June 16, 2022 Board of Education Special Meeting - Part 1

001good evening i'd like to call this meeting of the board of education to order please rise for the pledge of allegiance to the flag of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all thank you so much i apologize that we were late we're just coming out of executive session but we have a fun night ahead of us with lots of recognitions so let's get started can i get a motion for the consent agenda okay thank you miss is there a second thank you miss costa all in favor of the consent agenda she's here are you cool yes sorry that passes eight zero thanks so much okay we're going right into recognitions i was expecting to call them up for

002uh their speeches but we're actually going first into ghs senior class president where are you javi come on down wait you're not speaking yet you're not no you're coming here come on okay check thank you so much okay we're ready for your speech but i'm so excited yeah congratulations i know you have great plans where are you going again thank you so much well he gets his speech next he comes back at the end again that's right now we're also going to recognize our student government president kwame is that on now all right so you all right hold on let's put this mic behind so we can okay there you go all right so sorry miss can you hear me yes we miss it javi is heading off to harvard and kwame i think i

003remember you're going to penn so this is uh we have two wonderful students who have done such great things for our schools and you're the great people thank you so much this is my like second favorite part of being on the board then first one is graduation which is of course happening on thursday so this is uh such a great way to end the year thank you both so much and i know we're going to hear speeches from you in a moment i hope so that's perfect next up we are doing our spring athletics champions and do we have miss marchenko is she here there she is great uh thank you chairperson stowe and to dr jones and to the members of the board for having us here tonight i'm speaking on behalf of the

004girls rugby program here at the high school but i'm also uh here to represent student athletes who have had great success both in the winter and spring this school year so i'd like to start first by recognizing boys track and field as fciac champions this spring so that's something that's wonderful if they accomplish and now i'd like to move on to the students who made the uh made allstate in their sports so at this point what i'd ask you to do is if you hear your name called please stand if you are in the audience and please hold applause until we have everybody standing so we can recognize our student athletes for the winter and spring so let's start with girls tennis courtney sheet and julia thomas if you're here please stand up girls golf

005alison bauer girls lacrosse emma abbasia sofia nietzsche boys tennis dylan atkinson kai jane nick o'brien boys lacrosse james pilk matthew trimmer charlie zola boyce swimming justin jacob michael delasha matthew hake aiden bucaria felix flaxstad ryan g whitaker grover keken clark andrew diamond liam flaherty and cheerleading avery banks lauren civitillo sierra rollins lindsey sylvester grace traeger boys ice hockey recipient of the connecticut hobie baker award danny pratley boys track and field andrew o'donnell harrison goldenberg gianluca bianchi zachary jelinek boys track and field state open andrew o'donnell girls indoor track esme daplin haley townsend olivia eslava kayla egan and girls outdoor track all new england esme daplin and caitlin fay if you are in the audience please everyone give them a round of applause [Applause] and because i am here to represent the girls rugby program i'd

006like to uh take a few minutes of your time just to to give you a little bit about them and to also recognize uh the accomplishments that that they've really worked hard to achieve this season as well as in the last few years so if if you're not aware already we have for the first time won the state championship this spring and i want to thank uh not only all of you for supporting what we do but uh specifically i wanted to take some time to thank ralph mayo who has been extremely supportive of what we're doing at the high school pete giorgio has been absolutely amazing uh in supporting what we're doing and he is absolutely on board with what what we want to achieve and accomplish thank you to joe kelly and mike

007fina former head coach of the boys program of course and mike fina current invaluable resources and support to us as we've started our program and are growing um a personal thank you to joe patron and lara vivelo my assistant coaches who are are just absolutely amazing to work with and and a huge part of the reason we're successful we we had our first season in 2019 we've only been here a short while in that season we were fourth of six teams we came in fourth out of six 2020 we had a covered year 2021 we came in second of six and here we are in 2022 we have 10 teams in the state now and we came in first so and i think it's important for all of you to understand what we're doing with

008our program and what we aim to achieve it is one of the few sports where no experience is necessary when you come to the high school and in fact in all of these years i think we've had one come to us she's sitting up here now who came to us with experience prior to coming to the high school very unusual in sports in greenwich high school and something that i think we can really capture a lot of athletes who might be missed otherwise uh and and accomplish great things and to that end we have no cuts anyone is welcome and as rugby as a whole is so are we inclusive and welcoming of all it's a sport that accepts all shapes body types people from all different places and walks of life and there's a

009spot on the field for anyone who's willing to work hard and do the team thing so it really is a very special sport it means a lot to me but i also think it can bring really good continue to bring really good value to our students at the high school but along with that as well it is one of those rare sports where the supply at the high school level is much less than the demand at the college so colleges need our athletes and so for example we went to a tournament this last weekend and the colleges are just dying to talk to our girls and make relationships and for me the key is to both teach these kids their life lessons it's so much more than the sport but to open doors for them

010and so that's what i feel we're trying to accomplish and that's what we're well on our way to doing for these kids and i just feel like this is one way that if we can really keep doing what we're doing we can really do that for our kids so i will not take any more of your time but i do want to just take i will only take a minute more of your time i do want to recognize my kids for all of their hard work and everything that they've accomplished so i i will i will call out the the names if you are here please stand uh faith alexander fiona breyer sophie citron katie coyle ayanna davenport emily dominguez ruby garcia isabella gaga ruby lampkin queer levy alexa marascal keira martin ivanka marasak julia

011montero kim kimberly maracho lena natali sid natali janae nivot lara olmsted julia pallone emma pack ali perna natalie rojas delilah ruiz sophia siccott grace shelkai lara smigo ashley torres brown jessalyn vera nicole nguyen jocelyn shingri and beerus civilic congratulations girls well deserved [Applause] and thank you again to the board for giving us this moment uh they really earned it thank you they certainly did could i ask you to stay at the podium please for a second yes uh i just want to let everyone know i had the honor of serving the state of connecticut as the president of connecticut rugby both boys and girls and uh and aaron served as the league director for the girls and did a fabulous job organizing the entire league uh i had the honor and the the uh the

012pleasure of presiding over the state championship game and awarding the trophy to our team uh what a match to watch it was fantastic thank you for that and in return the state of connecticut uh i with the power vested in me as president of the state of connecticut i uh you are the girls rugby coach of the year for the state of connecticut thank you that was great thank you so much aaron thank you girls this is great really appreciate you guys coming out um next we go to um science i like how we have a real diverse agenda in terms of our recognitions tonight so 2022 science fair awards i believe andy bermonte is online hi how are you guys tonight hey thank you andy let me uh share my screen here hopefully i

013get this right um thank you chairperson so thanks to the board of ed and dr jones for this wonderful opportunity to to recognize these amazing young scientists um so i am the science research teacher at the high school and so i'd like to take a few moments to go over what was an incredible year in science research at the high school um so for many of these students as i understand it they're attending virtually so if you but if you're in person when you hear your name throughout the presentation if you could just stand up that would be awesome um so the first up is the regeneron science talent search what i wanted to do but i don't know that i can do is use um oh hold on just a moment i think i

014found it uh no maybe not um a little cursor or a little pointer but anyway so the first is the regeneron science talent search and this is a a competition where seniors um in november of their senior year basically present work that they had completed uh through high school whether it was the year before or as perhaps as a sophomore um so what happens is about 14 or 1500 kids apply and 400 to 300 students i'm sorry are selected as uh regeneron science talent search or rsts scholars and they're each awarded two thousand dollars and the school is awarded two thousand dollars as well which is really kind of nice and this year we had three students uh the first is stephen blank for design of a rapid temperature independent highly accurate dual antigen coca

01519 detection card the second is ella moore for inhibition of covet 19 respiratory complications being an r954 peptide brady kinemon receptor antagonist oh it's a mouthful and alexa for creation of a rapid non-invasive diagnosis for specific learning disorders via fixation tracking and gaze interaction so before i go into what each of these are very briefly just like to pay special attention to the fact that now for the last decade greenwich high school has had 37 rsts scholars which is just simply incredible so that is really cool so very quickly uh let's see can i get it to move all right so first one up is steven so essentially what he did very quickly i won't read the title again but you know keep in mind all of this work was happening during the pandemic when

016the kids were basically scrolled away in the school doing all this research and there really wasn't a method to to detect over 19. now we're all very familiar with these lateral flow devices or these little stick devices where if you have two lines you you're positive test what makes um steven's test different is he uses fluorescence to do the detection with a uv flashlight and what makes that so significant is uv detection using using fluorescence is about a thousand times more sensitive than the current you know test that we use where it's just simply visible color so that is an amazing feat that he did thank you steven great job the second is ella more and i know you're looking at these things and you're getting a little dizzy so i'm trying i'll try to

017explain very quickly but you may have seen this some of these before but cover 19 over here on number one on the left the way it gets into our cell is it basically migrates through something called an ace2 and an ace2 site and that ace2 site basically regulates something called bradykinen which is represented by these light blue dots in number two if you could see my mouse moving around so what ace2 does is it controls the production of dabk and once the virus has migrated through that ace2 inhibitor the dabk starts to basically reproduce out of control in in the cell that's infected and all the neighboring cells and so subsequently those dabks pass through what's called a b1r receptor and cause all of the inflammation that was really the or is really the most

018significant um aspect of covet that really caused all the trouble so in you know while this was all unfolding and we're all talking about the different medications that didn't work ella had the idea to actually find she found an r954 peptide which essentially blocks the b1r receptor so that the dabk would stay on the outside of the cell and to make a long story very short it basically would disrupt or prevent you know the the intracellular inflammation that caused all these respiratory disorders which was fantastic just as a special note i tell this story all the time when when ella and i call this startup company to get this r954 uh the gentleman on the phone said to me um he was the ceo and he says uh andy um what university are you calling

019from i he says well is this a student project i said yeah this is incredible because we waited so long for this material to be purchased by some leading university to do this work so this is beyond incredible given the time frame when it happened so congratulations ella uh alexa nakanishi our third science talent search scholar what she did um was she created a basically a five minute reading test that uses an eye tracker to basically diagnose whether a student has dyslexia or some other very similar reading disorder so very quickly if i could if you look on the the purple diagram on the left that is typical reading eye movement where you basically track from left to right in a very linear uh and and you know sort of predictable way if you look

020at the middle patient or the middle student that has dyslexia you notice a very uneven very jagged movement across the line so if you look at the graph on the bottom right the purple lines represent the norm you know the typical readers and the blue represents the atypical and so essentially in five minutes of taking this reading test you can you know alex's system would be able to diagnose with a hundred percent accuracy whether a student whether a young person or any person for that matter has dyslexia alleviating all of the expensive doctor visits and so forth and so on so another very incredible project so congratulations to alexa next up is the connecticut science and engineering fair so we had um basically 18 participants and they are melissa bayram justin bernstein angelina fogarty anna

021gaelic isabella gaga ambika grover zara hawk adam klaczewski audrey lynn ashley malkin madeline minichetti ella moore catherine o'brien naomi park marika sakai yushan or jackie song john trudeau and elizabeth wallace some notable finishes at the kinetic once again it was a tremendous effort by the students some of the more notable finishes were ambika grover finished in first place in life sciences and was awarded a trip to isaf first place in engineering and another trip to isaf um second place in biotechnology and something called the joseph a gerber award of scientific excellence which is awarded to just two students in the state and they each receive a thousand dollars cash in a uh a silver medallion naomi park finished in first place in physical science as an isaf participant second place in aerospace was the second

022joseph a gerber award winner ashley malkin was first place in computer science fourth place in biotechnology and fifth place in life sciences for an isaf participation as well and elizabeth wallace was third place in physical sciences uh at adam kolaszewski fourth place in physical sciences and a university of hartford engineering school a hundred and twenty thousand dollar scholarship which is simply amazing um angelina fogerty third place in biotech eureka sakai fifth place in biotech and a university of connecticut academic excellence scholarship which is essentially half tuition for the four years at uconn um audrey lens second place in environmental sciences and selected to participate in the genius olympiad justin bernstein third place in environmental and also selected for the genius olympiad and finally madeline minichetti received a university of hartford engineering school 120 000 scholarship

023as well only two students get those scholarships and both for gss students so congratulations to all of those tremendous students that went to and did so well at the connecticut science engineering fair next up is the norwalk community college fair now this is a smaller fair but what was really kind of unique about it this year was it was the first in-person fair that the kids participated in um so it was really it was really nice to get out you know get out from behind the computer screen and have these kids actually talk to someone face to face um first person or first student justin bernstein isabella gaga zara hawk noah kim audrey lynn madeline minichetti catherine o'brien naomi park emil schoenberg roman sofman jackie song john trudeau aryan wadwa elizabeth wallace and kiara young

024were our amazing participants and once again the ghs students did really really well they essentially received most or six of the eight top awards including elizabeth wallace finisten first place kiera young in second and john isabella noah and naomi each received an honorable mention so congratulations to our noah community college fair science fair participants awesome job once again next up the last thing up is the an intel or i'm sorry not intel anymore regeneron international science and engineering fair so as i alluded to before uh three of our students well there are actually four spots that were one but one was one twice so three of our students went to atlanta georgia in may to participate in the international science and engineering fair that is ambika grover ashley malkin and naomi park now again to

025give you some perspective in the last 15 years that is now 49 students that we have sent to isaf and that is simply incredible their schools would clamor over getting one or two students in that same time and we've got basically nearly 50 which is just awesome so to give you a little impression of what happened here they are holding their medals so i'd like to go over just a little bit all all three young ladies did exceptionally well uh ambika grover finished in first place this is incredible this this isaf is basically the best of the best from all over the world so each of these kids has had to have won their state science fair to get to this point so you literally have about 1200 of the brightest kids on the planet

026and ambiko came in first in biomedical science which is another very very difficult category to be in so she designed a novel i'll read the title novel dual functioning tissue plasminogen activator and anticoagulant therapeutic metabolism for rapid ischemic stroke treatment so very quickly uh if you have a stroke or if you have blockage which is made out of cholesterol in your artery you typically are administered tpa or tissue plasminogen activator the unfortunate or the downside of that therapy which works very well is that it circulates throughout the blood it's not it doesn't have any specificity towards that clot it works on the clot but it can go anywhere and it sometimes causes stroke so what ambika did was she created this micro bubble delivery system of tpa and also something called dicomerol which so what

027happens is this new material that's imaged in the center there it looks like a baseball with these little tentacles these tentacles are selective to the clot and so essentially this this little bubble will find the clot dissolve it and the drug that she loaded into the micro bubble will also disrupt what's called the clotting cascade which is the mechanism by which clots reoccur so not only is she dissolving a clot she's causing she's basically prohibiting it from reforming which is simply incredible keep in mind guys i'm reading this to you and i need to remind you this is a 16 year old girl doing this stuff it blows my mind when i read it and i talk it a second was naomi park she finished in second place in environmental engineering for two thousand dollars

028and she did something called biomimetic removal of microsphere water contaminants via cell calcite via calcite infused coral-like melamine sponges so very quickly she found out in her research she was very concerned about microplastics and all these you know all the plastics that we throw into the ocean and waterways they basically create these little micro plastics or just shards of plastic it turns out that carl dead coral you know which is very interesting can actually grab these microplastics for a process that's called essentially the nucleation where the the calcium carbonate will grow around the plastics which is shown here where my cursor is so you know naomi's idea was to why not take advantage we can't go around killing coral to take out microplastics that's as naomi puts it that's counterintuitive um but what we can

