be in person okay yeah i'm assuming they can't hear us so yeah let's move on then okay extended school year yes y stands for extended school year the individuals with disabilities education act requires that every iep team for each individual child with a disability make a decision each year about whether or not extended school year services are required to provide a free appropriate public education a lot of lingo but that's my world so i gave you information about the number of students across the levels not all students require extended school year services but the team does make a decision typically they look at two factors first and foremost they use a
059model of regression and recruitment which means will the student lose important skills over the summer and be unable to regain them quickly within a reasonable time frame typical of their peer group that has a little summer slide and comes back to school and quickly regains if the child by virtue of their disability would have difficulty doing that then we would recommend extended school year services additionally we look at kids and we look at whether or not they are at a period where they are where they have emerging skill development functional and academic and or academic that would be lost if there was an interruption in instruction so those are the kinds of things we look at and the ppt team looks at to make the determination about whether or not a child requires special education
060and or related services during the summer so each child again has their individual plan for summer services and the full panoply of services that's available during the year is available in the summer should they need it so speech and language otpt nursing services specialized transportation the full panoply of services is available so what you see here are in your packet and it's on the website for those out in the world on zoom the numbers of students who are participating who who will be participating in extended school year we also invite at the elementary level we have a summer fun program for preschool through grade five to invite typically developing peers to come to the school and you'll see the numbers of peers who have decided to join us this summer we have a wonderful group
061of peers that come every year and and um and our kids work together with them it's a great program a lot of fun so if you if you need a boost this summer pop on over it's a lot of good stuff you see the staffing we have 18 certified staff and 34 non-certified staff who will be working we also have two nurses one working at our elementary and one with the high school students and community steps we also have genesis if you remember genesis really runs at 11 month program so we don't necessarily it is esy but we it really is an 11-month program it runs through the month of july so all of the genesis kids join us in the summer as well uh in the month of july this is found at miller
062dress school miller driscoll is where pre-k five is and then middlebrook and the high school students and community steps are centered here community steps is obviously out in the world andrew how many kids do you guys have coming how many iep kids do you have coming that number is on the first page so you see 62 students from miller driscoll 53 from cider mill those are students with iep do you know what sort of percentage of the total i don't but i i haven't done that math but i can get you the the percentage of the total number of iep students i can i can do the math for you okay similar to what i asked for chocolate i was our enrollment kind of study year to year it really is kind of steady year
063to year typically you have more students at the elementary level more emerging skills at the elementary level students newly identified so they're just getting their services underway so we tend to extend preschoolers those are emerging skill years so we tend to do a lot more extended school year the older the students get as you would expect their skills are becoming more solidified and they don't necessarily need to not to mention they are adolescents and they don't necessarily want to be in school in the summer so um you know so we have those pieces um books so and we do run a very uh program for our most most complex kids um those students are with us in the summer it's about a quarter so do they have the choice of coming if they qualify or
064are they expected or they're expected but not required we don't there's no there's no there are no teeth to it okay we expect students to come families go on vacations and make other decisions some kids go to sleepaway camps and and other options but the vast majority of kids who are invited to esy attend yes they do okay that's i think most of them want most families want their kids oh yeah they want to yeah they don't want the huge gap because they're such so hard then coming back in september it's really a great thing to do you know to maintain the level of learning yeah yeah i guess movie angel that's what i was thinking about pre-k how many pre-k kids do you guys have most of the pre-k is invited to esy okay
065so the vast majority of the pre-k remember that our pre-k kids begin on their third birthday so some kids are beginning right now and so we don't want to start them and then stop them so our pre-k most of the kids come through the month of july or invited to come okay um probably for a later or a different time is i'm just wondering what the effect of the accelerated learning model has been on the special ed population and you don't need to like answer right now but i'm just thinking you know in terms of the expectation or the worry that some students will regress has accelerated learning you know has that changed anybody's progress or thinking or summerslide type issues yeah okay thank you and also the ability to make it up in the
