BOE Meeting (19 August 2021)

001i don't know what that entails does that red light mean that we're on yes yes it does okay all right i'm going to call the wilton board of education thursday august 19th regular meeting to order is there a motion to approve the agenda so moved thank you glenn is there a second exactly thanks ruth all in favor aye aye agenda's approved comments from the public we can take them tonight in two ways one if one is if they're members here from the public who wish to speak now's a chance or on zoom via email to lucille de novio do we have any um any speakers or emails i do not have any emails all right and i don't see anyone here there will be us opportunity at the end of the meeting consent agenda is

002there a move to approve the consent agenda thanks glenn second second all right ruth all in favor all right because i wasn't on the board okay well that brings me to the board shares report where i want to say welcome back everyone um certainly board members and especially to laura laura schwem so thank you for joining us for these next few weeks really appreciate it also like to thank our av tech crew that's here tonight filming for us uh there are three people one of whom uh it's his birthday tonight so we appreciate his extra time and effort on his birthday so thank you these are students who are skilled and dedicated so i want to thank them in advance also i think we're all sort of beginning to feel the buildup of for the

003beginning of the school year that sort of annual positive vibe that emerges at this time of year and so i think about all the kids pre-k to seniors and each one is anticipating the year with high expectations so our mission as we all know as a district is to provide the educational environment so that all our kids can realize their hopes and dreams for this year so in order to have a smooth opening to school it takes a lot of summer work and i wanted to take a minute before the students and the teachers come back and say a special thank you to our k i mean to our yes our district summer staff which includes the dr smith the district leadership all the principals the office staff custodians and anyone else that i haven't

004mentioned but the behind the scenes summer work is immense and so we thank you as we anticipate a smooth school opening tonight we have a lot on our agenda so let's get started and i'm going to hand it over to dr smith great thank you and i will echo you in several ways first happy birthday happy 17th birthday to joe eustis who spends as much time here as we do and has for a couple years now as the av team so we want to wish him well and thank him for being downstairs and to all of you and everybody at home who's watching and a couple folks who joined us tonight welcome back to a new school year we're excited to launch this school year staff across the district have been finalizing their preparations and

005we're really excited and looking forward to welcoming students in person on monday august 30th i also want to expend a extend a very warm welcome to all of our new families of which we have a considerable number who've moved into town over the course of the last year and then finally give a very special acknowledgement to our senior class of class of 2022 if you can get your head around that number right so as you can see logistically we're picking up where we left off in june so our meeting is hybrid with administrators joining us remotely and then other members of the public have the opportunity to be here in person or to tune in through zoom online and i expect we'll continue this format um you know probably through the entire school year so

006as debbie noted i too know there's mounting nervousness as we approach the start of school about the increase in covet 19 cases i want to assure all of you that we are well planned and well prepared to ensure that this will be a great school year we'll continue to communicate routinely and we're going to ask all of our community members to be flexible as we continue to adapt and respond to changing conditions conditions switching gears here as always there's much to celebrate and so as part of that i want to thank and advance and celebrate all of you and our staff and our families for the tremendous ongoing partnership i also want to celebrate and recognize our pta presidents who like so many of us have been working routinely across the summer gathering information sharing

007information making themselves ready to start this school year and we know we work best when we work well together i think the previous school year really illustrated that beyond the shadow of a doubt in celebrating in other news we learned this summer that you all the wilton board of education was again the recipient of the connecticut boards of education level 2 leadership award and this award is one that recognizes high performing boards of education so i want to congratulate you on that recognition again the board also received several bonnie e carney communication award honorable mentions there was a recognition in the social media category one in the district budget category and then two from cave in the special projects category and those are we receive awards pretty regularly and i think it speaks to the

008high quality of the information that we present so congratulations on that i'm going to stop there because you're going to be hearing a lot from me and so the rest of my comments are going to be organized through the rest of the agenda so thank you okay thank you uh committee reports i honestly don't know of a committee that met but somebody could remind me differently no nope all right so dr smith back to you review so tonight we're going to organize my update really in two pieces one i want to start with cobit protocols and really speak specifically to health and safety strategies and then the second piece on the 2021 opening update um that'll i'll just you know contain those comments around um our reopening plans and updates um and we'll start that

009section with a vaccination status update and we've got lots of good information to share all of the information that i'm sharing tonight we've sent out recently you received this our parents and staff received this lucille has it on the screen and so it contains all of our opening strategies so i'll be referencing this um throughout these comments can you um remind us when you'd like us to request if we have questions sure so why don't we um why don't we if you don't mind i'll walk through covet protocols and then i'll stop and we can just revisit anything any of the comments any of the information that was shared and then we can do the same in the second piece if that makes sense um so um first uh we've you know retained a number

010of high leverage health and safety strategies and we've relaxed others in an effort to maximize high impact instruction and these we've talked about these in the past so these should make sense the first item is masks so as i think everybody knows currently we're operating under binding guidance issued by the commissioner of public health and the commissioner of education as authorized by the governor through executive order 13a which requires all individuals regardless of vaccination status to wear masks while inside a school building that guidance is enforced through september 30th and at some point we'll get updated guidance um but i don't really have a sense of when that's going to be and so as soon as we know something else about masks we'll certainly share it but that's really the punchline and i think the

011answer to the mask question with respect to social distancing we'll continue to practice social distancing to the extent possible where we can achieve three feet or greater we will most of our classrooms because of the population density we really can't achieve three feet consistently so where we can we will but we won't be able to have three feet always and everywhere so all the more reason why it'll be important that we have masks certainly while students are eating their lunches we will have students at least three feet apart in cases where we can have more social distance we will and so our lunch protocols will be very similar to last year well also as we did a year ago continue to access the outdoors and take advantage of as much outdoor time as possible certainly

012as the weather permits in our music classes to start the year we'll again retain the social distance parameters that we utilized last year there is some updated research that suggests that social distancing in choral classes can be reduced to three feet if students are wearing masks but the department of public health hasn't yet offered any updated guidance so the guidance that they published most recently suggests at least six feet in those classes and so that's the guidance we're going to follow until it changes unless it changes again hand washing and hand sanitizing very important practices with all of our staff and students we'll continue to have hand sanitizing stations at the entrance of each school and in every classroom it will be as it has been the expectation that students and staff will sanitize their

013hands as they enter the buildings in classrooms and then we'll maintain the signage reinforcing those messages with respect to ventilation we continue to implement the department of public health ventilation guidance from a year ago as you know that guidance stipulated that we set our system so they maximize fresh air flow through the buildings we increased the type of the quality of the filter we use so it's a little thicker than the standard filters that presents a challenge when you're trying to move air through the building but our systems retain those settings we engaged with a commissioning agent again this year and that person has been working with mark esposito our full-time hvac specialist going through each of our buildings i expect to have that report fairly shortly but we should feel pretty confident in the

014job that mark has done and will do he's top notch and our systems you know are in very very good shape with respect to cleaning and disinfecting the dph has updated their guidance there and are suggesting that the kind of rigorous cleaning that was in place last year doesn't need to be in place this year they're pretty confident that fomite transmission is very low risk and so the recommendation is that we revert to the traditional routine daily cleaning and then we maintain the cleaning and disinfecting of particular areas bathrooms nurses stations so we'll do that we were one of the few districts a year ago that introduced voluntary surveillance testing and so as part of the welcome back to school guidance that the state department vet is offering they are proposing surveillance testing as another