029do is mimic that in a sponge where we can basically create this environment in a plastic you know in a in a sponge in a melamine sponge so what we can do is we can catch these microplastics so on the right side of the screen our scanning electron microscope images that this student took herself right and this is basically showing that her sponge can remove over 64 million micro plastics for a device that's basically a square foot this is simply awesome it is so incredible so in the middle you see a clean sponge and on the bottom you see the green ones they're green because it was easy we bought a green version micro plastic so they'd be easy to visually see so congratulations naomi simply incredible and finally ashley malkin finished in fourth place

030in something called translational medicine which is more a device supplied medicine she received 500 for developmental readily accessible machine learning diagnostic for early stage tbi using eye tracking methods so very quickly often times and especially in youth athletics you know kids collide their head you know they basically have collisions of the head and no one's really sure do they have a concussion if they you know they play on are they risking serious injury these repeated undiagnosed concussions can lead to post concussive syndrome memory problems brain fog and and longer term parkinson's or cte which we've heard a lot about with professional athletes so what she did was she devised a diagnosis system or diagnostic using machine learning or computer learning where essentially a student and athlete in this case would go into the tent much

031like they have on the sidelines of a football game where they reset a shoulder or something like that and take this two-minute eye test and based on the movement of the eyes which is very connected to the areas that are that are damn you know that suffer from these head collisions she'd be able to tell you whether or not you have a concussion in in minutes which is simply incredible congratulations ashley for awesome awesome work by the way ashley is a ninth grader she's a freshman i don't know how she got these skills but god bless her um so last but not least um the stockholm junior water prize is a water prize or it's a water competition um where there's a per a student selected as best in the state and each you know

032this year it was adam klazewski who is currently in colorado defending his work what adam did was it created a system to not only detect but to clean what are called pfoas from water pfoas are these flame retardant chemicals that are really getting a lot of use especially in these forest fires in california for example where they're spraying this all over the environment and while they're great at putting out fires they get into our water systems and they they don't degrade they simply need to be removed so this project is very is very timely it's very applicable and and the results were simply awesome so uh congratulations to adam and thank you all for listening i'm sorry that i went on a little bit too long but i really appreciate your you know you're recognizing

033our research students thanks again thank you so much andy it's i it doesn't ever feel wrong because you learn so much feel like you're in class when you listen to these students and it's great to see some names that i know and i happen to know the freshmen sitting there ashley malkin who i've known since preschool i'm not sure i can take any credit for the science that we taught at round hill nursery school but um it's pretty impressive all these students and um i'm excited to learn more about what you're thinking about doing in middle school when you see the results in the high school later so thank you again and on to all those that are standing here online thank you stand up congratulations [Applause] okay now we get to go to our

034public hearing and let's but it's great we're going to hear from javi and kwame one last time so come on down guys dr jones members of the board and meeting attendees i'm javi sarah senior class president at grants high school tonight as ms stoger said it's my final time addressing the board so with that i'd like to begin with a lot of thank yous mr silkman standing you're sitting back there got a little smile on his face your tireless efforts towards supporting student government have not gone unnoticed a ghs alumnus himself mr silkman is devoted passionate and supportive i remember when former student body president mark chen stood up here a year ago today and spoke of mr stokman's incredible email there but availability from 5am to midnight but i wanted to just expand on

035that a little bit mr stoken doesn't just get a little bit of sleep he is incredibly prompt his little icon will appear on my document seconds after i sent him my email he was a truly dedicated civil servant and it's no wonder he's a fine product of the grants public school system mr mayor and this is two out yeah mr mayor and miss tulada i'd like to thank them both for their accessibility and open doors to get one of their ears it really was as simple as showing up to their office together we modified midterm and final policy to better support students and i want to thank them for all of the behind the scenes hard work that this took miss foster thank you for helping us navigate everything this year from our two successful

036doctoral tournaments to record-breaking sized prom we really couldn't have done it without you lastly chair stow dr jones and former chairman bernstein thank you for your continued dedication to hearing student voices at ghs at each and every lunch meeting you showed your faces and offered your attention this direct line communication was pre was priceless and i truly truly believe it better the ghs student experience so thank you um i'd also like to offer my own reflection reflections it's with immense gratitude and pleasure that i stand before you here tonight as it has been every month the scheduled time for student voices at each board business meeting is a proudly unique characteristic of the graduate board of education believe it or not attending these meetings has honestly been my favorite part of being class president despite

037the homework load or whatever upcoming tests i had i always found myself staying at these meetings way past my allotted speaking time this is because decisions that this board makes are of critical importance and as a student i have a vested interest in our schools your jobs come with plenty of public criticism and little praise but i just wanted to ensure you that all of your work is appreciated regardless of all the noise please continue to give our teachers the agency to teach us truth based on reason and fact please continue to support new initiatives and explore new teaching ideas like the new african-americans black and puerto rican latino studies elective nelson mandela once said [Applause] also mandela once said education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world never

038forget the power you wield and do not waver and using it to support the growth of gps students and ignore whatever agendas others ask you to meet thank you for your time tonight i look forward to speaking i look forward to watching isabella and mitch what they can accomplish next year also sitting back there and i have the utmost confidence that you all continue the great work that made my 13 years in the gps system invaluable it truly has been a pleasure now i will pass the mic to our student body president kwame broughton thank you so much holly good evening dr jones members of the board and meeting attendees my name is kwame botting student body president at ghs tonight i give my last remarks in my position i'm truly grateful for my time

039not only this year but in student government over my four years at ghs i've attended lunch meetings with dr jones since i was a sophomore and can truly attest to the board's commitment to consistently consistently listening to the wants and needs of students so thank you to dr jones and i know that she'll continue to do an amazing job along still alongside trace doe i also want to show gratitude to mr silkman back there like javi mentioned our student government advisor for truly being the glue that kept everything together this year this man would wake up at any time and respond with the utmost diligence and care for all of our initiatives not to mention he edited all of my speeches and kept me on track when setting agendas for lunch meetings and student government

040mass student government is lucky to have such a dedicated advisor and we cannot thank him enough before javi and i pass the torch to isabella and mitchell to begin planning for next year i'd like to share my farewell thoughts on actions on action when asked why he doesn't observe moments of silence after mashing things on the daily show congressman jim hein said if you're in the one room where you can start fixing this problem and your answer is let me just stop talking for 10 seconds and by the way the flag at the top of our building we're going to drop that down 20 feet that's negligence that's not honoring anybody honoring the victims means that we're going to fix this representative heim's word stuck with me not because i don't believe in moments of

041silence but because i am a firm believer in action for the past year i've watched with my two own eyes parents bigger back and forth to the point where this room is physically split into two sections based upon what agenda one supports it is my view that this is a room that can fix our community's issues this is a room intended to be a space for truth as well as the opinions of greenwich residents but most importantly this room is intended for hard and sometimes uncomfortable discord that results in substantive initiatives when discourse becomes more divisive than productive or unifying then there is a problem i believe that we as a community [Applause] that we as a community have reached this problem and need to address it for the betterment of our schools we all

042have experience what inaction looks like on a local state and federal level so i implore us all to use these meetings as a means to take action and make greenwich public schools the best it can be for every student teacher and parent who is fortunate who is fortunate enough to be a part of this community with this i'd like to close our remarks by introducing you to next year's leaders of student government student body president isabella geigel and student body vice president mitchell goldstein i'm confident that these two will excel in their roles and i'm so excited for them to continue this important tradition of representing ghs students at board of education meetings thank you all for your support enjoy the summer and best of luck next year before these guys come down i just

043want to say to kwame and javi sometimes this job is hard and um but you think just reminded me of why i do it so thank you so much for um those powerful words i can see why you guys love the school this past year um i look forward to meeting both of you and hearing from you over the next year thank you so much are you are we speaking tonight or not no not today okay next year okay very good way to put you on the spot well thank you guys so much seriously call me and javi you know you have to make a tradition of continuing to come back right okay good good okay all right with that we go to lil from the gea comments but then you know me come on

044all right good evening everyone chairwoman still board of red members dr jones gea and community members before i start my speech i'd like to congratulate um all the science winners for jiren or community winners international isaf uh winners um our students are just just amazing our spring sports uh and i'll talk a little bit about the the girls team but um i don't know if i can say what i'm gonna say it it's just so many women in the science that um i noticed this year it warms my heart um and as a three sport athlete at my high school and a d1 athlete and still involved with the nc2a and conferences um it just uh and i went through title nine um and i wasn't allowed to like to play the trumpet or the

045drums or take the wood shop that my brothers did or any of those things and i remember my sophomore year in high school we got the same equipment it was just just amazing so we've come a long way baby so a little bit about the girls rugby i remember when it was just the club and i did go out there and help for a couple uh months and it's a new sport so to take on a state championship uh is just amazing so uh that's another thing brings a smile to heart but i want to congratulate all our amazing students and our athletes this is a great place to uh go to school to live and to work truly evidence of that tonight okay now everything else is going to be boring [Music] um some

046things always seem impossible uh you know until they're done we've had uh really difficult years uh these past two and a half years and we've made it through this year 21-22 school year yes we have come a long way and we've learned a lot from shutting down to remote schools open schools uh opening up cohorting hybrid social distancing all in with masks on mask off and now we're coming to our graduation and now school's going to be out for the summer okay i hear a song coming on but i won't sing although i do think i'm a good singer but so kudos to all who made this happen for our students um but we still have much things to accomplish we're not done yet we must keep our focus sharp you must keep positive momentum

047moving forward on these issues we must continue to make our mental health initiatives a priority for our students and our staff we must focus on teacher recruitment it's very competitive out there and not only recruiting them but retention uh we must continue to focus on stocking our shortage of qualified substitutes we are in a a good start with all our building initiatives uh but we need to continue to replace repair and maintain our school buildings provide more time for our teachers to collaborate with colleagues plan and less time on non-educational duties and more time with our students more time on professional learning we are on the right path may we continue to show kindness compassion empathy be tolerant work through our challenges together and celebrate our successes together the world has changed as mother teresa

048said the world has changed by your example not by your opinion i wish everyone a happy and healthy summer and i do have a little token for a board of ed members i think of godfather don't eat the cannoli but there are thank you so much lol i like that hey this is this is not going to change the labor negotiations just don't give him one and give him mine i get his thank you so much all right mimi what do you have for us do you have any gifts i was thinking please don't make me follow kwame because i couldn't have topped that and then you brought the cannolis seriously all public servants all right thank you that's so kind um [Music] all right good evening dr jones chairstow and other members of the

049board of education i am mimi duff president of pta council representing the 15 school ptas and the families of all their members let me start by saying congratulations to all the students highlighted in the student government athletics and science awards section of tonight's presentations the world is your oyster and your accomplishments to date are only the beginning looking at tonight's agenda we're excited to express our support for the newly proposed elective junior innovators program at the middle schools what an incredible opportunity for middle schoolers to be able to learn from and be mentored by ghs's angie andrew vermonte if tonight's science awards summary wasn't impressive enough i encourage you to read the book the class about ghs science research class i wish i could have a redo at high school to partake in all the

050amazing classes being taught at ghs and this program being extended to middle schoolers sounds phenomenal we're also happy to learn more about the summer school program aimed at filling in educational gaps for students requiring additional support as well as accelerated and enrichment programs we're also happy to see the zero waste program on tonight's agenda led by our green school chairs for years we have spent hundreds of volunteer hours doing research having meetings running pilots collecting data delivering presentations educating students during lunch hours sorting recycling from garbage and writing for grants we would like to see waste reduction a district priority in the lease we would like to apply the procedures that were written for our district nearly a decade ago recycling is the law and current adherence in our cafeterias is falling short p-tech is

051ready to work with the district on this there are many other items on the agenda tonight that we're interested in too many to mention so i'll pivot instead to the big thank you as i finish my term as pta council president i want to thank the board of education and dr jones and all of the others on ptac as p-tech president i have truly been standing on the shoulders of giants you will hear from some of our community chairs tonight specifically diversity equity and inclusion green schools and academic excellence they will highlight some of their recent achievements and current advocacy work within the district this is just a sampling of the incredible work that's been taking place and we look forward to continuing to work with the district toward the betterment of all of our

052children what you will see tonight from my colleagues is their unwavering commitment dedication expertise intelligence professionalism and also caring for our community they are steadfast in their research-based approach to look at best practices in other districts and see what we can improve in our own district many of you know that i work at a day job in finance but together we have a massive and i know massive skill set on our ptac team with professionals in educational consulting mental health law marketing and so many other fields together we are a very strong and mighty team and it's been my pleasure to work with them this year so a big shout out and thank you to all my ptech colleagues we've enjoyed working collaboratively with dr jones and her staff as well as the board of

053ed and many others that need the district thank you and thank you i also want to give a brief plug for the district they sent out a parent panorama survey and those are due tomorrow it might be in your junk folders mine was your life might be crazy right now mine is but let's all find the time to fill out that survey and spread the word let's have our voices heard i know this administration welcomes the feedback before closing i want to acknowledge that we are late with our p-tech annual report that's immensely on me and we will submit it in the coming weeks make sure it's included in the future board of ed docs for the public record and also posted to our ptac website these are hectic times for all of our working

054parent volunteers myself included so thank you in advance for understanding thank you again for your time and consideration hello karen i was just going to say having written that report many a time if it's late that just tells me how busy attack was and all the incredible work that must have gone on this year and i cannot wait to read through it so thank you thank you mimi for your service thank you for having me the other night at the ptac event and um and thank you for plugging the survey i must admit i am all about um just making the deadline and so i did mine before i came to the board meeting tonight and you have one more child than i do me me so it did take some time because you have

055to do it for each child um but it is really important so please everyone make sure you get that in before tomorrow okay so with that we now go to our community comments we do have 22 speakers i'd like to hear from everyone so if you are saying sort of the same thing as the prior speaker we would appreciate you um sort of saying thank you and moving it as quickly as possible and i will call the first speaker with who's on deck so the first speaker is jackie holman followed by alyssa thanos members and dr jones i signed up to speak about wms soil update because it was the first of the 14 agenda items that you chose for us rather than letting us speak on a first come first serve basis about the

056issues parents feel are the most important for instance i noticed that you didn't have an agenda item to talk about how you are illegally implementing yale's ruler program without board approval it's really shocking what you've done you've literally leveraged a public-private partnership to gift yale's curriculum to greenwich schools but the worst part about it is that you completely bypass the board of education approval process a process that is required by connecticut general statute chapter 170 section 220 subsection e which specifies that each local board of education shall establish a school district curriculum committee the committee shall recommend develop review and approve all curriculum for the district all curriculum must be approved by the committee before it can be implemented even curriculum that's gifted from a public private partnership the 9000 series of your own bylaws

057reflects this legal obligation of the board it says that you're required to implement the educational interests of the state as defined by law and that the mandates in the general statutes pertaining to education within the jurisdiction of the state board of education shall be implemented children still why was this process not followed before the adoption of social emotional learning programs including ruler and second step why did you allow your only employee to start training teachers on yale's program without board approval as required by connecticut general statute and by your own policy is the board exempt from the following connecticut statute a couple months ago former board member peter share informed you that you were operating illegally by teaching this unapproved curriculum out of curiosity did you seek legal advice with counsel after that meeting did

