BOE Organizational & Regular Meeting (2 December 2021)

001okay it was quiet for a while just for reason all right then i'd like to call the december 2nd board of education organizational meeting to order this is a meeting that we have at the beginning of our first meeting in december and it's to sort of organize the board so we do this annually our first task is the election of officers we start with nominations for the chair are there nominations for the chair i nominate deblo for chair is there a second second okay thank you further nominations all right at this point we vote we vote and according to our bylaws it's done on ballot quick question are there any rules and responsibilities written for that for the roles there are in some of our bylaws yes yep yep we were just talking about how

002some of it needs to be updated because they're repetitive but they are outlined so um just to understand how this works were there conversations about who wanted to i just got that text from you 10 minutes ago were there conversations about like who was interested yeah i think typically people express interest to me or sometimes i might ask them and it's typically the wilton tradition has been the more senior board members who have the time and have expressed interest yeah no i'm not interested oh no no no no [Laughter] yeah so it's those it's those two criteria and coming up with the team and and there was no dissension it was all like everyone was fine with the i think there were some questions but i think people have agreed okay okay how does jen

003vote from home she's gonna email jen i'm sorry um can you email your ballot in where's jen she's there yeah okay yep she heard you all right great all right yes thank you thank you and then i think lucille collects them and counts them cool oh god sorry she's coming over oh i thought she was walking around this way i was proud six votes for debbie love hey thank you very much are there nominations for vice chairman i'd like to nominate ruth deluca is there a second i'll second that all right are there further nominations so no one else wants to be nominated okay so you okay congratulations ruth are there um nominations for secretary yes there are because i'd like to nominate chen lawler is there a second a second all right thank you

004are there further nominations six votes for general hey congratulations jen all right officers are elected the next item is the consent agenda and again this is an annual appointment of council medical advisor and designation of signatories it's not a consent agenda unless anybody wants to pull something off and discuss it is there a motion to approve the consent agenda so moved thanks ruth is there a second a second okay all in favor aye jen okay all right consent agenda is approved uh meeting dates um these are the dates to the best of everybody's thinking right now and as we all know we can add meetings subtract meetings or change dates of meetings but these are the the sort of regular meetings that go to town hall it's not in stone they are flexible but for

005now this is what we're aiming for is there a motion to approve the meeting dates all right thanks jen is there a second second thanks mandy all in favor aye aye okay the next one is committee assignments um i talked to lucille ahead of time um it should not say approval i wanted to change that to discuss we've got people who are new we've got people who don't quite know what their interests or time availability is so if you could treat the list as an information item and each board member serves on a board of ed subcommittee you could let me know your interests sort of in rank order because i can't guarantee everyone's going to get their first choice but not tonight just some time before the next meeting and we'll compile a list

006send a draft around and hopefully be able to approve that at the next meeting and then there are other roles you see the liaisons to different ptas etc so again let me know your interest areas and i'll do the best to accommodate those any questions on that we're just not going to approve them tonight okay all right that ends our organizational meeting that's adjourned and we'll move right into our regular meeting i'll call the december 2nd wilton board of education regular meeting to order has everyone had a chance to um review the agenda yes okay is there a motion to approve it all right thank you is there a second second okay thanks ruth all in favor aye aye okay all right now it's time for comments from the public um i'm gonna say what

007i usually say before public comment that we welcome public comment if you wish to make a comment just state your name and address and please be aware that comments are limited to two minutes each and that the board limits the number of comments on any one topic to 15 minutes there's also time for public comment at the end of the meeting it may be frustrating but please know that the board does not respond directly to comments instead we listen carefully and provide follow-up if appropriate and finally please remember our board's civility policy all right are there public comments from people present in the room before i ask if there's any emails yeah come on up to the microphone and again just state your name and address thank you hello thank you for this time my

008name is dr silva clark and i live in wilton connecticut i'm 125 nautical road i do have a daughter in wilton high school and i would like to comment on the form 61 black and latino studies curriculum i understand it is an elective and it was when i printed it out it's about 295 pages so i've read unit five and six so those are the two units i will comment on um so in on reading unified there are quite a bit of things that i i found disagreeable and quite divisive there is one statement that read quote students will examine the ways that the legacies of slavery white supremacy and settler colonialism continue to affect life in what is now the united states segregation and inequality persist in the united states this gives one the

009impression that we are living in a systemically racist country that still practices slavery we have had great progress in this country and the civil rights act of 1964 was passed with the help of whites fighting alongside blacks americans both white and black have elected a black president for two terms a black mayor attorney general and many cities however this curriculum mentions none of it lesson 5.4 includes words such as resistance systemic racism and equity the term equity denotes race-based discrimination to breed to achieve equality of outcome instead of equality of opportunity and is one of the tenets of crt or critical race theory it also mentions nicole hannah jones the controversial writer of the 1619 project who wrote that america was founded on slavery and that the revolutionary war was fought to defend slavery from

010british interference rather than the truth which is that the revolutionary war was fought to escape tyranny from great britain her partisan essay has been refuted as false by many historians and has no place in any school curriculum unit 6 starts with statements such as institutional racism continues to undermine the progress of african americans institutional racism another crt term to undermine our nation in order to fundamentally change it page 117 discusses student activism activism and asks how can young people get in quote good trouble and suggest asking parents about their quote protest history taxpayer funds should not be used by public schools to promote political partisan social justice activism page 118 discusses quote teen led blm marches and how quote student activism spreads to high school campuses role of schools is not to encourage unlawful violent

011riotous rebellion against our country resulting in looting destruction of property and death this is extremely irresponsible and dangerous to encourage this type of behavior in our children i do not want my child to graduate high school with the desire to write riot in our streets there are also selected student resources in the appendices and one of which is stamped from the beginning the definitive history of racist ideas in america by ibrahim tex kendi he this is an author who's known for his anti-white racist views and believes current racism against white people is justified by past racism he does not believe in rewarding one based on their merit but on race which is discrimination this is another infusion of marxist crt that divides our society along racial not lines with white men as the oppressor and

012black and brown people as oppressed this should not be taught in any school i have excuse me to revise this break so that it continues contains only factual information about black history without the lens of partisan political ideology of crt i'm done all right sorry all right thank you thank you thank you do you want to leave a written comment written copy as well i will i will submit okay all right thank you are there further public comments from the people in the room lucille are there any via email uh no there are not okay thank you uh consent agenda consisting of uh minutes from several past meetings is there a motion to approve the consent agenda thanks ruth is there a second second thanks pam all in favor aye okay reports uh board chairs

013report um just very briefly want to officially welcome uh two new board members tonight nicola davis and pam ely uh welcome and um i know you you know you're got a lot of work ahead of you so we're glad to welcome you thank you it's good to be here great superintendent's report great i've had a number of items so um first uh welcome pam and welcome nicola and thank you in advance for joining this great team um and as debbie said there'll be plenty of work to do in the days and weeks to come so we look forward to engaging with you further first we want to congratulate our wilton high school model congress team our team hosted a conference with model congress delegates from new canaan and darien these students did an outstanding job

014running the conference with poised thoughtfulness and diligence we want to offer a special congratulations to team member henry rowley who was awarded best de best legislation in the labor and commerce committee and to his teammate sean gregory who was awarded best legislation in the foreign relations committee so congratulations to our model congress team also just before the thanksgiving break four members of our model united nations club participated in darien's model u.n conference alexis deckel mario cavone aaron griffin and aditya batal represented the interest of their assigned countries and worked with others to develop resolutions aimed at addressing issues of inequity through the world we want to congratulate alexis steckel who was awarded best delegate at that conference so congratulations alexa i left for you at your places um this packet so uh earlier this week