015high leverage strategy so we'll continue to offer voluntary surveillance testing we sent out the link to that when in one of our memos to families and we'll continue to invite those who are unvaccinated particularly families at cider mill and millard driscoll to participate and so that will continue weekly as you've seen and you'll hear about later on are vaccination rates for eligible individuals are very high and so i expect them to continue to increase but we'll keep surveillance testing as an added measure with contact tracing and quarantining this is a practice we got very good at a year ago and so we'll continue first to maintain isolation spaces in our schools than we'll use as necessary we'll follow the connecticut department of public health and state department of education interim recommendations for contact tracing and

016quarantining they have changed slightly and so per a cdc recommendation there is a couple of carve outs so one of them pertains to students only in classrooms and so if students are within three feet then they'll need to quarantine but if they're three feet or greater and they're wearing a mask and they aren't showing symptoms then they will not need to quarantine and so if you think about the way we operated last year and the numbers of students we had to quarantine because of direct contact this will be a really important mechanism to reduce significantly the potential number of students who will need to quarantine vaccinated individuals as long as they're asymptomatic do not need to quarantine so that's also a change from the guidance that was published in the middle part of last year

017and then for unvaccinated folks the guidance remains the same and so we have our quarantine and contact racing procedures set up and ready to go cross your fingers we won't need them but um we are ready to go let me style stuff there questions yeah what is the status of lockers okay we'll lockers will be used this year they will great because that's not mentioned anywhere uh so that's good news okay that's great are we using the gym knockers as well kids changing kids will be changing gym lockers and i think you know what um when we look at the the highest leverage strategies so certainly middle school high school um you know vaccinated individuals and we have quite a number of them in their schools highest leverage strategy followed by masks you know talking

018with dr mack and she reviewed our protocols um we think you know there are lots of practices we had in place before the pandemic that we can return to and i think like everything else you know we'll of course be monitoring daily and we can adjust as necessary but you know those two things for sure having a place to start the year we came through last year really unbelievably well all things considered i think and to continue what we did last year it makes all the sense in the world to keep it up i'm pleasantly surprised or not shouldn't be surprised perhaps by the percentage of our staff that's vaccinated i think it's phenomenal but do we know obviously perhaps everyone hasn't responded or didn't participate in the survey but let's say there's a if

019there's 85 percent militaristic of that 15 percent that aren't vaccinated do we know what portion of any of those have uh recovered had covered and recovered and now have you know we don't have we didn't ask okay question yeah because i think they may not be vaccinated for a very good reason they don't need to be and so that would skew the percentages are incredible but and our students also the families have been diligent evidently about getting their children who are able and qualified or 12 and older actually and that's fantastic it speaks so highly of the of the community yeah we have um i think we are wilton among that age population i think we might be the fourth highest vaccinated population in the state yeah i'm not surprised it's just great i'm thrilled

020to see that and it's not gonna be an easy year certainly but we're doing all the right things i think so the other question about the mask mandate from vermont his ability to issue executive orders expires september 30th right now unless it's renewed again by the legislature so i don't know what's going to happen there or who then is going to be the person making the decision i don't think we have any guidance or need we don't okay so we're good through the 30th and then we'll just wait to see right that's correct because he cannot after the 30th and his ability to issue executive orders goes away yes okay all right great any other other questions hi mandy welcome good to see you other questions on covet protocols um numbers that came in um

021anybody who did not respond did they count as being not vaccinated or did we just skip it no it's unvaccinated so the percentage that we reported is of the total population in the building so what maria and her staff have been doing is going back and reaching out to folks and trying to you know nail down their status and so we'll continue that and there's i don't know if all of you caught we're going to actually transition to that vaccinations is like the first item under um the 2021 opening update and so maria is going to walk us through all of those numbers and she can explain all of that in fair detail and then if you haven't seen the governor's order you know he's now imposing a vaccine mandate for all k-12 staff and

022so that's something we have to get the specific specifics of that order and begin to implement it so that'll you know i expect we'll hear the details in the next day or so and that's just for staff um have you guys assessed the vaccination for the students the survey going out there that's coming up you got here just in time um math breaks are we gonna go back to doing them yeah yeah we are and that will be you know determined uh by the administrators you know in concert with the teachers and they're not required outside correct masks are not required outside correct and what about the lunchroom what about the lunchroom so during lunch will they be social distance again so lunch will not be in the lunchrooms so lunch will be in the

023cafeterias at uh the high school at middlebrook at cider mill the high school middle also at the two upper schools they'll have over flow space in the gymnasium cider mill will utilize the science lab upstairs as they did last year at miller driscoll the students will eat lunch in their classrooms and in the cafeteria and so the administrators there have set up a rotating plan to move kids over a period of weeks in and out of the cafeteria but students will be spaced um at least three feet apart they'll obviously have their masks off when they're eating and then they'll go out and enjoy recess and if you discuss this already i can go back and listen but for the sneeze guards are these guards are gone and tables are three feet apart and so

024in the cafeteria tables are three feet apart in the classrooms you know we're going to try to achieve three feet where we can but we also know um we'll have teachers who are episodically pulling kids for small groups and so you know you'll see kids clustered at periods of time for um for instruction my only other question is about surveillance testing are we paying for that or is the state paying for it so we have a supply of tests remaining that we'll use and then the state has offered um a surveillance testing program but it's for targeted groups and so we'll pursue that with the state and you know as much as we can access their programs we will can you talk a little bit more about ventilation given the fact that it's nice weather

025to what extent can we open windows go outside take more masks breaks if we're outside we don't have to wear masks um are we going to do we sort of what we tried to do last year and get out as much as we could absolutely so you know at the high school the campus will remain open and so students will have the opportunity to eat outside the seniors will have the privilege to leave campus during lunch in all of our other schools that um you know the issue for our buildings um really is around humidity and so you know when it's not humid and we're not running the air conditioning as much windows can be open we can you know maximize pressure it gets challenging to maintain the interior conditions when in high humidity and

026so that's when you know we wanted mark just you know he's has it down to a science okay but you know he's always you know monitoring our machines especially on those hot days because we're trying to keep the the climate controlled as well while maximizing as much fresh air flow as possible and i understand that humidity is going to complicate things um pe classes physical education classes they will run as they have in the past the pe teachers when they're doing engaging in activities that are high respiration they'll have the kids spread out and certainly um you know for the start of the year whether permitting they'll have students outside as much as they're able to okay and then um just one more question from me anyway is the or at least for now the

027quarantine thing if we're not can you explain the three feet and the quarantine and the vaccine so and the mask and the right so i guess i'm you know sort of zeroed in maybe more at the elementary level in terms of who might need to be quarantined since they're not going to be back so they can't have been vaccinated right so if students in the elementary school so we'll just use that as an example right um if they are at least three feet from a positive individual and they're wearing a mask and they're asymptomatic they will not need to quarantine if they're within three feet for more than 15 minutes over a 24 hour period or for some reason they're not wearing a mask or they're symptomatic then the quarantine rules apply and the quarantine

028is 10 days 10 days or there's a 7 day quarantine provision also [Music] based on being asymptomatic and having two negatives two negative tests right okay i think it would be helpful i think for all the parents out there if we could just kind of say what a day might look like as compared to last year just in terms of even like the younger kids like so we're talking about returning to small group instruction being able to fully move around the classroom we're going to the art room we're going to the music room there will be i presume multiple classes out on the playroom around at the same time i think that would you know how buses will be operating at the end of the day sure i think that might be a little bit

029um helpful i agree like an faq document would be great to send out because there's so many questions right just from each principle like or something along those lines just lockers will be you will be changing a gym just kind of yeah just a picture of so by you think what would be more helpful is by building because much of that information was published in the documents i sent out but i think it would build by building it be more helpful yeah i think that you know if the even if it's just kind of like a hand up maybe i need a teacher day or an email that just goes out just kind of to give like a sense of yeah um when you're talking to your child and they're like well what will it