058you take any steps to remedy the known violation of connecticut statute and to remedy the violation of your very own policies by the way speaking of board policy i have repeatedly asked you to consider implementing a policy to protect vaccinated students from experiencing potential heart related issues in gym and athletics i'm not sure if you saw my op-ed in the grand sentinel about vaccine injuries but the risk is very real and then fabrication of teens in fact two teams in connecticut have already died from myocardial caused by covet vaccination i am begging you please do not ignore this risk thank you [Music] thank you next up alyssa van oss followed by amy ruth hi thank you we're going to share our topic yeah great thank you first i want to say that i was blown

059away by the athletics and science achievements this year that was amazing and i'd like to say kwame we hope to make you proud um by using this discord for good in the future um we are amee muth and alyssa vanoss co-chairs of the ptac diversity equity and inclusion committee we were in we were introduced as a special committee for the 2021-2022 school year but have been voted and approved as an ongoing committee we look forward to our continued work with the pta school leadership and all of you the 2021-2022 school year was about laying the foundation early in the year we identified key heritage and culture moments that could be included in school newsletters and other communications sent by pta and school leaders we built alliances and partnerships with the curriculum enrichment team discussed discussing

060ways we can partner in the upcoming school year we've built a website that will be ready for launch in advance of the 20 20 20 to 23 school year with book recommendations curated in partnership with the parrot library we plan to use the website to share content around diverse activities and happenings in greenwich and beyond broadman knowledge and celebrate our multicultural community we are retaining six of our current dei school reps into the next school year and look forward to new members joining we have built connections throughout the community including the ywca and the greenwich alliance with the goal of stronger partnerships and programming in the 22 and 23 school year for across all of our schools we've built relationships with the middle and high school gsa teachers and counseling leads to promote lgbtqia events

061we supported and partnered with community leaders to promote the town of branch greenwich pride event on june 12th and for those who missed it what an amazing day that was the artwork was provided by our eastern middle school gsa and the town proclamation is now framed and on display at greenwich public library our most visible achievement will be bringing common circles and the showa foundation's experiential installation and identity project to central middle school so thank you tom healy for the partnership it will launch in the spring of 2023 and align with kindness month ordinarily this would cost over a million dollars to install but because of the unique opportunities being gifted to greenwich public schools for the upcoming school year by common circles and the showa foundation i'll pass this yeah we would like to

062speak in support of number six of the board strategic plan stretch goals where you identify the goal of increasing the diversity of staff by utilizing diversity and retention initiatives it is very important for our students to feel represented in the staff teaching and administrative body we were thrilled to see the strategic plan's fifth goal of increasing each student's sense of belonging but we were hoping the goals would also be more specific to include more teacher staff training in general around diverse student needs in order to increase feelings of belonging and enhance curriculum so each child feels represented we believe social emotional learning in general is critical to creating a safe school culture and overall sense of inclusion we hope this teaching will be particularly mindful of the needs of all children regardless of race culture

063religion gender identity sexual orientation and socioeconomic status we continue to question how the board tackled the title ix policy update and are concerned with the ability to provide protections to all students with respect to that in relation to the cms building specs we encourage the board to move ahead with providing space for all students including the three gender neutral bathrooms in the original specs we hope that there will be greater movement on the part of gps in addressing the racial imbalance issues as identified in the december report in particular how can gps supplement pta budgets or curriculum enrichment opportunities so the enrichment opportunities and program at julian curtis pam ave new lebt western middle school mirrors that and the schools around them with much larger pta budgets one suggestion would be an expansion of assured

064experiences the curriculum for curriculum enrichment which is the vehicle by which there can be equity and experiences further how can our boe meetings be even more accessible can these meetings be simultaneously translated into other languages for non-english speaking parents or asl provided for our deaf and hard of hearing students and parents accessibility is key for all of our families to feel included and increase an overall sense of community we encourage gps to consider rural on an even broader scale beyond the ems pilot funded by the greenwich alliance as a tool for increasing emotional intelligence throughout our district we can look at school climate data at other schools in fairfield county who are using ruler to see its utility creating a safe and inclusive environment will benefit all students enron mental health issues and potential violence

065in our student population we were reminded at the town of greenwich's pride event this past sunday of how important it is to promote and foster respect acceptance inclusivity and an overall sense of belonging in our community when a former gps educated man shared that if there were events like this when i was in high school i would probably be a different person today actions and words matter representation matters we hope to see you at the town's juneteenth event at noon tomorrow in the steps of town hall let me thank you for the opportunity to talk and welcome how we can work together to support all of our students thank you very much next sorry can you say it again sorry allison khan and then megan crutchley okay sorry i get that right i'm hyped a

066little bit height challenged i'll just put this down hi good evening good evening dr jones good evening chair stow and members of the board i appreciate your time my name is alison khan i'm a resident of greenwich a parent a spouse a member of the lgbtq plus community and a human being who cares about this town as being a place where everyone is safe especially our children i'm missing my most precious time of the day right now my bedtime routine with my five-year-old because it's critical that i speak out on behalf of our lgbtq students of all ages in this town i speak on behalf of the trans kids who continue to be the battering ram for nonsensical culture wars waged by people who have never met let alone tried to understand what it's like

067to walk in their shoes there should be no space for bullies in this town not for disinformation or hate and ignorance not at the expense of our children not for anyone there is no threat there are no trans students taking scholarships away from star athletes there's no documented trend of harm that comes from creating gender neutral bathrooms what we do know is that when you strip policies of stated and federally guaranteed protections for lgbtq students like this board did with title ix the pain of that erasure is felt it is felt by our lgbtq students the hardest we have failed them when we make fun of kids needing safe places to use the bathroom we have failed our children when you consider erasing us from history from literature from curriculum we have failed the arguments

068being made are tired they've been debunked we cannot allow ourselves to be swayed by misinformed minority what's also proven is that the majority of us in greenwich and across america more than 80 percent by major polls like gallup um and others believe that lgbtq people deserve the same rights and protections as everyone else we must put the culture wars to rest we have so many more important things to work on and we can actually make meaningful progress if we can come together rather than allow a small vocal few to drive us apart we have the power to do right by our children and i'll end with reading the proclamation that alyssa referenced that was read by first selectman fred camillo on june june 12th at greenwich pride celebration whereas the town of greenwich proudly supports

069the rights of every citizen to experience inequality and freedom from discrimination whereas all people regardless of age gender identity race color religion marital status national origin sexual orientation or physical challenges have the right to be treated on the basis of their intrinsic value as human beings and whereas the lesbian gay bisexual transgender and queer communities contribute to the cultural civic and economic successes of the town of greenwich and whereas we as a society acknowledge the need for education and awareness to end discrimination and prejudice and encourage residents to reflect on the ongoing struggle for equality that members of the lgbt community face and celebrate their contributions that enhance our town [Applause] [Music] thank you and good evening my name is and i'm here representing the queer and gender diverse community as a queer health advocate

070non-binary health coach speaker and educator i have two mantras that guide my work we are all just flowers in the garden and inclusion helps everyone i'm not here to talk about celebrating diversity since we already celebrate diversity in the world around us in the beauty and uniqueness of plants animals fish and flowers what i'm asking is that we start to realize and include the great diversity that also exists in human beings gender diverse people have always existed we show up in ancient indian texts over 2000 years old and throughout the journals and diaries of the first conquistadors and colonizers of the americas in fact the reason why trans and non-binary identities may seem like a fat or a fashion has to do with the very type of erasure of our existence the greenwich school system

071is taking part in as we speak i assure you i exist when we talk about inclusion helping everyone with the example of gender inclusive bathrooms we talk about not only transgender and non-binary kids and adults we talk about kids with special needs that have aids with them we talk about kids with trauma kids that have been bullied in bathrooms we talk about kids with religious obligations that need a private space and we talk about adults and children that are menstruating we all have gender inclusive bathrooms at home we use them on airplanes and we use them every time we use porta potties if you don't have a safe access to public bathrooms it limits the time that you can spend in public and it can lead to health issues eight percent of trans and non-binary

072folks had a urinary tract infection or kidney-related medical problem from avoiding bathrooms teachers also suffer from this just so you know 59 avoided using public bathrooms altogether 26 percent of transgender and non-binary people reported being questioned verbally harassed or physically assaulted in bathrooms myself included lgbtq plus youth have some of the worst health outcomes in the united states of any kids and according to the trevor project's national survey on the lgbtq plus mental health in 2021 of queer youth seriously considered attempting suicide in the past year and that jumps up to over 50 for trans kids 72 of queer youth reported symptoms of anxiety disorder 94 of lgbtq youth reported that recent politics negatively impacted their mental health on a positive note lgbtq youth who have access to spaces that affirm their gender identity reported

073lower rates of attempted suicide trans and non-binary youth who had one person in their life that accepted and affirmed their identity were 40 percent less likely to attempt suicide you may think this doesn't affect you however however you don't know which children are in the queer community by removing stated protections for lgbtq youth and denying basic human needs like bathrooms you're further damaging the health of not only queer youth but those who love them and allowing ignorance and hatred to take the place of love and equality i'm going to finish my last two sentences we know the type of world that ignorance and hatred creates and let's instead take this time to organize around common humanity and love i thought that was important thank you okay next up kelly shulman followed by mary tobin haley

074online i am not seeing anyone by that name online okay not am i mary tobin oh here she is sorry and then next up is bob chaney greetings dr jones chairman chairwoman stow and board of ed members thank you for the opportunity to speak this evening in support of the zero waste schools program my name is mary tobin and i am a proud parent of a first grader at old greenwich school i have been grateful for the support of gps in so many ways big and small during these last two years of the pandemic i wanted to offer my thanks to each of you tonight while i have the opportunity to do so in person so thank you tonight i respectfully ask you to consider adopting the proposed plan for the zero waste schools program

075in particular i want to focus on the critical need to reduce our food waste by getting our food scraps out of the trash and into the compost bin as a volunteer with waste free greenwich i have seen firsthand the positive impact of working with community members to help turn their food scraps into a renewable resource that improves the health of our soil our plants and vegetable gardens and in turn ourselves when we throw our leftover food into the trash most of it ends up being incinerated releasing toxins into the air we breathe and our children breathe when i volunteer at the food scrap drop site i have been amazed by the willingness of residents to make a difference people stop by the chat and tell me again and again how much lighter their trash is

076it no longer leaks or smells and they no longer feel that weight of guilt of wasting so much food and many of them say my kids said i should start composting our children will inherit the world we leave them and we can give them the tools and best practices now to be good stewards of their environment look nobody feels good about wasting food but fortunately this is a problem we can solve we have proven examples of school districts that have implemented food scrap recycling in our neighboring towns such as westport and wilton and we have a blueprint for how this could work here in greenwich with the zero waste schools planned before you tonight food scrap recycling is a highly effective way to divert the bulk of cafeteria trash and keep the heaviest and most

077expensive components out of our waste stream for example in wilton they diverted over 90 percent of all their waste in just five months and 48 almost half of what would have gone in the trash was food food that instead was shared donated and turned into compost now we recognize that not everything can happen at once and that is why the plan recommends a pilot phase for food scrap recycling that would then be expanded to other schools the relatively small costs associated with hiring an organics holler to take away the food scraps can be offset with changes to our carting contract dramatic reduction in tipping fees and state grants as an rtm member and together with the base of support of committed parent volunteers many of whom are here tonight in green we will be there

078to speak up on the plan's behalf during our town's budget deliberation process next year together we can have a huge impact on improving the health and well-being of our town thank you very much next up bob cheney followed by renato de frances good evening my name is bob chaney and i'm speaking this evening regarding the zero waste schools program as well uh for those who might not be aware the zero waste schools program will enable a standardized system regarding waste reduction across the entire greenwich public school district uh julia de shams and angie heartless will go into detail later this evening about what exactly the zeroway schools program is and what it can do to assist the greenwich school district get back to the legal standard of recycling in this city for the public schools

079what i want to speak about this evening is about the title 1 schools in the district as it pertains to the zero waste schools program title 1 schools often lack the volunteer base that other schools in our district have as a result there are issues getting various tasks like recycling in the cafeterias accomplished this also makes waste reduction a harder issue for our title one schools as well now this is where the zero waste schools program comes in this system will have uniformly and consistent consistency across the entire district as it establishes a top-down approach this approach supports the district procedures that were set in place over 10 years ago the zero-day school program through implementation and education will incorporate a team-based approach that entails just one planning meeting with administration relevant staff and volunteers

080these teams called green teams will ensure that waste reduction is happening in all 15 district schools even those with a less substantial volunteer base this program once off the ground will not require additional staffing the zero waste school program timeline plans for all title one schools to be the first schools to use organic haulers as we've just talked about which are soon to be the most effective method of handling food waste we can't wait to see these organic hollers in the schools and they will serve as a pilot for the district in the winter of this coming school year but julian angie will also speak about this in greater detail later this evening in closing i just want to state that the zero waste schools program is designed to bring uniformity and consistency to the

081waste management system so that students and staff have a similar experience in all 15 schools and follow the same best practices we know that some schools have teachers and principals lunch monitors custodians perhaps even an army of volunteers but these things should not be the determining factor of whether or not waste reduction efforts are being made at a school recycling in all 15 schools is necessary by law i feel that as students move from elementary to high school they need to be accustomed to proper consistent guidelines and procedures ensuring waste reduction and lack of contamination i know that because of remote screwing we took a few steps backwards in regards to recycling and waste management in the district i feel it is now time to take a leap forward 30 seconds thank you for your

082time and have a great evening thank you very much uh next up granada de freitas followed by harriet gomer hi good evening everybody my name is renare de freitas i live in riverside i have a fourth grader at riverside school and a sixth grader at ems i am the co-chair of the ems green committee and is co-chair and member of the riverside green committee i will talk about my experience at riverside as i've never been to ems because of kovit the green committee at riverside school is a very active committee it has a lot of support from teacher parents staffs and principal for the year we have at least five big green activities in the school like waste free lunch day boot and co-drive halloween custom drive recycling refresh in the cafeteria and many more

083riverside is example for other schools to follow a brief example of the continuum works in the compost station at riverside school they have a very well designed and functional cafeteria bean station where they have recycled bean compost beans liquid beam in general general waste me teachers and students helped bring the compost material to the station with the support of our principal 4th grade students collect the compost materials from the bean station a teacher who is the door that leads to the outside of the building they dump the material in the compost station and come back inside the school always very fast and efficient thank you very much custodians where their union contract cannot transport food scrap to the outdoor compost bin so at riverside we rely on teachers and students but not every school has

084this luxury homes and responsibilities are facilities district leaders district staff principal teachers students custodians and ptas are largely defined already by the district procedure approved by the board of education 10 years ago the zero waste school proposal further defines the role of responsibilities in incorporation addition additional waste reduction strategies implementation and education should not rise on the shoulder of student groups passionate teachers or parents volunteers but instead should be led by principal and district administration and support by other stakeholders according to the district procedure school principals and district leaders are responsible to support implementation of and comply with solid waste recycling program provide guidance to teachers staffing custodians and promote use of seniors and among other duties all teachers are charged with instructions recycling rules modeling and promoting the process and insurance proper bin are

