001everybody's with us so we'll go ahead and call this special business meeting of the board of education to order um michael if you could bring the flag up i'd ask please rise for the pledge of allegiance pledge 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 for that all right the uh next item on our agenda is our consent agenda is there a motion to approve the consent agenda miss downey is there a second i can second them karen hirsch all right consent agenda i'm going to go ahead and call the question uh bernstein is a yes downey yes yes kelly yes kowalski karen i think you're muted sorry for clarification snake the
002consent agenda is just to approve the mass the past minutes yes that's the only item on the consent agenda okay uh yes thank you uh olsen yes share yes and stow yes thank you very much it passes eight zero all right next we're gonna get to one of my favorite things uh student peter i have a point of order sure sure so um i i think there's an error with our agenda for this evening um i think there are two defects i think we need to address we at our last meeting we had postponed uh a motion that was on the table pursuant to it was under the caption the good of the order um that's i think that's unfinished business under our rules um and under our rules i think that must be taken
003up first uh according to robert's rules which is what we're governed by um i think the the second defect that we have with our meeting today is that we've we have something similar on the agenda but it's actually called something different um and i don't think we can properly do that under robert's rules if you're looking at section 21. okay uh in speaking with both uh abby walder from the town law department and also the general counsel of cabe uh given the questions about the procedural issue this is actually being captioned as a new item peter if i may i'd like to withdraw my motion for the last meeting okay is there any objection to mr kelly withdrawing his motion from the last meeting hearing none that motion is withdrawn and we'll be handling this
004as a new item on our agenda so kowalski that actually deals with your uh your questions okay and with that we will move on to the student and staff recognition first mr johnson for the ivy league invitational parliamentary debate winners good evening board chair board of ed and dr jones grange high school has a proud history debate because our kids are awesome and our teachers prepare them for all different types of topics the pandemic has given rise to the online debate tournament and our students have thrived particularly ambika and arjun the parliament parliamentary debate is style is fast is fast-paced and the students have little time to prepare their arguments or in debate we call them contentions i am proud of their individual accomplishments this year but i've been just as impressed in how their
005leadership has brought more gh students to participate in the art of debate this evening i'd like to congratulate ambika and arjun thank you congratulations to them and boy i wish these student centers still look like that all right next up is our scholastic writing winners miss barry thank you good evening to out to all this year approximately 1700 students submitted entries to scholastic writing competition from our very competitive hudson to housatonic region we had 13 winners with three students winning multiple awards the scholastic awards began in 1923. those recognized over the years include john updike joyce carol oates and stephen king i'm pretty sure we'll be reading some of our student writers in the future i'm going to start with the honorable mentions cody baker an honorable mention for the critical essay how the inequality
006in education will affect children in the long run jordan cervantes honorable mention for the poem beauty alexander hofstra honorable mention for a science fiction fantasy story rerun atlanta kennedy honorable mention for the short story the duel max lou honorable mention for the critical essay bipartisanship in a politically polarized society valentina pellegrin honorable mentions three different types two poems just a word and lavender love child a personal essay slash memoir my kitchen and two writing portfolios finding home in the magic of women z-e-n honorable mention for three poems everything writing and triumph and annabelle zao i will mention for science fiction fantasy story the bankers we had a number of silver key winners eva anderson flash fiction story message in a bottle eve fesco silver key for personal essay memoir strangely native amrutha nendukar silverkey for
007personal essay memoir political refrigerators valentina pellegrin two silver keys one for a story lover's lane and one for a poem select memories jacob winston silver key for a science fiction fantasy story the flares zee yen silver key for a poem morning walk joanna zhang a silver key for the short story falling star and annabel zao silverkey for the personal essay memoir angels landing it's two awards for annabelle valentina pellegrin brought a gold key for the flash fiction story falling star eight awards valentina and you've been a perennial winner for us and ze yen gold keys for the poem home and the poem snow six awards for ze really celebrate these terrific writers and encourage them to keep on writing thank you very much thank you so much amazing a lot of awards there uh next
008up are scholastic art winners miss nixon the greenwich high school art department is very proud to recognize our eight connecticut state scholars scholars four of these students received honorable mentions three received silver key awards and one received not only a gold key award for connecticut but went on to win a gold key on the national level now in their 97th year the scholastic art and writing awards is the largest longest-running and most prestigious recognition program for creative young people in the united states the awards have an impressive legacy as bridgette mentioned dating back to 1923 and a noteworthy roster of past winners including andy warhol sylvia plath truman capote richard avedon robert redford and joyce carol oates each year nearly 2 800 students enter original works from about 145 schools in connecticut i would also
009like to recognize the ghs art teachers lisa scarogni jamie charles shayda ardellan william booth chicava bennett and liz vazquez for their teaching and encouragement of all of our students and especially tonight our scholastic winners these students have taken many art classes and have been taught by many art teachers to get to this place from kindergarten until now i would also like to thank ralph mayo our principal for his constant support of the arts and lauren newell our arts coordinator and the board of education for their ongoing dedication to providing the very best art education possible for our students in the greenwich public schools our first award recipient that i'm going to mention is stella santini who received an honorable mention for digital photography and you'll see their work as i call their names thank you
010to michael bailey gordon honorable mention ceramics liliane bijerke honorable mention drawing and illustration sarah bosai honorable mention computer art alexandra feneroli silver key photography matthew stuttgart silver key computer art sofia porgau silver key art portfolio and kelly schneider she is our gold key connecticut winner and also winning on the national gold key level for her photography thank you everyone for recognizing these talented children thank you very much they are amazing uh mr johnson was there something you wanted to add yes mr uh bernstein thank you very much um i i did not mention uh my student's full name so i apologize for that ambika grover and arjun kashur and uh that their uh parliamentary win is on the national uh level and they are nationally ranked both as a team and for their um speaking
011prowess at these debates and um will continue to compete for the rest of the year so i i didn't want to leave that out thank you thank you very much and congratulations to all of our student winners for their amazing work uh whether it's in art debate writing or everything else that they do all right uh before we get to our public hearing just uh got a few housekeeping matters at the beginning again thank everybody for attending our virtual uh board of education meeting meeting is being conducted pursuant to the governor's executive order 7b we record our meetings they're posted on our website and our youtube channel uh the agenda for tonight's meeting is on our board doc website you can get there from the greenwichschools.org site clicking on the board of education and then
012scrolling down to meetings this is a special business meeting we are taking public comments tonight for those who signed up there are 25 people signed up you can do the math at three minutes per comment uh we're gonna be here a while uh for those of you who didn't get a chance to sign up you can still email all of the board members by sending a single email to board of ed members at greenwich.k12.ct.us meeting tonight is going to consist of discussion by and among the superintendent board members uh and the staff um i'd ask people to please stay muted when they're when they're not speaking uh ask participants to state their name each and every time they speak unless i've called on you uh we need to just be identified for the record uh
013we'll be using the raise the hand function so i can call on people in turn uh that's the board members try to keep their comments concise uh and for any voting we'll be doing roll call votes so those will be preliminaries and now we're going to move into our public hearing starting with our ghs student government and um peter who is speaking first uh you can bring up both mark and i brought up meredith's social media okay great hi um hello to all the members of the board and to the people observing the meeting tonight my name is meredith blanchard and i'm the ghs senior class president and i wanted to thank you all again for graciously devoting time to student voices at each meeting i have some updates as we are well into the
014third quarter and spring break is right around the corner it seems that we have gotten approval for some forms of prom and graduation which is exciting for students parents and faculty alike as coveted cases continue to stay under control in connecticut i'm optimistic that our traditional end-of-year events will be closer to normal than originally anticipated our prom will likely be over two days and at the school and i'm so glad that we will see that happen graduation is also likely to be able to include guests which is something my parents definitely approve of the rest of the student government's executive committee has also been hard at work our freshman class ishi hasset advocated for the placement of pads and tampons in every women's bathroom before any student who required those products would have had to
015go to a house office so this is a great improvement our sophomore and junior class presidents isabella gaga and steven blank have been working hard with food services to make sure that students can get the most out of the free lunch program i wanted to add that i personally get the lunch almost every day and have been enjoying the way that the lunch program turned out this year the last thing that i would like to comment on is this year's senior internships the college board greatly revised this year's ap exam schedule which warranted some changes to the timeline of senior internships i worked with our head of guidance ms nadel to go over ways that we can help seniors get the most out of their experience with internship this year in particular my hope is
016that we can work around the ap schedule to possibly add a few additional days to the work or project experience thank you all again for supporting our school community i will now turn the mic over to our student body president mark chen good evening chairman bernstein dr jones members of the board cabinet and beating attendees my name is mark chan student body president at greenwich high school i'm so glad to see that we have been having some warmer weather these past couple of days and weeks it has been great to spend more time outside and while we are continuing to move along with projects and initiatives in student government many of which meredith discussed i also wanted to use this opportunity tonight and in the future to talk about some longer standing topics of interest
017that have been of consistent discussion over the past several years but first i'd like to share an exciting update at the last ghs pta meeting our director of student activities mrs foster's proposal to purchase tv monitors to be placed in front of each house in the gym foyer sign swing student center and outside the pack was approved we are incredibly grateful and thankful to the pta for their generous and continued support and these tvs are a critical step forward in facilitating communication and in making information more accessible whether it be announcements school news or sports games earlier in the year the pta also helped purchase more outdoor seating from picnic tables to chairs and as the weather warms up more and more students are back outside during their opens and lunch block i hope that
018this is a positive trend that will continue even after we return to more normal times the main topic i'd like to bring into conversation tonight is midterms and finals i believe this year presents a unique and phenomenal opportunity to reflect on the relevance and utility given that our midterms are cancelled because of the pandemic and we meanwhile wait for a decision on finals through my years as class president alongside former class president and student body president zane cotter we devised a series of pre and post midterm stress surveys we collected and dated what we already knew that midterms and finals caused significant amounts of unhealthy stress and unhealthy mental fatigue what's more is that close to 70 percent of students reported that their performance on midterms and finals on average is not an accurate reflection
019of their academic potential and abilities i firmly believe that there are other ways in which we can more effectively assess cumulative knowledge through projects presentations and even more frequent small quizzes as a senior who will be off to college next year i hold no skin in the game yet i urge our community members parents teachers and administrators to carefully consider for the future the merits of midterms and finals as as they exist in their present state if not total elimination there are many ways in which we can reimagine these assessments to better serve our students thank you for your time tonight it is always a pleasure all right thank you meredith thank you mark appreciate the comments next up will be gea carol sutton good evening board members dr jones cabinet and members of the
020grants public school community on zoom my name is carol sutton and i'm honored to represent 900 members of the greenwich education association congratulations to this evening's honorees we're very proud of your accomplishments in debate writing and the visual arts and we're proud of the greenwich educators who guided you along the way it's been a busy month for gea amid our regular association work the greenwich alliance trivia contest was great fun for all and especially the two gea teams who finished third and fourth place thank you greenwich alliance for your generosity and for always supporting teachers and students gea also had its third successful biggest loser event during the multiple week event about 50 teachers spouses and colleagues worked to build better habits and to raise money for our scholarship fund thanks to lori mulligan for
021organizing into new lebanon for having the greatest contingent thanks to governor lamont dr jones and mary keller and her team were getting vaccinated but even with shots in the arm we're growing concerned about cases in town rising in the 11 to 20 and 41 to 50 age groups as reported by the greenwich department of health and to new cases in our schools please everyone this is not the time to let our guards down no matter how much we want to be back to normal the gea executive board would like to thank negotiations chair joe kelly for the opportunity to engage in a full and frank discussion of the challenges of pandemic education we look forward to working with joe and his team in the future as we forge a path to consensus this evening we
022look forward to the discussion of the big ideas math program we appreciate the teachers had a voice in the vetting process and that the program contains a comprehensive collection of digital resources beyond new materials though teachers need designated professional development time and ample time with their grade level teams to plan for a smooth launch and implementation we also look forward to an update on the restoration of north myanna's school and implore the administration to explore every possible option for getting the north mianis community back to campus including modulars we know that gps had a bad experience with modulars during the construction of hamilton avenue but that experience could inform this one and the palmer hill site is flat and expansive and though it's not on the agenda we asked the administration and board to give
023as much attention to the social emotional and mental health effects of the pandemic on our students as you do on their academic needs teachers have seen troubling signs in all age groups and some of the effects have yet to emerge we may not we may find that the personal and interpersonal effects of the pandemic are more acute than learning loss and we must be ready thank you for your ear have a productive meeting thank you thank you carol all right next up is uh pt council brian pildunis good evening i am brian paul dennis president of pta council representing the 15 school ptas and the families of all of their members pta council congratulates all the students recognized this evening and thanks all of the faculty and staff involved in making that success possible especially
024in this interesting time pta council would like to thank the league of women voters greenwich and all of the participants in last month's school budget forum one takeaway from last month's forum was the repeated call for a town-wide discussion on various aspects of the future of our district we look forward to tonight's discussion on the strategic plan as a good starting point for this discussion also a similar similar form is planned for next month to discuss our school facilities more to come on this event shortly for now pta council reiterates our strong support for the funding of the next phase of the julian curtis work in the capital budget and for the funding of the full boe operating budget ask including the special education out of district portion following up on previous comments first we
025continue to support immediate steps to alleviate chromebook issues and look forward to reviewing the additional information requested by the boe during last month's meeting second we look forward to the additional information requested last month also relating to the link it results third like last month's concern about the need to update inaccurate data or information contained in reports we also ask that information requested by boe members be appended to the meeting documents so that all can view these updates as they are uh provided finally we reiterate pta council's desire to participate in the needed follow-up work on the uh as described in the alp report on tonight's agenda you will be reviewing the recommendation for the new k-8 math textbook pta council takes no position on this but i'll personally be talking about it later parents
026are very interested in having a paper available for any students k-8 who request it i'm happy to say the recommended resource provides such a student edition parents are looking forward to the release of the parent portal and it can almost guarantee that we'll be we will be providing feedback as soon as that is available finally last month i spoke about the academic and social emotional issues facing students as well as the need to look beyond covid a recent remote school parents meeting highlighted the need to plan for the return to school for students who have not been in buildings for over a year the social and emotional impact of the virus has changed over the year and students are facing different concerns and issues than those experienced last march and in september we are pleased
027that the district is already working on this need and parents and pta councils stand ready to assist the planning in any way possible we believe this plan will benefit all students not just remote school students thank you all right thank you very much brian all right next up is our community comments before we uh begin i mentioned we've got 25 people signed up uh everybody's allotted three minutes per speaker we ask that you not go over we will turn you off uh we don't want to have to do that so please pay attention to the clock on the screen uh remind you that uh we're going for uh for uh comporting with civility right the speakers can offer objective criticism of operations and programs but should not be making comments about specific individual district personnel
028if you have issues with that you should uh let the superintendent know again you're you're asked to express yourselves in a civil manner for our policy with dignity and respect and pride for the privacy of others uh you know it's not our intent to stifle comments but uh you should be aware that if you violate the rights of others the law of defamation or invasion of privacy uh is out there and this is our policy it's policy 9325 if you'd like to look at it it's on our board website um if we have to uh i'll try to give a warning to folks uh if if that persists we'll have to uh we'll have to turn you off and we don't want to have to do that so we'll start with our first speaker francis
029new bay can you hear me yes okay hello this is francis funobe co-chair ptac remote school special committee as we enter year two of pandemic learning we express our sincere thanks to our greenwich public school teachers and staff who have tirelessly inspired innovated and instructed our kids in particular we know that high flex teaching is so incredibly challenging and we really appreciate our secondary school teachers for all that you have done to keep our kids engaged in both modalities for elementary greenwich is one of just three fairfield county school districts providing a standalone remote option and the only one still teaching more than 400 great k-5 full-time remote learners thank you to all our 30 remote school teachers and our neighborhood school principals specialists and district leaders for all their support this week our k-5
030remote learners celebrate spirit week remote school class parent volunteer jana mcqueen brainstormed with the remote school team leads to come up with an easy carefree way to honor and celebrate our remote learners today was dressed like your favorite superhero and i hope that some of you are wearing your capes masks and shields i especially appreciated the many children who dressed up as teachers you are our superheroes to support our mental health as brian mentioned the gps mental health duo the boys have provided live and asynchronous programming to help survive this continued upheaval the boys have always shared that even though they have multiple degrees in child behavior they too get frustrated and make mistakes be kind to yourself there's no blueprint for pandemic parenting we look forward to our continued partnership to develop re-entry reintegration