066fall so again i'm not asking for an answer now i'm just thinking that we should look at what the impact on accelerated learning has been with special ed needs i don't know if there's any way of teasing that out um i think there will be in terms of the academic skill piece some of the other issues we face are harder to measure against an accelerated learning model oh sure no it's uh yeah i think accelerated learning is aimed at academics so yeah the academic remembering that many of our students with disabilities um the actual direct side is not necessarily the primary right deficit right yeah so where it's relevant maybe we'll try to find a way questions comments all right and all the teachers are willing able and available we have a staff nicely put
067let's see how the staff is a lot of stuff you know the hard parts you know speech and language pathologist ots pts you know we have a staff we were worried trust me we were worried that this was going to be a year we were going to have a hard time staffing the the entire program many school districts are having a very difficult time staffing their program but we have a very dedicated team um right and so great we're lucky yeah we'll say thank you for us that's wonderful um any other comments questions okay website this is exciting take it away okay well thank you um so um i'm doing a presentation tonight on where we are with our website and you probably heard um through the budget discussion um that we have gone to
068a new vendor that came from the fact that we were ending a five-year contract with final site or current vendor and um as a group our webmasters myself and um others need to discuss you know where we are and one of the things that we looked at is could we do better um and um we looked at a number of different vendors um that we were we had demos with that you know actually do apps and and also website and um we decided after we saw this particular demo of gabard communication which is the um the vendor that we're going with that in fact we would be able to do much better because and you'll see as i go through it the features that are included it comes with an actual app so it's the
069website and i'll show you um where we are with the website itself but there's an app there's a number of different widgets that make it really easy to to use and i mean i know you heard the good news we're saving a lot of money essentially the roi on this the return on investment is is just amazing because we are not only getting the website we're getting the app it comes with an e-notification system and it does um something that we have to kind of do behind the scenes which is ada compliance with our website so it also helps us with that so we thought that it was a really exceptional um you know value and it also provides us with this opportunity to reboot our entire way that we're communicating so i wanted to
070talk to you about that so we can audi thank you we can go on to the next slide which is what i just went through so let's go on to the next one so um with our agreement with gabbard the big features are that it's got exceptional support very responsive and you get a person on on the line i put that up top because anybody that's worked with anything technology wise knows how important that is when things aren't working you need to get a hold of somebody it is very easy to use we've done training already with the webmasters we've done two sessions of two and a half hours each and we're going to be doing further talked about the cost saving they also are including a free yearly redesign so after we live with
071the website and the app for an entire year we can get garner more feedback and make some changes and i talked about the fact that this includes the app the adi ada compliance and notifications so a couple of weeks ago i went out with a thought exchange survey to our parent community so that they could actually help us with the design process of the website as well as the app the question we asked was as we work to you know redesign this user-friendly website which areas of the website do you frequent the most and what features you know do you want to see so we had almost 200 uh parents um participate and we had almost 2000 ratings within thought exchange so um on the next page you go two more slides adi the next
072one i just want to show you this slide so this is basically what parents go to the site for the most um and overwhelmingly was the calendar probably not surprising district calendar a need to you know have up-to-date school events um and have those events for each of the schools the second was the parent portal and the idea of having particular systems and things that parents need at their fingertips really easy to get to power school schoology those are the things that you know dismissal manager at the lower levels school bucks and ways to pay for different things whether it be lunch menus etc so they just wanted a really easy way to do that also being able to contact staff members teachers administrators etc so having that directory of information contact us information one
073suggests that make sure that you have links to the phone number so it's really easy to call and then just really easy to find some departments like nursing you know the nurses and being able to get to that easily lunches absolutely really important you know being able to access lunch menus easily being able to order lunches and also pay for them and then finally all kinds of notifications one comment was that there's just so much coming in through the email that it would be really nice to have it consolidated through another way and so we're going to look at all those opportunities the following slide shows just the word cloud of all the words that were kind of you know used throughout the survey and you'll see calendar really big and events and make it