085handled custodians are labelled recyclables and provide and monitor and enforce complying of recycling success depend on the bottle up and top down collaboration and adherence to the procedure and law thank you very much uh next up harriet followed by hillary harper good evening my name is harriet gilmer i'm a parent at um riverside school i have a second grader and a third grader and also a sixth grader at eastern middle school um i have been on the green committee since my sixth grader was in kindergarten so this is my seventh year now and i'm currently on the board of riverside over green wellness and the garden as we're not just mentioned riverside has done an amazing job really the group of parents and mr weiss has been very on board with um the whole program

086anything we've asked for he's he said yes to we feel very lucky we applied to be a green ribbon school several years ago and and that was a huge honor for us and we've worked hard and there's a green ribbon award that when i spoke to the connecticut green leaves program about i said what do we need to do you know we do all these things at riverside and what can be done next and he really what they stressed was what we lack here at greenwich public schools is he said it needs to be if all the pta volunteers left the program needs to be sustainable that's what really it it needs to come from the top down we do have a handful of teachers who are very involved and we're so grateful for them

087and they get support from you know several pta members but and in general they also get some hard comments from some parents sometimes and our custodial staff is is some are on board some are good for it their contracts forbid them from taking out the compost we came up with an innovative idea for our students to do it our student council program where students took initiative to take control of composting and recycling in the cafeteria was hugely successful and then as soon as we got off the ground we had coven and and during kovid there was no recycling and we asked the captain can we have it can we have it it's too much work and it was again it was custodial staff has too much on their plate which i do understand but again

088as bob mentioned recycling is a law it's not something we can't we have to avoid and by teaching our children the lawsuit and apply to us is not really like giving them lessons for for life and we work really hard at riverside and they go through the schools and i think um i wish for all the schools that they had to see equal opportunities that um it ca and for that to happen it needs to come from it needs to be just what we do it needs to be part of the culture at greenwich public school system and this um zero waste schools program um julie and angie they've put so much time and study and research and they know all the numbers in the details but just as a passionate parent and community member

089i just think this is a benefit not only to our students but our entire community whereas people at home you know just the waste reduction in our town it really starts with you know we have a giant public school system and it really begins there so thank you thank you very much next up hillary popper followed by roger rosenthal good evening i'm thank you chair stone i'm dr jones and the entire board of education for this opportunity to speak i am harry herbert i am a riverside parent i currently have a second grader and an incoming kindergartner so lots of excitement for this next year i have been part of the green committee at riverside for the last three years the first year as a volunteer in the last two years as a co-chair and

090so i am here to share a little bit about my experience on the green committee but to primarily also support the zero waste schools program so just quickly with most of my chair experience going through kobe wanted to kind of jump in this year and what we're able to do and as harriet mentioned we've had a lot of support from our principal christopher weiss and so in the fall even though we couldn't go into the schools we were creative and he allowed this opportunity to come on to the playground to work with the students and for america recycles day in november we were running relays recycling relays with students and we were really encouraged by what we saw the students doing because not having been in the schools for the last better part of the

091two years not having known that recycling stations were not up and running we still found that our students knew how to recycle they were excited about it they wanted to show us what they what they remembered what they've been doing so that was great um confirmation in the fall when we were still in a community that really valued recycling and then jumping ahead to um more recently riverside we were finally allowed to go back into the cafeteria which was extremely exciting we were encouraged to see that our cafeteria sorting station was up and running and so we were able to re-initiate the recycling refreshers with our students and except for the kindergarten and first grade students who are new and through covet hadn't received any of that initial education yet um we found that our

092students again remembered we had we already like kind of seamlessly had this um recycling and sorting station back up the students were using confidently um the young ones needed some guidance but um but it was clean and it was efficient and it was up and running so i'm offering that quickly to then um go and offer um some of the highlights of the zero waste program proposal that i think are relevant to what we're seeing at riverside and what we would like to see in all of uh greenwich public schools so this initiative does ease the burden on the custodian in seconds because you have the bags are being changed less often it's more clean and you do have support from the community and volunteers coming in so you have people in place and support

093to create a uniform program across the district this program does not create more waste it just diverts it in meaningful ways um so it doesn't require any extra staff at the schools um but we do need to have the training for the custodians and those lunch monitors to ensure that they're able to support the students when they're in there when we don't have our green volunteers and parent volunteers thank you very much thank you next up roger rosendale followed by sandra heath good evening my name is roger rosendahl i'm a 25-year plus rather than a bench and both of my children spend time in public schools and i myself am a public school person when where i had really smart dedicated teachers who actually opened doors for me for which i'm very grateful uh could

094not help but be impressed by all the presentations tonight i'm by greenwich high school uh both athletic and the science program very impressive i specially shout out to the i've gone now to the uh rugby folks it's kind of dear to my heart i played rugby myself during college many many years ago no girls then and so they come a long way baby for sure so why am i here transparency and accountability transparency understanding the process of your decision making with respect to any particular issue accountability holding yourselves accountable for truth with meaningful consequences for false information and compliance with this as jackie holman said compliance with your own policies your own regulations this is particularly important for controversial issues of the ruler program social emotional learning critical race theory safety gun policy anything that

095has a political bent connotation the education school system is to teach children how to think not indoctrinate them into what to think thank you very much uh next up sandra heath followed by dinah or so [Music] dinar sorry do you see sandra sandra online i do not see anyone by that name okay then uh mr so yes sorry followed by sophie lynchow good evening dr jones chairwoman stowe and board members my name is dina urso i'm a mother of three boys our oldest attends central he's a sixth grader and i have a fourth grader in a preschooler at north street my husband and i are both lifelong residents of greenwich i'm here to speak um regarding the cms project i will also be incoming co-president uh next year and thereafter or pta president i'm speaking

096as a mom but before that i wanted to say thank you for sending the police officers to the schools for the last couple weeks it's been really enjoyable to see them interacting with the kids i dropped my preschooler off every day and i was a former prosecutor so i know a few of them and we always chat for a few minutes so that's really enjoyable to see them today i'm here for cms i'm asking you three specific things as you tackle the project first that you think long term and don't be short-sighted even if it means that the state will reimburse at a lower percentage as a result i'm encouraged to hear that the ed specs that are being discussed are hopefully going to be a bigger building and i ask that you not backtrack

097on that plan second i ask that you strongly consider what the staff and the students suggest about things that they think would make the building the best it can be whether it be adequate space for instrument storage or placement of the bathrooms or enough offices for the pe teachers or multiple cafeterias these are the people that are in the buildings day in and day out they have first-hand knowledge and i ask that you give the input that they are passing along the utmost attention and finally i ask that you don't lose sight of this being a school whose purpose is to be a place for students to spend very formative years learning and growing i'm sure as the process continues there'll be many opinions on things like noise and traffic and things along those lines

098and i'm not diminishing those concerns but i do ask that at the end of the day the focus remain and cms being a school and i think that's it thank you so much for your time thank you very much next up surf adventure followed by francis novae sophie you can speak and go ahead please oh hi can you hear me we can go ahead oh okay um hi everyone my name is sophie lunchow and i am a sophomore at greenwich high school i'm just going to jump right in there and say that i'm advocating for the zero waste schools program for gps and after looking it over and providing some input from a student's point of view i think that it's a really great initiative i've noticed in the past at eastern middle school and

099now at greenwich high school that waste reduction is definitely not a focus when it really should be for instance at the high school in the student center where students eat their lunch there are hardly any recycling bins you really have to search for them and as a student i know that many students don't try to find recycling bins because they just want to get back to their friends and are honestly just too lazy to go searching this means that the majority of the waste gets thrown in the trash at ghs when really it could be managed in a much more sustainable way not only environmentally but fiscally as well this zero waste schools program would be such an effective and efficient solution to this issue if sorting stations were set up all over the cafeteria

100or student center kids would be able to easily access the correct bin and quickly dispose of their waste furthermore in school many of my peers don't even really know why recycling composting and really just effectively managing their waste is important they don't understand that reducing your waste reduces greenhouse gases which will slow global warming or that it will save energy and precious resources or even that it will reduce incineration and landfilling which will prevent water and air pollution all of this is pretty basic knowledge that should be taught so i think that moving forward it would be really important to teach the students often in classrooms cafeterias and through special programs why waste reduction is important instead of just how to reduce your waste that's another reason why i like this program so much it

101really educates the younger and probably older generation like the teachers on the impact of waste management now i know that i'm only a student but i think the fact that i am a student is a big reason why my voice should matter on this issue my generation is figuratively and literally the generation of the future we need to develop habits such as waste reduction habits that will benefit our future and our planet in years to come as we know the planet is quickly deteriorating climate change is quickly becoming a very serious issue waste reduction will teach kids about these environmental impacts and also teach them very easy ways as to how they can reverse these impacts by simply sorting and lessening their waste so that's my opinion thanks so much for letting me speak i

102really and truly hope that the board will support the zero waste schools program thanks thank you sophie we always love hearing from the students especially thank you so much and next up francis nobody followed by lisa small hello this is francis winobe mom of three gps kids for the past year or so i've been using my three minutes to share children's books to remind us why we're here and who we're here for and the voice of the student she just shared that too in september i will join the ranks of mimi duff brian paldunas qriket diamond karen hirsch to take on the role of ptac president perhaps a new friend would like to take my place as storyteller until then let's enjoy excerpts from let me fix your plate a tale of two kitchens by

103elizabeth lilly to kick off the family favorite the road trip once a year on a friday night my family leave the city and drives for hours and hours to a mountain in west virginia my mama opens the door into the cool dark night let me fix your plate she says mama's midnight kitchen is warm and light with blue tiles on the floor and cat plates on the wall later my sisters stack vanilla wafer cookies mama pours the pudding and i cover the top with slices of bananas then we eat it all three days later we leave mama's house so early it's still night and drive and drive and drive south and south and south to a little orange house on a patch of scratchy cloth grass in florida we get out of the car and

104the hot sticky air hugs us close then abuela runs out and hugs us even closer there's food inside come eat she says in abuela's midnight kitchen white tiles feel cool under my feet aunts and cousins and uncles and neighbors talk over each other above my head i crunched and scuba roast and slurp fwan and fall asleep at the table my mom's still laughing saying loud spanish words that i don't understand in the evening i hide behind the couch with my book while my cousins and aunts and uncles dance salsa and merengue abuela finds me and gives me some stoneus three days later we leave the little orange house and drive and drive and drive back toward our house in the city we stare at the changing scenery tummy's full hearts fuller already missing the salsa

105sausage toast tostones ants aunts arepas abrela has bananas mountains mama cats fog and scratchy grass when we reach our house i'm hungry i say so mommy mixes flour and daddy beats eggs i set syrup on the table and little polito's hungry little chicks gobble them up and then drift off to sleep in their soft feather nests board of education principals vice principals teachers staff good night and thank you for an incredible year and to all i wish you a summer full of wonder whimsy and wellness our children are our future thank you francis maybe you could send me your reading list for the summer um next up lisa small followed by diana martinez good evening chairstone members of the board dr jones the entire gps community and gea my name is lisa small and i

106along with jessica and wright polanish are the co-chairs of ptac's academic excellence committee this year our committee continued to advocate for the education of all gps students to the highest levels of academic excellence with a greater consistency across all gps schools and an effective and transparent communication strategy between all gps partners in education despite the ongoing covet pandemic we were able to achieve or at least further the ambitious 10 goals set this year by the ae committee among these goals it was extremely important for us to develop a strong productive and transparent working relationship with each of the new k-8 program coordinators mike reed tara fogle and bj marcus as well as to continue to strengthen our relationship with k-8 director of curriculum mark d'amico it was very clear from me our introductory meeting with

107mr d'amico and his team in september that this group of administrators was different and that jess and i would have a voice and be viewed as partners never before have have we been given such that have we been given such better unfettered access to and such open and transparent communications with district administrators as we have been given this year it's truly been a revelation to have administrators openly acknowledge and subsequently demonstrate with their words and actions that parent voices are important valued and being heard by the district we are incredibly proud of our strong bonds that we forged this year with the k-8 administrative team and we look forward to continuing to work in partnership with the district and building new relationships in the coming year in addition a long-standing goal of the aea committee

108has been to advocate for a second parent teacher conference in our elementary schools we are excited for the district to introduce this second parent teacher conference into upcoming congress contractual negotiations with our teachers and ga this summer we conducted our own due diligence that showed the gps is one of a very few school districts in our area that do not have a second conference and that uh and that from what we can tell gps administrators and teachers agree that this second conference is an important addition to our school calendar we acknowledge the challenges that exist in building these conferences into school calendar and the time time and effort required by teachers to prepare for these conferences and the general twists in terms of contract negotiations however the ae committee on behalf of our parent community

109want to underscore to all of our parents our partners in education the importance of giving parents and teachers an additional opportunity to discuss student progress during the school year the opportunity is now is now here so please let's make a second parent teacher conference a reality thank you and time have a good summer good night diana martinez followed by cheryl resnick thank you good evening dr jones members of the board of education happy pride month fourth graders at north miami school have recently completed a unit on the struggle for civil rights in our country and recognizing a teachable moment in the rainbow flags that decorate our town i asked if i could come in and read a book about the history of the rainbow flag to my son's class my son's teacher was delighted but

110she had to ask her principal who directed me to the curriculum the principal relayed that i could teach about diversity in general but not about gay rights it's discriminatory to exclude the struggle of an entire segment of our population since we need direct representation of all groups in our curriculum so i contacted our superintendent for a specific policy and she explained that words like gay and lesbian are considered mature vocabulary for our elementary students dr jones empathetically offered that i could do what other parents have done at elementary have my son read a book in a small group with a social worker outside of class i explained that having a social worker read the book seemed to pathologize being gay and i wondered if at least we could have the book read in a celebratory

111way in the library with a small group of students who opted in i finally got approval only to find out that i had been relegated to the courtyard so next week we will have a small group of students in the courtyard reading together about the history of the rainbow flag at north miami school we're not even allowed to be in the building i wanted to pin a picture for you of what your policy looks like at greenwich public schools and let me begin by saying that teaching about the struggle for gay rights in elementary school is not the same thing as teaching about sexuality we're teaching about the right to be who you are to love who you love without being persecuted for it so while we do need to meet students where they are

112developmentally i reject the notion that gay and lesbian are mature terms for our children whose parents are gay or lesbian these are the words used to describe the people who love them the most for our children who have already had same gender crushes as early as elementary these may be the words that make them feel seen for the first time our current policy attempts to erase silence and ignore the existence of lgbtq plus families students teachers and community members and i hope i don't need to tell you that our elementary students have already heard the words gay and lesbian 30 seconds my son says students use the word in elementary school regularly except they use it as a put down or they use it whenever a boy is not conforming to gender roles this practice

113of avoiding the language of gay and lesbian in our elementary schools may be the reason that middle schoolers report an even higher rate of bullying and harassment than high school students we're refusing to address their discomfort around the many expressions of gender and emerging sexual identity at their most vulnerable time as they begin puberty time thank you thank you very much next up show resume followed by catherine mccarthy obviously i'm not cheryl cheryl's driving she couldn't be here tonight so she asked me if i could read this on her behalf okay um so every time i say i and my imagine that i'm cheryl i am just made and surprised about the lockdown drill held on wednesday june 8th at greenwich high school my daughter informed me that during the drill the students weren't allowed