031and inclusion plans as our families return in person this spring and fall while we have learned in different modalities we are one gps community and we learn together lastly sincere thank you to our community partner greenwich alliance for education for funding monthly virtual assemblies for our elementary remote learners crossing our fingers for additional funding we hope to squeeze in may and june assemblies to round out the year if you are seeking a worthy charity please consider a gift to gae for our remote learners thank you very much our next speaker is randall smith i do not see a randall smith all right randall if you're on if you could hit the uh raise your hand function okay unfortunately we're going to move on our next speaker is beth mcgilverey bet sorry if i mispronounce your
032last name hi can you hear me yes i'm gonna just make this quick but i was um lined up to uh speak um for peter here i am a little appalled that the board of ed is spending extra time on this when there's so many other issues that are so important a hot mic moment happens to um people it's a mistake but to make this a huge issue i'm i'm really appalled thank you thank you the next speaker is jennifer kutai jennifer you just need to unmute okay thank you so much good evening i'm here to discuss the current special education review which is well underway i have received very concerning information regarding pcg i was contacted contacted directly by gps staff members a state representative as well as a director of special education in
033another state i would ask that you make this information i am going to read available on the boe website in order to sustain total transparency the project director leading this review is not a special education teacher nor was he ever he worked in assistive technology which is a far cry from being a special education teacher please have that information removed from the description posted on gps website as it is false in 2017 the office of the inspector general in new jersey determined that pcg doctored special education student records they improperly altered school employers employees responses to time studies to indicate their activities were directly related to providing medicaid services when the responses indicated the activities were unrelated their actions led to new jersey having to repay 300 million dollars in medicaid reimbursements the project director
034for pcg was quote chased out of the delaware department of education and mishandled a statewide special education plan he has been described as quote a snake oil salesman who caused enough of a problem in delaware that angry parents state government and the department of education wanted him out from staff at greenwich public schools i was told our children were observed without parent consent or knowledge and personal parent information from the surveys were shared with the special education administration as a parent who sat on the last review done by key to ed i voiced my concern about this review leaving parents almost entirely out of the process with this additional information you have a significant burden to prove that the information provided by pcg has integrity i ventured a guess that the boe knew about at
035least some of these allegations and chose not to inform parents and taxpayers you don't need another review or even more taxpayer dollars to realize that special the special education infrastructure is irretrievably broken what i can tell you is that without significant staffing changes special education families will not wait three to five years for the results that are long overdue thank you all right thank you very much the next speaker is jackie homan hi my name is jackie holman i'm shocked after what happened on last week's pta call gpa gps and the pta allowed a doctor to promote misinformation to our community the doctor obfuscated the truth by stating coveted vaccines are fda approved when they actually have emergency use authorization which is a far cry from fda approval euas are issued without waiting for all
036of the evidence required for approval and they can be removed at any time the doctor encouraged parents to be critical consumers of experimental unapproved vaccines while promoting a one-sided platform about the promise of hope here's what she left out of her sales pitch over one hundred seventy six thousand one hundred seventy three vaccine injuries have been reported to cdc's vaccine adverse event reporting system twenty four hundred people tested positive for and or developed coven as a direct result of vaccination 1349 people died from experimental covert vaccines in the u.s over 20 countries suspended use of astrazeneca vaccine already if you read the package insert you'll see it says the coveted vaccine may not protect anyone or everyone the cobia vaccine is an unapproved vaccine that may prevent copin there is no fda approved vaccine to
037prevent covin it says this right on the package that gps and the board of ed have declined to issue a simple correction despite repeated requests why is that why didn't the doctor disclose financial compensation she would receive as a result of vaccinated potentially thousands of children in our district bill gates said vaccines are phenomenal profit makers pfizer boasted its vaccine to become the most lucrative in the world is the doctor's optimistic outlook influenced by compensation she'll personally receive if all 9 140 gps students get two jobs each it could generate as much as 725 000 or more it's the ethical and moral responsibility of gps to promote factual information to our community and to issue a correction using fear tactics to encourage members of the community to seek experimental vaccination is irresponsible and dangerous worse
038if an employee felt pressured to take it for fear of losing their job it could expose the district to a lawsuit like the one just filed in la earlier this week many parents reached out to me to express frustration at what's happening especially with respect to vaccines critical race theory and mental health and well-being impact on our children with the plexiglas and duct tape prison that's been created for them parents are afraid to use their own names for fear of repercussions since we've all heard stories about dcf being used for retaliation the fear is real and palpable the propaganda on parents and children needs to stop for the sake of everyone's mental health and well-being thank you all right thank you very much the next speaker is david langhorne i do not have a david
039langhorn david if you're with us could you raise your hand use the raise the hand function okay we're gonna move on the next speaker is carolyn peterson hello can you hear me yes good evening my name is carolyn peterson i am a parent of students at old greenwich school and eastern middle school i am an active realtor in town selling greenwich and our school system to prospective residents every day i am also both president of the old granite school pta and a board member of the old greenwich association while i have spoken many times in this forum on behalf of the old granite school feasibility study i am speaking here tonight on behalf of the students teachers and parents of julian curtis school it is their turn to get our focus and attention we need
040to bring our town's schools up to par with today's elementary school standards julian curtis is asking for the very same improvements we are asking for at old greenwich school namely ada accessibility security and health and safety we need to make this commitment to our students into our town to delay the julian curtis project will only delay the projects at seven other schools and this should not be acceptable this is why all the schools have joined together as one united voice to support the julian curtis project the recent infrastructure safety concerns at costco north mianis riverside and old greenwich schools should be reason enough to make these projects a top priority in town thank you thank you very much our next speaker is kimberly fiorello i think you're muted okay thank you so much uh this
041is kimberly fiorello i serve as state rep for district 149 but i'm here as a personal character witness for a friend and that's peter sure i wanted to speak um to his character and his tireless work for our community and serving 12 years on the board of ed i know that the work there is just amazingly tireless for all of you uh amazing board members and very grateful for the work that you do as a fellow as a fellow public servant and volunteer for our town um i think you guys know that there's uh you know in this zoom era there's been just such a blending of our private lives and uh the time that we spend as a public servant and i understand that there was a very unfortunate uh hot bike situation um
042which is uh not a great example to set but i hope that um all of you will not vote for the censure as um i feel that it's a harsh sentence especially um in these times where everything is uh you know googlable and uh it would be a terrible last note on someone's long service to our town so uh keeping in mind the bigger picture of all the work that he has done i hope that uh you will have an understanding of um you know of poor skills in muting oneself and please accuse that and in a continued spirit of working well together to not censure uh peter sure and thank you so much for your consideration thank you all right our next speaker is katie jackson i do not see a miss jackson katie
043if you could raise your hand all right we're going to move on our next speaker then is shelly kring hi good evening yes we can hear you okay um to the members of the greenwich board of education my name is shelley crane while i am very grateful for the opportunity to speak to you tonight on behalf of myself and my husband what i have to say what i have to speak about is every parents every special education parent's worst nightmare i know we are not alone in this hell i have two wonderful beautiful smart children full of potential but also my son is a student within the special education system here at greenwich public schools my daughter olivia who has been denied services and testing over the years is only now being tested i would
044like to speak tonight on behalf of my son lex stevenson my son lex has suffered year after year by the hands of this administration not only has he been denied a faith he has been denied a safe and secure school environment lex is a student at the high school and he is just now being evaluated for an iep five years later we have had to fight for any evaluation since we became aware that he was challenged academically year after year and hundreds of emails later we have a child that has gone from loving school to a child that now suffers from ptsd school trauma numerous additional learning disabilities that lex hasn't been afforded to have looked into and tested with proper evaluations severe anxiety and who is a victim of this broken system why has
045it been so hard for us to have the services lex is entitled to including child finds idea rti not appropriately documenting his learning disabilities on an iep instead referring it under the 504 and every denial along the way to be identified any further to encompass the totality of his deficits and strength because of his learning disabilities lex was bullied for years and again and again email after email our place for his safety mental health and well-being were all ignored this these are also violations under the idea the support class that skip that just now that counselor has raised the alarm bells and said this kid needs to be tested we were told lex was tested after the fourth horrific fourth grade year he had including abused by a teacher how could they not test him
046how could they not test him with all the concerns for so many teachers that's time if you'd like you can email your comments to the board i will thank you very much thank you all right i think i saw david langhorne raise his hand david are you still with us yes good afternoon good evening how are you all tonight just fine i got a couple of different people you knew the rules right number one is there a particular reason why we were yeah but you're interrupting my three minutes i only got two and a half thanks to you go ahead david two things number one i i've i find the fr i find myself getting frustrated the poor mr sheer for a brief moment of lunacy and something that he regrets every day is being
047vilified beyond what a normal person should be vilified for calling somebody a little bit of an off-color name if i was able had the luxury of calling every single person that called me a name over the last 20 years it would be spectacularly awesome for me leave the man alone that's all i got to say on that point second point i hear all talk about the schools and their improvements and everything does anybody actually know that there are birds flying in the central middle school gymnasium right now because it's dark and the holes in the roof does anybody know that nobody cares about central middle school and this disgusting situation it's in and then i get to the pleasure of reading the school the bet documentation and i see i'm spending 22 million dollars on
048a new ice skating rink that can't be realistic i know that um that um old greenwich school needs work i know julian curtis needs work all of them do maybe you should all take a field trip down to central middle school and take a look and the 250 300 kids are sitting at school show them the same level of respect that you throw the 900 in old greenwich or the 350 or 400 that are at western it's just not right and at some point someone's gonna have to step up and for 22 million dollars you're gonna buy an ice skating rink that operates for five months of the year for five percent of the population and my last and final piece is and i hate to go a meeting without my shed coming up it's
049frustrating and i gather the rumor is that the fabulous school board unfortunately seemed to have missed the deadline to put phase two in hence my shed gets pushed back from 2022 to 2023. i don't exactly know where the visiting stands the visiting fans are going to stand at the next football game it seems incomprehensible that we managed to be two days late and i'm really hoping that's not the case because that would be just bad luck on our side with that well i think i have 11 seconds to go i'd like to thank you all for everything you guys do i don't want to be a downer today but i think we are moving in the right direction thank you david all right next up is amy mooth hi this is amie dr jones chairman
050bernstein and members of the board of education thank you for allowing me the opportunity to speak this evening and for everything has been done to provide our children with the option of an in-school education i appreciate that this has been a huge sacrifice for many to for many to make this happen i'm not sure who on this call saw the article written by ms prabhu in the march 6 heart for current but i urge you all to read the article written by this brave eastern eighth grader this young woman spoke eloquently and kindly about the racism she has experienced at eastern we were impressed that she did not let the fear of repercussions interfere with having her voice heard and ashamed it ourselves for keeping our claims of racism at eastern so discreet as a
051parent i have feared repercussions for my children and family and it has prevented me from speaking as openly as she did but i want her to know that she is not alone other students are also living the experience she has had at eastern and i'm sure other schools in the district miss prabhu your bravery has sparked our family to think about how our fears of repercussion have prevented us from speaking out and yet you an eighth grader found the courage it seems like it is time that the people on this board find the courage to examine what is going on in our elementary middle school curriculum that is allowing this behavior to flourish at eastern or maybe the better question is what is missing from our curriculum social emotional learning has been grossly underfunded and
052unsupported in our school district the curriculum seems void of meaningful diversity equity and inclusion curriculum and i question whether there is appropriate training for our teachers staff and administrators just to strategically integrate it it needs to start in the elementary schools not as a reactive intervention to a severe problem in the middle schools our ptas are appreciating the absence and trying to find ways to support and integrate it into our schools but without a strategy from the district we will continue to work in silos without creating meaningful change i would also like to thank the guidance counselor mentioned twice in this article who this student felt safe confiding in from this piece it seems her guidance counselor validated her experience and helped her find her voice so she could bravely speak and share her experience
053these students of color of diverse and rich religions and cultures should not feel like they cannot receive an education in a safe accepting environment i should not have to worry that my biracial child isn't safe at school because of the racism and bullying that has to be endured we are not even addressing our lgbtq population here in this discussion racism at eastern is a school district and community problem our school district is plagued by racism and a culture of otherness as proven by the identified problems in our special education system the language around differences has to change to one of inclusion and acceptance thank you thank you very much our next speaker is jane sprung i do not see a sprung jane if you're with us if you could raise your hand all right i
054guess we'll move on then our next speaker is janet mcmahon yeah the wrong janet i do not believe she is on the call all right janet if you're with us could you raise your hand okay we're gonna move on then our next speaker is alyssa williams miss williams if you unmute yourself you should be able to speak hello yes we can hear you okay my name is alyssa williams and i am a single mom with two special needs daughters i am here tonight scared and afraid of the retaliation many other special education parents have faced but i feel i must do what is best for my two daughters that i love more than anything else in this world reign is in sixth grade and has suffered serious educational setbacks not because she is learning disabled
055but rather because of the serious neglect she has suffered at both julian curtis and central middle schools most recently you excluded me from rain's triennial meeting this left reigns team to pre-determine her needs which is a serious violation of the individuals with disabilities act you also failed to provide me with a copy of her iep in a timely manner which violates connecticut state laws additionally you lied and said it had to be done within a certain time frame but as we speak today that date hasn't even arrived yet i told reign's team how concerned i was about her regressions and how her goals reflected that of a third grader her math goals included counting coins that is not the goal of a sixth grader the question is why would greenwich public schools look to do
056everything everything possible not to offer my daughter the services she so desperately needs at a meeting for my younger daughter michaela last week i was told by the assistant principal at julian curtis that they were going to stop the clock on my request for a full evaluation because quote she had a 20 40 vision in one eye again this is a direct violation of the idea the reading specialist backdated a letter and tried to slip it into my friends daughter's staff members thank you very much despite the fact that i have requested all correspondence be sent via email your scare tactics are to send an assistant principal to public housing at night uninvited to see how she can call dcf on parents of children with disabilities again the question is why would greenwich public schools
057look to intentionally cause harm to my innocent child the answer is simple i like many other special needs families in greenwich or poor i do not have the means to hire an attorney to fight this and the district knows it so they don't provide our children a free and appropriate public education just because i can't afford a lawyer doesn't mean i don't love my children nor does it give the right to deny them an education your sick and disgusting behaviors will impact both my daughter's futures enough is enough you don't need pcg to do a review to know you need to drain your swamp i have a lot to lose by speaking tonight but i will never give up on my daughters i may not have money but i do have a voice thank you
058thank you very much all right our next speaker is abby large can you hear me yes go ahead thank you have you considered doing this worldwide pandemic that there is an entire generation of students going through trauma that there are students who have fallen behind academically and the achievement gap has been single-handedly widened by this pandemic that there's an overwhelming number of students dealing with serious emotional and social trauma why haven't any of these topics been discussed and debated towards a solve for our children why has there not been one agenda item listed in over a year that discusses what you're going to do about it on the front page of the march 9th greenwich time it said that greenwich is slated 32 million 805 thousand five hundred and forty one dollars in total school
059aid k-12 from federal stimulus money for covid relief why aren't you discussing how you will use that money for this solve forgive my frankness but have you considered why you are spending time energy and our taxpayer dollars fighting each other it's toxic beyond disappointing to watch and sets a horrific example to our children of how true leadership is supposed to be worse you will have failed an entire generation of students which will be ingrained in them forever as we are fortunately getting our vaccines to hopefully bring this global pandemic to an end why don't you consider bringing the toxic relationships to an end as well and focus on the current and future needs of our students which in the end matters most okay thank you our next speaker is james waters although i'm not sure
060he's with us see him mr waters hey can you hear me peter yes go ahead great thank you thank you board of education members my name is james waters i wanted to speak tonight to strongly encourage the board of education to act on two important items first please uphold the district norms for greenwich public schools and censure peter shurer for his comments he has a track record of ignoring these norms repeatedly and should specifically be held accountable for his words and actions in calling the chair of the board of education a quote effing d-bag during a public meeting in february the district norms are be here be safe be honest care for self and others let go and move on we hold our kids to these standards and we need to hold our board of
061education teachers and administration to the very same standard as his own allies said tonight it was a quote moment of lunacy and quote it was not a good example please send our entire town a message that mr shure's actions cannot be tolerated and censure him tonight you must not sweep this under the rug as some of his allies would encourage you to do second please support dr jones's interim appropriation request for north miana school we just learned today that north miami school will not be fully repaired by september and that alternative space will be required for half of the school i applaud dr jones and her team's team's work to get the school opened as quickly as possible and encourage you to support her in expediting this project even more i strongly encourage the board