030be like this year are we going to the library are we going to just so they sure can have parents can answer those questions easily so i'm just trying to imagine how the easiest format for that so uh an example of a daily schedule a life a day in the life of a child yeah [Music] well you know starting with maybe the bus ride yeah you get off the bus and you go yeah your class and if you're changing classes for subjects or french you know insider mill just also um some of those kids some of those third graders were not in that school yeah prior so cider mill experience it's very different from a kid that had already been there yeah the year before that so just yeah we can do that absolutely kevin

031as part of that the best question sure want to take a bus to daycare or to the y yeah so we'll have we'll be providing transportation to child care centers to pre-planned after-school activities what we're not going to do unless it's a pre-assigned activity we're not going to be providing ad hoc transportation play dates you know generally speaking you know in the past before coveted kids could board the bus for downtown and so we're not going to start the year allowing that and that's really because we need to have clear bus rosters in case we have to contact trace and so our thinking right now is um you know we know there are activities and child care centers and things like that that kids have to get to and those we can plan for because

032they're pre-registered in advances so we can you know predict which kids are going to be on which buses in the afternoon and that way we can assign seeds and if we have to contact trace we can do that effectively our thinking is we'll watch how the first several weeks of school unfold if transmission rates are constant or begin to decline and we feel comfortable that we can start to loosen things up again then that would be one of the areas where we would loosen up a little bit more so if my child is getting tutored at the library i would send an email saying every tuesday my child has to have a library or in that case the um i'm going to go back and talk to the principals about that we weren't talking specifically

033about you know those kind of one-off moments what we're talking about are you know programs that kids pre-register for right and then um going back to the vaccination question i'm sure jen has more questions sorry jen if if a child in who has been vaccinated you mentioned the quarantining for kids who had not been vaccinating right for a child who has been vaccinated they don't need to quarantine right now so if they are within three feet of a positive child if you are vaccinated um you don't need to quarantine and asymptomatic yes you have to be asymptomatic that's right all right so jen did you have more questions if you want to send out the faq in an email format try to do it before meet the teacher because that way hopefully ideally the teacher

034won't have to be answering the same questions over and over sure i think kids can focus on just meeting the teacher so any other questions or comments on that part it's all good as good as it can be great all right so why don't we move into the next piece and i'm going to have maria who should be present with us virtually um just walk us through the vaccination numbers yes okay and some of them were in this packet as well yeah you have this summary good evening everyone oh it looks like i i'm not able to we're seeing it yeah we we have it here maria okay so just uh let me pull it up on my screen okay here we go so the vaccination survey results that i'm going to share reflect the

035surveys that we administered to all parents of students who are age 12 and older those are the students who are eligible for the vaccine and all staff members across the district we administered this vaccine in the first two weeks of august and i want to be really clear that um just to state the obvious many people aren't checking their email regularly over the summer or are on vacation so the vaccination rates that i'm reporting out on tonight are really as of you know early this week because we had people continuing to respond and in fact even as of today we've been having people continuing to respond um we are gathering more information i will give an update in the future on all of the information that we've collected but so far the response rate has

036been very good and we're very optimistic that the rates are even higher than what i'm going to report out on tonight i'm going to go ahead and advance slide or ask lucille or kevin to advance the slide okay so just to begin with students we combined the high school genesis and community steps populations into one group and the reason for that is the the size the group size for genesis and community steps is quite small and we didn't present any information that could be personally identifiable for some of the students in those groups so we've combined them all into one all students in those groups are eligible so it's 1250 students we had a 78 response rate which really at any point in the year is excellent but considering that it's over the summer it's

037especially good and then at middlebrook we had 551 students which is 61 of the middle brook population eligible and again a very similar response rate 79 percent so we're going to advance to the next slide at wilton high school genesis and community steps we have confirmation that 961 students are fully vaccinated so that's 70 essentially 77 of the total population we have confirmation that 1.8 are not vaccinated and then 21.3 have not responded yet so um you know just anecdotally we've gotten responses from families saying well my child will be vaccinated by the end of the summer or at the start of september and so we suspect that we're going to get more responses and that many of those responses will be that the students are vaccinated so you know when we look at a

03877 vaccination rate it doesn't mean that you know that the remaining percentage reflects students who are not vaccinated it just means that we don't necessarily know yet and if we move on to middle brook we have 898 students there that's the total population 551 eligible uh we have about 44 percent 40 45 essentially that are fully vaccinated 3.6 percent confirmed unvaccinated and 12.9 percent that haven't responded yet and this uh chart reflects what those percentages look like compared to the entire middle brook population i thought you might be interested in knowing you know across the school approximately what percentage of students we have that are confirmed vaccinated knowing that the entire population is not eligible and if we look at the next slide the vaccine eligible students the vaccination rate of those students who are

039eligible is essentially the same it's very similar to the high schools it's about 73 of eligible students are confirmed vaccinated just under 6 percent are confirmed unvaccinated and we have 21 percent that have not responded yet now i've left room at the end for for questions is that okay or do you prefer to stop now and ask questions about the students before we move on to the employees we'll wait we'll wait go ahead okay we'll move on to the employees tonight's update reflects information about 616 district employees that includes certified staff our teachers our counselors our specialists non-certified staff our paraprofessionals custodians office staff like with the parent population we have many staff members who are away over the summer we hope that many don't check email that they really take the time to recharge

040and so what we're sharing tonight again just reflects who has responded to the survey we continue to have people checking in and responding for the first time so we're sharing with you what we have as of now we did not include in this update information about our substitutes cafeteria aids and athletic coaches while we administered the survey to members of those groups we recognize that for one or the least likely to check their email over the summer so the response rate has not been as high as the other groups and two those are the groups that change the most in terms of you know turnover so we continue to hire for those groups and we'll look forward to to presenting the information on those groups at a later date so if we take a look

041at the next slide with our confirmed vaccination rates by location um i think this is a very positive start for where we are if you look at miller driscoll 141 employees are confirmed vaccinated and i want to be clear that as we look at the different sites we only have at this point about three to five percent of our staff who have confirmed that they're not vaccinated so when you look at a percentage like 85 percent vaccinated at miller driscoll it doesn't mean the 15 aren't it just means we haven't heard back from most of the the remaining 15 just to break that those groups down a little bit more we have 88 percent of certified staff those are the teachers and support of the specialists that work with the students the counselors and then

04280 percent of nine non-certified staff paraprofessionals secretaries custodians would fall into that group at cider mill very similar 124 employees 82 percent vaccinated to break down that group a bit more 86 percent of certified staff are confirmed vaccinated 73 percent of non-certified staff vaccinated at middle brook it's similar again 84 percent of the entire staff population is confirmed to be vaccinated 86 certified staff of non-certified staff and then if we take a look at the next slide we have the high school genesis and community steps groups 84 vaccinated 88 of the certified staff at those sites are vaccinated 75 percent of non-certified staff are vaccinated district offices this includes central office the business office the continuing education leadership are confirmed to be vaccinated 100 percent of the certified staff are vaccinated and 91 of non-certified

043staff are vaccinated and then if we look just overall across the district no surprise there's that 85 percent again keeps coming up uh vaccinated 87 of certified staff and 79 percent of non-certified so um i think this is a really great place to be considering that you know we weren't sure what response rate we would get over the summer we continue to get responses you know daily we're reaching out to staff as well and in terms of the other groups that were not included the substitutes koshers and cafeteria aids we do have some data on them just not enough that i felt that it was an accurate reflection so i'll look forward to sharing that at a later date now i'm happy to take any questions that you have i have a question it's mandy