015i had the pleasure of joining kathy kuhn and her team at the miller driscoll pta meeting at the conclusion of that meeting our two millage school pta presidents presented us with this they had solicited a list of gratitude from a number of the parents and kids at miller driscoll so if you need a smile go ahead and read i'll just share a couple for those who are at home so excerpts from the miller driscoll gratitude list so what are we thankful for our wonderful caring teachers and its staff the welcoming staff they made my children feel right at home from the very first day they set foot in millie driscoll when they were in pre-k my youngest even feels like she is part of the community and she is only three love this school another

016writes the brilliant caring and supportive teachers and administrators another rights for in-person experiences at this amazing school and the list goes on and on page after page so um if you need a smile and thank you to the miller driscoll community for sharing that with us that was the thanksgiving theme yes yes looking at the drawings yeah that's great uh tomorrow debbie and i will be participating in the first legislative breakfast of the season we'll be joined by other board of education members administrators and state senators and representatives from across fairfield county earlier today i shared with you the letter outlining my own legislative priorities for this upcoming session i'll be requesting that legislative action to address some of the systemic issues surrounding access to mental health care for our young people who require acute

017care and support and also legislative action to lower the special education excess cost reimbursement threshold from four and a half times per pupil to three times per pupil i hope you take a minute sometime in the next few days to take a look at the letter what we tried to do kim zemo helped craft some pieces of it was just paint a picture for our legislators about the gap in services we're currently facing here locally in wilton but across the state so in short we have certainly seen a rise in need of kids experiencing acute mental health care issues and so our response typically is to if the kids are here at school and they're you know ideating suicidally or something like that will contact the parents call mobile crisis mobile crisis is backlogged so

018in some cases you know they're typically supposed to respond within 45 minutes sometimes we've been told that the wait to get services and immediate response is two and a half hours i think more seriously when they do respond oftentimes students will be transported to an emergency room and there is where we see one of the most significant breakdowns oftentimes kids will go to the emergency room and rather than be seen by a psychiatrist or another mental health professional and receive a mental health assessment if they're seen at all they'll be seen by an attending physician in the er and we've had a number of cases where if kids have been seen they've been released to their parents and then they come back to school the very next day and they have not had any response

019to the issues that happened there in the first place and so our folks are trying to respond trying to connect with other providers in the community and put together some support there's a second issue with providers here in the community and across the region first trying to find kind of a non-emergency room individual to provide in an emergency situation is next to impossible some of our local providers you know don't even have capacity to do emergency response for kids that are already on their caseload forget about you know new referrals um and then we also have the issue where as we're trying to set you know young people up with providers a number of local providers don't take insurance and so you know they can't even be seen um so this is a it's a

020significant issue it's growing as a result of the pandemic i know this is on the radar of many of our legislators already so we're going to be raising this concern and hopefully we can see some positive legislative action through the short session this season and get some additional support we could spend hours going into the issues around special education so i'll save that for the workshop but the you know the short of it is neither the federal government or the state government fully funds their obligation to provide reimbursement and funding for special education so excess cost is one of those areas you know we have some students who because of their needs are very expensive to serve and so right now the law reads that any cost over four and a half times the annual

021average per pupil expenditure is eligible for reimbursement the problem for us and for many of our neighbors is that as the annual per-pupil costs increase that threshold gets higher and so many of these kids their costs you know even though their six-figure costs fall below the threshold and so we are eligible for reimbursement so i'm seeking legislative action to lower the threshold in the example that i provided in the letter through the calculations that andrea's staff has done if the threshold were reduced from four and a half times to three times that would allow another 30 of our kids to be eligible for some of the cost reimbursement to the tune of something like you know 1.2 million dollars that's also just by the way assuming only a 75 reimbursement which has been the state

022average over the last several years not 100 reimbursement which we're entitled to so hopefully we'll get some good traction with um with those issues but um for your information we'll attend tomorrow and we'll i'll update um the board when we return and we'll have other opportunities as the season unfolds cave also runs legislative breakfast there's typically one in westport in early january that you'll get an invitation to probably through the cave liaison and then there are others that take place around the state so you know we're always encouraging legislative advocacy did you have anything on that debt no okay so i just want to also provide just a brief covet update so we've had a challenging couple of weeks on the covet front here we've seen new cases each day this week and over the

023course of the last two weeks we've seen 21 new cases dramatic shift from the preceding month right now kovadak now the website that i monitor daily is reporting an average of 18.7 new cases daily per 100 000 here in fairfield county the state department of public health is reporting for wilton an average of 16.7 new cases over the last two weeks they do two-week look-back periods this is a sharp jump i think probably the last time i reported on this we were below five and so um worrisome trend you know i mean the good news is we have a high number of vaccinations and you know that number continues to increase our mitigation strategies remain in place but it's a turn that is most unwelcome so we continue to monitor we continue to lean on

024our medical advisor for guidance and we're hoping that this trend will abate and we'll see lower numbers soon the we had some questions um about screen and stay and so i just want to talk for a minute about this green and stay protocol so you may recall there were a couple of other states i think massachusetts maybe utah were running a test and stay program so if a child was exposed or an adult in school was exposed they were within that six feet in a test and stay protocol like massachusetts is running they could agree to daily covet testing as long as they remained asymptomatic they could stay in school connecticut opted for a different protocol called screen and stay and so rather than testing if under a certain set of conditions which we've outlined

025in the documents that we've produced and shared with parents for the last month if a student is considered a close contact and kind of meets the criteria it's in class he's wearing a mask the people around him are masked as long as that child's asymptomatic he or she is eligible to stay in school okay he can participate in most school-based activities part of the agreement is that parents have to certify you know that they're going to test daily and that they're going to also follow some of the other protocols so i think what's an important distinction to note here screen and stay pertains just to school it doesn't pertain to activities outside of school and i think that's been some of the confusion and so naturally as parents are trying to contend with this they're

026confronting you know some of these confounding issues because frankly the logic doesn't always hold when you're looking at a screen and state protocol and then you're looking at a a testing protocol that would you know enable you know school community members to test you know beginning day five and then return to school um you know day seven or eight whatever the case is so um they're just what i would ask people to do is is if they find themselves or their children in these situations to look carefully at the protocols and to call with questions just so people are fully aware of the um the nuances for each and so i think you know most recently we had some questions at cider mill about this so tomorrow the administrators will be um you know picking

027it up again but you know they're not our locally developed protocols so it's not like we have leeway to change them i think what we can do is just try to communicate really clearly i think the benefit of screening stay that we've seen in the short term is that we've been able to as we've seen an increase in covet we've been able to hold on to kids in school and not have to send them to remote learning but there are trade-offs with that that families have to make in opting for that decision um we haven't i mean we talked about it early on but at this point i wasn't you know personally advocating for a change we haven't had discussion at this table about the you know the benefits and the drawbacks i've heard you

028know just in general i know we've had you know maybe a handful of complaints or concerns expressed about it i was you know checking in with administrators around conference time and the day that i checked in i think there were two maybe three concerns presented at cider mill i don't think there are any over at middlebrook i don't think there are any at miller driscoll in general i haven't received you know an overwhelming number of amount of feedback about that you know so in my opinion the practice is consistent with what we're doing with staff and so you know perhaps especially in light of recent um increases in covet i wouldn't necessarily be advocating for a change today what about um the staff who is not vaccinated are they getting weekly testing and who's paying

029for that yep the um the staff member is obligated to pay for that test right and so there's a whole protocol set up the state established guidelines maria's office manages that in the case where a staff member either doesn't test or doesn't submit a test that person is put on administrative leave until such time that he or she had do you remember what our overall staff vaccination rate is oh it's high um maria do you know off the top of your head i mean we were in you know 97 98 now you know i haven't looked at it um you know recently but we're at about 98 the last time that i looked um and i also want to add uh about the weekly testing for staff who are not vaccinated that the few instances