062of education to do whatever it takes to upgrade all of our schools to today's standards and to tell the board of estimate and taxation to stop kicking important capital projects down the road thank you for listening and i hope you will do the right thing thank you thank you very much all right our next speaker is mabel bolestra hi good evening this is marvel good evening members of the board dr jones and all present i thank those of you championing our cause and those of other children in the greenwich public schools your efforts are invaluable and we applaud you last week the greenwich times printed an article on its front page a plea for equity please read it i was filled with equal parts anxiety and hope at the thought of our story being shared
063publicly to help other families and raise awareness regarding educational access with the hope that it could provide a roadmap to achieve this for all students access comes in many phases first general access under the ada then personalization under section 504 in the idea i will focus on digital access in trying to view transition materials for greenwich high we found the website not compliant with access under the ada we emailed as directed and requested that this be corrected it's my understanding a gps team came together and is working on that thank you this is a wise plan for action by gps there's an abundance of case law and ocr decisions affirming the requirement that websites and online platforms be accessible just as the ada requires physical buildings to be accessible so must the websites and online
064platforms in our complaint referenced in the article the state department of ed ruled among other things that all teachers and staff working with my son had to be formally trained to ensure implementation of his iep accommodations as a blind visually impaired student you might already guess that means digital access is required but here's the thing we don't need an iep to demand that access digital access be provided another neither just any other family or student at gps those are already required by the ada failure to have digital access principles implemented and threaded through every aspect of the educational environment and curriculum is a violation of the ada the ada doesn't say wait for a disabled person to show up and ask it requires equal access already be in place greenwich has a long-standing history of
065non-compliance with the ada despite ongoing and heroic efforts of advocates in this community providing educational access is a walk in the park by comparison do we want greenwich to end up like in other dominoes as my son athlete stated he shouldn't be the only one to benefit from the accommodations he receives these are universal required for all regardless of the presence or number of students with disabilities use us please as a roadmap to provide required access to all gps students and just as you must for my son implement training at every led level for every administrator every teacher every staff and student to ensure digital access is required by the ada is implemented and taught to all in our community again we ask please use us as a roadmap to do this for all of
066us thank you very much thank you so much all right our next speaker is megan g megan if you could raise your hand get a couple of megan signed on all right thank you all right you just need to unmute hello hi megan we can hear you go ahead okay perfect thank you board of ed members i'm speaking this evening to you on behalf of peter scherr who is a friend neighbor and former colleague i've known peter in each of these capacities and can speak to his character passion and dedication his work for the town of greenwich and the board of education has been unwavering peter and his lovely wife karen have been passionately engaged in the greenwich schools for close to 20 years our eldest children started their academic journey together at north miami
067school ems and then ghs i have four children and my youngest son is at ghs as a freshman we have been actively involved in our schools as class parents board positions in the classroom field trips and fundraising initiatives we were proud to have had our children in the greenwich school system a system that was known for excellence in education a college preparatory curriculum with well-prepared students for higher edu academic endeavors back then greenwich schools prided itself on a well-rounded curriculum with an ib program at isd a strong special ed faculty esl programs achievement from a state and national perspective and an expansive set of enrichment programs it was truly a beautiful and innocent time to raise a child i've personally witnessed peter's journey and dedication to the board of ed the past 12 years he
068has been a passionate and steady advocate for what greenwich schools have always been known for excellence in education which is the reason we have all decided to live in this town and have our children educated here i am truly disappointed with the motion to sense censor peter after he personally and publicly apologized i feel that the motion to censure peter is an overreaction this motion and and the time the board is spending on the matter is merely a distraction which deflects from other more critical issues that impact our students like full-time in-person education delivery delivering excellent education and resuming extracurricular activities meaning a return to normal life this is critical to students overall health and well-being as they have lost so much over the past year which they will never ever get back i urge
069the board to focus on the critical matters at hand and focus on your charter and i hereby request that the motion to censor peter be dismissed thank you megan before you go could you actually tell us your last name we need that for the record the letter thank you very much appreciate that all right our next speaker is marina levine you need to unmute one second i think you're unmuted you're good to go oh good my name is marina levine i'm the parent of two public school students i believe it is imperative to support the board of education budget as it is presented and inclusive of the improved improvements to julian curtis furthermore it is essential to support the interim appropriation needed for repairs to north miami's the conditions our children our children are learning
070and influence their self-worth when their schools are outdated inaccessible and in a state of disrepair it tells them that their learning environment and their safety are not a priority on a recent drive by old granite school the front steps were roped off with caution tape it's an embarrassment it is not the message we should be sending to our students and our community at large not to mention anyone looking to buy a home here on censure one of our school norms is care for self and others however mr shearer's pattern of behavior includes publicly shamed parents gps staff and contributing to years of dysfunction on the board he is repeatedly disrespectful to the superintendent and has posted bizarre social media posts regarding uh saying things like students are being indoctrinated i think we have to call
071this out and it's high time we move forward with accenture thank you very much thank you all right our next speaker is molly celibi good evening i'm just going to quickly speak about a few matter of two matters i'm not going to opine on whether or not the board should censor mr shure but i do call on all public figures elected officials no matter one's political affiliation to immediately apologize for mistakes anyone can forgive an open mic but i didn't hear an apology that very evening nor a few weeks later in an op-ed that was written we must hold everyone to a high standard we should have the highest of standards in this town for ourselves in our community at large secondly i ask you to support the interim appropriation for north miami school my
072alma mater a wonderful school that educated nine celibi's over four decades thank you all right thank you very much our next speaker is natalie adee hi thank you as the pta president of western middle school i had originally planned to talk about the fields again and urge for their reopening and get an update on those but after listening to these comments i think i just want to speak as a parent i want to urge the board and our leaders to stay focused on the needs of the kids we have so many concerns the special needs concerns the building concerns the curriculum concerns the list goes on you know when i listened this evening to stories like the one i heard from shelley and from alyssa about their special needs journey with their kids my heart
073breaks for them um it's it's not an easy journey for for parents so i just i just want to urge the board to stay focused on the kids you know i don't want to focus on hot mic moments i'm saddened by that conversation you know hearing these comments it's it's just a distraction from the kids so can we please focus on the kids thank you thank you very much our next speaker is lorelei o'hagan actually while you're looking for lorelei janet i see your hand is up maybe you could bring janet up generic mcmahon who uh we missed you earlier go ahead janet hi can you hear me yes okay great um thank you for letting me speak tonight uh i was busy for a little bit and then i just got out of my
074meeting so um i just wanted to uh address the members of the board of education tonight because i wanted you to ver i wanted to urge you to vote yes on the motion to censure mr cher everyone is entitled to make mistakes but the profanity uttered by mr cher on the zoo mic on february 20th was neither a mistake nor a one-off over the past seven years i've personally witnessed countless board of education meetings wherein mr share demonstrated aggressive condescending and toxic behavior toward other board of ed members superintendents and have meyer staff additionally he is shamed bullied and attacked greenwich public school teachers parents and even students on social media to add insult to injury mr cher continually refuses to apologize for his vulgar behavior and instead tries to minimize and excuse the incident
075away as an elected official this is unacceptable he must be held to a higher standard and he must be held accountable for his actions ignoring this latest incident will only give mr cher a hall pass that he habitually enjoys accenture is not only long overdue but is it is the only path forward so that the board can conduct its business in a productive and peaceful manner indeed a public censure may give mr share pause the next time he disparages a member of the gps community please vote yes to censure mr cher and finally give him the accountability he so consistently evades thank you so much all right thank you our next speaker is lorelei o'hagan if we were able to locate our lorelai if you're on could you raise your hand i do not see
076her okay we'll move on then uh our next speaker is ryan oka i do not have a ryan oka okay ryan if you're with us could you raise your hand okay not seeing any our next speaker is laura coston i do not have a laura coston okay laura if you're with us oh i see a badger 05 can we see that is that's you laura all right go ahead uh thank you in the interest of avoiding redundancy others have already um covered what i wish to speak about so thank you all right thank you very much and our last speaker is cara philbin i hope i got that right i did not see a car out if you're with us could you raise your hand okay well i'm having a lot of luck there all
077right well that is the end of our community comments thank you to everybody who uh who spoke to the board uh we're gonna move on in our agenda to our superintendents report so dr jones take it away thank you mr bernstein i do have a couple of items tonight first of all since our last meeting we have opened all of our elementary playgrounds which is was very exciting for our staff and our children we've also returned on wednesdays now at our high school ghs continuing to take those small steps um towards the end of the year getting more open and also doing that in a cautious way as we watch what's happening with covid we are starting to plan for the end of the year i get a lot of questions and emails about what
078it's going to look like when we talk about graduation and moving up and all of these different celebrations and it's still a little too early because as a reminder our guidance comes from the connecticut department of health epidemiologists our local department of health and governor's executive order so we expect that we will probably see lots of changes between now and june i am very very optimistic that we can be outside and have gatherings that we couldn't have at the end of last year but again it's going to be ongoing and we're watching literally every day for the vaccine just as a reminder the vaccine is is optional so you know it can be a controversial topic each family really has to decide how they feel about the vaccine for their own child it is not
079mandated and again we'll continue to share information for parents to make an educated decision on what they want to do for their family and if you didn't hear the announcement within i think it was the last 24 hours the governor did move forward april 1st for 16 and above so that starts next week and we are working behind the scenes to help parents understand if they want to get their child vaccinated what are the various ways that they can do that obviously it'll be through the vam system as well and we'll have more information about that in the coming days we were working with yale new haven health today on that issue we also are working on summer school we there there are several moving pieces to summer school one of them is really watching
080what type of summer school is it going to be in person which of course will have that option uh which building is not does not have major work going on um so that it's a good summer school site and we're working through all of those various issues right now so in the coming weeks you'll see information on summer school for those um students who are recommended also a very special thanks to north myannas pta who hosted myself and dan watson joined to talk about the north myannas work we knew that they were probably going to be dialing in and watching tonight um and and helping them understand that this is uh far beyond like the flood that we had at costco this is this actually involves construction because of the ceiling the plaster ceiling issue
081and i'm not going to talk um i won't belabor you with that because i know it said later on in the agenda but again thanks to the pta and we're trying to be very transparent uh with families that once we got the decision that the entire lower floor must also have new ceilings that we will we do not anticipate that we will be ready for september we won't have the official timeline until we actually get the design work done um but it is it's a big project and um i think the last thing that i really have on here is just i do i do just want to comment on pcg um with this with the committee that has two board members and two of our pta representatives that meet with pcg um at least
082one of them got the an anonymous email that kind of alerted us to some of the issues that were referenced in public comment tonight and i just i want to assure the public we absolutely followed that up with pcg and had a discussion and just about what that we don't even normally address anonymous emails but we knew this was important i just want to reiterate pcg is a firm that works nationally and not only do they work nationally they're also right now they were the firm that was selected to work in the state of connecticut on the brand new iep system that will roll out in connecticut next year and the audit the audit component that was referenced in new jersey um is a totally different division than the division that actually does what we're
083doing uh with the audits and they have worked in new jersey for a very long time and they are still working in new jersey um so i just i just want the community to know we absolutely have followed that up and there was a reference to a survey and pcg put out a survey and staff have had no access to that whatsoever and i have no idea and neither does the committee um we have not seen any of that right now and i know karen hirsch and karen kowalski will probably address that in their comments about where we are in the process right now for pcg so i'll just i'll leave it at that thank you all right thank you very much we're going to move on to reports of officers committees and liaisons board
084members if you want to raise your hand all right mr kelly hello everybody i got uh two things to talk about number one uh is the on behalf of the negotiation committee we had a wonderful meeting with carol sutton and the gea uh we talked over a bunch of things because as we all know it's been a been a very challenging time we've been going through and we have to give lots of credit to our teachers for doing a great job for our staff uh for uh off the charts uh behavior for our community all coming together and working together and and getting through what we did uh i think we did everyone combined did a great job and we all should be very happy about uh about what we've done uh the board of
085ed we've worked together on a on a heck a lot of stuff that happened to us across the way and we put a lot of hours in so it was a good meeting very productive uh the negotiation committee uh listened to what the teachers had to say with carol and her committee it was good stuff next is the uh cardinal stadium we had a visit from the tree warden recently so working out some things uh with the tree warden but we're moving forward we're digging foundation uh for our bleachers uh it doesn't look like we're going to make uh graduation for a complete project certainly there'll be considerable uh progress made when graduation's there so hopefully we can look at the uh at what's there and understand that we are moving in the right direction
086around graduation time in our staff meeting uh on last tuesday uh labor day is our uh our projected completion date uh we uh we plan uh hope to plan on having a a great opening of the first football game we hope to rally the community given that kovitz behind us and everyone could come out we'll we'll put on a big event the day of our first home football game where we could christen our new stadium and be proud of what we have there that's all i got thank you thank you joe all right miss hirsch i just wanted to address um the special education audit steering committee um and say that we are now pc pgc is in the process of analyzing all of the data that they have uh uh compiled um and we'll
087be starting to develop their report um which they plan to present to the board in late june the steering committee has asked uh questions regarding action planning scenarios and we'll be returning to the board uh possibly in may to have a second discussion um to to to work towards our action planning for once we receive the final report additionally ciac met this month they have discussed uh different subcommittees and subcommittee work as well as ideas for upcoming workshops all right thank you miss olsen megan you're muted i think you're still all right sorry sorry sorry i know i pulled up i pulled up my dates yeah all right here we are so first you heard nothing so first um on distinguished teachers award um uh very exciting um many packets have come in so first
088of all thank you everybody who has gone ahead and nominated um teachers we really appreciate the behind-the-scene work that goes into that and um we're really looking forward to to the next step um in terms of dates on april 2 21st wednesday april 21st is when the six teachers will be announced um the six uh recipients of that award and a date to keep in mind then the following the following evening april 21st um the night after that at the board meeting they would be then recognized and the ceremony is scheduled for may 4th um so that's that's scheduled for may 4th that award ceremony at central middle school at 4 30. so again thank you to everybody who took part in that um also a few highlights and updates from the greenwich alliance um
089just a reminder that the reaching out grant applications they're due but they're due to the alliance by tomorrow march 26th um the grants get uh the grants allow teachers and educators to do so many amazing things so please get those grants in um the the deadline's been extended till tomorrow um tuning into music lessons uh will end at the end of april which is a month earlier than in previous years this has been one-to-one lessons for 63 students over skype um which has has used up the budget a little bit faster because it's one-on-one this is the only instrumental music instruction for some of our students because of the covet protocol restrictions so that's been something else amazing that that the alliance has has um taken part in the trivia challenge was a huge success
090um it raised over fifty thousand dollars for programs for greenwich public schools students and teachers so thank you to all who participated and supported um thank you of course um as usual to julie foreign hope i said it all right this time finally in the developing artist grant program is featured in the april edition of the riverside og neighbors magazine um for four years this alliance grant has brought professional artists to our three middle schools to give students experience working in a variety of art mediums again thank you to julie for all of her hard work and the entire alliance for for all these all these great things that they've been able to help provide our schools with so thank you continue to support greenwich alliance please all right thank you megan uh miss stoke
091just real fast um i wanted to update you that it'll be posted tomorrow but um we all can make it thankfully is that next wednesday at 11 o'clock we are having a budget committee meeting to just purely dive into the covered expenses which of course you'll see that sean is tracking quite closely but of course we need to work on a plan on how we will luckily use the covid funds that were being granted and there are multiple as we know funding sources coming in and so we want to go through that thoroughly so that's something we will be discussing next wednesday at 11. and then obviously we'll report to you at the next business all meeting thank you kathleen miss downey uh just reporting on the high school entryway the rfp to hire an
092architect was posted i believe on monday so the plan is that the next couple weeks architects can come in make bids um and then the committee will select an architect to move ahead with the project so the project is moving along christina just for scheduling purposes um you know the board will have to approve the architect so once you know when the rfp responses are back and you have a timeline let us know for agenda planning i will do so my guess is it will not be in time for our april meeting my guess is it'll probably be for may best guess right now great thank you all right just a a quick chair update uh remind people we are in the throes of budget season so the bet is is hard at work uh
093they are meeting for a public hearing on monday night march 29th at 7 p.m and they're taking comments there they're also taking email comments their work will continue i believe april 1st is decision day so they're they're marching towards that after that the budget will then go before the rtm and its main meeting so board members at some point will come to you to ask you to help with the district and committee meetings so just keep an eye out for that that's probably a month or so away but uh never never too soon to remind you because it comes up fast all right with that we are uh done with our monthly reports and we're going to move on in our agenda so the next item is an action item uh this is the replacement