044can you go back one slide sure which slide is this one so all schools so 616 employees 512 vaccinated so are we assuming you haven't heard from 104 or of those whole numbers like what percentage are not vaccinated well you know it's we we have confirmation from about three to five percent that are not vaccinated and how you how are we handling when a staff member says i'm not vaccinated i'm not getting vaccinated so that's interesting because you know as we've seen in this world of covid you know things change so rapidly that we have as of 4 pm today a mandate from governor lamont that requires all staff that work in schools k through 12 to be to be vaccinated and we haven't you know obviously it's just been a few hours since he

045made that announcement so we haven't had sufficient time to process what that means but um you know naturally when there are mandates like the one that he made today with the one that he announced today there are medical exemptions that people um would need to apply for and qualify for there are religious exemptions and there's also from what i could see from my you know just preliminary exploration of what he he sent out there's also a test out option if people who refuse to be vaccinated agree to weekly testing however who pays for that um is is in question because the state is is not covering that type of testing for individuals at this time so for people who have very specific reasons for not being vaccinated there does appear to be a provision for

046them for others uh you know i think we'd have to work through that i mean it's it's the governor's mandate so we were required to follow that to adhere to that and to ensure that our employees do i think it's also important to recognize that there may be issues with bargaining units you know our bargaining units may demand to bargain over the the impact of this mandate and what that might look like so again this is all late breaking news and we don't know exactly how this is going to play out but uh there's there's a lot less choice for people when a mandate like this is issued so um i'm happy to update more as we proceed in the coming days and weeks but this is what we know as of almost four hours

047ago today and then for like the future booster and for kids who turn 12 say in october what's the best way to disseminate that information once they receive the boosters they receive the vaccination do we have like a one email address for the whole school or you're talking like your parents want to volunteer yeah information without being affirmatively asked for it yes so if someone if i have a child in october turns 12 and i want to go get that information could we possibly set up some way to get that information to you instead of having you have to keep sending out surveys absolutely yes i think what we'll do is just post something to the website well we'll probably continue to send out reminders just because people some people really like the reminders or

048just like the ease of having something right in front of them not having to go find a link but we'll also post something to our website we want to make this as easy for for staff and for families as possible yeah i think that'd be great especially for all the kids turning 12 in the fall and my last question is the substitute like two questions substitute aids athletic coaches what's your plan for them are they included in the governor's mandate they are yeah it's all employees so how many right now we have 616. how many how many will that add substitute aids athletic coaches approximately are we talking 30 50 100 oh no we're close to 800. yeah yeah yeah because we you know if we we have um many many athletic coaches of the

049course of a year we have you know between 60 and 100 substitutes we like to be on the higher end of that number when we're lucky but right now we have about 60 substitutes uh and then we have not very many cafeteria aids across the district maybe 10 to 15 but yes they're included we've already administered the survey to them however as i as i mentioned earlier they're they're less likely to check their email over the summer you know some of the coaches don't work until the winter or the spring so um that's just going to take us a little bit more time to work through but we're absolutely committed to collecting that information and obviously to adhering to the governor's mandate so would you say we're committed to on the first day of school

050for those that this is important to that every one of the schools will be vaccinated you mean not the governor's staff sorry staff no we couldn't commit to the first day of school right everybody vaccinated now and the governor's mandate is um i think it's by the as the 27th of uh september okay and so i mean it's going to take us some time we don't even have the details yet right i just wanna i didn't think that was gonna happen to make sure that and my last question is parents who want to come into the school yeah so we're allowing volunteers and visitors in a limited fashion but will they have to show proof of vaccination to come in um to just to enter the school you know this mandate is really for employees

051so i would think not and you know folks are in when they volunteer it's for a very limited time we have all of the other mitigation strategies we've just spoken about in place so at this point i don't see requiring that i don't see the necessity of requiring that either so if i were a parent sending a kid to school looking at your numbers maria it looks like very close to 90 percent of certified staff in each building is confirmed vaccinated and some of those numbers may rise if you get more information or people finish up their vaccines and then by and then by september 27th that number may be higher right or well unless they have an exemption that part of the governor's thing isn't quite quite clear i mean that's 90 who have

052responded no no that's the total of the total okay that's what i went down yeah yeah yeah so i think that's um yeah i think that's remarkable and pretty good absolutely and thank you maria and your whole staff for collecting this information and and presenting it so clearly but i think that should be heartening to parents who are wondering about the vaccinations status of staff that looks like close to 90 of certified staff in each site are fully vaccinated now and that number can only rise yes okay i think that's great yeah yeah so thank you everyone great other questions any other questions on vaccines yeah i guess the only other question is do we have a vehicle for knowing who has is not vaccinated because they have antibodies having recovered you know from covet

053or having had covenant and happy antibodies do we know how to identify the that's it may be a small number i don't know but well i i would just say you know right i'm just going to go with the most recent mandate that was issued by the governor that doesn't um exclude people who may have antibodies and um you know people who have had covet are also recommended to be vaccinated even if they have antibodies so um i'm not aware at this time of any um exception for people who have antibodies we haven't collected that information and you know all of the recommendations that i have seen have been for people to be vaccinated even if they've just recovered from having kobed which i know may seem you know counterintuitive to some but uh we've

054seen lots and lots of people even staff members who recovered and were advised by their physicians to be uh you know to receive their second dose in many cases within you know a period a very short period of time so we don't have that information at this time and i have one question about bus drivers were those included in your survey or do they do so are they separate so bus drivers are not employed by us they're employed by sta we did include the bus drivers we worked with the town and received you know support from the town health department to include them in our vaccination clinics in the spring and a number of them did participate but because they're not our employees we did not administer the survey to them however we are in

055the process of collecting that information from sta in the same way that we're collecting that information from chartwells our food service provider because their employees are are not ours and we don't necessarily have the same access to them will they be considered employees in under the governor's order yes i forget exactly the way um it was initially phrased but um i my understanding was you know essentially anyone who works with or is associated with um kids in schools will be mandated and i believe that does cover bus drivers it's essentially anyone who comes into the school yeah so we'll i mean those are the kinds of clarifications we'll get once we see the written executive order but i think that's accurate great so just several guide any other questions comments on either presentation all right

056well thank you both that's a tremendous amount of work and thank you for presenting it and thank you for thinking of just about all the details so yeah thank you and um thanks kevin for agreeing to work on kind of making it as user-friendly as possible of course thank you i think there's a few other pieces here just to go over of course one you know as we've been talking about since the springtime and we have made plans our learning model as you know is in person a full day five days a week for all of our students we don't plan to offer a voluntary remote option this year and so you know the expectation is that kids will be coming to school in person if students need to quarantine for the reasons we were

057discussing a short while ago the plan at the moment is to enable them to access their lessons through schoology so we had a whole year of using schoology we got some great feedback from some of our students at the end of the year last year we continue to provide training to our staff and families on the use of schoology so you know the expectation is that lesson content will be available to them we do have plans to provide some tutorial support to students and so we're still refining those details that tutorial support may come from some of our certified instructional staff it may come from some of our other homebound tutors or others but students can expect to have some support while they're home and then we're you know also asking teachers to make sure

058that they're checking in on any of their students who are uh requiring uh quarantine can i interrupt them questions yeah while i'm thinking about it along those lines so are all kids going to be assigned to chromebook again this year or is it going to be like in the younger schools as needed i believe well i believe we'll have all uh kids assigned to chromebooks because you know especially in the younger grades if kids need to quarantine they'll need to access them um you know what will be different kids will certainly be relying on our chromebooks but you know as we saw last year that was the primary vehicle and even when kids were in person they spent a lot of time in front of their screens so i don't expect that kids will be