030we've had where a staff member has been sent home i would say have been related to just confusion about when the test needed to be submitted or tests not coming in on time you know people have been um you know very uh you know they've followed through with the their requirement we haven't been having issues i think it's been more of an issue with confusion at different times but the rate's right about 90 98 percent i can pull that up um and give you an update in about three minutes if you give me some time i'll just take a look why don't you email it yeah yeah i think the email would be okay great that's it for my report all right great question about the visitor protocol i think that um i think that

031you know part of the frustration for families that are not vaccinated for whatever reason is that they have to go through maria to get in it's not that they have to show proof of you know a negative test it said there's that one extra step and it's um [Music] you know it's just another way to make them stand out from everybody else right there's an extra step for them in order to get admitted um so i don't i'm wondering if it's possible to you know continue that they have to show a negative test but could they just show up at the window with their negative test instead of having to go through maria to make that happen maria correct me if i'm wrong but i think as people have been doing that they come to

032the door the window they show their identification i thought they only were coming to you if there was an exemption that they needed to um demonstrate right so that was a protocol that was recommended by legal counsel just to be consistent so that we're treating everyone the same that's the protocol that we have with staff and and i think it was intended to be proactive so that we could answer questions for people and ensure that people didn't arrive on site with an expectation that they would be allowed in but have either the wrong test or a test that was taken too early but we really have tried to streamline that and and we've put out the information that people can arrive on site and have a negative test result that was um you know from

033a test that was taken within 72 hours of arrival it's not intended to be invasive it's not intended to to add additional steps for people we haven't turned anyone away that i'm aware of it was really just intended to be consistent with our protocol for all people who are in our buildings and also to be proactive again so that we can communicate with people and clarify you know offer any any you know responses to questions that people might have what are the um the math mandate in the schools confuses me sometimes because um it seems like after school you don't have to have a mask on in schools like if you're doing sports in our schools after school so there's the math mandate only during and also at the tri-board meeting recently no one had

034mask on at comstock when i was watching from zoom so i just i feel like the optics of it just i'm confused a little bit yeah so they i think so the comstock's not a school building and so it's not um subject to that mandate the mass mandate for schools you know stipulates you're in a school building and students are present you have to have a mask um so the um you know the there was i got a question i think yesterday or today about a park and rec program a basketball program yeah um and that may have been running and the kids weren't wearing masks the coaches weren't wearing masks i think they might the guidance pro they had probably been practicing and the guidance wasn't released until friday or monday and so um

035the youth sports guidance and the ciac guidance mirror each other and so any of those youth sports programs if you are unvaccinated you have to wear a mask if you are vaccinated during most practices you have to wear a mask it's only during game time where you can't be you you can not wear a mask if you're fast basketball team that's practicing at comstock you do not need to wear a knot well you're still subject to the youth guidance the youth sports guidance so the masking for youth sports i don't think is you know subject to location but in our school buildings if kids are around people should be wearing masks you know i think where um where it's okay so if you have people if you're by yourself if you're you know a teacher

036in your office if you're me in my office and nobody else is around you know i have been removing my mask in that situation and lots of other people too but you know whenever you're in the presence of others and certainly in the presence of kids you should be masked is that helpful yeah any other questions comments um i don't think any committee's met since the last meeting so how about the financial report yeah dan's here um the financials haven't changed but i'll just give the summary over again for the new members to just give them a you know a flavor of where we are right now um on our last report and today for this month uh we are on target for our budget um we had a couple of things at the beginning

037of the year both pluses and minuses that um had affected it we have what's called oped that's our pension um obligation sorry it's our medical obligations and then our pension obligations every year we have to set uh a number uh through our actuaries of what that budget is for the year and then based on the return of the trusts um when the extras can win sometimes the number's higher sometimes it's lower fortunately for us the number that we needed to [Music] pay for this year is lower than budgeted so we have some savings on those lines consequently though we had issues with some elevators that needed immediate repairs so those savings from those two line items were used and rerouted to be able to get the elevator repairs done we also had typically we have

038done in the past where we go out for a lease for our uh some of our its needs this year we did not have that lease um it was not approved so we took the dollar amounts that were related to what we thought would be lease payments and we reallocated them to some um i.t equipment that we needed that was going to be in the lease so we've made some you'll see in some of the line items we've made some changes back and forth um due to these type of needs and we also have some changes in sped classifications on students whether coming in or going out of district so that changes the allocation whether it's salary line whether it's the tuition line so you'll see that in the amended budget column as well but

039right now we're still on target for budget um and we haven't had much movement from last month so if there's any particular questions but welcome them and what line exactly is the elevators allocated to yes but you'll see that from one of the largest lines there it's again uh 171. i have 150 154. oh i'm sorry i i'm sorry i pulled out last month's report my apologies i've got too many reports let me pull it back out uh i'm sorry i should still have about 171 what's in the amended budget yeah 171 816. yes i see 156.53 is that what you're looking at yeah i see 156. yeah right you're not no it's under equipment oh i'm not sure what one that was yeah that was committed with 150 171 816. okay maybe i have

040an older okay okay i'll make sure that the the one you can just email us whatever the latest you see yeah i don't see any 171 anywhere we've got um building repairs 253 and then equipment repair maintenance 156 is the adopted bike yeah that's what we have yeah all right so um the date the date on this is budget projection october 31st 2021 oh the one the one i um the one i submitted last was november 14 2021 so there's a flight difference yours is november 14. yours doesn't have a day ours says october 31st right yeah the actual budget sense report that's so funny it's at the top all right it's at the top so i'll just get this final one that i have out i'll get it out yeah let's just rewrite it

041first okay yep he must have gotten this from the last meeting okay right okay so ann are there any transfers that the board of ed needs to approve there will be another coming forward because i'm taking out you know the smaller dollar amount ones you know where we just do you know a couple of supplies um but i'll get you a break because i want to be able to give the breakdown so that you can see what they actually are versus their co they're combined here um and then i will present it to the next meeting okay for transfers okay yes yes all the transfers basically are in that budget amendment column so when we talk about transfers do you see the second column over from the left left uh budget amendments are transfers and

042they always should pretty much they should equal to zero because we're doing the allocation so i will get that list out to you okay and what was the 223 720 uh transportation services amendment line item from the top on the last page it says transportation services um remember there was an allocation out for a different need between we have in district and out of district and then we have uh typical transportation and spent transportation and it was in it for reallocation because you'll see part of it where uh 130 is in the line below when we call it the transportation services there's 130 there and there's 223 there's a net there and we also had an adjustment up on a further line for tuition because we had students moving without going into too much detail

043um so like i said you can take it from a tuition line it might have been originally budgeted there and we move it down to transportation because now we're moving it because the child is coming back into district and we need a different transportation for the child so we have some of those changes i can get more specific details if you want but um you know depending on what the situation is we don't go into that level now i get it yeah and just one last question i i always get a little confused on staff staff replacement did we hit our target or not um not yet not yet we're still they're still moving and we're doing a um we're we're doing an analysis off the staff replacement right now basically who has gone out

044who we've retired in the differential yeah um i believe we will still come in at that number okay but depending on if anything change from needs from again students moving in district or different needs um it could change but we should have by the end of december where we think we stand with the staff to know that that we can realize that number of belief okay all right so you're saying that also comes in with medical as well depending on the changes on that kind of like the catch-all for everything on a personnel clause yeah well i know we usually estimate it so i just wanted to know how close we were yeah i'll go for the next report to let you know where we're standing all right other questions comments all right thank you

045anne welcome thank you review and discuss all right we have the wilton educational tv update i know we have some presenters for this great so uh this evening we want to welcome fran is here to support two of our students uh joe eustis and harrison forland who are here this evening joe and harrison are two of our key leaders who run the wilton high school and we tv program these two gentlemen with fran came to see me a couple weeks ago that update me on all of the work that they've been doing in growing this program over the last two years it was stunning and uh they asked and i thought it was important that you get to see uh what they shared with me a couple weeks ago so fran right joe harrison welcome