094for the item that was postponed at the last meeting um miss downey is there a motion peter i actually have a point order before miss downey makes her motion sure go ahead you had mentioned earlier that we that you had received um advice from the town attorney as well as from a cave attorney and i just wanted to point out i don't know what that advice was uh but or whether it had looked at this particular issue but my understanding under robert's rules is that um if you are um if this if this is the same material item in a meeting for which emotion was withdrawn on the issue you cannot take up the same issue twice pursuant to section 38 and i don't know if that was dealt with but i just raised that
095as a point of our a point of order yeah i i have a different reading of robert's rules uh the item that uh that was withdrawn was a question about the notice of proper notice at the last meeting uh therefore we have properly noticed it it's a new item at this meeting and therefore we can take it up okay i just want to note for the record that obviously i have i have a slight disagreement with respect to the rules i'm not sure what was advised to the board on this but um section 38 reads pretty clear to me okay well thank you for that ms daniel i'll turn it back over to you yes i'd like to make a motion that um as published in our agenda documents a move that pursuant to board
096policy 9222 the board censure peter shurer for his conduct during the february 18 2021 meeting when he was heard using offensive inappropriate language and uttering a disparaging comment about a fellow board member censure is warranted as his behavior violates board policy 9271 the code of ethics specifically the provisions that board members and superintendents recognize that clear and appropriate communications are key to the successful operation of the school district board members and superintendents will always carry out their respective roles with the highest levels of professionalism honesty and integrity board members and superintendents both recognize that they serve as part of an educational team with mutual respect trust civility and regard for each other's respective roles and responsibilities board members and superintendents practice and promote ethical behavior in the boardroom as a model for all district employees
097thank you is there a second second thank you miss olson all right mr chair i see your hand if you'd like to start the discussion no i don't want to strike the discussion uh i'll i'll like to hear from the other board members first but i have a point of order um mr who is presiding over this because mr bernstein i know you've been we've all been advised by the town attorney that for reasons that the town attorney has well documented you've been advised to recuse yourself because you have a conflict on this item so mr chair to that point uh the person you've heard from is not the acting town attorney that would be barbara schellenberg who i spoke with earlier this evening after the letter was sent to us at about five o'clock
098today when this item has been out there for about two weeks so i'll question that timing uh we discussed that there is no legal requirement for me to recuse myself there's nothing in our policy there's nothing in connecticut state law until that would be formally shown to me i i do not believe that is so if you'd like to uh to to appeal that we can certainly have uh mr lead the discussion on this item i'm fine with that no i'm just i was just asking the question over who is presiding and i guess let me let me also add to that this is unsolicited advice from one of the attorneys for the town not the acting town attorney uh and at this point we still don't have a full explanation of how that came
099to be and uh why that was shared with us uh but i'm fine turning it over to misto if she if she would like to call on people and call the question that's fine well i i was just i i was just i'm asking a simple question peter okay all of us as board members it appeared in my mailbox out of nowhere today i don't know who solicited that you'll have to figure that out um it appeared in my box today i read it before this meeting the advice of counsel to the board seemed to be pretty clear i was not aware of this i've never been aware of this ongoing dialogue that i guess you've been having with people i just wanted to be clear in the proceedings here how it was going to
100be handled the advice of counsel was in their opinion that you should recuse yourself and i'm i think i've just heard you say that you disagree with that advice and you'll continue to preside okay i don't need to preside i'll be happy to turn it over to miss dough i would know mr share you did send a letter to the paper where you said the comment wasn't about me so uh with that misto if you would take over that i don't even know the well if you if you'd like to speak mr chair you can speak this is discussion but i'm going to turn it over to mister to preside all right okay all right um seeming that it looks like christina downey's hand is up first so christina um i'll just comment on i
101don't really see that there's a conflict but that's a true conflict you know but whatever uh my comments were simply this um i'm i was distressed and disappointed by the insulting and derogatory profanity uttered by mr sure during the february 18th board of ed meeting all elected public officials are held to high standards of conduct and are accountable if they do not adhere to those standards this is particularly true for this board due to our unique status overseeing thousands of young students and hundreds of teachers in particular we the board of education and the greenwich public schools require appropriate behavior from our students and staff and acceptance of respon responsibility for failure to adhere to codes of conduct we cannot be a credible oversight body and we certainly aren't role models if we do not
102ourselves abide by those same norms okay it looks like joe kelly thank you um my daughter came home from school a few weeks ago and she was obviously bothered by something and she didn't share it first but she at dinner time we were talking about the occurrences of the day and she stopped for a second and she asked did one of the board of ed members say and she used an abbreviated version of what mr sheer had said i was offended by the abbreviated version said please don't say that at the dinner table i i am very proud of the work we do at the board of ed at that moment i was not proud of the board of ed it was a problem if the kids at school and she did say they're talking
103about this if the kids at school think it's okay because us as role models are using language like that well then is it okay for a student to use that language to a teacher when that teacher is disciplining the student is it okay for an athlete to say that those words to a coach when he's trying to help the kid take him out of a game and replace him with a substitute is it okay is it okay for a child at home to say what was said by a person on the board of education is that okay it's not okay i support the censure not because i hate mr sheer to be honest i don't like him either so it's it's not that i i share i'm on the same party uh political party he's
104on i've been a republican for 40 years uh it has nothing to do with that it has nothing to do with his past performance it has nothing to do with his opinions a lot of his opinions i happen to agree with i it's not anything about that at all it's only only specifically about his use of that language and he has to be censured uh as an example to the kids this is the board of education that's why i support uh the century ms kowalski uh thank you i'm i'm i'm disappointed and concerned that we're actually still having this conversation and i think probably all of us feel that way um mr shirt apologized publicly in the paper he said it was a mistake he said it had nothing to do with a board issue
105or directed toward any board member mr shurer is a board member that has been appearing publicly for 12 years and and this is the the first you know f-bomb moment dropped in a state of always on tv always on the mic and i'm just going to give him the benefit of the doubt here this board has so many pressing issues that we need to discuss and handle and i'm honestly troubled that this is all happening this way we heard tonight multiple people who have heart-wrenching stories about what's happening in our school district and the fact that we are dedicating an ounce of time to this versus the minutes and hours that we should be spending on the other issues is troubling to me personally i think this is just not good board governance we seem
106to be more concerned about the mistaken hot mic than anything else that is as before us and most of us said at the last meeting when we adjourned this that they'd rather be dealing with board stuff so why are we dealing with this this way um personally i think this is a a reflection on board leadership and a complicated history between members of the board and in my opinion this should have been handled by a phone call and it just it wasn't instead we've turned this into a public denigration and for what reason um we're adults and and this feels a little personal and hypocritical than anything else i i think were and my concern is that we're setting a precedent based on uh personal history and that feels really uncomfortable second i think this
107is you know calling the kettle black and casting the first stone how many of us have referred to another person or even a board member negatively dropping a four-letter word in reference to to one another the only difference is first we weren't on a hot mic and second of all um he wasn't directed at a particular board member it was a mistake and mistakes happen and we teach our children that mistakes happen and to move on sure thirdly i'm i'm just not sure what effect we're intending here tonight and my concern is that we've singled out this one incident to make some kind of statement and to that point i think we need to be as a board very careful uh because this borders on silencing or free speech look you may not like the
108speech i get it and they're made up and there may be a better place for it i get that too but this is free speech you know he didn't say he was going to kill someone he wasn't inciting a riot he didn't put pictures of people's heads on wanted ads throughout town which has been happened before and no one challenged those and no one found those offensive centering someone or whatever is intended the consequence here dabbles very closely to the line of centering free speech and i'm just not going to be a part of that such conduct potentially brings liability on this board both as a board and independently and i'm i don't want any part of prohibiting free speech and certainly not the speech of a non-paid volunteer that has been elected three times
109over to this board and most certainly not over an accident on a hot mic issue for which he apologized for if you think that we should be doing this because the conduct was unbecoming and against our school norms which i've heard then i think we as a board better sit back and take reflection and stop being so selective last february actually two februarys now ago february of 2020. we all sat here on in on panel as our community was throwing publicly ad hominem attacks that over to each other over the turf versus graf fields incidents and the parents were screaming at each other and not one of us said anything to stop that conduct i was embarrassed by that conduct it was a mistake on my part as well as all of ours to not
110have said anything about the conduct where parents were attacking each other personally over a discussion versus turf fields versus grass fields where were the norms that night and what were the lessons we were teaching our kids that night so let's be real careful that this that this is not a selective attack because this feels a lot less about the actual conduct but more about the person saying the words and that too i want no part of look i think this could have been handled much better we should not be discussing it this way as i've mentioned before the boar should be spending time on the matters that need discussion the achievement gap our special ed the parents that told their heartfelt stories tonight that's where our attention needs to be and i'm done talking about
111this issue uh miss olsen sure so mr cher and i actually have had a collegial rapport in discussing uh gps issues offline but with regard to the hot mic moment it doesn't align to the norms of the greenwich public schools or what we should expect from our public officials now i believe everybody makes mistakes but the key is whether we learn from them and evolve from them whether we own up to them whether we admit them saying it's a mistake and saying i apologize i don't have more time for this subject which is what mr chair wrote in the newspaper is not a sincere apology in fact it's not an apology at all it's saying i'm sorry i don't have time to apologize so you know this children are listening to these calls we are
112an example we should be held to high you know high standards as elected officials students have been suspended for cursing for using the f word less than what was said unless on that call um if you i know students that have been suspended for this feel free to take it up with me uh offline i'll tell you all about it so we are holding we are holding our students to a different standard than we are the elected officials and and that's not okay since mr sheriff seems to be doubling down rather than actually apologizing for this i don't see any other option than to vote for censure ms hirsch much like megan i've had a collegial relationship with mr cher for many years um but i really was disappointed to hear the disparaging remark during
113our meeting on thursday february 18th we are a policy-governed board and as board members we have ethical duties and responsibilities related to our public office towards one another as board members staff and the public as the longest standing board member mr share should be familiar with those policies including policy 9271 our code of ethics we have a code of ethics for our staff we have policies on expected student conduct and policies on meeting conduct for those who wish to address the board as well as our own code of ethics and we are expected to practice and promote ethical behavior in the boardrooms a model for all district employees and our students conduct like this does distract us from our responsibilities of focusing on the needs of our students and does not represent the behavior we
114want to model for students or staff or other members of our community i'm not sure why some are suggesting this is a bad character or that we are turning this uh into more than it needs to be it is simply a response to a moment that happened um and again much i believe like ms olsen said it is you know we all make mistakes but when we make them we apologize um i have yet to actually hear that um and i was very disappointed in that as well thank you okay um i appreciate everyone joining us tonight like many of us i would like to move on from this unfortunate incident i'd prefer not to spend our time on this issue and it would have been better for alza all of us if you had
115simply apologized promptly that's the minimum we'd expect of any of our students and we should expect nothing less from our leaders therefore i would like to seeing no other hands oh peter sorry uh proceed peter mr chair i guess now it's my turn um well i appreciate the comments of my colleagues um i i think there's a little uh history that winds up mattering but first let me get a little housekeeping done uh to my constituents those people who elected me those who didn't elect me those people who i'm representing um i've already addressed this publicly but i'm sorry i didn't manage my zoom microphone effectively and that you may have overheard what i've clearly said was private comments about a private matter the reason board members don't know that is in the prior 30
116days other than mrs kowalski no one on the board has contacted me reached out to me asked me about this issue they've expressed no concern to me directly they seem to express a lot of concern in the press but they haven't expressed it to me directly so i'll repeat what i said uh before in a statement it was a regrettable regrettable uh mistake um i think it's really important for people to actually recognize mistakes learn from them and move on that's what we've been trying to do in our school system for a long time if you're a gps staff person and you're similarly offended the same applies to you as i've said before if you're a student please listen to me carefully i realize profanity has become a part of your daily life and it's
117something that's everywhere it's in art popular music literature film television it has become pervasive in our society today that you as students are being raised in and contrary to the comments of my colleagues on the board and i don't know why they don't know this i know profanity is actually extensively used in texts and assignments actually being delivered in 10th grade english at greenwich high school an important question for us as a board is how does that happen but that's a separate matter regardless as i've said to students there are better and more effective words use those instead now i want to address the six of you on the board we have some really serious issues classrooms collapsing students displaced huge losses in learning serious student mental health problems genuine real anxiety among our 1300
118employees toxic school environments that have dragged on for nearly a decade a broken special education system and a yawning achievement gap i've had the benefit of serving with some incredible public service giants like lauren raven leslie moriarty peter von braun and laura erickson i know that with them i've cherished my role on the board as a steward of our community schools and they would never have let the board and board power be used on this type of stunt and it's i believe it's a stunt so let's have a moment of truth and honesty every single one of you have used profane words in conversations with me many times i was disappointed to hear mr kelly bring his family into it but if we're being honest a couple board members here know that the use of
119profanity is so pervasive in their households that their actual children are using them in school regularly i will say what i said a moment ago you're trying to censure me for words that gps actually teaches in our classrooms and i i know you know this because it's been circulated to you in a note so i would suggest we all uh climb down from those very high horses that we seem to be on and have a serious discussion look i understand that the six of you are angry this isn't new you have been for a long time i understand you don't like the probing questions that i ask of superintendents jones in administration i have great frustration that they never get answered i understand you don't like the questions about student learning and achievement gap or
120mismanagement of budgets or questions about unauthorized teaching of ideologies in school i understand you don't like my relentlessly pushing on things like why we weren't having any online education for our students last year i i i know all of you i understand you don't like me ever having these opposing views you many of you have verbalized that to me i realize that you would like to prevent me from asking these questions and expressing a different view i get it i also understand that for some of you there is a deep personal and political uh background to all this i've worked very hard to keep that away from the board you know i understand as an example of mr mr kelly and others are really angry about my active and public support of the republican opponent
121to a board member in the connecticut state representative race mr kelly's made that point exceptionally clear and he's said on numerous occasions that my supporting another candidate was unethical so i understand that this is a much bigger issue than my mistake of someone overhearing my own words on a private matter which i've explained publicly unfortunately i can't help it if none of you are going to ask any questions you're going to automatically assume what it's about which is what many of you stated today and you haven't even asked me about it you know the fact that not mr kelly mr bernstein miss olsen uh now uh miss downey making this motion or any officer of the boa ever contacted me about this confirms what i think everybody needs to know what this is about and
122this is the really understand uh that this is a much bigger issue than my mistake of someone overhearing my own words on a private matter which i've explained publicly unfortunately i can't help it if none of you are going to ask any questions you're going to automatically assume what it's about which is what many of you have stated today and you haven't even asked me about it you know the fact that not mr kelly mr bernstein miss olsen now miss downey making this motion or any officer of the boa ever contacted me about this confirms what i think everybody needs to know what this is about and this is the really true and this is the really troubling part this is about using the power of this board which is an agent of the state
123of connecticut to try to chill my speech and wind up denying me my civil rights and uh that's a very dangerous place for the board to be now i've been here before past this prologue you know as well reported i've been sued by mr bernstein previously the pattern is oddly similar to right now last time a long suit was launched press hysteria was created and then an attempt to quickly withdraw the lawsuit trying to deny people who my reputation had been dismerged and two other people's reputation had been dismerged to essentially uh prevent us from getting our day in court and recovering our reputation from the species charge fortunately there was an impartial referee called the judge and he said no way and he ruled at the time the court does not find the defendant's
124conduct disruptive or harassing as mr bernstein is alleged he's essentially admonished for bringing uh uh a case that tried to censure free speech yet here we are again essentially having the con conversation in this situation it's even worse okay the town attorney actually told all of us hey peter i'm sorry but you're 10 minutes into this and i really do want to move on so are you can you wind it up uh kathleen i'm gonna finish my statement okay that's fine i just want to let you know that you're 10 minutes into it so thank you i understand that i understand that quote on march 11 2021 the law department was contacted by greenwich time about the censure of peter shirt at a meeting of the board that was to be held that same day
125we were advised of this action the town attorney advised of this action by the media notwithstanding the fact that the agenda item did not specifically reflect accenture this means someone on this board who had not even bothered to notify me that they wanted to censure was already out talking in the press i don't know who that was i think we'll get to the bottom of who that was i could guess who that was but i don't know who it is so uh i i think these situations i've historically handled these quite differently um when i happened to be the board chair and um there was an incident with who is now the chairman we'll even be rated irene parisi to the point that she was almost in tears and the democratic caucus called for him