074easy that was really important so you kind of see what what people were thinking um going on to the next a couple of slides it's just really a review of what i've been talking about in making the website easier to navigate and things like including clubs and activities and you know all of those types of things going on to the next slide you'll see that calendar was like i said the very first thing that came up you know parents need it to plan they they basically want to get to things like early closing professional development days knowing when summer camps and holidays are so all of that and up to date in real time also came up board of meeting notes board of ed meeting notes was something that was suggested as having an easy
075way to get to that information um going on to the parent portal on the next one you'll see the types of things that you know that are wanted in a parent portal even covert rates were brought up the dismissal manager lunch money you know just a number of different systems and information all in one place on the next page you'll see more information about the request for that email directory contact us so if you go to the next slide you'll see that and then finally the last a set of feedback was about the lunches okay so going on to um the next question what time is lunch over you need to know did i eat so on to the next slide um then you'll see that right now we're literally in the process within the
076next week of doing the mock-up and designing our own app so what this will mean is that parents will be able to download an app that is basically our website app um that you know out of apple store you know depending on what kind of phone they have and getting the actual app it's going to be called campus life but we're going to call it wilton public schools campus life and on the next page you'll see what it will probably look like and the categories because we have to choose the categories that are really quick and easy to get to that we'll probably you know start with as i said calendar directory lunches news parent portal these are all the things that came up in the survey so that's what we're going to reflect in
077the app um we'll have a nice you know picture on the top and wilton public schools on the top but it will be our own app so going to be school it's going to be a district specific it's going to be district and within that we'll be able to tailor it so if you go to the lunches you'll be able to go to the different schools yeah that's correct yep um so that's where we are with that and if we go on to the next slide i am going to be able to show you where we're at with the website because we've been in the process of mocking it up so if you out if you click on that new wilton public schools website it's a link great thank you okay so this is the
078unveiling of our new um website you'll notice the very top looks probably similar to what we've got right now our navigation is going to change just a little bit you'll see that there's a little house which is our home so you'll be able to easily get back to home all the time on the right hand side you'll see the magnifying glass that's our search bar and then in between you'll see some things that look familiar we've added really straight um easy to get to teaching and learning so we'll have all our curriculum information very easy to get to board of education of course is there resources divided up so that we have like parent and and you can if you click on just like resources and get an idea we have like the parent resource
079student resources staff resources community resources all in one place the navigation itself is interesting if you go to departments you see that you can go to one of the um i can't remember which one already has pages with it i think it might be digital learning but you if you go down and you scroll to them you'll see that you can easily go from one thing to another so that it's less clicks and you can just navigate easily so everything's going to be set up in that way at the very top you'll see our big quick links our calendar contact us and i want to i want to we've been having we've had and it's been very popular with our parents it's a very quick way to get to things that parents want so that's
080our very top you'll see right now that we're using the same slideshow that we've got on our current website that is going to change we are in the process of re-kind of imagining what that could be we do have with this particular vendor the choice of either a slideshow of photographs or videos so we can actually have video footage up there which would be nice and if you go down a little bit further you'll see that we have particular shortcuts and you know we've got the parent portal we've got student services human resources is in there you'll see on the right hand side i'm getting ready to post information about summer learning so that's going to be up there and we'll be able to change these throughout the year as you know summer learning comes
081down and we want to put something else you know beginning of the the school year information so that those are ways that we can personalize each of the school sites as well each of the schools will have their own shortcuts underneath so middlebrook for instance might have something like middlebrook teams because that's what they have in their school and you know that will be done with the principals and the webmasters there will be a news widget as you can see underneath and each of those stories have like a little bit of introduction to what the story is about the picture and then if you go to look at the second one adi if you click on full article for the billboard art it brings you right to the full article so it'll be very easy