046all right thank you for having us yeah thank you um so um hello everyone my name is harrison forland this is my partner joe eustis uh today we're here to talk to you about wilson educational television um so before we start i just want to thank you guys for allowing us to speak here um and for your time and with that i will give it over to jeff so just a brief overview of what we're going to cover today could you just click the slideshow just so this goes on just anywhere on that screen here on the right screen yep okay so just what we're going to cover today the who's who in wetv obviously we have a lot of team members of it so it's important to know who they are the background information

047like what we do how we do it and some of our goals for the future and then a brief history of wetv some scheduling communications kind of the back end logistics of what we do some statistics mainly viewer statistics our next steps which again talks about our goals and then obviously we're a video team so we'll we have a highlight video so what is wilton educational tv from the ground up we are a student-led student-run and student-driven television studio composed of high school students and when i say student run i mean everything from the camera operator to the back end logistics to meeting with administrators to figure out what particular what are the particular particular needs for an event all of that is done by students obviously with some adult supervision by fran compart and

048we have three divisions of wetv our main wetv one handles board of education meetings like this graduation and any district-wide content so that would be you know the portrait of a graduate video the schoology wrap video anything that's just for the entire district then our whs tv channel and program handles live streaming warrior athletics theater events and any school assemblies anything specific to wilton high school morning warrior is our club component of this program we produce weekly episodes about school news and it's kind of the entry point for new students so if they want to join this program and potentially become a wetv member you start with morning warrior and one of the hallmarks of wetv which i mentioned before is that it's student led a9cc actually points to us at meetings and says that's

049how every studio should be run this is just a couple pictures about our space this one right here is a newly organized storage area which we did over the summer we're very proud of it because now all of our gear for uh for like on on location shoots is in one spot cameras tripods everything so we can just roll out and all of our boxes in case we have to rma something are all organized some of the team members so for we tv it's myself harrison audi downstairs anya foreign and finn o'halleran and david unruh and then for our morning warrior team leading under mr kevin slater we have avery baumel she's a senior she heads up our talent and anything on air myself and harrison ryan giancola you may have heard commentating on some

050of the games he heads up our sports division audi ratney our lead editor and obviously finn o'halleran and david unruh so now i'll pass it back to henderson um right so right here is just a nice little collage that we put together because obviously as you just heard we do a lot of different events we just wanted to showcase some of our crew actually filming some of the events this includes theater sports um and board of education meetings see down at the bottom we're actually with retired member glenn henley all right so wu tv is always evolving we're always improving and one of our unofficial mottos is that the new leadership tries to outdo the previous leadership so we try to outdo jake arnold so we can say look at what we did it's better

051than you and then he tried to outdo his his predecessors so it's a nice way to continuously evolve the program and keep growing it so just a brief overview of the history it began as wilton educational film cooperative under genre picky and when he retired it kind of died down a little bit but it was revived revived around 2014 as wetv the group now as a student-led organization then the biggest point from this would be in the summer of 2019 we invested in a mobile studio it's essentially a studio in a box we can roll up to an event like the starter middle board of education meeting that year fill a set of cameras and within in an hour be ready to broadcast rather than jerry rigging equipment from our control room and then not

052having that available to film say the morning warrior episode and then in the spring and summer of 2021 the digital media and communications team was created to help support this program and then in the fall of 2021 ryan giancola and his family donated half the funds to be able to purchase proper commentary equipment for games so obviously we thank ryan and his family for that yes we do um so as you can imagine because we do so much um we're filming a lot of stuff we have to schedule um we have to have a very um concise scheduling and communication system so this was our very first attempt of it um as you can see it's just a giant google sheet with a lot of inputs it's very labor intensive and it's very overwhelming for

053new members who are coming onto the team so fortunately to this year we've moved over to monday.com which is a website that essentially streamlines the process in not only scheduling but communication as well so we can add any event we want and add our team members on there and it'll automatically update their google calendar and send them an email to update them so taking a deeper look into it as you can see this is just our board of ed section we have um the title of the meeting you know the event time the producer the different crew members our equipment list and our location so this is just some something that we use to uh you know organize ourselves and also update all our members um it also has a very nice feature uh with

054the calendar feature it allows us and our team members to get uh sort of a bird's eye view on everything we have coming up so we can see what nights we're busy and when we're busy it also gives our teammates on the communications team also the ability to see when we're busy so moving now on to some of our key statistics we along the channel 78 uh the public asset access that we run we also have two youtube channels which we broadcast to um wilton high school tv which is again mainly our athletics um and also and theater um and wilson educational tv which we mainly live stream the board of ed meetings um so for the wilton high school tv we have 655 subscribers um which jay garniewicz our predecessor he tried to set

055the goal for us to have 500 by the end of this year and as you can see we've completely smashed it um we've all we've also had um 100 over 165 000 lifetime views and just in the past 30 days we've had over 15 000 views which has been amazing and then uh looking at the wilton educational tv channel um we've had 372 subscribers 48 000 lifetime views and in the past 30 days just over 1100 views um which has also been very interesting and cool to watch our membership count so as joe broke down earlier we have the different levels of wetv we have the wetv which has six members which include joe and i um our whs tv which has 20 members so again those are the ones filming athletics and theater and

056then for the morning warrior we have around 30. um because we have such a diverse group and people are doing athletics or during different parts of the year they are busy we have like it's always changing so the member count isn't a constant so we have roughly third so i can't dive into all these statistics in depth because then we'd be here until midnight but to highlight a couple of the important ones our sports are sort of the hallmark of wilton high school tv we saw a very very very big increase in viewer viewership during the pandemic we actually got about 30 000 views in the winter and spring season of last year and it's especially notable in the spring season because students were it was more open students could go to games as well

057as parents and then this year we haven't seen a drop-off that's too significant even though that things are more open now and more and more people can go to games because one of the main benefits of live streaming is not just the people in wilton that can't see it it's the people all across the country and all across the world we act on the 2020 graduation we actually got viewers in like seven or eight different countries which is phenomenal and we got about 17 000 views for just the fall of 2021 sports games which is incredible because it hasn't had the months and months that the other seasons have had to like and get more views because this data was collected like on november 15th um again you also should all have access to that

058data that you can delve into a little more deeply on your own um but again to go over just the same format for the wetv channel um you know free pandemic we were averaging around 60 views uh on our live streams um and in the height at the start of the pandemic in the spring of 2020 we had averaged of almost 700 views per live stream and that's excluding graduation because it was an outlier in 2020 we actually had over 5 000 views which was a big milestone for us 5000 views on our graduation video and then again last year we averaged around close to 200 views per video and our graduation video got 3000 views so we hit a lot of good milestones now we'll turn it over to fran all right thank you

059so much harrison and joe for that presentation i think that one of the things that i'd like to just kind of bring to life is the good news story that we've got over here with this group the fact that this is student-run student-led is a very very important part of this but think about where we've been in the last couple of years and this particular group of students have become like the eyes and ears during the pandemic so um there were very few sports um that were actually videotaped prior to the pandemic by the time that we got into the pandemic and now we're up to just about every game that is being live streamed music concerts all kinds of events and the fact that they're here and you see several students up here and

060downstairs that everything is absolutely at an excellent high professional level when i think about this group i think about the portrait of the graduate and the fact that they are exhibiting all of the skills and attributes that we really are looking for in students from the leadership of citizenship um to um you know creative entrepreneurial designer which is exactly what they're doing and getting that hands-on type of experience in everything the monday.com is a project management tool and you saw all of the details in there that looks like a lot and it is because there's a ton of things that they're doing and they're juggling all of it so this year i wanted to acknowledge the group of adults that basically are meeting on a weekly basis we have a digital media team that meets