126to be disciplined my approach was different speak immediately directly and personally which i did with peter and i he he raised his concerns he explained himself and we moved on from the issue and i don't think he ever repeated his behavior he said it was a mistake and it was regrettable contrast with what we're doing now i've been living with this for a month whipping up the press whipping up borders ambushing people with century motions never speaking to me so i think it's fair to say i have a little bit different view of leadership and how the six of you should address this thank you peter please can we really wrap it up it's 12. we have so much to go in this meeting and i see joe's hand up but please i'm trying to
127call so i'd like to call the question mr kelly are you going to cut off my speech mr kelly would you like to respond are you trying to cut off my speech mr keller oh i was called on so my hand was raised and i was called up peter all right please can you please i will finish kathleen thank you okay look so you guys can go ahead and do what you do okay you can finish this political stunt which is what it is i i i think you've been advised by the town attorney the risk that you're in i would rather you do not force my hand to the next step board members can't so brazenly use stay given authority to dismerge someone's reputation and then deprive them of the civil rights without accountability
128so i think i've made clear um there are a number of defects in this in this situation as you've laid it out you're exposing yourselves and others to a penalty i would encourage you not to do that um i've said what i've said on this matter um and you can believe it or not it doesn't really matter to me it doesn't change the facts um i wish this hadn't happened of course um and i've said that repeatedly the most disappointing part is the kids and parents of greenwich desperately need serious people to work on serious problems and it's it's time to get real and get on with the task at hand so do what you're going to do and then we'll have to deal with the consequences that come with that mr i don't actually
129have a raise the hand oh cause you're a chair okay um did you want to say anything peter mr bernstein yeah just very quickly i i think the less said the better uh this has never been personal this issue is about behavior and meaning just very very clearly we have a code of ethics that we all must follow um you know i said this to mr sure the first time we met after i was elected to my first term we probably agree on more than we disagree about this is not personal though i do regret the fact that you've tried to make it so um you know at the end of the day a real apology actually would have gone a long way here peter it's not on us to call you it's on you
130to call us uh on behalf of myself i've never heard an apology from you what you wrote in the paper is not an apology the community can come to its own conclusion on that but this is about your behavior at a meeting we we hold our students to a uh to a certain standard um you know the standard when we when we have an expulsion hearing is whether the behavior violates a publicized policy of the schools or is disruptive to the educational process you have violated our code of conduct you disrupted the board meeting with your language and at the end of the day we we should be held accountable to that higher standard we should set the example i am aware of the time this is taking i regret that we are not focusing
131on student on students right now but the fact of the matter is we need to tell the community that we're serious about this that we do want to hold ourselves and our students to a certain standard you can smile and smirk all you want mr share but at the end of the day good governance is about being held accountable and i'll stop there and i'll call the question yes it's 8 59 so let's go all right i'm just going to do it on the order of my screen because frankly it's simpler karen hirsch yes megan olsen yes peter bernstein yes karen kowalski no joe kelly yes peter sharer uh i'm not voting it's not appropriate for me to vote great christina downey yes and kathleen stowe yes so um six one one thank you uh
132peter i turn the move meeting bernstein back over to you thank you we're gonna move on to our discussion items the first discussion item is the school calendar attempting to set the last day of school and graduation date dr jones take it away thank you chair bernstein the calendar that is posted tonight has the last day of school for students which does include the two snow days that we had on june 22nd the uh one unique feature is that we do have a save the date graduation but it's two dates this year instead of one simply because we don't know what type of graduation it will be and if we end up for instance if the uh gathering size is by a house it would take us two full days um to get through all
133of our houses so we have set aside 21st and 22nd and we will continue to you know refine that as uh the governor changes executive orders and we watch what's happening in connecticut so i guess dr jones i just want to make sure everybody understands these dates are still subject to change pending our voting which will likely happen at our april meeting is that correct yeah yes okay all right any discussion no questions wow okay so we will take this up at our april meeting locking in the dates um hopefully the closer we get to the end of the year the more certainty we'll have about events i know that the students especially our seniors are are quite interested so we'll get there all right next up is our math textbook recommendations this is a
134first read so dr carabillo mr dimico turn it over to you good evening mr bernstein board of education members dr jones cabinet members and community participants tonight we are pleased to present our recommendation for new textbooks to support our k-8 math program our current textbook math in focus was adopted in 2013. although it is generally aligned to the common core mathematics standards supplementary resources for standards and some grades are necessary the digital component of the textbook is no longer available the resources are limited there was a need to explore math textbooks with a greater variety of resources to meet the needs of all granite students this year a k-8 math textbook review committee was convened and charged with evaluating math textbooks and recommending one for adoption the committee was composed of teachers parents building administrators
135and central office administrators the committee was charged with identifying and evaluating math textbooks recommending one that was closely aligned to the connecticut core math standards supports our math curriculum and provides a variety of resources for teachers students and parents we are recommending the adoption of the big ideas math program tonight's presentation will include a video overview of the program and resources statements from elementary and middle school teachers and a parent statement i'll now turn it over to dr carabello good evening everyone mr d'amico and i want to thank our textbook committee and our team for all of their time in the thoughtful questions and comments they posed throughout the process we also want to commend and thank mrs saval for her leadership and the many years of collaborative work as our district stem coordinator we
136wish her great adventures as she looks forward to her retirement we also want to thank dr todd white one of our thought partners and consultants for facilitating the math textbook committee and for his creative development of the narrated video which we will discuss in which will be discussed the processing criteria used for selection of the big ideas program key features for students accessibility and parent and teacher resources including examples after the video mrs valley will discuss the professional learning support plan for implementation mr uh antonucci if you could start the video please in the fall of 2020 the district began the k-8 mathematics textbook adoption process between october and february the textbook review committee met 11 times to review various programs and texts beginning in january we collected input from both teachers and students in
137february the committee then narrowed the choices down to the top three with two coming out as the clear favorites finally at our last meeting in march we made the recommendation and sent it to the superintendent the committee membership included a wide variety of stakeholders representing various perspectives the textbooks and programs reviewed were based on varying philosophical beliefs about mathematics instruction the programs offer differing approaches and represent some of the strongest programs on the market today tonight the committee is recommending big ideas math the program is multi-faceted and has many features that meet the unique needs of our community the criteria used by the committee to assess each program was extensive in addition to the large categories of concepts of literacy critical thinking acquisition of basic concepts learner engagement 21st century skills digital learning parent resources
138and supplemental resources the committee also rated each program on other criteria in short big ideas was the only textbook to address all of the criteria thus making it the top choice almost unanimously on the committee the committee talked extensively about lessons learned from prior adoptions we wanted to make sure that all materials were ready to go at the start of the adoption period we also wanted to make sure that there was a strong and logical scope and sequence to follow and that all materials would be included finally we were looking for strong partners in professional development who were willing to commit to being there with us at every step of the way as we began implementation why big ideas math well there's a clear progression of learning from kindergarten through eighth grade there's a balance
139of conceptual understanding along with procedural fluency that we know our students need the materials are there to allow teachers to easily differentiate and even supports for our students learning english there are built-in assessments and reporting systems and that all important consultants consultant support is built in as well one interesting feature is called lori's notes it embeds professional development throughout the book we'll see more of lori's notes in a few minutes the program is loaded with features to support students parents and teachers let's take a look at some of the key features first everything is in one place no more hunting for resources teachers can access all materials at any level giving them greater flexibility to meet the needs of students it is designed to accommodate the accelerated students transition from elementary to middle school and
140provides a pathway of learning into algebra 1 geometry and algebra 2 for students needing additional challenges in middle school there are academic vocabulary and support materials for students and parents in 14 different languages and there's easy integration into and supports for our rti students big ideas was built on a foundation of strong educational research that employs pedagogical moves that have been shown to increase achievement that we've mentioned before the pathway for middle school is both extensive and flexible but most importantly ready to go centers are provided for the elementary classrooms and all resources are editable so that teachers can adjust them for the students who are sitting in front of them big ideas was developed by math teachers in partnership with national geographic that partnership focuses on the application of mathematics in the real world
141another key feature is the homework app students can download homework and then make use of the precious minutes waiting for dance class or soccer practice to begin by completing some homework then when wi-fi is available they just upload the homework big ideas works on various technological platforms it also addresses a variety of learning modes with songs and video games let's take a look i do have to warn you though you may leave tonight's meeting singing fish crackers [Music] i got fish crackers one two three fish crackers and all for me i got fish crackers four five six fish crackers in the mix i got fish crackers seven eight nine fish crackers and they're all mine i got one two three four five six seven eight nine ten let's do it again choose one or two
142players then press start flip a card find the asteroid with the area of the polygon clear all the asteroids to complete the game [Music] that's it how does big ideas reach all of greenwich students well there's a place for both reteaching and enrichment and extension we see materials designed for english language learners we also see materials that are representative of all of our students there's qr codes for remediation needs for both students and to help parents and those are in both english and spanish there's a dig deeper section for the enrichment needs of students and we cannot forget about our special education students and our students in response to intervention or irti there are resources for them as well here we see an example from a middle school book that is written in spanish and
143designed to support an english language learner being at an active volcano is amazing living in a tent in the arctic following a family of wolves you're down at 2000 meters below the surface so we travel on these small canoes what a biologist tries to do is understand life [Music] i am a biologist and also i am a scientific illustrator i'm a large carnivorous ecologist i am a conservationist i am a deep sea ecologist i'm an archaeologist geothermal scientist tester of engineering astronomer nuclear engineer doctoral candidate at howard university assistant professor of wildlife ecology marine biologist limnologist cultural anthropologist visual storyteller graduate student at cornell university photographer astrophysicist a chef geologist co-director of the uc santa cruz paleogenomics lab anthropologist volcanologist biologist and a bio-archaeologist i'm a national geographic explorer and i love math [Music] the
144parent voice was represented very well on the committee and the committee listened in big ideas you can find parent resources available in 14 different languages they're also available in both digital and print format another key feature is the evening tutoring hours are available from big ideas and as we're going to see in just a minute there are reteach lessons available with qr codes so that parents can see a video of how things were taught in class as a way of assisting their child with homework let's take a look how many counters are there in all each group has the same number of counters so they are equal groups you can model the equal groups with a tape diagram there are three equal groups of eight to find how many counters there are in all you
145can write a repeated addition equation an equation is a mathematical sentence that uses an equal sign to show that two expressions are equal there are eight counters in each group so add eight three times eight plus eight plus eight equals twenty-four you can also write a multiplication equation use the multiplication symbol multiply the number of equal groups by the size of the equal groups to find the total number of counters three times eight equals twenty-four there are twenty-four counters in all another key feature is the multi-language glossary it highlights key mathematical terms with definitions in multiple languages as mentioned before big idea materials are editable so that teachers can put their unique personality on the lessons and meet the needs of the students in front of them the teacher voice was strong in the adoption
146process and the committees considered teachers needs in choosing big ideas big ideas was written with math teachers and the professional development is delivered by math teachers there's a strong scope and sequence so teachers can follow the textbook and the materials as designed there's a human uniformity of materials used across the district so that there's no more patching together of resources all of the resources are available in one place and it shows them how and when to use them and finally what we kept hearing again and again from teachers was how teacher friendly the lesson format and the materials are professional learning opportunities for teachers are essential for a successful implementation of the program big ideas has multiple resources built into the program including a video library in addition there are lori's notes at the beginning
147and throughout each chapter from kindergarten through eighth grade that help teachers with high impact strategies and unpacking the mathematics in addition there's an ongoing approach to professional learning in may our plan is to provide an introduction to teachers teachers will get their access codes print materials scope and sequence assessments dashboards etc and can begin unpacking and playing around with the materials over the summer we'll offer an optional two days of professional learning on how to use the resources in august teachers will unpack the materials and plan for the 2021-2022 academic year and for the first two years every trimester teachers will have the opportunity to engage in question and answer sessions and plan for upcoming units over the next several slides we'll show you some examples of laurie's notes big ideas takes a balanced approach
148to rigor they understand that conceptual understanding is important but also procedural skill and fluency are as well teachers will model the mathematics and then differentiate practice for kids making strong content connections and assessing along the way in order to make instructional adjustments strong academic growth for students occurs when five strategies are used with purpose and focus those five strategies are direct spaced practice feedback teacher clarity and classroom and discussion and all are built into all aspects of the big ideas program big ideas offers a seamless program from kindergarten through algebra 2 with opportunities for elementary school students to easily transition into math in the middle school and for acceleration in middle school big ideas is chosen to comply with web content accessibility guidelines the student platform will be compliant for implementation this fall the teacher
149platform will be compliant by the fall of 2022 compliance includes things like audio descriptions captions text color contrast and resizing options assistive technology support through various web browsers there are some exceptions which include pdfs multi-language glossary and some of the math tools but additionally big ideas makes large print versions of student editions available as well big ideas is used by a number of other connecticut districts you may be wondering why some of the other programs were not chosen well some didn't even address the connecticut core standards others the interface was difficult to navigate for students and or teachers we found repeatedly that there was a lack of materials for either acceleration or remediation or both some programs were not even complete and they could not guarantee a readiness for the fall of 2021 others offered
150limited or no parent resources also we were very concerned about the continuum for middle school acceleration and multiple programs didn't offer anything language resources were limited in some some had no student portable and in others materials were only presented in one format either print or digital and we know that parents want both so what can big ideas do for greenwich public school students the vast array of resources will allow for a more tailored approach especially with acceleration and remediation big ideas is designed for conceptual understanding but still promotes building procedural fluency it allows for a more fluid transition between elementary and middle school and that will allow for acceleration for students who need it materials are designed to support parents as well and those parents are there helping their child there are both digital and
151print versions homework help is available as well as the homework app for added flexibility in our busy schedules additionally by helping teachers and parents with the abundance of resources that meet individual students needs we are helping all of our students all right dr carrabillo or mr d'amico is there anything you want to add to the presentation before we turn it over towards the board we have some uh teachers that have volunteered to just give a very short um uh comment about why they chose the program and also one of our parents so it would be okay if they would speak yeah if you want to uh if you want to call on them in turn mr d'amico i'm actually going to turn it over to miss saval who's going to run the line up through
152for us she's muted our first teacher is mike reed he's a north mianis teacher uh good evening everybody thanks for having me uh excited to be here i um i feel very lucky to be to be chosen to be on this committee um and support the district just a little background about me i'm a second grade teacher at north america school i'm also a resident and a father of two daughters i go to costco school so um through my various jobs in the district as a math coach instructional coach and assistant principal and a teacher at multiple grade levels i feel like i bring a unique perspective i've also learned my lesson that following todd white after he presents is always a hard thing to do so i'll keep it short and sweet but if
153you sort of look at it from a macro perspective it provides us two things the big ideas program it provides adaptability and cohesion so that would be the most simple way to think about it what i mean by adaptability is specifically with our tiered supports it provides a lot of opportunities for us to support all of our outliers whether they be low or high as well as um it's adaptability as far as virtual and in person we know we live in this world where at the drop of a hat we could go virtual so we wouldn't even skip a beat if we chose this program and then as far as cohesion that's something that's been lacking for for years um where um you know everybody would really be on the same page from uh from
154a class perspective to a grade level perspective vertically k through 8 and family connections as well and real world connections are embedded i've had the opportunity to use the program with my class for the past few weeks and it's been very accessible i have special needs students ell students so i've had a chance to try it out and then from the micro perspective um i think the word that you would sort of hang on to would be comprehensive um it um allows the students to explore to think to to apply the skills they've learned in novel situations um it has some nice sba kind of formatting to the questions even at the second grade level so i think it sort of prepares the students in that regard and um you know as a parent the
155homework help is is awesome um as todd had mentioned um there's a qr code that you can scan so a parent at home could watch a little four minute video to say oh that's how they're teaching this and um you know they'd be able to support um their their children at home so um big proponent of the program um and um i'd be happy to talk in more detail with with anybody that would like to hear more of a take but thanks for having me thank you very much mike our next speaker is tammy summerton she's a teacher at hamilton avenue good evening chairman bernstein members of the board of education dr jones cabinet members and the community my name is tammy summerton and i'm a proud teacher and a thankful mother of four very