059on their screens uh to the same degree that they were a year ago because we'll have teachers providing you know so much direct instruction in person so kind of along those same lines can i ask a question sure this is just because i um well we can talk about it later but um the remote option i understand the not choice not voluntary we're not doing it widespread knock on wood all of those things but i think we learned that having that technology tool can be valuable in some situations so for those special circumstances where some students needs may benefit from it on a short term temporary with the goal of you know full active for live participation i just would hate us to say we're not going to do any of it as a blanket

060statement that's all i don't want i don't hope that's not our message no well i think here's what i would say and um you know maybe we're not talking about the same thing but as a district we're absolutely what you know we've been describing is remote ready and so we had an entire year's worth of experience you know using our remote tools we have the technology um you know what we heard louding clearly from all of our instructional staff for the most part was the challenges around the hybrid classroom and so you know we really because of all of that really rich feedback about the lack of effectiveness and the challenge of managing two environments we're really you know we weren't insisting on maintaining a hybrid environment and so will we have opportunities or may

061there be some circumstances that necessitate a hybrid environment quite possibly and then you know we respond we work with staff and you know we do what we need to do to support kids i think you know in the other other you know possible situations like we experienced uh a year ago if for some reason an entire class needed to uh quarantine you know then we absolutely we run a full remote class and so that we're certainly equipped to do um if we you know come to a situation where we have um a number of kids you know across a grade level who uh need to quarantine or there's some other circumstances that are keeping them out of school and we need to create a remote class i think we have the staff and the expertise

062to be able to pull that together in pretty short order as well okay all right thank you all right some of this we may have already uh covered so we talked about transportation uh with some of your questions a moment ago um we are inviting all of our families to utilize our buses so we have a number of them they roll right by your house so feel free to put your children on them in the mornings just remember to have a mask on your children the you know there are lots of us who experienced the traffic issues last year and so we're not as we were in the past recommending parents drive their kids to school so please use your uh taxpayer-funded school buses we have aids on the buses again this year or not

063yeah we we didn't have aids on the buses last year did i read correctly though that seats will be assigned we're going to have to have assigned seats and that's really because of the need to contact right yeah no i totally understand i just want it to be clear that i read it right and that parents will understand that right if your child wants to take the bus do you have to tell them [Music] no you don't need to make a reservation um so you can take the bus but yeah yeah so they um so the you know the the bus drivers will have pre-populated rosters and so students who you know are on those rosters will have an assigned seat on the bus it'll probably take you know a few days maybe a week

064to sort that all out we talked about lunch recess so just again in terms of you know trying to um promote more typical uh life of school uh we have child care available um that delores informed me the other day that we're at capacity right now and like so many other sectors she noted that she was having difficulty finding child care workers and so we're at capacity at the moment and don't have capacity to expand so you know hopefully that'll change in short order but child care is available we'll be running our full complement of after school activities we'll be running our full complement of athletics as uh you know people hopefully uh read all of that's done in accordance with the guidance we have from ciac cdcsd dph to mandy's question a moment ago

065we'll be welcoming visitors back into the building and volunteers back into the building and you know our intention there again is to start slowly most of our parents if they read some of the information that was published um already know that we have scheduled for next week meet the teacher days and so the principals put out information about that so those are scheduled and we're looking forward to seeing people in person and allowing our students to meet the teacher in person that's wonderful do you know how short we are for after school i don't you know somebody are you free yeah so i just want to take a couple minutes and talk about our instructional and social emotional learning priorities and again this is not new information but i think for the sake of the

066importance of repetition it's important to speak out loud so we've spelled out several goals um those were published in uh some of our recent communications and as well in our return to in-person instruction continuity of services plan that we developed and put to the website and shared with all of you at our last meeting so you know briefly you know our goals we are ensuring the health and safety of all of our staff and students we have a goal to support the social and emotional learning needs of our students to address the unfinished learning that's been brought by the pandemic through an instructional and intervention model and then lastly we're looking to restart the implementation of our long-range strategic objectives which primarily include the work around portrait of a graduate so that's some very exciting

067work that we're looking to re-initiate this coming school year so with respect to instruction and we'll set up another board workshop sometime in the next several weeks so we can really get into the weeds on the instructional framework that we're using to address unfinished learning through the pandemic here the the framework that we're referring to is is often called an accelerated learning framework and so i'll just actually pardon the educational jargonese here i'll break it down for you pretty simply and then just know that you know we'll spend time with chuck and his team and really go through it in great detail the framework focuses on delivering grade level content that prioritizes essential skills and content using routine assessments and other learning data teachers and administrators work in teams to more closely monitor and respond

068to student progress so not anything new but i think a more rigorous approach so the components of the accelerating learning framework are these one responsive teaching based on formative real-time assessment so in a nutshell what does that mean that teachers are using the information available to them whether it's formative assessment summative assessment you know other anecdotal measures and really deeply understanding where kids are and what's next for them in terms of the learning progression and then responding okay so we've talked about elements of this when we've talked about differentiated instruction but you know we're looking to really key in on this much more broadly across the district the second element of an accelerating learning framework speaks to the prioritization of essential concepts and skills and so you'll recall a year ago more than a year

069ago we began to talk about priority standards and so what that means is as a staff on a grade level as a group of teachers really getting clarity about what are the most essential standards concepts and understandings that kids need to have in focusing on those on a particular grade level okay the next piece the third piece here in the framework is referred to as designing academic tasks as deep learning experiences and so what that calls us to do is really give deeper consideration to what we're asking kids to do in service of the learning okay so is the learning task do we know that it's grade level do we know that it's rigorous do we know that it's aligned to a standard and so you know taking some pause and really looking at those

070tasks and ensuring that those pieces are in place the fourth piece really speaks to promoting student self-efficacy and so you know that work is largely embedded in a lot of the social emotional learning work that we do and really teaching to be teaching students to be curious and strong self-advocates and really you know taking ownership for engaging in their learning and then the final piece here references you know scaffolding learning and prerequisite skills and you know again to summarize simply what that means is not only knowing uh what kids need to do next but also knowing what kind of steps they might need to take or what um you know kind of gaps there are in their learning and filling those in so they can take the next step in the learning so none of

071that's new for us really what's new is you know focusing on you know more deeply understanding each of those pieces and then also better understanding how those components fit together in this framework so chuck and his team are going to be working through the principles and with our instructional staff implementing this framework we've contracted with the connecticut center for school change to provide professional opening support so we began some of that work this summer at our administrators retreat and that will continue uh throughout the year good question yeah go for it all right are are have there been any standardized assessments developed targeted specifically at covid loss learning loss as a result of covered none that i am aware of i mean the standardized measures that are available to us have not changed so we

072use the smarter balanced assessments here the sat um locally you know we've adopted the nwa map test um and so those are you know primarily the the um standardized measures that we use yeah for some reason i would have thought that perhaps somewhere along the way someone would have worked to develop some mechanism for measuring learning loss as a result of code maybe not i don't know actually the math test um does measure the amount of learning loss and we'll talk about that at the workshop okay all right okay all right thanks chuck thank you chuck i have a question about that as well so do we have an idea speaking of covered learning loss um i know from experience for example middle brook some classes finished going through xyz section some classes in the