061weekly and comprises of maria naim who's actually on the call and that if there are any questions later on she and i think there's a couple of others katherine luxtone kevin slater ken d'anaj greg terryl the entire whs admin team are all really part of the group that is supporting this this group of students we have been working very hard on their long-term types of planning the first is really to redesign the studio they have a studio that you know has had equipment in there and you know there have been grants for equipment that come from the area 9cc i've had the privilege of representing wilton at those meetings and we do get grants we do get a couple of grants a year but they don't really you know fit all of the funding needs

062that they really need so we put things together you know we cobble it together as i call it for example their studio downstairs is actually a donation from wwe so you know different studios different people there have been all kinds of individuals that have kind of come in and said you know we're going to help you and there's been a lot of community type of work where maria naims you know video production students have gone out worked with the chamber of commerce worked with businesses worked with the dmv has gotten have gotten a number of awards this is an award-winning team so we've been working on the redesign we've also been working on how do we upgrade their infrastructure meaning that they need servers and you know the heading unit which is the way that

063we broadcast it out to channel 78 it's very old so things like that and then also just you know raising awareness of what they're doing um and the team itself that um you know meets one of the things that i'd like to say that we are hoping to do is manage the growth so growth is wonderful but you need to make sure that um you know the students and everybody that's that's involved is able to to do it and and be successful in everything that they're doing including their schools work so you'll hear more about this as we proceed through the budget process as we will be putting forward a small but important cost center budget for this this group and um there's there's going to be continued uh planning one of the things in

064terms of the awareness we now have a website the two youtube channels they talked about are linked directly on our website under uh district information if you go wtv you'll see this presentation the video that you're about to see and the links to their um their youtube channels where you can go directly for all of the events and also the live stream right now this right here is being live streamed so it's it's a great great service for the community i can tell you from my experience of working with the other districts normally in a board of ed meeting like this they have one camera and you know oftentimes it's not students it's you know somebody that's being hired out by the board of education to come in and do that you do not get

065the same quality so the final thing i wanted to do is acknowledge the team that's actually here and working so um adi rothni anya fourland finn o'halleran and a very big shout out to luke medalla because you're about to see [Music] a video that he had a very big hand in putting together which is going to come up right now and after this video plays you know please if you have any questions good morning warriors i'm kathryn stein and i'm amy bommel today is wednesday november 10th day a on your specials good morning warriors it is ryan gene cole back with your weekly sports update our very own wilton high school warrior bands performed at the new milford high school band show hello i'm annie moreland and i'm here today with dr o'donnell and kathy

066campbell well guys earlier this month two new movies came out hi i'm ro i'm here with garam mo hey guys my name is edwin gregory and welcome to the wilton educational tv studio it is ryan g cola back with your weekly sports update and today fcs just finished and boy where are some great games wilton's been looking to get at bridgefield for a long down in time end intercepted it's over [Music] wins [Music] feels like the present right now the warriors win 14 to 7. [Music] i hear america singing [Music] all i am is just a housewife nothing special nothing great what i do is kind of boring if you'd rather it can wait the devil himself's in charge here about the prince of darkness our satanic supervisor foul and nasty with the cloven hoof

067does he have a name the pirate captain they call [Music] hello ready ready set set go ha ha [Applause] we know this isn't exactly what you were planning on for graduation but we've done a really great job i think of getting together the most authentic celebration possible while still being a little unique to the year 2020 absolutely cat i also want to extend the thank you to wilton educational television wetv they've been hard at work and they put together a great celebration and filming it [Music] good afternoon hilton high school it's here for the class of 2021. it is my honor and privilege to present to you our valedictorian of the class of 2021 lilly makita [Applause] [Music] [Applause] one two three [Applause] that is what love looks like and sounds like you may now

068change the tassel from right to left thank you everyone all right we have got through our uh agenda so i am adjourning the meeting [Music] well done right there he uh helped a lot putting that together that's wonderful can i ask um how many hours does it take a typical wetv you know member you know just do you have an average number of hours average number of hours per week or something a week or a month or whatever so the typical wepv member it really depends on the season but on average it would be about you know four to five for the typical one for leadership it's closer to like 15 to 20. per week for leadership sorry okay but per week yes per week sorry yeah yeah that's amazing okay so or do you

069find like do you want more students to be joining you or do you feel like you have enough we're always looking for more okay all right do you recruit from the because there's a video production course that runs what's the relationship between you guys and the courses that run right so um so the video production team they also deal with a lot of videos um but if they're interested they're always welcome to join the morning warrior and we do take on a lot of people who end up enjoying the video production course and they end up joining the morning warrior and wetv and it works both ways too some people that join morning warrior because it's a club and they just want to try it out they end up taking some video production classes wow

070there's a very close relationship we have maria naeem that's on the call as well she's the instructor for the video production classes and there is a lot of you know back and forth and there's a number of students that take her class that are also working on projects with them and i'm curious to that you are able to put stuff online because i'm one of my family is in the uk and they've been able to watch um music concerts and they'll be able to watch graduation without being here so thank you for what you do thank you yeah one of the nice things that did happen as a result of the necessity of having to do the things that we did during the pandemic is that they did rev up and they have now this

071this we need more infrastructure but they have a system in place where they're now able to do the streaming of all of these things that really weren't happening before and even though you know we're beginning to be a little bit normal and there are audiences the streaming is still very much wanted that's all wonderful is there like do you have a next goal either in terms of projects or services or memberships or so we'd like to get we tv up to 500 subscribers as well but to i'll give it as like a short term and a long term goal some of our short term goals for this year like in the fall we expanded sports coverage to have commentary at every game yeah we're looking to have graphics at every game so you'll have you

072know a clock the game clock the score the pictures for each uh sorry the logos for each team and then as a long-term goal like frank kumper said we would like to upgrade our infrastructure upgrade the head-end unit that's very old and then actually have funds to be able to purchase equipment on a more regular basis so it's not kind of pulling from this grant that grant a little bit of money a little bit of money there yeah another really big part is the studio itself we wanted to remodel that because we're using just a currently we're using like a green screen background um it works but it for our our main set we'd like to expand that as well to make it an actual set you won't find a professional studio that uses a

073green screen as their main set they all have green screens but not as their main set all right is there any other districts in the in our nearby who do anything approaching what we do in wilton um there are a few schools who um who live stream or broadcast their sports games um i think it's darian actually has theory ann has a professional company or sorry a professional adult company because we're professional students but they they do their they hire it out and do it that way and then new cane would be the closest competitor so to speak to us in terms of students running it but they're they're strictly sports and they do a little bit of other stuff but not as much as we do we're a little bit biased think that we've

074had the best of course great work really thank you thank you thank you guys yes thank you terrific baby we need to get out of advertising your presentation is very timely considering it's budget season so thank you thank you well-timed thank you it is now on a serious note though thank you so much for coming i love having kids students come and talk to us it's um definitely a bright spot so thank you thank you thank you thank you i thought i said one thing i don't know if you guys can hear me but um the state department of dmv the motor vehicles department reached out to me like a couple months ago and they requested a lot of all the districts they worked with westport dairy and uk and everybody they asked if our

075students would collaborate with them to create a video promotional video for the gold star that they're putting together for the state department so our students are actually going next week to meet with the deputy commissioner to shoot this news story and we're the only one even like the news stations have not done this they asked us to do it so that was awesome that was said something about our students and their talent yeah that's awesome great you we'd love to see you next time yeah yeah so come back and update us again that's wonderful thank you thank you for getting it done well done now an update on the genesis um probably not the program but the location yes so uh just i wrote to you i think maybe a week ago um so several