156different learners and this innovative diverse and dynamic town as a person with a personal and professional stakeholding grantage i'm speaking to you tonight in support of adopting the big ideas mathematics program for kindergarten through 8th grade students my investment in math is rooted deep here in greenwich i started my career as a math coach and continuing on as an elementary educator who has been part of the math curriculum enrichment committee that has developed the current math assessments standards-based playlist and scope and sequence documents i was also part of the groundbreaking personalized learning math pilot through it all i've worked under some of the most esteemed consultants and professionals such as todd white and greg tang i was one of the humble teacher representatives on a committee tasked with presenting a math program to support the
157vertical alignment of the mathematics curriculum i heard numerous presentations and offered quality competitive and comprehensive programs to support learners of all these presentations i found the information shared during the big ideas presentation to be the most remarkable while the presentation was impressive i spent a good deal of time navigating the platform manipulating the resources and using some of the materials with my students to see the most important point the program speaks for itself some standout highlights of the big idea program include a focus on self-assessment real-time access to data vertical alignment that includes accelerated pathways live after hours tutoring in grades six through eight ell multilingual supports in 14 languages cross-curricular connections application of mathematics in the real world focus on problem solving and better dok level questions rti supports qr code supports to strengthen
158the home school partnership and ethical and diverse representations of learners in the program of all these strengths i shared here are these are two that showcase the value of the big idea programs the most for me first what the big idea authors have done is addressed a need i have not seen tackled in any other program they acknowledge that within the re-teach general education and enrichment student population there are also emerging proficient and advanced learners within these levels they provide comprehensive resources to address all students needs as a teacher and a parent this dialogue has danced around many a conversation but often it was addressed as a best practice certainly never provided as a staple to any mathematics program i've come across in my career second feedback from an honest middle school math teacher who
159is currently using the big ideas math program in darien a similarly performing town was invaluable her accolades of the big idea math program highlighted the use of real-time data as a tool to adjust instruction on the spa she said the platform was inclusive and easy to use perhaps though most importantly she feels as though she continues to see data that the program positively impacts student performance and mathematics as evidence from progress monitoring scores and increased scores on standardized tests as you can see the big ideas program is one of a kind i wholeheartedly believe in the value of this program to accelerate mathematics instruction in this already remarkably achieving district i believe this program is transformative innovative and exactly what the students parents educators and community members need to produce the future mathematicians of the
160world big ideas exudes what albert einstein has always known education is not the learning of the facts but the training of the mind to think please consider adopting the big ideas mathematics curriculum for the kindergarten through eighth grade students thank you thank you tammy now we're going to hear from victoria jukic she is a middle school teacher at central middle school hi everybody uh my name is victoria yukich i am an 8th grade math teacher at central middle school and since my first interview at central i have been the biggest proponent of big ideas big ideas is the textbook used in darien and when i taught at middlesex middle school three years ago i was able to work firsthand with this resource big ideas allow students and teachers the opportunities to do the math online
161the students are able to complete assignments assigned to them and submit them through the online platform big ideas provides immediate feedback to the students and teachers are also given a detailed breakdown of each question which students struggled who excelled and everything in between this data becomes something we as teachers can use to drive our instruction without having to give students additional assessments through link it or star we get to understand the full picture of where our students stand with the content day by day showing if we need to revisit something to clear common misconceptions or if they're ready to move on and dig deeper into a topic going with big ideas is the right decision for greenwich allow your children and our students access to the best resource out there thank you and i trust
162that you will see the benefits to making big ideas the textbook choice in our community thanks thank you victoria our last speaker is a parent brian pelle dunis good evening i'm brian peldinis you might have seen me earlier tonight and just for full disclosure i was on the previous committee that selected math and focus so i have a little bit of uh of experience here as a parent i focused on two points how would the new resource aid a student in learning the topic and how would it allow parents to support the students as a committee member and as the math club organize organizer i obviously wanted to look at the content so from a you know support point of view for the students i think the digital resource will be easy to use much
163easier than the previous resource and it will provide additional resources for the different levels of our learners the parent supports and language supports are good the family letters as noted come in 14 languages and with the access to the online tutors i think that'll be exceptional and that should also help both the students and the parents while i found minor points to quibble within the content the presentation of the material was well organized and the word problems were clear and appropriate to the lessons which i thought was very important the digital format and the content appears strong and should support personalized learning and customized progressions which we have talked about as i noted in my com pta council comments parents are very interested in having paper textbooks not just digital textbooks or paper workbooks i
164clarified this with sheila this afternoon thank you and the recommended series combines the textbooks with the workbooks to provide a paper version of the online resource so you get both this is a welcome resource to support students and parents and to bring consistency across the district i'll close there thank you very much and thank you for the opportunity to serve on the committee i wholeheartedly support this and i'd also like to say congratulations to sheila all right if that's it from uh from the administrative team and thank you to our teachers for uh staying up late and i know some of you uh quite well personally so appreciate you being here uh i'd like to ask uh miss hirsch and then mr share who both serve on the curriculum committee to add their comments and
165i'll turn it over to the other board members so mr short should take it away uh thank you well first big thank you to todd white for um for his presentation and ensuring that we got to hear fishy crackers because i sing that in my sleep um but i wanted to say having sat on this committee and see having seen every single one of the presentations um big ideas clearly stood out as a front-runner um it was the overwhelming majority of the committee members selected this as their first choice and those who did not had had it as their second choice after discussions were narrowed down many of those who had you know well i should say the few who had had it as their second choice moved it back up into their first um
166as you can see from the presentation uh the textbooks show the lessons are engaging and they're student friendly with real world details what you didn't see were they made it student friendly by talking about video you know it's this video game versus that it was something that could be very relatable to the students um it has incredible supports built in for staff students and parents with pacing guides with standards address it's compatible with google classroom it was aligned with the connecticut standards and as mentioned several times it has skill review handbooks that are available in paper or downloadable for students who uh want to use materials on the go there were family letters which are an integral part of integral part of supporting students many of the lessons in the videos the reteach videos that
167they talked about were available both english and spanish um first for our spanish speaking families as well and it has an incredible support for everything from rti all the way through advanced learners if you could probably look we had materials for high school level courses available to us as well it's an incredible opportunity for us to provide our teachers with what they've been asking for for a really long time each chapter at the start it has incredible professional development for each uh for teachers at the start of each chapter there's video libraries it talks about the information that the students needed to know to capture the information of the current lesson and offers opportunities for them to give reteach to their students if the students don't have a full grasp of that knowledge um and
168again as they mentioned before their embedded qr codes and lessons for homework easy access to support parents and students and teachers at home with tutorials in multiple languages and good ell support as well for students with special learning needs ultimately this was created by teachers and um has an incredible host of edible editable resources that includes assessments and enrichment for emerging proficient advanced students and i have to just tell you that having seen many of the other presentations which were very a lot of those textbooks were very standard looking textbooks just moved on to online this was engaging this allowed our students to really delve in deep this is the perfect definition of personalized learning where a student can really follow the path from start to finish if they want to learn more if they
169want to go back and learn more about a subject or topic that they didn't know um enough about or they want to move ahead at their own pace it's all built in and it has a lot of support um i i just have to say i was highly impressed i did have only one question uh well i have probably more than one question but for now and i'm hoping that uh dr carabillo and or mr d'amico might um speak to us just about what's included in the student enhanced resource packages and the teacher resource packages as i know in comparison to a lot of the other programs we looked at this had so many things built in they weren't uh just you know surprise add-on costs um this had so much already built in but
170i just didn't know what was built into the packages that were presented to us so karen we do have any we do have an answer to that question i i had asked sheila to follow up with our big ideas rep so sheila can you report out on what you found sheila you're muted sorry um in total the k5 resources there are 45 different resources in the k5 program for each level 6 8 there are 47 and for the algebra geometry in algebra 2 there are 58 so in the dynamic student edition which is the interactive student edition there are virtual manipulatives interactive explorations digital examples and the tutorial videos that were referenced earlier so if you look at each homework assignment and k2 they're called practice 3 5 and 6 8 they're called homework and
171practice at the top of the homework sheet just under where the student would put their name there's a worked out example and then a little house with the qr code so that student and parent before they start the assignment can actually review what was taught in class so that helps us solve the problem of the parent trying to figure out how it was taught in class and how to help their student the presentation tool and the major resource for teachers it's called the dynamic classroom and it has lori's notes which were referenced earlier and they contain professional learning for teachers they contain the progressions but more importantly they contain leveraged instructional strategies that teachers many of the teachers can choose from based on the needs of their class they have the vocabulary and vocabulary applications
172at the beginning of the chapter and they have question stems for whole group discussion and for small group interaction so throughout the chapter as each topic changes a new set of glorious notes is there they have extension activities they have activities for kinesthetic learners they have steam and art activities so all different kinds of things where students can make the connections between math and apply it in other disciplines as well they have language arts connections so it's the resources are very rich but most importantly they are curated in such a way that the teacher can look at the topic understand what the learning target is communicate that to the student in the form of an i can statement the learning target is also on the homework sheet so the teacher as they move through the
173unit can easily use these resources because they are applicable to the particular activity or homework assignment so in the dynamic classroom for teachers they have the interactive explorations digital examples formative checks and victoria referenced that earlier so the teacher can do a quick check of where her students are get the data in real time and immediately adjust instruction answer presentation tools flip two dynamic teaching tools this is also part of the homework assignment so the teacher can personalize and customize an assignment for each student skills trainer that is for enrichment and also remediation so our intervention students would benefit from the resources and strategies in the ad area digital flash cards steam videos a game library the glossary that we referred to lesson plans and also a whole section on differentiating the lesson which tammy
174did reference for emerging learners professional learners and also advanced learners graphic organizers pacing guides the pacing guides are very detailed very sequential and really helps support our current curriculum and for the upper levels they have worked out solution keys three to eight and they also have math tool paper so you have graphing paper you have all sorts of different tools that kids would use in math that are all digital and also in print form there are a number of assessment tools there are technology resources review handbooks so by chapter generally in most of the program the format is similar so it allows for an easy transition from the primary grades to the upper elementary to the middle school and then the algebra geometry and algebra ii so that's a family letter warm-up activities extra practice
175re-teach enrichment and extension puzzle time assessment books pre-requisite skills practice this is also on the student portal so they list out the skills that are necessary for success in the chapter parents and students can go into those do those activities and also scan a qr code and there is a worked out example and also a tutorial for student and parent um and i just wanted to just double check this does include it was that they had offered us i believe was it two years of professional development uh for our staff um already included in that um okay so that's fantastic and the last uh one why one comment in a question i didn't mention before for parents that wanted uh paper textbooks um they can there's things that can be downloaded right from the website
176as if it were which is the exact copy that they would have if they don't want in a big heavy textbook coming back and forth um the only question i have is because i know there's so many incredible assessments built in um did we ever ask if that information could be transferred directly into linkit or upload it into link it from there jen lau has followed up with big ideas and she has not noted any problems with technology at all fantastic okay the other thing that's really important is particularly for our um primary students they really teachers have told us that they really want the students to write and kind of lessen the amount of digital resources during the time that we have support from big idea and we are in this program students get
177a new consumable textbook every year so students could either turn their homework in digitally or they could write it out in the textbook and just turn the answer in and the teacher could use the textbook similar to a math journal take a look at what the student work is so there are many different ways to use the digital hard copy combination thank you that was an incredible amount of detail and i will turn the mic back to someone else thanks thank you all right mr chair did you want to uh talk about uh yeah i um [Music] i'm going to take a quest i'm going to deal with a question that i still have that's opened separately but since we're in the comment as a one of your representatives on the curriculum committee um this
178team worked really hard to and very diligently to assess a whole series of options in the marketplace um as you can imagine um one of the questions is you know because we had a problem before we had acquired math and focus but i think it was unrevealed based on the prior head of curriculum development it was not being followed and it was not being used so i really want to complement this team in trying to pick the most modern resource they could pick that meets the needs uh that they see in the classroom particularly the teachers who are on the committee and i believe they've actually selected the one that will bring all that all the modern most modern resources that we need so i would strongly encourage the board uh to adopt this um
179there is however a secondary strategic issue that the board needs to deal with you should be aware that uh the textbook is 100 aligned to the common core and the common core standards are not our standards for performance for grades k through eight so uh there's an issue that we have to deal with but it strictly in terms of a resource to acquire um this is the best resources of the ones they reviewed uh they're enthusiastic about it so when it comes time i think we should just absolutely support it and uh acquire it we do have to have a separate discussion about how it gets actually implemented um ann and mark i know in some of the things that the committee reviewed you guys had a discussion about progression and you were going to
180make some modifications um i don't i didn't see those in slides here that came to the board but maybe i missed it um did you guys want to educate the board about what you're thinking as it relates to progression uh peter i can answer that question for you over the summer what we're going to do one of the things we did hear uh from the teachers loudly and clearly and repeatedly was that they were very uncomfortable skipping around the book as we had to do in math and focus right it was a lot of confusion and that contributed to the fact that they don't use it so what we are doing this summer is we're looking at the scope and sequence in big ideas and we're looking at our current bundling of standards in our
181units and we're going to rebundle them so that the textbook is aligned to our curriculum and teachers can literally start at the beginning of the book and teach through the end of the book this way we feel it makes it easier to use it's clearer to use we've i've also talked to big ideas about custom pd and that will happen beginning may 12th for elementary teachers we have multiple consultants so that there are no more than 30 teachers in a class so that they will have an opportunity for intense question and answer when the board approves this textbook our teachers will have digital access the next day so the idea here is to have multiple opportunities in both may and june for elementary middle school teachers to get this professional learning before they have to
182go home so that over the summer they are able to navigate this and begin to do some planning we have two days in august in mid-august and then we also have time for team planning at the beginning when teachers return so we have purposely set opportunities for teachers so that they can not be confused and not be overwhelmed by these resources and understand how to navigate it log in customize and do all the essential functions that they need to do thanks sheila did that's really helpful but um i was actually i'm sorry i was actually asking about progression so through the continuum um did somebody want to address that um could you peter could you clarify are you looking at progression from grades one through eight okay what i'm saying is and and i've said
183this we've talked about this many many times right um so our standard in granite the common core standard is pre-algebra by grade eight yes our standard in greenwich is algebra by grade eight it is one additional grade so you what i want board members to understand is is when we buy a textbook that is aligned to the common core standard it's going to teach in grade one grade two grade three grade four all the way up to eight but it's going to be teaching at the end of that progression in eighth grade they're one year behind because our standard is one year forward so you cannot go out in the marketplace uh based upon the textbooks that were reviewed and by a textbook set that perfectly smooths the progression across grades k through eight or
184one through eight that matches our progression that we need to have it smooth for a student that's why and i've talked about this many times we have um speed bumps if you will for a student in our progression as they move through grades this is why we have and just listen to the terminology uh five to six uh yeah five to six jump or double jump what that winds up meaning is a kid has jumped over content okay can our kids handle it yes there are kids who can handle it clearly and they wind up get getting to our goal of algebra by grade eight also our students who are in the alp program are automatically accelerated at a very early age so they have a very smooth progression to get themselves to algebra at
185the end of grade eight the concern that i have and i'm speaking to board members on this is because we all know this is true um there are students in our system who are able to deal with these jumps they can deal with these jumps because they're fortunate enough to live in households where parents can supplement they can hire tutors for their students they have access to accelerated learning outside the regular school year but there we also have lots of students who can't take advantage of that because of their financial resources because of the choices their parents make so on and so forth my personal belief is that if our standard is pre-algebra i'm sorry algebra by grade 8 our baseline curriculum not accelerated through alp or something else needs to provide a smooth progression