114to act like it was a real lockdown because of covet protocols and social distancing she and her fellow students had to sit in the classroom during the drill and continue to do what they were doing in class because they weren't allowed to huddle up and protect themselves like they would during a real incident was this experience limited to her classroom or was this the way the drill was conducted throughout ghs what did this drill teach the students to do during a real situation should it occur what kind of message is this sending to our children just to dial it in and think that it's okay nothing needs to be taken seriously if covert or another illness was rampant are the kids not allowed to huddle and help each other for fear of getting sick versus

115their own physical safety i feel like ghs and gps were just checking the box to say that they had a lockdown drill that had taken place are we still really at the point where the students have to change their behavior due to covert protocols i'm truly disappointed at what was taught to our children haven't we learned enough from what happened at columbine sandy hook parkland and most recently at rob elementary school as to how to best protect our children and show them how to protect themselves and others lockdown drills should be taken seriously and all protocols should be required to be followed for all teachers students and staff thank you thank you next up catherine mccursey followed by thomas kanye good evening dr jones chairstow board of ed members gps community this is going to

116be very brief but i wanted to give a public thank you this evening to several people on the first day of sixth grade i'm a parent of an eighth grader here at central and a ccs student on the first day of sixth grade mr healey said middle school's going to go very fast it's the shortest time that your child will spend in a given school he was right the pandemic flew right by and that's thanks to the teachers here at central they have really amazed me the entire time my daughter's been here throughout remote school she was a remote student last year and then the pandemic and also again this year they have been kind attentive pushy uh pushing in the right way i don't mean pushy pushing her in the right way challenging and

117everything that i just can't believe they could accomplish in three short years so i just really want to say thank you to them thank you to mr healey and thank you to mrs perron who frequently takes my phone calls and is not hanging up on me yet so um also i want to thank gene schmidt he has been principal at costco school the entire time our family has been there and he still also takes my phone calls i think so i want to say thank you to him he's been a wonderful inspiration and to alp teacher tracy salvatore we're going to miss you you've been terrific and inspiring to our students and uh we can't wait to find out what you're doing next and uh we salute you finally at ccs i know everyone's excited

118to welcome a new principal so we hope that we hear about that very soon and uh we can't wait to welcome that person and show them what a wonderful community costco school is so thank you and especially thank you to all of the teachers of greenwich public school who do the work i could never ever do thank you thank you very much uh next up thomas kanya who i see online followed by gabriella marcus and that's our last speaker yes my name is thomas kenia i am a father of twin boys in the same class as miss martinez's uh the words homosexual gay are really used um or words that are really used have been used in in my children's class since kindergarten at north america school because my children have two fathers me and

119my partner we've been together for 25 years so we really didn't need a lecture from dr jones about sensitivity for us gay rights and the words homosexual are not sexual terms they're terms about human rights the terms about the stonewall riots the terms about the aids epidemic and the terms about the discrimination that continues to happen including hearing greenwich and the terminology and the protocols that you people put in place we will be attending this uh we will be attending my children will be attending of course the the the the the lecture or the book reading and as they have been attending other events during gay pride and i am proud to say but very ashamed to say that greenwich has done it has really done a disservice to gay people gay parents and gay

120and children of of of gay parents uh in this in this past year thank you thank you next up i'm sorry in our last speaker gabrielle gabriela marcus she's submitting and writing okay thank you so much all right and that concludes our speaker of us thank you everyone for coming out and talking to us now we turn to our monthly reports dr jones first of all i just want to acknowledge the senior awards that happened um earlier this week they were just phenomenal and i think it kind of goes along with what we saw with science it was just every single content area in the high school so just well done um for all of our seniors that were there this week and if you've never been to the senior awards it really is because

121they don't know what award they're getting until they get there and i had never seen that before because this was my first senior awards because we've been in covid and it was just it's wonderful because i had a program that did have the award and the names but the students don't have them so that's it was so unique just wonderful we're also welcoming jonathan budd our human resources chief who is online tonight i know some of you haven't met him um david eisenstein is also new in hr so we feel like in our human resources department we're just so excited what's happening there just as a reminder i know many of you are attending um graduation next thursday it will be at cardinal stadium our brand new cardinal stadium which is going to be very

122exciting i want to build off of what mimi said please fill out the parent surveys the family survey and we really do count on that information and it helps guide um what we're hearing from our families so um and last but not least i want to mention and just say you know congratulations to uh ralph mayo who tonight is being honored um at the fciac is a hall of fame awardee so and that's where ann carabello is there on my behalf since she we wanted somebody there so congratulations to principal mayo that's great i know that okay um cody you want to go first with the alliance stuff thank you um i have four updates the granted alliance annual report is now available and i'm told it's part of the meeting documents um there's a

123good overview in there of their work over the last 15 years so make sure you get that for your summer reading second they're they're doing a vr ar virtual reality augmented reality steam camp for rising 6th to 12th graders at western and registration is still open on the greenwich alliance website third june 22nd there's a graduation celebration for the avid class of 22. all 37 grads are going to colleges including connecticut state schools and others that offered full need scholarships such as lehigh emory providence tulane and george washington uh last 147 thousand dollars have been awarded in reaching out grants to the gps for innovative educational programming the largest grant of 56 000 [Music] is for a science beyond a classroom which is for all gps first and second graders to go to the audubon

124so that's all i've got that's plenty thank you very much should i just go in order michael joseph on the strategic plan not on am i okay thanks aaron um on the strategic plan the um recall at the retreat we looked at some ambitious draft stretch goals that the the leadership team uh which is dr jones's administrators are continuing to revise and will be back for the board but i just want to remind the board that any feedback to give the distributed plan committee if you could send us any feedback on the draft goals um that would be that would be helpful so we can keep the momentum running moving there with the hope of bringing the goals back to the community and getting put down over the next couple months sounds like a plan

125karen nothing it's okay no but i will uh remind people to do the survey because we will be using that those results as part of the strategic plan so please please please send those in i suspect we're going to extend the deadline dr jones just saying um christina downey we've we finally got approval from the state to go out to bid on the high school entryway right away um so we'll be going out to bed um and hopefully i'll advise the board in writing once we see where the bids come back in i don't think i don't know if the board i don't think we have to we may have to vote on the contractor i don't know i have to look into that okay joe you're doing the waterfall update later but you might

126still have something right later okay you wanted the waterfall it's on the agenda i thought you took that off i took off the if there was more to it whatever you prefer why don't we wait until it's on the agenda less people here exactly i want to definitely make sure there's no one here to support you it's my goal second okay with anyone else oncoming updates no okay with that let's go to the discussion items western middle school soil update dr jones i really don't have much of an update as you know we're putting this on every single month and because we were submitting the wrap um at the state level we'll be going through that review so um it's really that's what's happening and that's where we are right now that's good enough i

127just want to make sure we keep we stay focused on it so i'm sure hopefully we'll have some good news uh by the end of the summer okay uh summer school planning dr carabello or mr d'amico sorry tara oh and this is where i have to do a shout out to the flip in the classroom michael joseph um i hope you all did your homework and watched the videos ahead of time i did and it was uh very helpful so i think we could go straight to questions is that the problem we're not we're not showing the presentation for the public that's not it's been posted it's posted that's the whole point of flipping the classroom according to dr michael joseph marconi and i just we think as a board we should have a discussion

128about that here okay but well i'm ready to go into questions unless you guys if if you guys want to watch the video just give me a sense yeah you watched it right and it was posted for the public so um they had their time to also review it okay so let's go on to sorry just one point going forward i'm okay with it but it would have been good to have printed um the because i think there were some slides that would be just going forward even though we don't i'm not saying we should watch the video but to have the slides to be able to write on as we're having the discussion i just going forward i think that would be a best practice i'd agree only because we're old but most people

129would be fine just no but just nominated no i know i know i'm kidding i'm a dinosaur too we're not talking about age you can call yourself old but age is a state of mind it's fair enough miss costin i i think maybe we should get the highlights like a quick highlights version before we just go to comments because it's okay to assume tara can you give us some highlights yes i definitely can the video is pretty short too i think i kept it under like three minutes but the primary focus of our program is going to be literacy and numerous eka when we look at the 912 program we're looking at credit recovery in core graduation requirements and then in our secondary focus we also have acceleration and enrichment classes we're running from july

1305th to august 5th our hours range from 8 a.m to 1 p.m this year we're also very excited to launch a tutoring program we have half hour sessions two to four days a week for k through four families that's rising first through fifth and for our enrollment criteria we um invited academic support students our ell population esi eligible students and then those taking our acceleration or enrichment courses and i went through the sections that we have 19 in elementary we have five courses in math bridge 22 courses at the high school and then i went ahead and did a breakdown of all staff and then our curriculum in k5 we have 90 minutes of literacy 60 minutes of math and at 6 8 we have 60 minutes of literacy and 60 minutes of math and

131julian curtis does have another satellite campus this year great questions michael joseph yeah so so so tara thanks uh everybody knows i'm a proponent of videos but thank you thank you so much for doing that feel free to help some of your more tech phobic colleagues with screencastify and stuff like that um i um i wanted to ask about um the the jc satellite campus and i guess i i wasn't clear what the uh what the purpose was of that or why it look it i got the sense that it's we have a primary summer school and then we have a one satellite at jc and i didn't know if we could or it might be for dr jones but i didn't wasn't sure what what what the the thinking was there tara do you

132want me to take that or do you want to go ahead and answer no you can go ahead so this was something that we tried last year and it was at the request of our principals and it's mainly in our title one schools where they really felt like they wanted a little bit longer day they also are trying to extend the school year in that it's their teachers that are actually teaching in their program so that way they they don't lose that continuity and just the way that the building approaches literacy and numeracy and we did see good results the reason it's one building is we will not do it if the principal can't commit and be present and they have their own staff otherwise they need to be at the just the general summer

133school because that's teachers from all across the district so that's why this year and sometimes it has to do um you know with a principle that is well for instance new lebanon the principal will have a baby in the middle of the summer have a new little one um they also may not have enough staff that want to work in the summer march last question that is it was at a new lab building meeting and we were talking about they seem to think they're having summer school there yes we are hosting our district-wide summer school for k-5 at new lebanon rather than costco correct i got that just trying to plan summer school this year was incredibly difficult when you think the high school campus is closed cms is closed we have so many major

134projects going on around the district and then on top of that we also share space with park and rec for their programs as well as eastern civic center which is also closed that house this summer um so we really work together with the whole park and rec team and to try to map it out karen with respect to the jc program how many kids are coming to summer school there currently we have about 42 enroll as of monday i believe and have i i get a little i do get worried in the sense that we're not being able to offer a similar program for other schools whether title one or not throughout the district and i'm curious to see whether or not we think we can accommodate this on a broader scale particularly because if

135we did see certain results and how we feel this has some inequity across the district as it relates to other kids that won't be having the similar teachers in the same type of of program i know we talked about this a lot last year what we what we do think is that if they can offer the program with their teachers that is beneficial to children especially in this k-5 area and it makes a big difference we can't force teachers to work in the summer so it's not something where we could make other buildings do it we also have some buildings that wouldn't have enough students summer school to really run you know an effective program i will say the extra layer that you know tara spoke to but it was it was quick because it's

136new for us is the tutoring component and the tutoring component is really trying to balance coming out of covid young children want to be at the beach they want to ride their bikes they want to be little kids and there are parents that would love to bring them in for reading tutoring two or three days a week and then be able to play and not have 90 minute and 60 minute sessions so we're trying to be more open in what we're offering families and options so they can make it meet what their family needs are i was going to say that's a nice change karen i was actually going to ask questions in fact about the tutoring program i was going to say it's the first time hearing of this option i think it's fantastic

137i know the board over the past several years has consistently talked about ways we can uh improve our summer school especially for the younger students and used to be that they'd have to come in for a full day even if they only needed language arts or math um so i think this will be really beneficial um but you know especially for students who really only have a very specific need even within language arts and or numeracy so i just had a quick question though um is was this basically being offered to any student that wasn't you know meeting a certain level of mastery the the tutoring option the tutoring option was offered to any student who was invited to summer school that includes our esy and l population as well as our academic support population

138parents could opt in for the full day program running from 9 to 12 for our general ed population and then from 8 to 12 for esy population and parents who wanted to have related services on top of tutoring if they did have those in their ieps we are able to accommodate that in our crafty tutoring schedules so it was offered to all parents we had 38 families and 40 students capitalized on that as of monday um i i will tell you we've gotten a few more emails this week for some families who booked some trips and wanted an opportunity to switch from the regular program to the tutoring option so it's getting more popular as the sun is shining and the temperatures are rising that's for sure well i think you partially answered my next

139question which was you know for you know what would this be offered to other students outside of that that might want to take advantage of that option um so i think you just asked that saying you've gotten more emails and i guess so is the fee for this pretty similar then than what we offer for the other uh summer school program because the tutoring option is for all of our invited l or esy students there is no fee for the summer school this year for that population we do have the standard fee structure that is agreed upon by the board for our acceleration and enrichment courses at the high school thank you and then my last question is since you mentioned high school um i know in the past summers we've had a lot more

140high school offerings uh they've seen they've been majorly reduced i don't see many if any enrichment options nor the um i think we always used to run an sat or act prep course uh for a lower fee over the summer is that something where we we took away for this summer just to give our educators a a much needed summer off or was there just not requests or need for any of those things yes sorry the decision to of the 22 ghs course offerings was done in partnership with the program administrators at the high school as well as their school counseling and guidance department to figure out what core graduation requirements are students not meeting and how are we going to get those students to get those courses within the four-year graduation rate so those

141courses are going to be our key our limiting factors are staff as well as space in our programs so the 22 core courses that we are offering are the ones that our staff at the high school felt would be the most beneficial for as many students as possible thank you for that and hopefully when we uh when we have the campus back open in the summer we can start offering some of those awesome enrichment courses that the students don't have necessarily the opportunity to take during the school year because i know that those were always a really impressive opportunities for students to take advantage of yeah and a small plug for the program ghs students do have until june 24th to continue to enroll for those nine to twelve classes and all of the information

142is available on the summer school website we should make the survey a prerequisite for it i like that karen kowalski do you have a question yeah i just had one additional follow-up question so um with the opportunity for the tutoring option is it is it either or or can it be combined with both taking the literacy and the math class plus getting the tutoring or do you only get one choice that's a great question it is either or if you are going to capitalize on literacy and numeracy we do need you for that full day the literacy tutoring at 30 minute sessions is in a small group ratio which i didn't get a chance to explain in our quick overview but it's a ratio of one literacy specialist to three students we collect data from

143their current classroom teacher to figure out the strands that they need the most support on and then we put them in a grade level band with other students who need that same support so it's real targeted literacy support for that 30 minute clip and parents could decide whether they wanted a monday through thursday or a monday wednesday or tuesday thursday schedule so when dr jones gave this idea to dr carabillo and i she really wanted to stress family flexibility and how to support them in the most targeted needs while having them have a summer schedule that worked for their family we did not unfortunately we were not able to craft a schedule where you could do 30 minutes of tutoring and then 60 minutes of math in that case you would substitute for the full