076weeks ago a couple of representatives from trackside reached out to see if we could uh explore some options to retain genesis at trackside um as you know we were looking actually looking across the street to relocate and have a a separate site um so we've had a number of conversations um both with the genesis team and with a couple of the folks at trackside and the good news is we've been able to come up with a plan that's going to enable us to keep genesis at trackside so that's really good news i think for the program certainly uh the program staff is feeling good about it i'm feeling good about it because i was growing more and more worried about the some of the financial costs that seemed to be emerging as we were looking

077at getting that building squared away so just to kind of recap you know when i first approached the board to let you know that we were looking for an alternate site the um team had been experiencing some growing pains there at genesis and one of the primary concerns uh was just the fact that they had to they didn't have dedicated space in the facility that they had to set up and break down and so just the challenge that was presented with that you know similarly with some of the space layout they were concerned about you know their own growth potential there so um in conversing with a couple of folks over at trackside you know they've really kind of opened themselves up in partnership and said look well you know we want to keep you

078here and we will you know make as many adjustments and accommodations as is necessary in order to make that happen so that's been a really positive development and so that the team is open as i said i'll be continuing to um meet with the trackside representatives we'll probably um revise the lease that we have um you know we may write in a mou as well but i'm looking forward to keeping that program there and that you know should be at least for the foreseeable future the the home of genesis how long is that currently five five years yeah it's a renewable fund questions comments okay what do they do for lunch they uh either bring their own if they have cars they can go out and get lunch um or we bring lunch over from

079the high school how many students can check side accommodate in the genesis program and how many students are there currently right now i think we have 17 or 18 students they were looking at a maximum capacity originally of as many as 40 and that's fully utilizing the um the whole facility um certainly you know as we've been practicing more social business you know we haven't needed to accommodate 40 but that number has shrunk because we've needed to spread out a little bit more so kevin if we got up to 40 say in two years trackside has the greatest part of that please if they could accommodate that they have okay so you're satisfied we remember one of the rationales for moving with some of the concerns about you know just the flexibility of space relationships

080and the hours of you know trackside programs versus genesis but all that's been taken care of it has been yeah and it's in process and you know frankly i lean very heavily on our team that's over there in the space and so you know it's because they they are there um i had them spell out you know exactly what they thought they needed we presented that to the trackside folks um and you know we were met with um a lot of agreement accommodation okay all right well we're nothing if not flexible that's well of course [Laughter] further questions comments all right budget assumption and goals we're already looking at 2022-23 budget it is so this is uh generally uh one of the initial steps uh in the budget development process is to develop some goals

081and assumptions so you have those i'll just take a minute and review them our primary goal is to provide adequate funding to maintain and improve the high quality education that we provide pre-k-12 within that our major priorities are to continue to address unfinished learning and support the social emotional learning and trauma-informed instructional practices within that you know we you know look at class sizes staffing professional learning and program initiatives we retain as a goal to raise overall mathematics achievement we have in the previous budget tabled a goal to begin the facilities improvement work at middlebrook and the high school as well as attend to the ventilation systems that are currently running at max capacity so you will see in the budget development process this year facility work featured we are also now supporting an it

082hardware replacement plan previously up until this year we had been making major i.t purchases through annual leases and so we have folded those costs into our operating budget and then to support program and curriculum development connected to our portrait of the graduate including the high school the new course proposals that you saw just a couple weeks ago and is on the agenda for tonight in terms of assumptions you know fairly straightforward um we'll honor our collective bargaining agreements we'll comply with federal and state mandates we understand that special education litigation could impact the budget and we also recognize that special education compensator compensatory service cost could impact the budget and then you know our professional learning will you know continue to target high priority areas are there any contracts that will that need to get

083negotiated that will impact the 20 2223 budget our transportation contract um i have to ch i don't know off the top of my head when our food services contract expires i think that might be due also any labor contracts no um we've got we'll go into negotiations with the wea probably at the end of this forthcoming summer um that contract expires the end of 23 yeah right so it would be the next that would impact fiscal 24. questions comments is the facilities improvement the 1970s bathroom at middlebury the well depending on which 1970s bathroom you're referring to um we did renovate the bathrooms down by the auditorium okay um those were addressed this summer it's been a while since i was in the building yeah do we get a as a new board member is

084it possible to get a list of all the federal and state mandates that the school district is behooved to hmm i don't do we contain all of the mandates written in a single place can i we can provide what we can provide let me think about how to describe that in an efficient way so what do you have what are you are you thinking about like special education mandates the law what's what's in your what's on your mind well everything you have to comply to from whether it's like reporting on the asbestos and building maintenance stuff to special education to i know the the long arm of the government yes so i can get a feeling for yeah can i think about how best it you know we we present that information departmentally when we

085do the new board member updates i don't know i i don't think we have like a single source that runs the list um i don't think there's enough paper in the world i'll make notes i'll make a digital file that's all i was yeah like how would you ever send that over yeah you need another server yeah i'll give that some thought nicole and just talk about how best that if we can present that efficiently all right part of the reason that we like putting this together at this time of the year is that as kevin builds the budget when we look at the budget presentation we don't want to be surprised and find something that we don't know about you know like we unpack something and we go what's this and oh it's the

086new science program so these kind of goals and assumptions just sort of cut off that possibility so that if there are new ideas new initiatives major i'm not talking about the the ordinary you know paint three classrooms kind of thing but any anything that's really new or going to be really expensive um or significant or strategic we need to sort of know about it ahead of time before the budget's built so i just want to make sure that this is inclusive it is okay kevin quick question about i feel like i have to honor glenn number two raise overall mathematics achievements i feel like glenn would always say like you keep talking about this and keep talking about this is there anything that we can tie to what we're spending and what our achievement is

087expected to be so instead of having like nebulous look just raise it like could we say we are going to spend x amount of additional dollars to do y with the expectation i'd have to i'd have to give that some thought because you know where when you think about where our dollars go the majority of dollars go to staffing yeah so if you're going to set a goal like that you'd assume that so just we'll play with this hypothetically so we would you know to your point to your example increase spending on staffing um to provide additional classroom teachers to drive down math class size to you know increase interventionists with the expectation that you know achievement would increase you know i don't know x number of points i suppose um i don't know that

088we could um i don't know i'd be confident in drawing a linear line that way that you know more staff equals this um the other place would be you know we'd invest in different programming or um some kind of right i would just love to see it broken down like how much were i i think we could say if we sent an additional three million dollars towards math we would hope to see depending how right how you spent it so it's assuming that um you spent it well so and right now i just want to have some way of looking back and saying that was a good way of spending it so that we don't continue spending it yeah i understood so can i um can i just think about that a little bit because

089i think what um to start i guess i would go back to trying to further break down where and how we're spending money yeah that'd be great because it's not like it's a line item to say right math i would love to see the breakdown of what that means um since it's the second budget goal and how much additional that's going to cost yeah i would even be curious maybe to see since we started the changes in the program 2017-18 perhaps what the increment you know what the percentage increase in resources that's been towards the program versus as opposed to just the constant right spending the constant steady increase so if there's been a particular an increase a percentage increase that's been higher than usual dedicated to the math program yeah i think where we

090would see it is with the addition of intervention yeah so just even just even so coaches beginning yeah it would just be good to define some of these like the coaches you know we're getting more coaches hopefully we're not but if we were going to get more coaches then let's see what the rate of return is sure so maybe back into it like rather than say raise overall math achievement just define what that means yeah you know in grades whatever it means this and grades whatever it means that you know so in other words break it down maybe by the schools you know element or if you're just going to concentrate on one you know like what what's the the focus okay debbie haven't we kind of talked about that right in there they were