082to go back and forth between that we'll go back to the home page so we're touring this if you go down a little bit further our calendar is going to look a little different so we're going to have upcoming events on the left hand side we're going to have a full calendar on the right hand side and we will have different calendars that you know we'll have calendars for each of the schools we'll have athletic calendars all of the types of things that parents have come to expect the back end thing is that um we will be able to use google calendars which everybody's really accustomed to using um you know within our secretarial staff and and others and rather than having a calendar that's on the website as well as separate calendars if you
083keep the one calendar and you just basically connect it it makes it much more efficient and an easier way to update it keep on going down you'll see that we've got tweets we're going to have social media on the left hand side we're we're going to have our facebook basically come back the last time we actually updated our facebook account was several years ago and we'd like to have that account there the tweets are a little bit different now because they actually scroll through and so you can actually scroll through the the tweets and you can see a number of them all at the same time which is very nice and then if you go down just a little bit further this is going to be where we're going to have some highlights you'll see
084that i just put the mission up right now which is very nice with the graduation picture from last year and that will be a place we can highlight things like portrait of the graduate and different images going down parents will be able to download the app and there will be instructions there as well as the notifications we're not not using school messenger we will be continuing to use that but this like i said this particular agreement includes a notification system that we can slowly roll out and do things like newsletters through it the following is actually a youtube feed that would be something that we can do different playlists and you know different things that we'd like to highlight right now we did a little reel i think you guys actually helped me out with
085this and we pulled pieces from submissions that all our students made to our area 9 access awards channel so these are different little psa pieces and and documentaries etc that we compiled and made one reel out of and finally at the very bottom you'll see there's a little numbers thing that goes up in terms of you know some of our statistics and our footer so this is really where we are right now we are continuing right now to add content on the internal pages the website goes live on july 1st this new website so we are going from final site to gabbert at that point the app may be coming a little bit later but we'd like to have the beginning of the school year this is a tremendous amount of work to put it
086all together but i think that it really provides us with this a wonderful opportunity of rebooting how we present ourselves and you know really at every different level i've been meeting with every department they've got wonderful ideas of what to do with their sites so that we can actually elevate um how we use the internal pages as well so thank you thank you addie thank you it i did have a breakdown yeah um so i mean i have to go back into it because there are things like um the athletics button which the high school parents were mostly interested in so which makes sense so i'd have to go back and take a look at it that way will it be an additional opportunity for parent feedback i think it'd be really useful to have
087maybe a focus group especially for high school or middle brook parents i think at the elementary school level it's all about lunch and school dismissal manager but um i know as a parent i definitely saw out more information with a high schooler absolutely i mean and i think that even within the the pta groups and you know as as this actually continues i think one of the things that we're really excited about is that you know every year we wanted to make changes to final site but that was an additional cost because redesign did not come easily and it was expensive so the fact that a redesign is part of our um you know our contract makes it really enticing for us to make sure that we get this right and we continue the conversation
088with with parents yeah on the app with the parent portal like there is an app version of powerschool so i think i don't know if school dismissal manager or anything else has an app but it might be an opportunity for parent education i don't think every parent knows there is a separate app for powerschool and i don't know i can't remember if there's apps for anything else i just use power schools yeah the lunch menus school box i have them all together under a school there's a number of different apps and i'm wondering if you know if you have a parent portal on the website it's kind of like your main entry and then you have links to the different things if that's helpful to parents yeah you know just if they're if they're looking
089at it from a computer yeah but if they're actually on their phone already looking for something i think we might need to educate people that there is an app for powerschool there's an app for this missile measure i'm not sure everybody knows that no and i think i think one of the things we will have to do with this because of the fact that parents need to download the app to use it we're going to have to do some awareness you know we will have to do some some parent workshops take them sort of like through a tour of the website so that they'll be able to navigate it and also go through the fact that they can download the app and um sign up for the notifications a little video thing would be great