073same grade finished going through right i don't know whatever alphabet you want to throw before that so do we have a way of determining like okay jen is a child she hasn't even learned about blank and now she's going to the next year and she's with glenn who has already covered that like and and where on average how many weeks behind were we on average do you have like a specific number like we finished last year four weeks behind in sixth grade i just didn't know if you had that data yeah it's not consistent data as you just said it varies by teacher and teacher and i wasn't prepared tonight to talk about that but we will definitely talk about it at the moment okay perfect yeah there's it is there's there's a lot there

074and so it's it bears its own meeting where we can just walk through you know pretty slowly in general i just want to make the comment that i like the fact that we're doing more assessment and um looking to make real time changes for that as the assessments come in and just as a board if there are resources that are needed to jumpstart that work or to get over you know in the short term some you know unfinished learning that i would you know like it to be brought to us so we can definitely um address them you know on the sooner side yeah that sounds great thank you um so they the additional benefit of um first as you would call the sr2 grant um so that was uh 325 thousand dollars or so

075um don't quote me it's been a while since i looked at that number but we use those funds to hire a full-time math interventionist and then a part-time social worker full-time math intervention is a starter male part-time social worker at the high school so we have some resources in place to you know kind of hit the ground running there and then beyond that the um arp sr3 grant we had 800 and 834 thousand dollars allocated to us to be used this year and next to support unfinished learning and social emotional needs for students and so we've written a plan that we shared with you we received some comment over over the summer we've just sent the first draft of that plan to the state to be reviewed but that plan too seeks to provide funds

076to do a number of things so we use some of those funds to run some of our summer learning programs this past summer we set aside a chunk of funds to hire additional elementary school teachers to keep class sizes on the low end of our average which i'll give you those details in just a second so we hired three additional classroom teachers two in kindergarten one in first grade to keep our class sizes smaller we continue to watch our numbers even as we come into the start of school here and then we also used a chunk of those funds or are using a check of those funds to hire part-time interventionists and those interventionists will work k-8 and they'll directly support kids and teachers who we identify as needing that kind of extra support so

077we're looking really to provide some really intensive support at the during the first half of this school year so you know as chuck was describing you know we can understand where kids are and then you know move them along as quickly as possible um that second piece of those funds we're using to support the just social emotional learning needs and so that's being expressed through engagement with a norwalk organization children and families age so they're going to be able to provide some additional staff for us again as another layer of mental health support and they also open up their resources so if we have to refer students or families out for outside mental health support through this engagement our kids and families get to go to the front of the line um and as you

078know if you you've read you know referral um services are really um yeah across the state um so we think across the country right so um you know we think that the plan is solid uh we're really you know keenly focusing on academics and academic intervention and we'll certainly we have the staff and the programs in place to get a sense of where kids are and respond meaningfully as we start the school year questions comments about that piece quick question you mentioned the interventionist would help the student and the faculty yeah well students primarily okay because i was just wondering yeah all right so last piece i have for you just as an overall update and yeah we get to meet again so i'll have another round of information for you um it's just and

079i'll i'll just share this with you briefly um i've provided this to you um already uh but we are um as of uh just a few days ago about uh 169 students um above the november projection and so you know i'm not terribly surprised by that we knew that there were kids out there and just you know the greatest differences are in the primary grades so um you know kindergarten were about 40 students beyond their projection and first grade were about 26 students uh 17 and second grade and you know the numbers begin to taper from there but in every grade you know we're showing you know some kind of increase over the projection and so can you um you sent us one chart could you maybe send it again sure update it for next

080week just sort of write before school numbers is there a deadline for enrollment or not what is the cut off there's so for reporting purposes um to the state october one is the cut off okay and so those are from a parent's perspective if they haven't registered yet because they ought to well they're in town and they're they ought to register as soon as possible but now we're it's always rolling because people move and change and okay so it still could go up you might get less yeah yeah and so these you know these numbers um you know we also you know will people have moved out of town and you know haven't yet um withdrawals of the withdrawal so you know these numbers will adjust but you know i'm feeling pretty confident in general

081about where they are yeah which is i mean it's remarkable to see the increase yeah it's not surprising at all i think it's a positive sign for us right and for our school system absolutely yeah to see the kind of increase that there's faith there's confidence in what we're doing and i think it's really a positive sign yep right yeah we watch the real estate market go crazy and i was thinking where are those kids well now they're here that's great yeah it's crazy it's great i think it's fantastic yeah good all right so just keep us updated that um and you've had well we'll probably hear about hiring next week too but um yes you've been keeping up with hiring with them we have been okay yep we have been and we're um you

082know except for the the very late resignations we've had a good hiring season we're gonna take us through that next thursday okay can we be more up to date then great okay on the goals that's it you're done with all your stuff well that was amazing i'm looking at this meeting we've got next meeting okay okay another one we have enough meetings all right the next item is board of education goals i drafted these for everybody's information and lucille i don't know if do you have those yeah we are just going to we going to take tonight to discuss them a little bit i know you haven't had time to digest them and certainly next week be another discussion so there's no rush to approve these but i did want to get them to you

083to start us thinking to make sure that everything that we know about that we've included so these goals are based on a lot of our budget discussions when we sort of built that way back when in terms of why we're going to put our resources where we're putting them so they're based on our budget discussions they're based on our meetings and some of our subcommittee work they're based obviously on kovid kobit recovery and then last very last thing we did last year we had a little board of ed self evaluation workshop so i tried to capture all those kind of thinking along the way so just to be let's just go over the sort of the categories and if you think i missed something or whatever you can ask questions now or send me suggestions

084and we can update the draft for next week but the first one was really about health and safety and having to continue to monitor and keep abreast of the coveted conditions goal number two was to return we talked a lot about this last year we want this year to be as normal as possible so broadly speaking the on-site in person full time full range of activities etc the third goal has to do with and this kevin kept correcting me it's not learning loss it's unfinished learning is the term of art for this year um so anytime i was going to write learning loss i said nope got to correct it so it's really unfinished learning and kevin just talked about some of the accelerated framework and we'll have more from chuck about that and we'll

085hear more about chuck and you know sort of where kids left off just because there wasn't enough time last year as part of the issue and ruth to your point about resources i think that's as a sub goal there the next goal broadly speaking is about social emotional learning certainly in response to covid but also um there are many comments last year about how proud we are of our social emotional attention to social emotional learning and that we were proud of that as a district and we wanted to make sure that we continue that the next one was on academic achievement we talked last year about sort of the need for clear data that we could easily follow that we could understand improvement plans etc and that we wanted to focus a particular attention on

086math and so i think that was what we agreed to last year and we had talked with dr smith about that so anyway so there's some specifics about that so please feel free to add wordsmith whatever um we also talked about consistency there i think that was sort of a little bit of a concern last year just curricular and instructional consistency within a grade level so we talked about assured experiences i think that was the term category six is about the portrait of the graduate i always sort of refer to it as our strategic plan and if you remember last year we adopted it even though the language we felt was a little bit long and perhaps less than immediately accessible you know in terms of the an elevator speech but we do have those

087aspirations there and i know the district is going to well kevin and chuck will probably sort of roll out what the next steps are but we need to keep that front and center the next one is around diversity equity and inclusion we had started according to kevin some initial discussions amongst faculty about some of the issues and goals [Music] and we and we time ran out last year to really kind of dive into it so i wanted to make sure that was certainly not forgotten so that's the topic of our workshop next tuesday tuesday afternoon so again look at that language see what you think um number eight of course is developing a budget we do that every single year and i just want to make sure that we put all our steps there and

088that we're happy with them i did want to i think glenn and i have talked about you know the budgeting for the large capital improvement items and most recently even some of the technology items have come under question so how to budget for those is something we've got to finally come to terms with and i think that will be involved conversations with the town otherwise it's our fairly normal budget process [Music] number nine is to work on our own governance and i think uh every time we get together we say we have to improve expand continue uh avenues of communication so again i'm trying to i try to include that there and also some of the committee work some committees have very complicated things to do so how can we better engage ourselves with that