091talking about unfinished learning and we were you know giving certain percentages for each grade yeah yeah yeah and those aren't specific i mean those are achievement goals as opposed to you know budget goals but i understand right right but again if we want to overall math achievement we just you mean test scores do you mean like you know what do you mean and which test scores only because like when we talk about bullet point number three it's very easy to see the roi on that so you know we need x amount of dollars to increase middlebrook's ventilation system and as a result we'll have a better ventilation it's just would be great there's something wrapped around there okay yeah that's good feedback anything else on that um just the last one about portrait of the

092graduate again if there are any specifics that we know about maybe we could name them or maybe we're not ready to yet but yeah we can we can talk about it i mean we're we have a roll out plan you know that doesn't necessarily speak specifically to um you know new program development okay or training or right or maybe it does i mean i know you were going to do awareness and yeah which were buy-in and all of that and then okay all right just if you have specifics be good any other questions comments all right um where are we um a policy revision 5131.911 bullying prevention and intervention yes so um this is a required policy and one that's been on our books for a number of years it's here for review and discuss

093tonight because the law has changed so we've revised the policy to conform with the changes in the law there are essentially kind of three primary changes the first the state has changed the definition of bullying so if you take a look at the policy you'll see that we've struck the old language the former definition and then we've supplanted that with the new statutory definition which reads bullying shall mean an act that is direct or indirect and severe persistent and pervasive which one causes physical or emotional harm to an individual two places an individual in reasonable fear of physical or emotional harm or three infringes on the rights or opportunities of an individual at school the second change which is on the second page of the policy the back side the state has mandated that parents

094receive a plain language explanation of rights and remedies available under connecticut general statute 10-4 a and 10-4-b furthermore that parent that these plain language explanations be published on a district's website to the best of my understanding today these plain language explanations do not exist there was a committee charged with developing them when last i spoke to our attorney about this they just they don't exist yet so as soon as they're published and we have them we will put them on our website and then start sharing them with families we have a placeholder on the website that acknowledges that we're actively trying to fulfill the i obligation see why not all right and the last change is that districts are directed to invite parents of a student against whom a verified act of bullying was directed

095to a meeting to communicate measures being taken by a school to ensure the safety of a student so you know that has been our practice probably for ever but now it's codified in the revised statute this is something that the school deals with um yeah i mean we deal with you know i mean so i think um you know student i don't know i don't know a lot compared to what so um but yes i mean has escalated since the pandemic so i think i don't know that bullying has escalated but we're certainly seeing you know a rise in student behaviors um and there's you know i think you know a general sense of and anxiety and um you know shortened tempers and things like that i we have our administrators here so um have

096you guys been investigating more complaints about bullying this year than in previous years bob can you speak for the high school and who was on damian for the middle school yeah i would not say that we're investigating more uh specific bullying complaints right now i would say kevin you alluded to this in terms of student management there has been a significant increase in overall student management this year compared to last year when we were you know in a hybrid had happened and also the mental health team so there are some challenges that i would not say at the high school specifically regarding bullying that we've had an increase thanks father and joey i see you're here um can you speak for the middle school please yeah i guess the easiest way i can say it

097you know i would say exactly what dr adam was just saying is very similar for us that it's not an increase in phony behavior [Music] i would say there's been an increase this year but certainly more of an increase of social model while being present thanks thank you wow so you can see it's the the policy itself is highly regulatory um so we spend a lot of time with it when we're when we're conducting our bullying investigations it's almost like this is the right are the regulations as well yes and you'll there is a an accompanying regulation okay um any other questions or comments this is the first time so we have this again correct right okay so if we do have more questions between now and next meeting that's great and we are going

098to see it next meeting to discuss again not to approve it and the language that is highlighted has changed has that been reviewed by the attorneys this came straight from the ship oh came from it okay got it i'm sorry you ruth reviewed this at the policy committee i'm sorry i should have i'm sorry i mean it's ship menu yeah fitment and goodwin it's good and good um all right uh that brings us to review and discuss the new course proposals we saw several last week and out of uh understanding that we have two new board members who just wanted to make sure that we had a meeting in case there are any follow-up questions and then some of us from did send you questions and we may have questions uh tonight as well so

099i don't know how you want to organize it you want to just go through the courses and see if there are any questions or did you have in mind so i didn't i didn't we didn't list out the courses so why don't we there are specific questions i know you sent a couple chuck is prepared to respond to some of those um bob is also here so why don't we just i just think it might be easier if we say all right let's start with math are there any questions on the two new math courses that haven't been asked and answered i'm not i'm fine yeah okay are there both for both of them are you expecting i know i think this was mentioned last time but i can't quite remember is it um a

100section for both courses you're anticipating in the first year so bob the question was are you anticipate or check one one section of each the the three and two and two and one i believe that's what trudy said yes any other math questions all right how about american sign language before i'm sorry of math you did have a written question about the overrides and math yes would you like me to address that of course but i yeah if you hadn't had time i didn't want to push it that's all okay well i you know i just want you to know that the um the decision not to allow overrides in accelerated math courses uh was made when the board approved the change in the math course sequence and that came about as a result of

101a recommendation from the math curriculum review committee after we reviewed student performance in the accelerated courses and also surveyed stakeholders specifically teachers students and parents we're only implementing the no override practice as we roll out the new course sequence so at the high school level we would only be implementing this next year so currently at the high school there is still an override process in place this didn't affect overrides in other subject areas which i think was part of your question there is a process that's um delineated in the course of study document where parents can request um to be placed in a course that was not recommended by the school if there is a course that is a prerequisite to a no for an override then students must pass the final examination for that

102prerequisite course okay i just was trying to get at you know is it the acceleration piece that says no override and that was the and only in math yeah that was the motivation okay thanks and is it it's a two-in-one course is that an honors level course uh yeah it's an accelerated course yes so is that a two or three um we're not leveling that course um it it's for students that you're talking about the three and two another integrated the integrated algebra and geometry yeah so that would be students who completed um students who are in the tribe which i will call correctly students who take grade level math in eighth grade but who um performed at a higher level and students who took algebra in eighth grade would be taking the the two-year

103course okay so then a student coming into ninth grade would have the choice of taking an algebra one geometry course or they could take algebra three as a freshman um are they going to view both of those courses as equally rigorous um i think that the two-year course is more rigorous than the combined jubilee geometry but as a freshman student coming in who has the choice of doing algebra one geometry or algebra one as an honors level course which one would be more rigorous i think the combined algebra geometry would be considered but i should be clear that it's not a choice on the part of students students qualify for these courses and there is not an override option for the student and parent so but you can currently override into algebra three algebra algebra

104one to three no algebra one honestly this year you're able to next year you will not be able to okay okay parents do have the option to have the placement recommendation review with the final decisions with the principal any other math questions any questions about american sign language all right how about marine biology um dbt wellness are there other schools in in the dirk that offer dbt as a credit level class trying to remember what kim said that i don't believe so because i think it's a great class and it's it's been so successful at middlebrook that i think it should exist at the high school but i have a question about it being a a credit bearing class as opposed to maybe being offered in academic lab for students there so at middlebrook the

105dbt is a service not a class and the class that um we're proposing for the high school is a an educational class it's not therapy that's why it's being offered for credit it's skill based it's about students learning what's being done at middlebrook is more of the therapeutic version of dbt but you know what we could have kim come back and explain that in a little bit more detail how about the intro to exercise um science and sports medicine course i think there was a question i know i sent it in about the fte yeah and so we appreciate that question debbie so in the 6141 which we have now corrected um that was off by a decimal point so the question was about the fte allotment and so if we have one section of

106that class it would be actually .083 fde and if there were two seconds it means point 0.166 so teachers who teach pe health at the high school teach six classes so each semester course is not the equivalent of a 0.1 it's a 0.083 so that's a good pickup on your part we appreciate it we made that amendment a document well i was also thinking about budget and when i saw that was one section it seemed like an expensive section all right no thank you that was an easy mistake to make so thank you thank you any other questions about that course all right um how about the black and latino studies you got a question from me that was kind of rambling and maybe other people have more questions but it was a little hard