186to get the student to that place the way that the administration has explained they deal with that is they um [Music] try to personalize in an individual classroom which you all know we've struggled with implementing that consistently the curriculum team like sheila makes sure that they provide resources that give teachers the opportunity to do that which is a very important support but in terms of implementation our curriculum is not smoothed out it winds up being short by one grade level and that cascades through the system and we have to also work and support the administration in changing the pedagogy in the classroom so that we can do that this is about getting the right resources so that's a prerequisite we've got to get the right resources and big ideas is substantially better in what our
187teachers need to support this kind of program but it's our job as the board which we've done our standard is our baseline standard is 75 of kids at algebra at grade 8. that's essentially saying that is the standard for our kids and the common core is one grade behind that so we need to be certain that we're implementing in greenwich to get those kids at that 75. now i asked and i'll end on this i asked in a math review for the data to show how we're doing and sheila provided that it was actually i wish all other administrators were modeling what sheila provided because she provided it at a great level of granularity that was very insightful and it it allowed you to see exactly what was happening and in some cases we are
188very close to hitting that mark um i think she'll in some cases we are hitting that mark in other cases we're very close to hitting that mark but there are communities where we're off by a substantial amount which means we're creating uh a an achievement gap for some students and i think it's really important as we bring these new tools in make the investment that we stay focused as a board in our role of that goal and being certain that the administration is implementing so that we preserve all of that progress that has been made i will just tell you personally many of my kids have had mike reed as a math teacher they've had many other unbelievable math teachers in the school system they've all left they were the beneficiaries of that progression that
189we had as a standard which is a higher level standard than the common core i would hate to see us inadvertently um and i know other board members have had that same benefit for their kids we're stewards of a legacy i always viewed my job that way it's important that as we make this transition we don't lose all that progress that's been made unless the board wants to make a deliberate decision to revise the standard down to the connecticut common core which would put us with every other school district uh in connecticut peter one important thing that probably we didn't emphasize enough in the presentation was the fact that every teacher has access to the k-12 program so what we're going to be as part of our curriculum work this summer we're going to be
190able to address that because every teacher will be able to have access to the resources that will allow them to fill those gaps and that's something that big ideas offered that most of the other programs didn't so that gives us tremendous flexibility in providing detailed resources to our teachers they have access to all of the resources that the upper levels would have the tests the lesson plans all of the differentiation resources so we're going to be able to create those pathways and that's what we were referring to in the presentation when we were talking about that transition to middle school and the acceleration pathway because that was very much on our minds as well sheila if i could just follow up because i want to make sure i heard that right what you're saying is
191we'll still have the ability to get our kids to algebra by eighth grade because the teachers will have the resources in order to do that and and you're as part of your build out of your action plan you're going to take that into account yes that's true okay thank you all right miss olsen yeah so thank you so much um it it looks really engaging um it looks really visually stimulating which is important and it looks hands-on um i love the fact that there's songs in there i'm a big believer in songs i sing almost i make my kids sing little jingles all the time and not just to drive them nuts but if there's a huge correlation between putting a tune with information i mean whether you're learning a language or math math is
192a language there's a huge direct correlation between learning a language and putting a tune to it it's like those nursery rhymes can't get out of your head right that it sticks for a reason there's a reason that karen hirsch was dancing along and rinsing fishy crackers at home so i think that's really beneficial i think this has a lot to offer in terms of all the teacher resources my only question or concern um a couple people had pointed out to me you know in terms of the ed reports it it does look like it aligns you know especially it aligns more in the younger grades it seems like to the common core standards but if i look at um ed reports in middle school and especially even when it's a high school like algebra says
193it does not necess it does not align or does not meet does not um does not meet uh it's not aligned with common core standards so i guess i feel like it's maybe more suited for the the younger the younger folks i don't know if someone wants to speak on that in terms of um it aligns to common core standards it does not for algebra and a couple others um the addition that we uh would adopt is the 2022 edition and the ed reports uh comments were taken very seriously um by the big ideas authors and so when they were revising this edition they looked at the comments that ed reports had made and they made the necessary changes so in the 2022 edition they will be addressed and that edition is up for review
194next january and the elementary editions are up for review right now so even though it says does not align like with algebra one for instance or that that is in the process of changing or that will change next year the addition that we will adopt all right thank you miss tony um thank you this looks math looks like a lot of fun with this program um i just had a question relating to the cost because i see there was a link to the number of books etc what the total cost is do you feel that the number of textbooks you know some many parents want to have hard copies right of textbooks or students need them versus the digital and i know um we're in a period of concern over too much digital time kind
195of can you speak to what the volume of hard copies do you feel comfortable with it in terms of what we're going to have in terms of our students needs because obviously we're not buying one per student from the looks of the numbers at least maybe not in the middle school but yes in elementary we are buying one per student for k-5 okay they will have both digital and the consumable and for six eight uh we'll stay we are staying with the model that we have now but with the understanding if we have kids who want hardcover copies we are able to provide so in 6 8 we have each teacher has a class set of hard copies plus there are 10 extra copies that will go to the special ed resource rooms and also
196the media centers so kids can sign those out okay and if students request a hard copy we can get that for them because when i asked uh big ideas to build the proposal i asked for our current enrollment plus 10 percent so i'm going to we'll have the resources for students in terms of the consumable uh which is i guess like what we'd call a workbook in the olden days right for the k5s it's the textbook and hard copy only you can write in it but so okay now how does it work on an annual basis in terms of the cost component of that it's included in the cost that they quoted it's included for the entire six years that every student a new book when they go to the next grade okay great thank
197you very much sheila and thank you for all your hard work on this all right miss stoke um first of all congratulations sorry sorry is that better yes that's better yeah sorry there's definitely this is my when i use my three devices this is not my best one apologize um congratulations sheila is what i was starting off with and uh this was exciting and i especially appreciated brian pellegenius's comments about i know he sent us a survey that he had done and i think that that was helpful because as an elementary school parent i do often hear about the desire for more um you know hardcore paper textbooks and so it was nice to hear that um that will be available for every student um just following up on christina's question around cost looking at
198the full quote it's around 660 right um which seems to be perfectly fall in line with our budget proposal where i looked at the budget book and it was 6.50 but are you looking to buy this in this year it sounded like you were so you could start the professional development so how are we bridging the gap on this being in next year's budget as opposed to buying it now it's next year's budget okay the professional learning ninety thousand dollars of professional learning is included in the purchase so we can start the professional learning right away upon approval uh big ideas has promised to grant us digital access of the books so we will be able to have every teacher have digital access immediately and then as soon as the budget opens for next year
199we'll be able to purchase the materials got it okay so we'll have them for september because we can purchase it on july 1 then yes we will have them for september got it all right thank you very much okay mrs kowalski um thanks mr bernstein so i had uh just a i guess a follow-up question regarding the the st the common core standards versus getting to um our eighth grade level that we have for algebra so if what i guess i'm confused on is if each year the teacher is teaching to the common core standard pursuant to the books and the materials how do we ultimately meet our current goal of getting to that algebra level by eighth grade like how is this working because if if i look at this at first graders teaching
200the first grade common core then we get to second grade we're teaching the second grade common core how do we what is that natural progression so that that our our standard of algebra at eighth grade is can still be achieved based upon the current structure of how the the materials work to meeting common core by grade level we have an increasing number of students who are being provided with enrichment materials already in class and because the teachers have access to the entire program we can put together resources for those kids and document them within our curriculum so the teachers just have to look at those so and the other feature of this program that allows us to accelerate kids before middle school separate from alp is the fact that when they are exploring a standard
201there are three levels of differentiation the emerging proficient and the advanced and there are activities and teaching strategies outlined so as they're exploring the grade level standard they can explore in a deeper way and they dig deeper is included in every homework and practice assignment and every activity and that is an extension activity so the kids are going to be exposed to them earlier and because teachers have the progressions they know what comes next and they can use what comes next for students who are ready for that so will every student be given the opportunity to have these deeper dives as they go forward and how is it decided if they do the deeper dive or not is that a student choice when they're doing the homework and getting the assignment it's part of the
202homework okay so every student has that three level component that they're addressing in each of their assignments much as we're doing in the fifth grade assessments right now we have enrichment questions for students and that helps the teacher use that data to understand which students need to be accelerated but the beauty of this program is that the resources activities and homework is already written with those extensions in it so every student has the opportunity to try it okay so i think this is my this is my final question so every teacher is teaching the materials beyond what the common core requires in the state of connecticut so we are not forgive the phrase dumbing down our program to fit a book absolutely not okay this will allow us to accelerate more students thank you hey
203mr cher sheila could you just clarify what you just said and how that's going to get implemented because that's the thing i haven't understood we're we're buying a i mean you said before we're which is fine we're going to buy let's take seven second grade math right and we're going to that is covering a certain number of common core standards in second grade that's what the second grade math book is it covers the state and lines 100 to the standards of the common core in second grade right so obviously it lets a student within the year go a little faster or go a little slower it lets them go a little deeper or a little more shallow but i don't understand how it breaks out from second grade common core standards if a student's ready
204to accelerate into third grade common core standards so how's that supposed to work that is work that we're doing this summer you're absolutely correct the book does not do that but what we are doing is we are curating the resources and creating that pathway with this program so that in the fall teachers will see what they have to cover to begin to accelerate students so that they can meet that progression to get into algebra by eighth grade meanwhile minimizing the amount of material in the gap that we have now so i'm sorry i just i'm i'm not i'm not nearly as bright on this i apologize um how how is this set up so that let's say mike reed is teaching fourth grade english about fourth grade math um when and how does he access
205fifth grade math to introduce that to his fourth grade students how does that work one of the things that every math program has not just this one yeah is our progressions so we know what came before right so fourth grade so we know what came before in third grade so when we remediate kids we go back to that right because we know that they don't have those prerequisite skills right in fourth grade we're teaching a certain standard right you know from the progressions what needs to happen in fifth grade so at the time we're teaching that particular standard we can reference the fifth grade material and so can the teacher on that standard in fifth grade that concept that ties in and we can introduce it in fourth grade that's work that we have to
206do as a curriculum committee that wouldn't be included in any program i'd appreciate it if i mean we've talked about this probably sufficiently for this evening um i'd appreciate it if you guys you know maybe nobody else is interested in it maybe just do it in the curriculum committee i don't know i'd appreciate once you figure this out in april may and june before we break for the summer i'd i'd like to get a very specific um update because i'm as i say i've said this a hundred times already or not a hundred times i've probably said it ten times that we haven't talked about it enough to do a hundred um i'm really excited about this and i encourage my board members to adopt this even if it costs more money it's just such
207a step up um so it's not about big ideas in the textbook i just want to know more about how we're actually going to implement it um and and go through that i guess i had another question for you and mark and you don't need to answer it now maybe we can answer it when we take it up again um we did very well in greenwich in mathematics uh and our students did very well when we did in some elementary schools uh for lack of a better term team teaching where teachers most teachers if i'm not wrong coming out of a teacher college their primary if you're in elementary you know the core of what they learn is essentially what we call english it's reading and because that's the core skill reading and what have
208you um so it's understandable that a lot of elementary schools are elementary teachers some are really math focused some are less math focused so at some point in some of these schools what we have done is team teaching were people who were particularly skilled in math teaching math instruction um would take kids for certain parts of the of the day and focus on mathematics with them it's kind of what we have in alp and alp of course we have a teacher who really focuses on math we got another one or stem and we've got another one that focuses really much on humanities um i'd like to talk to you guys about your thoughts on reintroducing that consistently in certain grades or particularly in the elementary level to uh since you've been introducing a new textbook
209it seems it's an opportunity to modify practice and uh accelerate kids so i know you guys have been talking about that but i hadn't heard where you were landing on that where you were thinking about that mark and mark in terms of the calendar for instruction or if you just dropped the idea and as i say you don't need to answer tonight um maybe as you guys dig in and figure out how you're going to actually implement this to maximum effect for students um you could come back and share that with the board or i could just at least personally be really interested in understanding that from a curriculum committee view but if the rest of the board's interested in two i hope we would take it up we we can certainly talk about it
210at length at the next meeting but i will say in short one of the things that will really be a game changer for us is if we do proceed with creating that super block next year that i spoke of at a previous meeting if we can allow for humanities in the stem block to occur for all of our students then it would lend itself nicely to a departmentalization model in our upper grades all right i'm not seeing any more hands this will come back to us as an action item next month so we'll have another opportunity to get questions answered uh next up is our strategic plan update so mr share want to take it away and tell us what your committee's been up to yeah there's not too much of an update the last
211time i talked about this i told you about the survey that we have been developing since that time i think it was made clear that the full board wants to take it up in a regular board meeting and review that we've met on the survey uh at least six times uh uh i'm sorry at least five times probably six we have another meeting tomorrow um i'm we're struggling to get that survey out of committee i would like to get it out of committee unanimously without naming names there's a a board member who's you know has considerable concerns and wants to adjust it and keeps adjusting it and it's just taking us a long i i hope that that will all be resolved tomorrow anybody who wants to come to the meeting um i've said this
212a couple times if you have time and you can come and your board member particularly and you can come to uh one of these meetings um i know it's just a meeting of the three of us but i'm glad to take input from other board members on this subject and then uh once we've got that completed uh it can come before the board and the board can then try to edit that or take it as it is and then hopefully we can get in the field our original plan was to get in the field in that was the date in which we were not conflicting with any other surveys that are out there um for reasons i've just outlined uh that hasn't happened but hopefully we'll get out there so that the parent survey can
213be released and it is not conflicting with the regularly scheduled panorama survey that's out there um one other thing i wanted to just say about the survey because there's a bit of confusion you might be aware that we already survey parents and other stakeholders on a regular interval we are working very harder i've pushed very hard to eliminate the surveys are unimportant what's important is the data and what is really important is the insight that it provides so to have a strategic conversation we need to have information about what parents really think about the most important strategic questions that are before us and we also need that from other stakeholders we get a lot of the data we already need from surveys we already run on an annual or every other year basis there's a
214lot of data already available so the survey we're talking about is only to fill in those questions that are critical for the board to understand in discussing strategy that we don't know the answers to um i would also say i'm working very hard to not let that survey become the survey that uh re-surveys people on a set of things that we already know like we already regularly survey parents about communications we don't need to do that again in a strategic survey when we have all that i expect that what we'll bring back to the board is a consolidated data set that is the information from this survey plus all the other surveys that we already have within the district so the board would have a complete view and be able to move on to discussions
215about a real strategy and where we're going from here one last thing as a reminder um the existing strategy the existing measurement system the existing targets the existing goals are all in place until replaced by a new strategy so it's really important that as board members uh you go back and review all of the things that we're already living with i've noticed in a couple cases um there's board meetings and things we reviewed there's not familiarity with that the same is true in the administrators i've raised this with tony a couple times the administrators aren't familiar with what our strategic targets is and what the expectations are we just need to recommit ourselves to that because that's what we voted in by board vote 8-0 last june um so it was unanimous and it's important
216that we continue to follow that otherwise people are going to get very confused the public is going to get confused our administrators are going to get confused our teachers are going to get confused and just we as board members need to be leading um consistently from what's out there so my plea to board members is if you aren't familiar with exactly what that is please go back and find some time to reread it become familiar and if there are any questions you can send them to us uh on the board on the committee rather all right thank you for the update peter uh if people have questions or comments they can raise their hands uh i'm happy to hear you say you're trying to slim the survey down i'm very concerned about survey fatigue uh
217as well as just the timing of the survey we're entering april in what has already been a odd year um so i just i worry about that you know the the other thing that looms large is basically there'll be a new board come november so the longer this goes the more i start thinking about whether we should be uh we should be actually voting on a plan or basically packaging this up so that that board can then make any decision about changes going forward yeah peter that's a really good point um i've said many times i don't as you know this would be my uh seventh sixth board transition and i've said many times i don't like uh exiting boards and exiting board members from trying to push through things at the end i know
218that many board members have pushed back on me on that they've said i'm here and i'm here through the end so i'm gonna do it and it always rubbed with me um we will have to figure out i think we can get ourselves to a place where we're at a logical whether we complete or not um logical handoff to somebody else uh we may be able to finish it'll all depend on how quickly we can get this survey that has been tied up in committee way too long way too long i mean people just have to do their work and move this thing forward you know there's there's enough of a time for discussion and i try to be very accommodating on that discussion but you know as i said earlier after five or six