144day program yeah i just was curious because um it sounds like a great program and something that from just having some background in in one that struggles in the literacy component that it might be a great option to look forward look into in the fo in this outcoming summers where you could offer the literacy option plus that intensified uh component with the tutoring particularly where it's such a low number of the ratio between students and teachers i'm sorry students and a teacher perhaps that might be a really good opportunity for those that struggle particularly in the literacy component to get like a double whammy with not so intensive thank you we're going to take all the feedback we can from the parents the students and then the incoming teachers of the students who are tutored

145over the summer to find out how they're performing and continue to if it's a program that's working to our families i'm sure dr jones shares this sentiment we'll make it more robust next time around it's downy uh yeah just a couple of questions how many i mean i know the numbers are going to change a little bit how many students do we have signed up at the main campus and for the high school courses do you have ballpark or do you know it off the top of your head tara i do at the high school and this is all actually as of 6'3 was the last time we ran the data for the secondary program we had 45 students in our high school courses it's important to know that historically speaking those numbers are going

146to bubble right before finals and after final grades are posted that's when students are going to find out if they want to retake a course or get credit recovery um yeah for our math bridge courses we have 18 students right now between five courses that's our middle school six eight math bridge courses for students who want to accelerate into an additional math course in the preceding year and we had around 290 in our k5 program does that include the jc in addition to that does not include the 42 students that are in jc as okay and then just in terms of our costs um structure do we have a sense or i guess would that be a report at some point but are we going to run the goal is to run this as a

147break even is that correct dr jones or i mean i know it's the goal but is it achieve where do we think we're going to wind up yeah i couldn't answer that actually at the moment i'm not sure if um tara have you worked with sean at all on that that end of it dr carabillo has worked closely with him so there is an approval process for all of the spending that does happen but um anne does work on that closely with sean okay no just and i guess we'll get find out about that at some point over the summer okay thank you how do the numbers compare to that last year in terms of the actual number of students not financials more or less the same we have more students in our k-5 program

148at this time and about similar in our six 6-8 bridge program i don't have the exact numbers on ghs because again that bubble does happen up until the 24th or that last day of school but i can get back to you on that okay and then i just want to understand directionally and um i noticed that for the assessments for math you were going to use pieces of the big ideas math program which made sense but for reading you were using star i didn't realize that was still hanging around yeah we are using star as our assessments just for summer school as an isolated assessment that we will use for summer school for a few different reasons i do this in consultation with our research manager to figure out what assessment is going to not

149take away from instructional time since we only have them for 24 days but can show growth in short spurts so we are going to be utilizing star for reading in the k4 classrooms okay makes sense thank you yeah michael joseph yeah so thanks i i did uh i feel compelled to note so i saw a star which i'm fine with the um the i saw the literacy curriculum uh which makes sense because it's our current curriculum in many areas is is the teacher's college um [Music] curriculum from lucy calkins and obviously that continues to be a concern of me mine i do think it makes sense tara that we haven't in the in the summer but i do think that moving forward particularly when we see the literacy data this fall um it's time for

150for for us to have a conversation about that curriculum and where it is we know that it is the subject of significant uh national criticism there have been a number of reports over several years uh criticizing it and then i circulated to the board just the article in the new york times front page sunday times from last month around how responding to criticism dr calkins has decided to revise the curriculum on claiming the uh all the learning that she's done in the last year about the science of reading but that research is 20 to 50 years old um so i do think it is something that we need to we need to think about particularly in light of the literacies course but it doesn't make sense for the summer i'm not it makes sense that

151it is what it is right now although while it is what it is we do want to maximize this time for students with the highest needs so we have worked in partnership with dr marcus as well as the literacy specialist at the k5 level to layer in fundations lexia and then the book of geodes in our summer program so all of our k5 teachers will be trained on that in our prep days for summer school so we're not solely relying relying on those tc units we do have a minute by minute breakdown of how they will be spending their time including other resources that's great and i know we've made strides with with geodes and foundations and other programs to advance components so i know there are other things that we do that's great yeah

152i just think it's worthy to note that um the the literacy team is ahead of that and they um actually and we won't spend time on it tonight but mark actually took took his team to another school district even looking at a reading program they were infusing in this year that they were using because we know we're going to have to go in that direction okay anything else okay all right thank you very much tara next up temple executive summary dr bud welcome good evening everyone can you hear me we can it's my pleasure and privilege to join you here tonight to join the greenwich public schools and as you know your reputation for excellence precedes everybody associated with gps and that includes our certified teachers and administrators who just stand and do great work

153every day i'm here to just give you a brief executive summary of where the district has been uh with teacher evaluation the past year and of course uh i'm doing this based on the information been given to me uh as i'm transitioning into greenwich for an official start on july 1st but you should know that as our administrators are finishing up their final observations uh and documentation in the last few weeks of school you may be impressed to know that there have been over 2 000 uh documented observations of certified teachers in our schools this year uh specifically 2030. and uh the evaluations show a range of proficiency and exemplary uh teaching practices by our staff from pre-k all the way through greenwich high school and i think those of you are familiar with the

154teacher evaluation professional learning plan know that the goal is to help teachers uh really excel at their craft by giving them feedback related to specific indicators of teaching and learning uh we will be able to give you a further report in future weeks once all documentations uh have been completed for this school year but again it's a privilege to join you here and i know that we'll be speaking quite a bit about how teachers receive feedback on their craft and how we continue to maximize the growth of the district again thank you thank you doctor bye and welcome um maybe dr jones if you could just give especially for the newer members of the board exactly temple's just sort of coming back because it during covet right we weren't really following it but we the

155state gave us the whole state gave leeway on it right correct the state had flexibility over the last two years so it's really just coming back and even this year as you know we started out in a covered type environment at the beginning of the year so there's an extension and that's one reason it's normally on the agenda at this time and we would have most of them completed but we're going to go right up until the end the last week so do you think this is something that we could see sort of our first meeting in september or we could or i could just send it out to the board it's really not um i don't think to spend necessarily at a board meeting on how many animations that's a good idea especially if

156we're gonna have a written report from p-tech and things like that but maybe we could get it um as soon as you have it that would be great go ahead michael joseph is our evaluation plan is that something that's um that's revised annually or is that is that it's separate from the contract a little bit where they're connected how does that work we actually have a temple committee uh that meets during the year and they actually just went through a very large um you know looking at it again over this last really 12 months and dr carabillo i don't think she's on i think she unless she is she but is she actually on oh i don't know yeah um but she is um actually the one that does that and runs the temple committee

157for us that that might be be helpful so when we get the report if i guess we could get the the revised plan too that would make sense that's a good idea okay so when i asked a question about the temple thing kathleen said we hadn't done it a number of years so i actually went back to a couple of meetings and i found the report that dr carobillo had done in 2019 in june and i think if you go back and look at that it gives you the background of all of this and then the process it's a fairly lengthy document so admittedly i didn't read it all but i did yeah but it does give the background and it would be nice to know based upon that 2019 document that she had presented

158whether or not there have been any changes in the course of the process and in conducting the reviews and maybe update it i don't know if it's updating that document or at least that's a good baseline for us to start this process karen will be also helpful as we uh have a new director of hr we'll also be coming in to uh to take a look at that and review and work also you know with with our our head of uh gea as well as dr jones see how how that process is going to work going forward uh in the best way possible to ensure that our educators are you know getting positive uh uh feedback to support their growth as well okay anything else all right so it looks like we'll hear more about

159that over the summer oh i think that's ann are you trying to say something uh i'm in my car driving on the way home from the fbx so as soon as i left that i decided i would try to listen to the board meeting we will be making a change in our temple evaluation document this year i've been in touch with the state they are very impressed with our new rubric that we have uh totally revised in 29 2019 we revised it and then we took a look at it again this year and we have done some more revisions we've also developed a fabulous resource guide for teachers to use so that we can use it as a base for conversations between the administrators the teachers and their reflective questions and it's really fabulous and

160i can't wait to present that to you and then also present it to the state and they said they might want to use our rubric or uh you know their their template for the rest of the districts in connecticut so we are working very hard at continuing to make greenwich one of these most excellent okay thank you i think we got most of that from the car okay thank you exactly okay i think we're gonna move on to uh the big topic of the evening i'd like to say central middle school and specs um if i could just frame the conversation for a little bit since we've done this a few times um and i want to give the board and the public an update so the building committee the six members it was originally

161supposed to be seven but one person got postponed to september that were recommended by the um select board of selectmen um were approved on monday night by the rtm the there are also representatives from the rtn planning and zoning dpw and then dan watson from our schools that have been assigned yes yeah that's why i said i want one from i'm sorry so we're down to five okay got it okay so there's five members now that the rtm approved on monday night but i think the other one or two are coming back in september just one we'll see okay um then we'll have the like i said the other numbers from the various town departments the be2 will select one next week as well i from the board of ed um so that's where the

162building committee stands um tonight we're having another discussion on this but i think what's really important and i think i've heard loud and clear from my colleagues here is that we just don't want to move this too quickly at the same time it's important that the building committee gets started and i was speaking to dr jones about it and i said well we're changing a few processes here why do we feel like this needs to be goodbye to it why wouldn't we make part of the n spec they have to report to the board every other month make it a requirement and if we do that and we we bless something in the next week you know it's like building your house right i mean you're giving a sense but things are going to change

163over time right because you don't like the kitchen anymore so i don't want us to feel like we're sending this off and we're never going to see it again i think it's behooves us to actually say as part of the ed spec this is a requirement and when i mentioned that to dr jones you said that that's how you did in fairfield is that right so i thought i had a brilliant concept and it turned out other districts were doing just that so um but so anyway as we change processes as we get better at these things i think that's something that we should um actually put as almost like an amendment to our ed spec um i think we should go through all the questions i know that we're kind of kept firing them

164off late to you and so i know we all just got the document but i really wanted to focus the conversation a lot tonight on size because until we figure that out and we get to give a sense to the consultants um you know everything falls from that so i'm going to open up to questions i see your hand karen but i actually was going to okay i was going to try to walk you through some of the numbers as i understand them and then ask chris cycle to sort of help me out with it because i understand he understands the percentages very well is that fair go ahead you know the only thing i was asking is we got this fantastic document with all the questions and answers that we've asked i just didn't

165i want to make sure it's getting posted and or it already has been posted oh okay it wasn't before i left the house i was just double checking thank you okay so i'm gonna sort of unders sort of lay out the broad strokes of the numbers as i understand them but please correct me if i am wrong at all um we've talked a lot about state reimbursements and how it and it's sort of driving a lot of our thinking i think and i think it's important that we understand what we would really expect as greenwich because the reality is it's not the percentage that most towns get um so i think we need to appreciate that right now as the building was currently put that we've seen at 104 000 square feet i believe the

166reimbursement rate would on that would be eight and a quarter eight point two five percent we wouldn't even get the whole 10 the whole 10 was really at 86 000 square feet so at a building that we've all seen so far that i'm actually going to say might be too small just for the sake of argument um that really is a building size for 600 so for 600 students at a 104 000 square feet um you're looking at a reimbursement rate chris correct my phone wrong of around 6.6 million am i right assuming sorry assuming it's an 80 million build uh yes that is correct okay so every bit we move so then i looked at a scenario in which it was 117 000 square feet because i think that was getting us closer to

167uh tell me if it was a 650 or 700 student number you're moving to 5.8 million if i think the reimbursement rate was seven and uh half maybe uh it was yes it was seven point rounding 7.6 so my point is if we were trying to move the building so please give a number for 172 000 square feet but by doing that i believe we were upping the students by potential by over 100 students and we're moving you know 800 000 we're losing 800 000. so i don't want us to spend so much time focused on that because in 2100 you know are we going to be happy we spent the 800 extra 800 000 for 100 students i'd argue yes but i think it's important that we i don't know if i have the

168numbers perfectly rolled out but it's it's kind of in that that mode so i want to sort of frame the conversation around that especially as we look at historical enrollment that we just got in the in the latest questions miss downey yeah i think we've all become a little focused on the state reimbursement and i think we've all had the discussion that this building is going to be here for a very long time i think we should be focusing on the building we think should be built um and will get reimbursed because our reimbursement rate is not 70 percent or like some school districts get i think we really i agree with you 100 that we should be focusing on the size and the number and the capacity um and that because all the other

169spaces are going to flow from there if if we're building to hold more academic rooms we should have a bigger cafeteria we should have yeah i think we all feel good about the auditorium probably but um you know we see this state reimbursement as this magic money but the state isn't deciding what we should build the state's only telling us how much money they're going to give us for what we build but i think we as a board it's our job to be thoughtful and determine what size building we think is the right size for this community i i know i've had conversations with several of you and i think we all feel that way i think the question then becomes what's that number and what's the size we're thinking about correct and so that's

170where i i kind of open up to everyone but i do turn you to the question answered and the document um number 53 i don't know what page number this is thank you um but so you know you go back 20 years and and right here we had 732 students you know eastern right now has north of 800 western is in the sevens you know i do who's to say central won't grow to that size again especially because it's centrally located so if anything were ever to change um and or you know you had another issue where you had to move some children not because you're redistricting simply because the system is growing um this would be the school that could handle it if we built it appropriately so um you know we're kind of

171at our low and so i don't want to think about it i i mean to me the number feels like it's more in the 700 to 800 student category but um i just wanted to get a sense for everyone so i just wanted to start the conversation there thoughts karen oh well before we had gotten this i had gone back and read through uh enrollment reports from the past i don't know decade um and yes i was i was glad to see it sort of outlined here but i i know we had sort of asked and i think also if you look in the documents a little further up what page was it um we'd asked about questions uh increasing the size i think it's question number 37. um and i think uh principal healy

172also had suggested maybe looking at a total of 660 which if you look back at sort of the enrollment numbers over the past i don't know decade or more that seems like a pretty reasonable student population size if that's what you guys are thinking about looking at and they outlined here um under question 37 if we went up to that number uh what that sort of would do to the ed specs we've been looking at thus far um because i think it was mentioned uh at least somewhere in the long line that uh when they were here last time csg said the building was sort of for 600 but it wasn't really it is actually they had specs i think you mentioned something if you want to be able to explain that it was really

173for still 511 but yes and so we did clarify that with the team and the building is being built by ed spec from when we look at it from a student perspective 511 students when the state looks at the total square footage they will say oh that's a 600 student building because all they look at is the the big square footage but our square footage is in like the large auditorium it's in spaces that really don't help when you need classroom space so we would need to add specifically classroom space and remember we did that because it was serving the community right that's for the rtm meetings and things along those lines so i understand why we did that but i think we need to go back to focusing on if it's just having it

174set for 511 i see is a huge problem yeah so i just wanted to make sure it was clarified here that even though they mentioned 600 it was those ed specs other than things like the auditorium were actually built for 511 students and so if we as a board sort of look at what we consider the appropriate size the number of students then we can sort of walk ourselves backwards that's why i think they they gave us an outline of what they thought we would need to increase by uh if we went up to 660 i think it was a seven year yeah okay cody did you have yeah just to add on to that um i went even further back than karen and pulled the numbers going back to 1996 for all the schools