107to understand what was state required by led by um statute and there were a couple of statutes apparent apparently at work and then what what what could we choose and then what could we just take charge of um and so if you could clarify that if it's possible sure so we consulted with the um state ed consultant at csde about this and i believe kevin also spoke with our attorneys about this the state the legislation requires that we both offer the course and that we use the curriculum developed by the state ed department the units of study are of high quality but they're really quite extensive and so at the local level teachers do have some decisions to make specifically around which lessons they will adopt what activities within those lessons they will use what

108materials they will use and how they will assess students the document provides a lot of options but it doesn't prevent teachers from developing their own and that's what our teachers are going to be working on this summer during their curriculum days [Music] and some of those decisions are going to depend upon the needs of the students as well as what's covered in other courses that were in high school specifically u.s history the co-op the course will be offered to students in grade 12 although i think as a dave mentioned at the prior meeting it is possible we can consider including students interested in great 11 depending upon their particular circumstances did that answer your question um well yes and no um i guess i'll just be blunt um there's some concern and i think you

109heard it um in a public and i come in a comment uh and again i don't know to the extent of the specifics but are we satisfied as our teachers and our staff that there are not a set of assumptions that um you know are brought to bear on the course you know versus studying something rather than us making some set of assumptions right this question has come up before and i think our teachers have been pretty clear that our goal is to help students inquire around these issues and we don't shy away from controversial issues you know one of the most important things in those essential questions is to what extent do these things happen and we support our students in researching that idea and coming to their own conclusions so there is not

110a predetermined outcome for students we are exploring and learning about controversial issues and we want to make sure our students are well prepared because when they get to college they're going to confront these controversial issues and we need to prepare them well to deal with it but our teachers are not coming with an idea of indoctrinating students in a particular point of view chuck the question i have um and i wanted to thank the member of the public who came and voiced her concerns it's the subjectivity around it how do we manage that because i feel like if i gave any teacher any curriculum there's an amount of subjectivity that can lean far one way or the other and i don't mean to politicize this but i'm just curious how we manage that well i

111think our teachers are quite adept at this you know they've been dealing with controversial issues for a long time um it's a matter of making sure that we're presenting things not as foregone conclusions but areas for inquiry and having our students use all of the skills that they the critical skills that they've learned to take for instance an eber ibram candy text analyze the claims understand where the context with which this particular author is making these particular claims and and to write their own conclusions about the accuracy of that i i think i also would like to perhaps see as the course develops because um the state curriculum is very detailed and that that there is availability to our teachers to tailor those lessons and i think especially like materials and so i think i

112would like to you know kind of better understand how that might happen with the you know acknowledgement that this is like a history course and um you know facts are not subjective so um well i think once the teachers have refined the curriculum over the summer we could certainly have them come back and do a presentation it might get a little geeky in terms of curriculum but we can certainly do that for you yeah i think that's something i think that that would be i think that would be helpful sure i think because when you read just what the state has put out with there's definitely there's different glosses that can be put on that and i think knowing you know the um the rigorous academic factual approach that our staff will take to this

113and seeing how that then materializes as the course um would be helpful sure we also don't want the course to be politicized no and that that that could happen as well well i i think adding to the um skeptic or worry if you will is that the state typically when they say we're going to require physical science or we're going to require geometry they will say here's some here we and they adopted the common core standards so they they sort of sit there but then they at most they sometimes come out with a list of topics to be included this is the first time it seems so prescribed and so totally right yeah and i think that's uh that's a little bit of um something to look at yeah you know i think that when

114we spoke with the consultant that stated department he acknowledged an unusual move on the part of the legislature to mandate a curriculum i do think there is some worry about you know this is a sensitive topic and i think the state wanted to make sure that a absolutely high quality curriculum was available to districts and as i said it's quite extensive no district could take that course as described and implemented in the year so there is a lot of discretion on the part of teachers about which lessons they will use what activities they'll use you know how they'll go about assessments so it's not prescribed i i don't want people to think that the way it's written is that's the way it's going to be implemented there is a lot of discretion on the part

115of districts to make decisions particularly since we all offer different types of history courses right so we have to look at what was covered in our u.s history class and adjust this course accordingly and u.s history is still going to be a prerequisite for this course or no yes we have said that there may be some 11th graders who will take it simultaneously jan did you have a question yeah just a comment i hear what you're saying about you know presenting and everybody trying to stay neutral i think it's also important though for having students read a book that is slanted one way that they are also reading a book that is slanted the other way so that a true conversation can happen about both sides that they've read versus only having one and i

116think what you know some families are starting to feel is that some of our existing classes that we're only having our students read one book that slams one way and we're not and then we're having a conversation about it but we're not ever really having our students read something on the other side as well and i think that's part of what the frustration is and the concern and i i apprecia i understand and i find that concern too i just sat in the voices for choices clapped the other day and have read and reading some of the books that are being offered and i do think that um it is um important that we make um historical and factual underpinning be the starting point of our of our conversations and of our of our um

117of our learning and i think that um i get concerned when subjectivity is put on that as well and so i just that's why i would like to see some of the you know how the course kind of meets out and it's worked out yeah and we can and will do that i mean what i want to emphasize is i think we not only have the latitude but we should exercise the latitude to to wiltonize this course that's the term we use around the high school at times and um and we will do so and so i think we can report back to the board as to how it's being developed and also how to be implemented but i do think that our teachers are very very adept at valuing and encouraging multiple perspectives on

118numerous issues and um having spoken with the teachers and under david's leadership david willock in the context of the social studies class you know that's an expectation so i think that the students in there will have a good experience i think that they will be encouraged to express value multiple viewpoints um i agree with bruce point i think when you look at texts um you want complimenting and or differing texts to present it for students for them to you know evaluate and diffuse and form their own opinions and then have that be a little bit of a you know an area to percolate these ideas with kids under the guides of a skilled teacher and this is something that our teachers do in most of our disciplines on a regular basis so um we will

119get this right and i think we can report to the board as to how it gets developed as we get ready to implement next year all right i think i thank you for the the answers and we'll look forward to follow up about you know this particular course um and then also to perhaps jen's larger point of you know just to make sure that or maybe the voices of course you know just to make sure there's a variety there's a spectrum of um on a reading list that that represents you said multiple perspectives okay any other questions or comments all right action items there aren't any [Applause] and then there are a series of meeting dates next week there are two one is the four board meeting uh it's that's not that unusual it's usually

120just the tri board and this year lynn vander slice is inviting the planning and zoning commission because there are some major projects going on that may impact the financial and the economic and the population and impact on on the on all of wilton so that's really kind of a state of the or the state of the town a kind of discussion ahead of budget development and just being aware of some of the factors that are influencing the finances of the town and then there's long-range planning we all got the invite for that that's the cast of a lot of people um that's at cider mill okay good i would have gone to the twin center thank you yeah cider mill learning commons all right great okay um comments from the public i did are you

121reading them i i shall okay i emailed and i texted you um okay give me one second sure okay so this comes from uh jared martin 26 laurel lane boe and administration i'd ask each board member and administrator to self-teach common core long division and regress that educational paradigm to each perceiving mathematical topic the board is always searching for more class time perhaps we can find it through optimizing the time we have by not teaching four different ways to solve the same concept by simply teaching the way that works teacher coaches are not the deficit as the teachers are reaching out to parents employing us to ensure our children have rote memorization of 0 to 12 times tables this was and is the job of the school and in second or latest third grade the

122foundational deficits created in second through fourth grade continuously show up in subsequent years raise expectations and we will raise results thank you any other public comments all right we finished the business of the meeting so it's now adjourned thank you everyone see you next week you