089and i guess i'm looking in particular teaching learning committee i think and then we want to make sure that we have adequate time in our meeting to full meetings and or workshops to sort of address things in a comprehensive thoughtful manner so um kevin and i always work on agendas but if you feel that there are items i think jen you might have talked about ordering them slightly differently you know we just need to kind of fine-tune that that's what i meant by that um etc uh that illusion and uh the last thing of course is you know we're the ambassadors for the district so to try to highlight our good work of which it's amazing you know the comprehensiveness and just the different realms the school district operates and i want to try to

090highlight uh all the good work that our amazing staff is doing and our outstanding kids so that's that's kind of an overview of the of the buckets of the goals and then there are some you know there's little sub sentences under each one so please take a look wordsmith it send it back to me we'll try to get a new draft out next week if you have any comments now that's fine otherwise we can talk about it next week as well it's pretty comprehensive it's so comprehensive yeah it's pretty yeah i don't think he missed a base all right i don't i don't think i tried to think of one i couldn't step i can send this to you but my only thing for number five yeah we talked about this instead of improving academic

091achievement i think we should say advancing for everybody so not just for the children who are in the lower and need improvement i think it's important to remember that we should advance it for everybody regardless of where they for all students all right so as you have thoughts like that please just email me and i will try to update the draft for next week and again there's no rush here to approve them we also need to give dr smith a chance to bring his goals forward i think they're pretty much in sync with what he's been talking about but um if not he'll have a chance to tell us as well and deb on a side note of course ruth and i were just talking i know i'm not one of the people who hasn't

092checked my email all summer but i think i missed the workshop tuesday afternoon what are the times of that is it a one hour two hour it says one o'clock but i think we scheduled two i think we're scheduled three years i have to go back and [Music] does the schedule was on one of your emails and seal is an attachment yeah it was a doodle kind of hole and then it we decided on the 24th and i believe it was um one two three four i don't know it's one to three and if we if we are shorter than that that's fine on the 24th but um yeah i didn't know if it was going to be um invite but i'll send out the agenda i think it's active right yeah yeah and i

093understand people's busy schedules so if it's easier to call in or zoom in that's that's fine too so as many of us will meet in person otherwise the rest of us can zoom and it's public as well perfect thank you okay um so that leads us to a policy discussion about student dress and grooming right so i didn't see too much about grooming in it to be honest i'm just primarily that's okay that's right the policy is student dressing room 5132 that policy committee met a couple times right at the end of the school year to review this policy we looked at some draft policies from other districts and some model language and we you know were i think the committee was mostly satisfied with the spirit of the existing policy so we made some

094minor adjustments we cleaned up some language and we added a couple of pieces so it's highlighted in green for you so i'll just read it for you so what the policy is stipulating here is that the responsibility for addressing grooming of a student rests primarily with the student and the student's parent or guardian the district encourages students and parents to work together to ensure that the students dress that student students dress in a manner that's appropriate for the school day or any school sponsored activity and respects the district's intent and responsibility to ensure the health and safety and social emotional well-being of all students some of the existing language ordinarily a student's dress or grooming shall not affect his or her participation in school classes programs or school related activities if however the dress or

095grooming of a student disrupts the educational climate or process we struck some old language or poses a threat to the health or safety of a student or any other person the principal or principal's design may require the student to change the student's clothing the students dress up grooming so that's the that's the policy and do you want to um i mean i think we looked at this really hard and we i think we instruct the right balance between respecting the educational environment and recognizing you know the need for self-expression and comfort and just um really um making sure that the code is applied consistently and equitably across the district and schools and classrooms and um and you'll see that more in the regulation that accompanies it and um making sure that any violations are handled

096you know professionally and confidentiality and um within mind towards um and regard for age-appropriateness and i think that those were what we set to achieve and i think the policy sets that tone and then the regulation amplifies it right is there a dress code in each building so that was thank you for asking that question um we had the district policy that was in place and then um there were there was not a set standard regulation and so this regulation is new um and that resulted really from this um recognition that um some of our lower schools had specific regulations that they had crafted sometime in the past in their handbooks and some of the languages a dress code that school for that right it's the it was the regulatory language and so some of

097the language honestly wasn't appropriate okay so we had an opportunity in the spring there were a couple of um issues that were raised one was at cider mill another was at middlebrook and so it really just opened the door for us to really look at this um and again you know i think more importantly to standardize the regulatory language for all of our schools so uh upon approval this will be the policy this will be the regulation this will be the regulation that lives in handbooks and then you know the next step for us will just be to you know work with you know ongoing training and conversations with all of our staff but what the dress code itself though is is my question this becomes there is no specific dress code any longer any

098longer so we've okay so there's no specific detail etc this is it period this is it the regulations yeah do i get about the subjective major of this yeah well it is subjective yeah you know um but like where does the buck stop so like the principal says our teacher says i think that this is creating distraction like i just feel like it opens up to and i appreciate all the work the policy committee did on this but i feel like this opens up to a huge fan of worms of subject yeah i think honestly mandy i would take the other position and say it actually narrows some of the opportunities and here's what i'll say just kind of experientially um with respect to the policy you know with except for the changes that we're

099proposing um that policy has been in place for many years right but how each school has had its own yeah well there's the schools have had their own dress code regulation right but the issues that we've experienced in general um at least as they've come to my attention have been few and far between and so i think if you go back to the spirit of what we're asking you know we're reaffirming you know kind of our um pre-established uh belief that um student dress is really the obligation of the student and the student's parents um and then if there is a question or a concern ultimately it falls to the principle or you know per the policy the principles designee right to kind of sort that out and you know what we're asking i think

100what we um you know had learned at least in one experience is that you know it may not have been handled in the most delicate way right and so i think that's what you know when we're working with staff and working with our administrators you know that's what we need to confront got it so you're seeing the other side of this as far as subjectivity okay yeah yeah boy i i'm just uncomfortable with this approach i think the staff is really key and i am as someone who's a dinosaur right so i won't say which of my children but one of my children had a problem like it would probably fall you know with hygiene and it was handled beautifully i have to say the teacher talked to the nurse the nurse talked to me

101my child never knew that it was someone from you know and and that was i thought you know and that came to mind over what was going on in the spring and honestly at the high school at least like everyone knows when someone has to change their clothes because it's you know a fishbowl but i think there are ways to handle it more sensitively and so and it always falls on girls you know um we all have opinions like you know of how our donors should dress or how our son's response is um but i also feel that girls get a lot of attention trust me they hear a lot from the voice of high school if they're just you know whatever but i think the sensitivity and teachers should be talking to the students

102directly and if they're trained and there's a way to talk about it and involve the parents and i know teenagers are tough you know but especially like cyber medal and middle group you know there's no reason they have all those systems in place to handle it sensitively and i think you know we get we sometimes lose things over time and whatever used to be standard becomes you know it just teaches like oh i think it's easier to address the child directly or whatever but my experience personally as a parent was lovely yeah and i think you know just again you know thinking about the numbers of issues we've had it's been you know i think i'm in year eight now and i would say you know minimal and so i think you know what we're

103driving at here um and the opportunity in front of us you know again as laura was just describing is to work you know with staff again and just make sure that you know it's understood and expected that you know we have young people and these are development matters but how much of the fact that it's been minimal do you attribute to the fact that we had a very specific code in place to be followed we didn't have a very specific code in place per se um and then the code wasn't consistent so you know for example the um you know one of the questions that came up in some of the old middlebrook language you know was this prohibition about schedules i've been talking about spaghetti right which is inappropriate that shouldn't be in a