090for them just the video as you can tell there's a video component to it yeah other questions or comments all right thanks for all your work good luck thank you yeah okay next item on new policy diversity equity and inclusion so you've got the draft policy went out with the agenda and i just have some thoughts to share so um this fall we committed ourselves as a board to a set of goals those goals included supporting initiatives to achieve portrait of the graduate goals such as inspiring and preparing all students to contribute meaningfully to a global independent society and to determine appropriate purposes parameters and best practices for addressing diversity equity and inclusion it's with these goals in mind that the policy committee drafted the defi policy currently before the board over the last several
091months the policy committee has been reviewing existing policies related to diversity equity and inclusion and concluded that the best way to advance dei efforts was to create a new policy that clearly and succinctly states the values and purpose of current and future dei efforts and programs the policy directly discusses the value of diversity equity and inclusion the policy states that the board views the diversity of our student body our staff and our community as a strength and that differences are an essential part of our history and current and future reality the board all believes that recognizing perspectives beyond one's own is a critical thinking skill that can result in greater open-mindedness increased empathy reduced stereotyping and deeper learning and growth the policy advances a clear purpose to ensure the school environment and curricula promotes belonging
092and reflects the principles of respect dignity and equal opportunity for all that teaching and learning promotes mutual respect civility diversity of thought and ideas and positive communication in the classroom the policy further defines diversity inclusion and equity equal opportunity the policy then directs the superintendent to promulgate regulations and establish plans and procedures as may be necessary to accomplish the policy's purpose and intent within the distinct areas of governance teaching and learning family and community engagement and workforce diversity and the policy committee looks forward to discussing the draft with the entire board questions comments okay i'll jump in um it's great i think you guys clearly put a lot of time and effort into this and i appreciate it so thank you um we've already had a chance to briefly chat um my only comment about
093all of it is the very last part which talks about the social justice part of it and it's not it's not what's written here on this policy it kind of is more what translates into the teaching and learning aspect of it and what our kids are being teached in terms of social justice so not really a conversation for your policy i like your policy as it stands um i think it's more it's going to come back to teaching and learning at some point for us to kind of further discuss but beyond that thank you you guys did a great job [Music] anyone else it's very encompassing very thoughtful it's really good normal process you know this is first read take time sit with it you know feel free to you know raise questions that you
094might want to come back to the board table with for next meeting and second read yeah we thought we would keep it on as a review and discuss for another meeting and then if there are not any proposals for any subset of change we'll look to adopt the yeah it looks like well it reads as if you took your time to do it thoughtfully and carefully and over a long period of time um i personally like that it's not boilerplate that it seems to have been sensitively done for this time this community are our aim so i like that too my only i don't know not question but maybe suggestion or maybe you can't do it but under governance and then teaching and learning you mentioned data under governance i just wonder if there's a
095way to incorporate data under teaching and learning as well because i i just kind of want to you know rather you know sort of veer away from sometimes we get into making generalizations and we're not sure if it's really having the impact or having an impact or if it's really happening or if it's really accurate so i just always kind of want to get back to the perhaps we can look at some places under where we evaluate the curriculum and instructional material somewhere in there work in a data component [Music] [Applause] and i also i'm glad that you included diversity of thought and i think that's sometimes missed in policy such as this all right so we'll yeah as you read it or think about it or um and this is you know encourage everybody
096in public everyone parents to read it and if they have reactions or questions you know just absolutely email us in general or you in particular engage on it yes yeah okay great it's well written whoever did that is very well i am a highly educated uber driver at the moment over-educated uber driver okay any other comments or questions all right contract negotiations this is a update schedule this is yes and we're just going to give you two minutes on what's coming up because we're going to be busy in the next number of months here with contract negotiations so good evening maria good evening good evening everyone that's right it's going to be a busy few months ahead of us pam mentioned earlier that it's hiring season which it is it's also negotiation season and this