175um in central's district i thought it was really interesting so first the 511 number seems nuts because if we were starting from scratch without the projections and you said okay uh you know going from trivia the last time we had fewer than 511 students was in 1998 and it was in the lowest we have it was 499 and 96. it peaked at 733 in the early 2000s so it just you know picking uh building to a number that we haven't had since 1998 seems not smart um i also just separately when you kind of dig into why one of the interesting things is the it seems to me that the biggest driver is the change in enrollment and cost cobb um goscob peaked in enrollment at 494 in 1998 it's projected to be down at

1763 15 next year and i don't think there's any clear reason why costco's enrollment is lower outside of just general durations in uh you know the people that are living in that neighborhood but i think the key idea is that when you think about over a very long period of time um you know we can't predict what the neighborhood makeup is of whether families have you know children in school or it's empty nesters or whatever but i imagine like the idea is that that neighborhood has the potential to you know in this case like that that's a 160 student swing so if you took that if you if you change the composition of koskov to a late 90s that's the difference between 510 and 660. it's funny that that number lines the cost cob spread

177lines up exactly with i think tom's guess i would suggest even going slightly above that because it's better to have slightly more space than less the other thing that flag is we've had multiple situations in recent years where we've had to for whatever reason uh roofs collapsing or uh the flood and gas cover years ago we've had to move students around so there's something to save for a little extra capacity uh swing space and it's central is centrally located for that so i think repricing it sorry yeah re-scoping it to a larger build just makes all the sense in the world and i would be remiss not to throw an insult into hartford the idea of doing anything based on guidance from the state government is just always a really bad idea so uh i

178yeah i i'm i'm very much in favor of looking at this from the standpoint of you know at least 660 um uh and you know uh yeah that's it yes joe in a construction and dan maybe you can uh vouch for this uh if you could uh if you cut a piece of wood too short you can't go back and cut it longer can you okay so so therefore we should take into consideration the fact that we need to have extra space given that we might need extra space so we also have to look at what the experts because we did hire experts to tell us what the numbers are going to be we have to look at the experts and also consider to give a little bit of a margin to understand things might

179go uh that other way if we make it too small that's a giant error if we make it too big it's an error but not quite as big as if we made it too small i know that we have no idea what will happen with planning and zoning and all of the new housing that's going up in town but we have to assume that it could have a material effect on our town population and therefore you know sometimes adults have kids uh when they move to town so i you know i i it's one of those like wild cards that you know i again building too small would be a serious error agreed i don't want to be in 2100 and someone's saying that board of 2022 was really short-sighted so exactly and i'm going

180to put your name out there michael joseph um you had some thoughts i know michael joseph i i don't want to i don't want to beat a dead horse i mean building uh designing a middle school for a population less than the number that has been in the school over the last 30 years is simply bone-headed okay so karen no i was just um i guess to double down on everyone's comments i i agree um and i also one thing that i wanted i think miss costume had said at a prior meeting if you build it they will come and one of the things that i was looking at is central middle school happens to be currently the smallest school by a population size western i think is somewhere tipping somewhere in the mid-sixes and

181then eastern is tipping somewhere in the mid-eights and to me this serves as a as a opportunity to if there is a way and i don't know if there is and i'm just throwing out there a way to also alleviate some congestion that we're certainly feeling at other schools i don't know if it's possible to make central a magnet school or give the opportunity to for others for the two other middle schools for kids to opt in here but it may be a way of helping to just balance out our middle school population so it doesn't feel so crowded so i think it's a perfect opportunity to do that we certainly have a large middle school population uh and i don't necessarily if if we build too small yes we will all be uh chastised

182later in life and i'm going to be chastised later for a lot of things and this is not going to be one of them okay think about your grandchildren here you know just add on to that western has a wait list now for its magnet program and is that an all-time enrollment level so okay so let's start walking through some numbers if you guys don't mind uh can i just say let's just take the whole state reimbursement out of the equation i just think partially to clear his point um also partially yeah it is moving like that he's like an 80 million dollar building you're talking about moving you know 500 000 years so and and i know it's easy to be cavalry about the money but it's more important to do the right project

183hey that's furniture well the other factors we use it you know with respect to state reimbursement we were talking about that in ways that might slow us down and and so one of the things to consider is how much of a reimbursement we would potentially be getting back from the state versus moving this project faster because we all know that we need this and so i would rather not hold it up now granted it's not my money well it is my money but only a small portion of that is well not if you advertise it over the next hundred years which is how long the building will right but the point i'm trying to make is if we look at the long game here and trying to expedite this i certainly don't want to hold

184the project up because we're shrinking a building to capitalize on a maximum return from the state that we don't know where we're going to get in red tape and that slows us down potentially a whole nother year to 18 months that's ridiculous karen i couldn't agree with you more having seen what it's done to the high school entryway project i mean we could have gone out to bed on this project five months ago if we weren't waiting to and jumping through the hoops for the state reimbursement and as a result of that waiting our costs may have escalated to basically eliminate much of what we're going to get reimbursed because i 100 agree so let's just build big and get the shovels in the ground oh my i haven't been trunk i'll get out there

185right now don't give joe any ideas he's like he's tough okay so why do i have 117 000 square feet written down can someone tell me how many kids was you said that was for six six six sixteen am i right about that or is that more like 700 can someone help me out because i feel like we need to be north of 700 kids in my head they basically said if you if we add 150 kids and take it to 660 right it increases you get three more academic classrooms you need an additional flex classroom you need an additional learning center and an additional 1 000 square feet added to the cafeteria a thousand added to the media center and course circulation would need to be increased by 2 400 square feet so that's

186a total of 8 400 square feet added to what we have if i make a suggestion i think can't we and then maybe the consultants if we as a board say we want the school built to 667 if we give them the number they can craft come back in the next iteration with the drawings is that correct that's correct i just want to kind of have a sense for them because what if they tell me that's for some reason 150 000 square feet now i know i'm gonna have neighbor concerns when you know that that would be like eastern is a hundred and somewhat thousand square feet right like if you're going to be one and a half size one and a half times the size of the current footprint i think we just have

187to realize that might be unrealistic too for the field right so i just want to get a sense for so if you look if you so if you look at here right we'd ask them for just sort of a comparison the current program yeah they're here just have them tell us roger yes could you give me the number following me guessing for [Music] 700 kids for example yeah we can i can't give it to you right now but here's here's the reason why we settled on 660. after discussion with tom and friend and i in the discussion it was found that with the way that the school program works with two teams that the enrollment would work could get divided up with the amount of classrooms and spaces very efficiently at 660. now what would

188happen if you went to 670 680 yeah you could probably fit those kids in but you'd start to get squeezed again unless you started adding more space and it wouldn't be as efficient space as it would be at 660. so what we have to have is a discussion really with tom and probably try to figure out what would be the next increment that we'd want to go to if it wasn't 660 would it be 690 or would it be 700 or 720 and what we try to do is develop a school that's going to be efficient for you it's going to be oversized to begin with you may grow into it over time but at least we want it to work efficiently should you ever get to that maximum enrollment or that higher end enrollment

189so i basically go up by 30 because it's a class is that what is that tom is that right one question just um how the current building what would that be labeled as for a number of students because we've obviously had lots of different students in the building but by our criteria how many is the current building set for um i'd have to do again the map but from what i know of the size of it i say that it's probably set up for somewhere in the range of about 600 students it's interesting to me just with eyeballing it like that we'd be adding ten thousand square feet but that the current building would it would be accommodating six hundred or that your guess is that it um that the current one would be for

190more students even though this the new one would be bigger although i guess we're taking the academic classrooms number down but it would be i'd be interested to know just so it's apples to apples hey like this is actually larger because this building did accommodate the 730 students perhaps the standards have changed cody i think right but um it does change and the word accommodation is is misleading um while you can do it it didn't mean it was easy and i imagine when you had 700 kids in there that was an extreme challenge for teachers and everybody involved okay so maybe kristen your original point is the right one maybe we just have to get kind of give them a sense for a number and then let's go off and ask our other questions okay

191sorry michael joseph as far as being efficient uh mr healy i don't know if you can comment on that i'm something does that have to do with the team structure why certain numbers make sense maybe you could talk a little bit about that for the public yeah yeah so i was i was going to kind of jump in a little bit so i i think the the issue this kind of guess what cody's point was as well is you know the current building is is the you know traditional educational model um off of those long hallways i think the building that we're trying to build here has a little bit more of that middle school feel with grade levels and teams being much closer in sort of geography of the building in areas of the

192building so the reason why it's not necessarily the cleanest or easiest thing to say 30 more kids is one more classroom is because those 30 students aren't necessarily all in the same grade it's not necessarily 10 10 and 10. um and then when we offer um also different levels of classes our class sizes don't just shake out evenly as well so you know when fran and roger and i had this conversation in my brain i went right to 660 because it gave me 220 per grade 110 per um team and then i was able to give class average sizes because basically what you do when you're looking at these spaces and building a master schedule is um you're trying to get an approximate class size um based on the number of kids that you have

193so when i look at my schedule and i say i have you know a hundred students that i have to service in a given period on a team that basically means i need five classrooms i need five learning spaces because that's about 20 kids per class it's never 20 20 20 20. um it varies so sometimes i have to go a little lower a little higher but that's where that all of those numbers came from so when we look at the next sort of jump um those are the kinds of questions that we have because you can make it work but if you get if we if we were to take this current model and say 660 with these three extra classrooms and then i went up to even six eighty or ninety and it's

194going to be in different grades that means that somewhere an eighth grade class is probably going to end up in a seventh grade classroom when no one's in there um so now i don't have that team structure or that grade level structure because i'm having to put them in an open room so it's not necessarily an easy question because you can't predict even distribution across the grade levels but we're trying to create that so i think going larger and growing into a building is obviously the right way to go um but what the right number of academic classrooms is based on that number would probably be at this point if we were going to the next one up to add three more classrooms you're probably talking about around a little over 700 we might guess

195would be somewhere around 700 would be kind of adding one more classroom to each each grade level and then you break that down to the teams i hope that makes sense okay okay please don't hate me um well so first of all obviously our you know the average square footage per student has changed over the course of time because of the way we teach so yes this building might have accommodated 700 um in the ways we used to teach and doesn't now so that i get that you know doesn't doesn't work as well structurally i also had my children at glenville elementary school before it was broken down and redone because it was built in the old style of 70s open-air classrooms because that's how they taught when that building was done it clearly did

196not serve the needs of the school population going forward so my concern is you know and this is a quick question for you uh mr healey um you know i know you were talking about doing it based on a teaming model i understand the focus on making sure we have enough the scheduling works based on cafeteria size but i don't know how long we're you know the teaming model is something we've done now but in 50 years we may not use the teaming model so you know that when we're starting to lay the building out you know by grade level or however you want to do it you want to talk about flex space you know is it the best way for us to look at the student population now because it's based on a

197teaming model that's my only quick question because again that was how glenville was done i used not teaming model it was done in the 1970s style of how they worked their schedules and that obviously didn't last uh for more than 50 years so just out of curiosity no i i think it's a great question because again i don't know that teaming will be around you know necessarily in the way that it is now um i will say that you know the way i also think about it is um the kids are still going to be between ages 10 and 14 and typically those are kind of very different needs at this age group so just the idea that the grades have sort of their own area of the building emanating off of this you know

198more centralized common learning space i think is a is a nice model i think it's a lasting model um just because um you know the idea of grade bands and working as a grade so whether it's teaming or not teaming at least having that third of the population in a common area um is beneficial for for uh collaboration of students for you know collaboration of staff um who are focused on that one age ban so um again i i don't necessarily know what we're gonna see in 50 or 75 years but you know the kids are still going to be ages 10 through 14 in the building and and the idea of structuring around their their age peers at least for now is something but that goes to another point of course which is we

199have students who are accelerating in math and other areas who are already integrating into um higher level classes with older students so um again i think um you know the teaming model might not be here but you know having these groupings of classrooms to organize students in this way i think makes sense um you know from a larger perspective i think in other areas not just the teaming model i was going to go with the family feud good answer good answer um so thank you because i think that that really definitely helps support it it's not just about a teaming model it's about the way we look at students at this age and how they learn and how they connect and i think that that is something that will continue for the next 50 plus

200years um as long as we make sure again i know we focus on some swing spaces in case you do have more overlap as you're mentioning some of the younger students working in higher grade levels et cetera i'm all good miss downey just taking the sense of the room just to move the discussion along i think um i i'm feeling personally and people can agree or disagree that we're feeling like 700 is feeling like a number that might be a better starting point for that but yeah and i think there's a d right there's a balance right as we've talked about bouncing anyway you know i don't think building it to 800 is wise because it's not there but if we you know the numbers may lay out once they kind of crunch them to

201say how many classrooms and how it works out but to me to go back to the consultants and say let's target 700 revise the ed specs come back to us and we can have a discussion and and see that we already think a lot of our questions were answered and i i to me that seems like you know we obviously can get into the beating of dead horse category but i think we wanted to have this as a primary focus of our discussion tonight because we're still going to have to have further discussion so i think if we come to a number um a ballpark number and that we're all comfortable with or a majority of us are then i think we can go from there i think that's right i think i think we

202also need to like get all the other big picture ideas out so that we really could next week have a vote that will include it coming back to us every other month or something because we are forming this building committee and the only thing that's really going to happen over the summer is them hiring an architect but we need to start that process um michael joseph so to that point of other big picture um issues dr jones i don't know if you've had any more conversations about special ed programs and infrastructure around that in the ed specs as far as bringing other things online we've talked a little bit about it and i i think that if we're going up to 700 we're probably going to have space that would be usable if we needed

203to add a program i i do think and i'm sure that roger will look at that from a space perspective that we may need some smaller resource rooms with the large classrooms if if you go to 700. okay the other things okay sorry cody where's that uh just that if we're getting it quartered at 700 i think the most useful thing to know is where the decisions are at the margin so it's if it's 700 and we went to 630 these are the things that come out if it's 700 and you go to 730 these are the things you add because that's how we'll probably be able to calibrate where we want to be because it's you know oh going to 7 30 all you need is this one more little thing then why not

204but if it's i think the unders because we're gonna we have a ballpark but we need to be able to understand how to decide you know in the margin agreed joe well that's a good uh good observation so should we conclude here with a range that offers spread sure let's get a number you're shooting for 800 900 which the high side i was not shooting that high one we call it 650 750 is what we're looking at as a range i think that actually sounds good to me that makes sense so let's conclude with the range 650 750. i like that wait can we bounce that off tom [Music] is it because 660 was his magic number so actually we were just kind of thinking about this uh roger fran and i so i think

205the next one again just in terms of the easiest efficient organization would be jumping to 720 um and then maybe if you want to go on the high side of that adding another 60 to 780. i think that that um iteration of 60 which is basically 20 per grade or 10 per team kind of helps us um just in terms of efficiencies with class sizes again it's never even but it's just helpful to run these numbers so if we were going to do that i would say and roger and fran please uh jump in but i would say 780 might be the high side just for the sake of us trying to run this model down to whatever number you have does that sound right i i agree i think that uh that's gonna be

206too high but it's helpful to know just for you know it it gives you context for the range that's true we could run a we could run a 660 a 720 and a 70. was it 66.90 i thought it was 660 then to 690. no 720 a 660 then to a 720 and then to a 780 and of course when you're doing that you know everything will obviously change in terms of um additional rooms with regard to many things i mean you know if you're going to run i'll give an example you know you you go up to a 780 you're going to need an additional art room at that point um because we're we're maxed right now is the way to think about when we say 780 is that really any number of students