104regulation it's sexist and it doesn't make sense and so you know i think to laura's point you know that's one of those targeted prohibitions and so that's the kind of language that we're looking to get away from all right kevin i think into glenn's point i think that because what's acceptable to a parent and a child is not necessarily acceptable to school personnel is there a way rather than addressing it during the school day for teachers and staff and whomever to speak to let it just go through for that day and address it after the fact instead of us targeting not targeting but instead of us bringing up to the child and making that child uncomfortable which everybody else now is staring at yeah yeah professional confidential and age appropriate so that the and the

105teachers should be supported and helpful and have a system and a protocol in place that um addresses that yes it should be if one particular teacher is sensitive to something and another teacher is not and it's ones of being class dependent and class specific or any index of that people well i didn't end up with a ball across one suggestion to capture that if you want closer communication with the family first rather than the student is to write that in somehow into this regulation that it's not necessarily the teacher to student it can be perhaps preferably teacher to family yeah here's the the is that bad well i don't think it's bad but this policy and this regulation like all of our others isn't going to speak to every possible scenario that's unfolding and so

106now as soon as you write either spaghetti strap or talk to them yeah there may be a situation that crops up where a teacher does need to speak to a child directly oh yeah and i don't mean to say it can't right but it's occurring at middlebrook like i know my kids will come and say like oh so-and-so had to sit in the office for three hours waiting for a parent to bring new clothes because everyone can see you know drop out of fishbowl right everyone like why are you in the office why aren't you in science class and i think that's what ken was saying is unless it's dangerous how many times do we have to address them right yeah well as high school principal i remember some famous t-shirts worn by males yeah

107you know with obscene language or you know drug messages and so those that's a different thing then and that's different because you have explicitly written that down yeah right i mean that's not subjective that's right you've got this you're leaving you're changing or whatever yeah it's the other part that's not explicit having the second page is that the old one that's the regulation the regulation so yeah the regulation is all that's new language got it and typically the board will approve the policy we don't approve the regulation but we can give lots of advice on the regulation got it yeah so i think you know i think i i understand what you're going for and i think it makes a lot of sense um i think the question is how do we craft that language

108so why don't we go back why don't we now where our policy committee here we'll go back and all right we can just we can play with that we'll get some input from that i mean which was definitely why we tried to talk to address students or parents and professionally and age appropriate we were definitely talking about these same um type of scenarios leaving it broad enough for individual circumstances to be worked out and narrow enough to know that there's a way that it shouldn't and can't sure yeah yeah yeah yeah i don't want to get i wouldn't recommend being terribly descriptive because that breaks down it's out of date as soon as you write it in some ways you know because this year's worry will not be next year's worry necessarily when it comes

109to dress all right so is that acceptable if we just kind of we'll go back and revisit it and um that's right um okay uh discuss and approve bell schedule right so um and then i think we you took us through that with some of your yeah so those those to us but there's another chart in here that we got yeah you can have a board briefing yep and so makes sense you know i think this is a minor adjustment um although important um what i'm asking um is for the board to um approve emotion uh to approve a motion to change the bell schedule and it's a five minute change and so the history here we've laid out for you in the board briefing but you know in short in our uh teachers contract

110um i think it's been in place for some time the working day speaks to an average of eight hours and so one of ours is one of the unique contracts that actually has that it also specifies the instructional day of 6 hours and 35 minutes which is very common across school districts in practice for many many years our instructional day has been six hours and 30 minutes not 35 even though that's provided for in the teacher's contract and my understanding of the history is at some point in the past when the district switched to late start times for the middle school and the high school there was an issue with students being uh at cider mill students in particular because they had their earliest run on the at the bus stop by like seven o'clock

111and so you know some of the kids were out there you know when the sun was still coming up and so one of the accommodations i understand was to um adjust the day to allow for that and um the loss was this loss of five minutes of instructional time and so what i'm asking is that we adjust the bell schedules and you know re-adopt the five minutes i think it's a it's a minor change um for all of the schools so at miller driscoll you know rather than start at 905 uh the instructional day would start at nine at cider mill rather than end the day 210 it'll end at 2 15. uh high school middle brook rather than end at uh 2 50. um it'll end at 2 55. do it so yay i

112don't mind the change my only question is we talked about five minutes a day equals about 15 hours roughly but how are we using those five minutes productively to really get back well you know it's i mean you know it's divided across the day and so um you know it's not necessarily you know five debbie as a similar question it's not like five more minutes in math because the day just doesn't know i was so mad when i figured out oh you can't do that yeah i was so mad right daddy's like oh my god i don't see a way of doing that um with the bell schedule so um you know the student experience will be you know not five minutes of additional time in any one area yeah okay yeah i mean kevin

113not to be nitpicky but at that last bullet point it just says like we'll meaningfully impact our students and we'll strengthen our ability to address our goals i i question the meaningful impact but i see what you're saying but it's not like right it's not like 15 hours that we're going to solve all the problems we're definitely not solving our problems in an additional 15 hours about 15 hours over the course of 12 years right i just that word meaningfully will positively impact well this is for you so yeah smith towards smith worksmith smith you can sit here for an hour no i i think we say you promised you promised yes a day yeah all right i moved that we adopted the new the revised uh bell schedule i second i'm just going to

114add as outlined in the august 17th briefing yep okay and so that was moved and seconded all in favor aye aye the opposition nope all right thank you approved [Music] we see our future dates which we're back here next thursday um tuesday tuesday yes of course tuesday there we go all right so um comments from the public i don't see anybody physically present did we get any via email all right before we do that then i just want to say what i always say is that public comment is limited to two minutes and we do not respond directly although we listen carefully and please include your name and address okay i don't have the address for me do we have a name dear board of education i appreciate the district's draft old priorities to be

115fiscally responsible to the taxpayer and support the social and emotional needs of students wilton institute institute for budgetary reasons and pay to pay to play policy creating a financial barrier to extracurricular involvement and experimentation i.e trying different clubs etc extracurricular activities have been shown to be extremely beneficial beneficial to whole student especially their social emotional well-being see and she includes a link to the case for high school activities the introduction of federal arp esser elementary and secondary school emergency relief funds to the district in in response to covid brings the opportunity to do more than refer children to external institutes for psychiatric evaluation but correct and reverse at least temporarily the inequity of the pay-to-play policy and re-encourage students to increase interpersonal interactions and improve social emotional well-being a stated primary objective of esser questions

116further to social emotional well-being of all students no one can hear you we just got to chat and i said a text that people at home can't hear you if you want to come closer to them questions further to social emotional well-being of all students can the board explain how the dress code would ensure social emotional well-being of all students and would there be a process to appeal the requirement to change clothes as the decision criteria seems very subjective thank you lisa pagano okay thank you um just can you summarize like for the people who couldn't hear at home just the first half just i don't want to the the email um starts off um about the goals of being fiscally responsible to the taxpayer and supporting the social and emotional needs of the students

117and pay to play policy and they would like the esser funds to do more than refer children to external institutes and reverse the pay to play policy and then it ends with that question about student dress okay okay thank you and next time we'll remember to use the mic i'm sorry no it's not your fault we just it's new to us all right and so if you could pass that out to all the board members so we'll definitely if we didn't hear everything we can we can read it if there's a financial difficulty yes no there is i'm saying there is um okay so any more um comments from the public lucille all right all right having finished our agenda seeing no more business before the board i'm looking at everybody this meeting is adjourned

118thank you see you next week see you soon you