097year we are either in the process of negotiating or are going to begin negotiating with three of our four bargaining units it's unusual to have so many negotiations going on simultaneously but what's been typical over the past two years probably the only thing that's been typical is for us to say well it's because of the pandemic and in this case it is uh we we waived timelines um for a number of the different bargaining units over the past two years just because of the complexities of the pandemic and gathering groups of people together so i'm just going to take you through the three that we're going to be negotiating first with our custodial unit we had a five-year contract with the custodial group and three years into the contract there was a required reopener for
098wages and benefits we deferred that in 2020 when the the reopener you know came into effect and have been um spending uh the past year essentially working through that again some complexities with the pandemic and gathering people together but we are in the process of um of mediating through that and then the actual contract expires in june so we've just begun talking about setting dates to negotiate the full contract which will include wages and benefits as well but all of the other benefits of the contract our secretarial custodial and paraprofessional group had a four-year contract which expired last spring and we extended the agreement by one year with a focus solely on wages and benefits and so the contract and the the extension agreement will expire this june and we're meeting next week to set
099dates and work through that process and then finally our teachers union which is our largest bargaining unit has a three-year contract which will expire in june of 2023 but we always begin that process earlier we begin it typically you know informally by having conversations in the spring about goals and then formally in the fall because that's typically a process that takes longer than the smaller bargaining units so we have a busy few months ahead and i know we'll have some board representatives working on each of the negotiation committees and we're looking forward to uh some productive conversations with our units so i'll send a note out with kind of date ranges and time commitment expectations the wea is the big one that's generally the the lengthiest negotiation and it's not uncommon to have at least
100one sometimes two late late night early early morning sessions as part of that but i'll i'll send that all right we'd be looking for uh yeah i think it's important to have some some board member representation in each of those and then we usually invite a board of finance observer to the wea we do all right thank you any questions comments what what you used a term for the custodial um negotiations that re-entered you said or re-enter or a real pre-opener opener is that so we had a five-year contract you want me oh yes please sure so we had a five-year contract and so three years into it we had negotiated um to go back and to reopen or to renegotiate wages and benefits after three years after three years correct um and so that
101reopener was deferred because of the pandemic right and so now you know we had an initial conversation with them some months ago but we're moving towards mediation on that piece of it and then the whole actual contract is due for renegotiation this coming year busy time yes do you guys agree to have a reopener because not everybody's on board with the current decision but they agreed it was so good i have to go back and look at the rationale because i mean it was a five-year contract which was also unusual yeah and so i think you know part of that was you know at the time when we were negotiating we were still had questions about health care and so we were looking at the stability of a five-year contract as a benefit to the
102board into the district than one of the just consolation agreements was to go back and look at wages and benefits again three years in a three-year contract is more typical other questions or comments sounds like fun one way to describe it there are two workshops i saw on you know learning how to negotiate one was at harvard for three thousand dollars or something outrageous and the other one was a cave but you have to drive to the middle of middletown so i don't know if anybody wants i think the three thousand dollar harvard one's probably off the table yeah is that the um we should i mean we should talk about if you're just kidding no that's a lot of time too all right um so you'll send an update okay thank you maria possible
103action items board of ed meeting calendar um i would like to defer this i think we need to look at a little bit of the budget stuff some of the meeting stuff and also board of finance keeps saying we want to you know do stuff earlier and i don't know what that means so and i would like to in if possible to include them on the workshop scheduling yeah yeah rather than just put it here yes okay so we didn't invite but i'm saying like let's agree right oh we always invite but maybe does now we'll work with three days yeah okay so so and and all of us you know look at this and you know make sure that it makes sense etc okay so then you see i'm sorry can i have a
104motion to defer this so much thank you second all in favor thanks um then our dates we're going to be seeing a lot of each other between now and graduation okay any comments from the public okay all right then this meeting is adjourned thank you everyone adjourned at 8 43. i registered with you to do that oh yes communications i have a yeah my daughter's turning eight in industrial and i'm taking her over to middletown to you know star 99 now we're going to get a four that's great yes you