207above 720 or is that like if you're at 750 if you have 750 students do you need a building built for 720 or a building built for 780. because don't you well i think i think the easiest way the reason why we're going in those numbers is because if you go from if you if i add 10 kids per grade or 30 overall i can make it work it's maybe not comfortable in certain periods or certain classes but i can make it work once you kick up to that next level which is why we're going by increments of 60 that's when i really need a new space so if you really want to get a sense of space and where we are again from an efficiency and comfort size so to speak um doing the

208increments of 60 just helps us say that's when we're bumping into the next need for more space and to fran's point i do think once we're getting north of 700 i think we're really looking at a second art room um you have to think about whenever you're bumping up as a you know tom and i have a lot of experience with master scheduling and what you have to remember is you have to have so many elective learning spaces which means you know you have to count oh yeah i have three spaces for for gym class i have one health i have one art i have two spaces for music i have you know you have to have a certain amount during every single period available for a certain amount of kids and so once you

209increase it's not just about regular classrooms it's about elective learning spaces and where those kids will be each period so um you know as you move up um you may max out on certain areas and so now you know like i said we definitely have maxed out in art so anything that we go up on now after 660 we will definitely need an additional art room that's just one example um so you know those are the kinds of things that we consider so i think this is kind of what we were talking about last meeting where we sort of said yeah you're you have your base case and you have your stretch case right so i mean so is it a lot of i mean i assume this is i'm sorry to be simple about

210this but is this not like an excel spreadsheet where i mentioned it last time where we could just sort of have another artworm is going to cost us x because now we're at 780. i wouldn't mind like looking at it i understand the point of comparison but if we don't think 780 is really a number that we're going to work with we maybe shouldn't be creating work for the consultants like if we really think we're kind of in the 660 720. maybe like a two because it's really 750 is what you're getting right exactly 780 or is that 780 because it pushes you close to 800. i think 787.51 but when you have 725 students are you like does that fit does that fit into the 720 building but i think that's what tom said

211i think he's saying it would go to 750. yes i think yeah i think i think again you know if you're looking at 720 we could probably even make seven you know 7 30 40 maybe even 750 work um again the trick is is it it depends on on where the distribution is by grade level no grade level is exactly even right we're saying these numbers as if it's even it's not even right it's not going to be 220 to 20 to 20 if we're at 660. it's going to be maybe you know 260 in one grade and and less so that's what makes it really tough so we're trying to give round numbers for the sake of trying to have a sense of what this building could look like but in in real life

212to fran's point um you have to get down to the very specific learning spaces and how many children are in each grade and where they need to be so there's enough wiggle room i think when you're in the range of adding 30 or so students to our estimate once you get north of that it might become a little bit more tricky in terms of of mapping everything out so um all right so that sounds like we should just 660 and 720. yeah and also too as we get a tighter spread we get closer to a deal so why don't we settle on the spread we're now 660 720 we're not going lower than 660 do we all agree we're not going any higher than 720 do we all agree am i buying for me we

213have a range i mean i still would be in favor of getting the information on it because i think it's useful to know but on the 780 uh to have an upper bound especially when you think about once you know what's there you can then evaluate what the option value is of extra space that's not saying you should have it just so you suggested we backed the offer up to 780. so now our market is 667.80 yeah well the middle range is always a scenario within a bid offer spread right correct that's probably on that so let's go let's pick a range and move on and then address it once we get further information how much how much work is it to do with the 780 maybe that's the part i'm hearing is a lot

214more is that is that why you're telling us that uh no i mean it's you know it's tom and i will go through each scenario and we will um go through you know we have to count the periods count the day you know it's just a matter of going through each scenario that's all we have you know one more scenario that's all um and then what we do is we we talk to roger and roger increases the cafeteria space and and he worries more about square footage and that kind of thing and we kind of tell them what we need at that point based on how we'll schedule the building um so so can i make a suggestion is maybe before we worry about revisions to this document they come back to us basically with

215a chart with three scenarios we have a discussion make a decision and then the ed specs can be revised consistent with whatever our decision is that seems to me the most effective can i ask a thumbs up i like that yeah how long do you think this would take because so let me let me type in here uh the revision really would only have to occur on the final three pages of the template okay so in other words we won't touch the document in terms of the narrative and all the specifications but what we can give you is the data in terms of how many spaces and sizes of them and on the last three pages of the template we can give you three sets of those one for six sixty one for seven twenty

216and one for seven eighty and then once you've had your discussion and decided which one you wanna go with then we'll revise the rest of the document to fit whichever one you decide so in theory could we how fast could we get those three pages i'm just trying to lay out our next week i think we could have them in a week [Music] don't worry about voting next week we've got to do this right [Music] i agree but i want to keep us on schedule because i feel like so i would be doing this call from vacation but that's fine okay okay so let me just let me let me wrap this up here well then we're gonna keep going but in terms of this so we're looking at three scenarios 660 720 780. you

217would think that within the next week you would be able to send us those three scenarios we could then get a virtual meeting on the calendar for some time next week at which point we can make a decision on that base scenario and yep and then um bring it for a vote probably right after the fourth of july my point is oh my if he says it's going to take him a week next week that brings us into next thursday night for instance we have graduation if there's there's the rain plan so that would be two nights so you're probably actually looking at the start of the following week because what's the what's the rain scenario if it rains is it all day on thursday or is it wednesday and thursday night you you can't

218overlap this with the possibilities on wednesday so i'm just trying to i don't if it what's the scenario if it rains for graduation it's but you want to go earlier would you graduation earlier if you think it's gonna rain on thursday so i'm just oh yeah so i'm wondering if we could have is there any chance you guys will be ready on the 22nd um hang on yes we could be ready by the 22nd okay yeah so can we meet wednesday night virtually shouldn't be long hopefully well well it's you know it's numbers right so good sense from everyone um i mean i guess i should probably put it on as sort of a vote i mean instead of all the expected to vote on the numbers we're gonna have to be sort of informative

219about it yep yeah but that's not at like four o'clock right i think we can you know it's 3 30 to 5 30. so we could do something how do you guys feel about you know 6 30 or something virtually june 22nd i know i'm supposed to be doing this during gender planning but this is where i read okay generally looks okay i can't but i'll send written notes before yeah okay you sure okay yeah is there a time that would work after 7 30. that's fine look what time is it now 10 13 why like nine halfway through a meeting so what do you want to do eight cody 738 eight's probably safer okay let's do eight that's okay i don't want to be the hold up i think it's okay i mean it's

220important that you're there is that one zoom we can do it in our pajamas well you can so let's i'm sorry roger is that okay for you guys roger fran 8 p.m on june 22nd yeah that'll work that's fine um so that's so if you guys come back and then we'll have sort of make a decision on numbers that night is there any and then also in that that's when we're going to sort of put an amendment in the aspect that it's a requirement for the building and community to come back and report to the board at least every other month um [Music] other big picture things that i know we wanted to get correct yeah but then we'll get it but then i think the next meeting will be the vote right but it

221would be ideally we get it sufficiently in advance of the vote so that if there are little things that we want to address it would be an opportunity so we're not doing wordsmithing in the middle of a meeting okay yes and again that's why i think it's this amendment is also important so you don't feel like you're saying goodbye to it yes karen so this is just a process question um you know obviously we want to pick the right size number obviously then we have may have a few final questions um i think part of the confusion that we've had is because we didn't have a lot of the detail that we've been asking for is usually what comes in a feasibility study which we didn't have because we had a lot of the details

222from before i know questions that joe and i answered were asking last time might have come from a feasibility document so if going forward we're going to change the process slightly to ask for the building committee to present to us more frequently the question then becomes if we approve these ed specs we send them off to an architect to come back to us with the design can we you know i i know technically once you agree to add specs that's that's that you can't change them once so as you can so my point is if we go forward with this we send it off to an architect they come back to us and we then decide you need to make a revision because i don't know you need a second story actually i have an

223idea yeah so here's the here's the thing if we we could what we could do is and we'll just figure out we could approve the ed specs for the purposes of handing them off to the building committee in that meantime while because they're going to have to go out and hire an architect which is a time they have to put out an rfp it's a time consuming process we have to approve the architect during that period of time if there is tweaking you know little minor things we will have probably a good six weeks between the rfp and them hiring the architect if we wanted to make additional if we wanted if we kind of feel like we can't give the baby away just yet um we'll we have time before they actually start engaging

224in any meaningful work so it's not that we're you know we're kissing it goodbye but we can hand up and say this is what you can use to hire an architect we may be doing some minor refining in the meantime and we can vote on it on the off chance that we said we see realize we've missed something so that makes me feel more confident thank you this is exactly on that topic and i'm going to use visuals if you may entertain me right now we're handing off to the building committee a design of the building that looks similar to this okay what we used to do is we used to set give the building committee a design that might look like this we're not doing that so what we might get back or the

225old way we would get back something like this and that's satisfactory because it's kind of close without giving guidance we might get this and that would not be satisfactory so we'd be further away from a conclusion than we would have been in the old process because we gave them and voted on a design like this and they came back the building committee with something that looked something like this so i'm afraid we're going to give no design plans and come back with something like this when we all wanted this so i think we're again i think we're getting a little bit confused so that will be something that will come back to us that has not yet been designed right now we're just talking about the internal spaces right that will come back to us

226with a design we're in the past yeah the architect well right but we're giving them no guidelines we're giving them nothing other than ed specs they could build the building like a triangle as opposed to chosen in the past when like when there's an approval yeah but no we don't put we didn't vote on the design until after the building committee had moved down i'm just using the high school delay the feasibility committee voted on the feasibility but the board never did the roy doesn't vote on the feasibility i'll say it again correct the board votes on the feasibility submits the design you get several choices you look at the set like we did with old greenwich school we looked at a bunch of different choices for the design changes in old granite school same

227with jc we looked at design we voted on one and so we kind of want it to look like this and then the building committee says okay the board of education voted on this absolutely 100 percent karen maybe you can correct me you uh you served on you served on the old greenwich building committee did you have koski karenkoski yes didn't you have a variety of different design proposals that you put in front of the board for a vote like a number of three or four of them i know we did at jc and uh i remember doing them for old greenwich we weren't actually voting in the design moon well you're not stuck you're not you're not like i'm just using the high school journey we could have hired an entirely new architect and

228done a completely new design correct but you had a first architect come and do a proposal that was infusible but the design behind it right that's what i'm saying so nothing is binding the way nothing to use your words we presented them with an idea that that was in the feasibility that's what i said that was the step that's what we're listening there's just like a little a little drawing that says this is what it could look like this is conceptual right then it goes to ed specs just kind of lay out what you need in there and then from the ed specs it goes off to an architect and then they come back and that's when we kind of hack away and it said yeah i don't like that joke if you're concerned the

229all building committee meetings are public if you want to go to the building committee meetings and see when you're interviewing architects and what the architects propose right any member of the community has the ability to do so and if we're not comfortable with it then we can have a discussion about it which is why they're going to keep coming back oh you do like we used to do and propose what we kind of want to do and give them reports we don't have a clue because we have to have the architect help us the problem we're giving them a blank sheet of paper and saying because we need to have a professional architect sort of come back to us with ideas i mean i can't tell you if it should be a try and wrong

230square until a professional tells me yes in a feasibility study you have several options that they present to you right but then you're going to vote on it and say okay building committee hire your own architect and this is kind of the way we yes how many of those have actually been done yeah but what is this but once it goes to the building committee and they hire an architect and the architect drafts something they bring to us a proposal but we then have the yay they're not going to come back with this they're going to come back with this i'm pretty sure they're going to come back with something that's more rectangular possibly triangular just in theory but it's just and i i might be the minority here and i do apologize but we're

231not giving them any design guidance causing a delay in the future when they come to us with something i disagree joe not a single one of us is a professional architect on this board we have no idea aesthetically what we want so we can't give them we can't give them guidance because we don't have we always have it seems like we have a strong preference for squares maybe we could guide them towards we we always have in the past this is the process that's changing the change of the process is we're not giving the building committee any concept of what we have approved we always would like to but the building committee gets that one they have to hire the architect the architect knows how many i'm just i'm just trying to explain right so

232the architect looks at these ad specs they know we need whatever 30 some odd classrooms we need this size of an auditorium we need this that they draft that plan and then the building committee looks at it but we have the ultimate say when it comes back from the building committee they can make a recommendation and use the board say yeah i don't like it it's triangular i want squares into building something that's absolutely wrong well i agree with you but i think that's you have to but that's why we're gonna have lots of steps in the process that's why i'm changing it to sort of say listen because you're right maybe the feasibility thing that that's at the same time it seems like there was a concept that came out a new lab and

233it looks nothing like it from the first to the end so um i think that the process really didn't work on the end anyway but i'll make at miami the final statement you guys can comment on it the process that we're abandoning and going to a different one was probably put into place for a reason and the reason it was put into place was to give some sort of guidelines to the building committee and the new architect to develop something that was already approved by the board of education i'm not going to answer so you could say whatever you want that's my concluding remark and i can i respectfully disagree that the new architect you hired for a building was not bound at all by what design a feasibility committee okay i think we made

234lots of progress on the numbers can i answer the question about something christine said was your point that we could vote now to just get the process started for hiring an architect and then go revisit it because that so here's this we have to present educational specifications to the building committee they'll have their organizational meeting they'll appoint their officers and their first task is to hire an architect in order to hire an architect they have to put out the rfp and go through the town processes which takes weeks right so during their organizational time and the hiring of an architect they will we will have time to tweak these however when they go out to bid on an architect they've got to have the scope of the project so they're going to need something to

235have the process of hiring an architect so if you can't give them nothing are they currently delayed while we deliberate or they only just performed on monday and they actually have not even had their organizational meeting yet the first selectmen has 30 days together we have 30 days basically once we there's no money for their budget until after july one anyway but that's why i am kind of like let's let's go you know we wanted to yes we're building something for the generations at the same time i was joking with my caucus the other day this is like software development we keep developing the software but at one point we actually have to get it to market so we do this if we if we provide them with that specs in early july we will

236not have slowed them down but that's what i want to say let's go so instead of asking unless there's very specific just to try to move this forward because we're barely halfway through the agenda and my my actual student at home is begging me to give her some help with some school schoolwork and i'm here um so my question to you is you know can you know are there any major questions that we need to ask tonight or if they're bringing back the numbers we're going to meet next week can we ask any more detailed questions that night we'll have a better idea then and then we can yes although i would hope that this document was the bulk of our questions and oh i got all the answers okay i mean the only other

237thing i was going to say when i looked through the big pieces it was energy that you wanted to make sure that it was being as energy efficient as possible that's obvious but you make that sort of a big category fields something that we're going to be very concerned with and we want to make sure it meets you know our park and rec and our our obviously our sport spring requirements security should be the best security size we talked about flex space right and then the outside theater those were kind of the big concepts i sort of saw and i think that we should we would probably all be like yes i mean you know i think the key to the spec is put everything you want in there it'll only likely be removed right

238so i think it's better that you you know put it all in and then we'll take it from there so those are i kind of give you those five six bullets and uh then we'll come back with size next wednesday make sense all right yes michael joseph ready to move on