219meetings on this it's like and by the way there's only 19 questions so the fact that we're still can't get it out of committee after we're just trying to settle on 19 questions seems to me to be um we just need to double down our effort and get that closed so hopefully it'll be there we'll get the survey out then the board this board can have discussion about survey the implementation of a strategy plan i at this stage because of how this has been delayed my own view is and i'll have to see how it plays out because i've done these things many many times in my corporate life strategic plan development and moving to strategic plan execution um it may be that uh we can do the work and the execution part particularly should
220be left to the next board so but we'll have to see how that plays out peter just one more thing um i would employ your committee to please get your minutes up and posted uh you may have them already and they just may not be there but you've met six times since october i know i've emailed you twice about it uh you know i can't usually make your meetings they you guys are meeting during the day it's a little harder for me but it'd be great if the minutes can get posted yep all right thank you all right i'm not seeing any other hands we'll obviously be taking this up again in the future wouldn't know when you guys are ready so just let us know we'll get you on the agenda all right with
221that our next and last discussion item uh is just an informational budget transfer um i don't know sean if you want to just give us a brief highlight about it yeah so informational transfer are ones that are transfers within the same major object code and do not require board of vet approval uh there were two uh two transfers within simple again with within the same uh major object code the one that i did get a question on was this bed transfer for 25 000 from professional services other to medical uh consulting services and that was for additional iep related services for neuropsyching behavior evaluations so just thought i'd pass that on if no other questions i'll move on to the uh the next item you you can't we we actually have a couple of action
222well i'll i'll cool you in on the next item in a second so to make sure anybody have any questions on the uh on the budget trends for the information only and then we'll take another one up as an action item all right uh seeing no hands we're going to move on to our first action item uh it is the north mianis interim appropriation request because this is an action item i'm going to move it so that we can start our discussion uh so i move that we approve the interim appropriation for the north minus cool ceiling collapse and the amount of 8.1 million dollars is there a second mr thank you all right sean now take it away okay thank you before i get into the numbers i just want to just give a
223brief update for anybody uh either on the board or online that uh is not totally familiar with uh what occurred uh back in february so if you don't mind i'll just quickly uh provide that overview on september i'm sorry on saturday february 13 2021 an alarm was triggered due to water intrusion resulting from a ceiling collapse in a second floor elementary classroom at north mianis elementary school immediate response from the gps facilities department and the greenwich fire department simply stated a plaster ceiling collapsed on top of the sprinkler line which in turn severed the line and caused a large flood and brought down the hung ceiling both on the first and second floor the ceilings were early 1900s construction using long nails going through the plaster into the structural beams however the sprinkler line and
224hung ceiling during their initial installation were only attached to the plaster itself this issue was not visible as it was hidden by layers of insulation and over time through expansion and shrinkage due to temperature fluctuation the nails eventually came down by the weight of the ceiling the interim request will include the emergency remediation response which includes swift water cleanup dehumidification environmental monitoring removal of uh instructional items and impacted by the flood the shutting off of all water to the impacted areas re-establishing fire suppression systems for the rest of the building and other work necessary to ensure the building was safe for immediate demo and construction and remediation the interim request also will cover demo uh and construction to remove replace faulty ceilings uh storage containers to clean out impacted portions of the building relocate by
225professional mover 15 classrooms across the district replacement of security cameras transportation from february through june for dislocated students um and uh and with regard to that if we do go past june you know with the construction that transportation we will most likely incur additional costs related to that on to the financials um so as uh the motion was made the total uh currently is at 8.1 million dollars i would portray it as a conservative number um and if i get into the details uh with regard to the damaged areas and this is in this is in a chart in the package the emergency response and the remediation and demo for the damaged area is estimated to cost 189 731 dollars the rebuilding of the damaged areas on the first and second floor uh 628 thousand
226eight thirty four so the total of those two items related to the damaged areas eight hundred and eighteen thousand five hundred and sixty five dollars uh in addition to the damaged areas uh based on uh recommendations from the engineers there would need to be some preventative work uh demo on the first and second floor for areas that were considered unsafe although we're not damaged uh on the second floor 294 592. uh the demo on the first floor would be 551. so total demo for first and second six hundred and twenty seven thousand one four three and then finally the the big number and it's a really high level number at this time and it's based on rebuilding uh first and second floor based on a 16 000 square foot area for both floors at a
227cost of 312 dollars per square foot uh that number comes in at 5 million 0 13 840. so when you add all those numbers up the total construction cost comes to 6 million 459 000 548 and um given that it's a high level number and there's a lot of unknowns right now until we get the uh you know all the demo done and then the design we've got 20 percent contingency in that number and that brings the number up to 1 million 291 910 for a total of uh 7 million 751 458 that's the construction related cost there are others the the biggest item in the other category as i mentioned earlier transportation from february through june uh that's three hundred and seven thousand three sixty seven um a replacement of security cameras uh nineteen
228thousand five hundred and there's uh about eighteen thousand of uh miscellaneous furniture fixtures and equipment and then a small amount for uh staffing requirements at the three elementary schools where the displaced students are attending so when you add all that up comes it to 8109.027 of that number uh and again this is an estimate the the amount that would be anticipated for insurance coverage would be a million 176. it's not a firm number um but it's based on you know the recovery of uh the cost related to the damaged areas and then the other costs such as transportation uh camera replacements and so on but as far as the preventative work uh the word that we have gotten from uh megan over at the risk department is that the preventative work would not likely be
229covered take questions at this point and dan is here to answer any of the technical questions all right mr kelly thank you sean uh now the insurance company uh will certainly be looking for responsible parties if there are responsible parties uh contractors who might have done poor work because it sounds like there might have been some shoddy work done uh will we also be pursuing the non-covered uh responsibilities we have and look for a a possible responsible party for poor work would we be looking for somebody uh to claim against i think we should certainly explore that but i believe that the work done was sometime in the 90s so i don't know if that a statute of limitations would come into play but certainly worth asking that question absolutely okay you want to make
230sure that that certainly gets done i don't want to if we don't have to be responsible for this i certainly want to go after somebody if they are thank you um just to follow up on that that's a conversation i know you guys are working very very closely with the town risk department and the town legal department and i know they handle the the claims with the insurance company so i just want to make sure you're partnered up we we are i've spoken to megan probably five times today and several times last week so yes we're we're in uh communication and we are uh tracking all of the cost in a google document that we provided to megan similarly for previous uh situations that worked very well i know you said i can it's a
231conservative number and you'll know more obviously after design i i would presume we'd also have a better sense once an rfp goes out and we start getting responses what's that with the time frame for that um i would say once we have the design that we can go out for the rfp uh i would hopefully say sometime in maybe we'd get an rfp response sometime in may it's my guess but dan probably has a better view of that yeah we're not gonna even have uh drawings for another a big package probably for another six to eight weeks so from there uh we go out for bid so it's a much longer time frame to uh to get the work started absolutely well we we started uh the demolition work uh we'll start that tomorrow for
232sure they've mobilized and ready to go but as far as the rebuild that's a minimum six to eight weeks away for the design and then we'll have to go through the bidding stages and then award and then contract thank you miss downey um so that was going to kind of leads into my question about timetable because one of the speakers earlier tonight made reference to the fact that we won't it doesn't sound like we will have the school in shape for use in september if you're really talking you know six to eight weeks for packets to go out and then bids have to come in and contract so tony i don't know if you since i guess it came up maybe at a pta meeting if you you or dan could just kind of talk
233through what the plan for where to house these students or what you're thinking just because if it isn't going to be done for september yeah we we wanted to be as transparent as we could with the families this morning even though we don't have the design documents so um we don't anticipate we you know we will have them with this timing and the size of the job we're looking for an alternate location right now and um i think one of the misunderstandings that the community has is that they think we have a lot of empty rooms because we made it work but what i shared you know with the north myannas community this morning is i have about two and a half pages of all the displaced um teachers that we have uh in order
234to make space the their colleagues around the district really bent over backwards to make space in their buildings so we've got art on a cart we've got you know costco music on the stage we have reading interventionists now sharing small spaces principles of giving up their offices we you know don't have teacher work rooms so i mean it's it's been a huge upheaval and because we think this could be um you know quite a bit into the fall we would rather have everybody together not the whole building but the displaced classrooms at one site and that would also be very helpful for the principal and the assistant principal because right now they're trying to mobilize around four different buildings to check on their staff and even from a cultural you know community standpoint um so
235we're working on that right now trying to think about what is the best solution dan will any when they're doing the project will any portion of the school be i mean you know it seems like you know is it the kind of thing like because i know some of this building is usable right now right so there's a couple grades there um i'm not sure which but then when we're doing the construction does that take the whole building off the table or are we going to be able to maybe do half the building to be able to get kids there i don't you know or maybe it's not possible what you have available right now is what you would have available in september basically the back half the building the whole front of the building
236from the media center on the left side of the building to the kindergarten classroom on the right side of the building first and second floor would be out of commission the rest of the building would be available we've made uh augmentation to the life safety systems and we've got the approval of the well we have the approval now to occupy the building as we're occupying it so it would remain the same okay thank you all right miss hirsch um thank you i had a quick question as i said you know like ms downey had said tonight was the first time i think we've heard uh public comment at least uh that the building might not be available to our students uh come september so uh i'm just sort of wondering when we're going to hear
237a little bit about a little bit more about what we might be doing to support the north miami student and staff community to ensure that they're in one location come september um and i know when we had discussions on uh building projects with other schools um about the safety and security of having students within the building while it is being created and how we'll make sure that the you know if we're taking ceilings down or things like that hopefully it'll be done while students aren't there for air quality and other things um so how we're going to ensure that yeah we we are using the building right now and um you know the team has built a complete wall so it's it's closed off from the portion of the building that we're using now so
238um it won't be any different than what we're experiencing this year so we'll have that space available it's really securing an off-site space for the classrooms that we have to play displaced right now and we have 15 classrooms we would like to get closer to 18 so that our specialty space will be available as well that's been a bit of a challenge obviously uh you know having uh speech travel and your reading interventionist and um so we're working again on that right now we can't say a whole lot about what we're looking at but um as soon as we know it and we didn't know about the lower level until just it wasn't a week or two ago when the engineers really came back and said yes they need to be repaired as well the
239whole lower level so i assume we'll get an update on that when there's there's more to now um and i know you said that your insurance is covering things like transportation um and uh materials that have been destroyed um if we need to get another site to do any of the work will insurance cover uh any portion of that or just at least transportation i don't know how that's working yeah i believe that would be covered i'd love just more detail when we when we have it thank you sure yeah for for those of you who are not familiar with the north face building it's it's it's actually two buildings so um there's the original building uh which is where this event occurred um and then there were additions made to the building that are
240essentially bolted on the back of the building um you know so and when the school is used actually students don't even enter or leave the building from the building that's affected um they've always entered and left the building from the addition where it was not impacted so it's super helpful that some grades are able to leverage those classrooms that are not impacted but that said um i was really you know i don't know if you guys read the engineering report um it was really disturbing to learn that the reason the ceiling was failing particularly or ceiling it failed compared to the other ones is because of all of the improper things that were hung from the original ceiling it's very clear in that report hanging the way they installed and hung this the sprinkler system
241the way they installed it on lights and the um false ceiling that was below the plaster ceiling um it just it pulled the whole thing down and um you know that was i don't know when that was done to to uh sean's point it was a long time ago what's also really troubling about it um is we had a full-blown assessment of all of our buildings for the master plan and to the best of my knowledge it's not in any of those engineering reports so we spent a lot of money to have all of our buildings fully assessed and they didn't catch it i i also noted in the engineering report that um at old greenwich although it appears secure it's got similar holes punched through its ceiling in some cases it's pulling away um
242different than i gather what happened at riverside so the whole thing is really disturbing about how these buildings were managed in some time in the last 10 20 years and we probably need to figure out 8 million dollars is a lot of money but the reality of it is we're now presented with i think what is an opportunity and uh i don't know the answer to this dan um but it seems to me this is an opportunity presented uh how do we make a silk purse out of a sow's ear i would suggest what we do is gut both floors all classrooms of the 1925 portion of the building because so much of it is damaged and this is an opportunity for us to rebuild that part of north miami school maybe even get there
243are hvac there with units punched through the walls it's not desirable it's not a standard there are other things and i would hope that we would even if it means we're out for a little longer take advantage to properly and completely rebuild that first half of the school in some cases the spaces aren't quite appropriate i don't know whether we would redesign any of the spaces the office spaces and small group spaces there are particularly a problem but i'm not so sure i want to rush to to do the project just to get it back online i want the kids back in there as quickly as possible but at the same time uh if we have an opportunity to rebuild a school that we were going to rebuild anyway on a different schedule um i'd
244like to take advantage of that opportunity now not just patch it back together to get it online dan can you address that um yeah it's it you know the timing is is right i mean uh as far as we have to do something um i wouldn't necessarily say we're patching it just to get it back online i mean what would be done would be to code it would be we would be replacing in-kind to what we have now except for the plaster ceiling uh it would allow us to get back into the building at a relatively quick pace um i think if you were to do something what you're referring to as a gut rehab uh with a you know a redesign you're adding a significant amount of time on can i ask you a
245question about that dan because i understood the dem from the reading the report maybe i'm not clear on the demolition um we need to demolish all of the ceilings on four one and one floor two right that's correct okay so we have to take out the ceilings right there was significant water damage right so do we have to take out any floors or they're fine take out any what floors no the floor is held up surprisingly well we are keeping an eye on it we don't have to redo the floors do we have to replace any walls because of the water damage there was a small amount of water infiltration on the first floor hallway and the second floor walls a significant amount of them are metal they use metal partitions when they went from
246an open style classroom to compartmentalizing so this is this is 8 million bucks to largely replace ceilings it's it's significantly more that's the entire infrastructure it's the infrastructure that was between the two ceilings right right and and the demolition alone is going to be extensive right so what else has to what is the scope of this what's the scope of this project could you just highlight the big items the demolition alone so the the way that the building is made up for i'm sure the scope of the rebuild we have to start from uh once that you have to take everything down first which means the lower ceiling the infrastructure meaning the lights electrical conduits sprinkler systems hvac lines uh life safety lines that go above the ceiling um all that comes out we have
247to shore up the existing plaster ceiling so it can be surgically removed and when i mean surgically removed the plaster that's there is very thick and it weighs about 20 to 30 pounds per square foot right so you'll be taking out sections that are no bigger than two foot by four foot at a time very time consuming uh the insulation in the attic would obviously fall out you have to take all that out so once we've determined what the rebuild is that uh to per code it's probably going to be two layers of sheetrock that has to be attached we have to have a design for how the infrastructure would be attached to the structure through the sheetrock we don't have all those details yet um from that there there's put everything back together then
248put the infrastructure back and then whatever is determined to be the ceiling and lighting system that would have to go back in yeah that was what i was saying it sounds like the only thing when you're done with that that because you're taking out all that and i'm just trying to understand if you take out all that infrastructure right and then we have to go put it all back i think i guess what i'm hearing you say is the only thing that's left is metal walls and uh floor the carpet's all going to be replaced and i mean there's no carpet there's there was area rugs but there's no carpet except in the media center right in the media center there was right so okay i i mean maybe gut rebuild is the wrong terminology
249i realize you're going to probably stay in the same footprint and the classes will probably stay similarly in the same place but i guess i had envisioned in my head you're going to have to rip out all this stuff your point all on the infrastructure as well as it sounds like you got to take ceilings out everywhere um that sounds to me pretty close to i don't use the same term i would call it gutting it but um and i i think you know that building suffered a lot with their hvac units the air conditioning units that are punched through the walls they're noisy they take a lot of space it seems to me if we're gonna go replace all this stuff and put it back um i don't know why we don't put in
250proper air conditioning proper heating that doesn't involve those units and is done centrally and if we're gonna have to take it all out and put it all back in i'd i'm just thinking about taking advantage of the we're not we're not taking out the hvac system that's that remains intended to take out conduits hvac conduits didn't you just there's supply lines that are minimal but the hvac units are unit ventilators that are located along the wall and they don't take up any more space than the shelving units that are there and they're less than three years old all of them all of them yeah okay okay thank you for answering the question all right miss kowalski thanks mr bernstein um a couple of quick questions regarding the the the new place so we're looking at
251instead of four buildings for north miami which they're currently placed in it would be two is what you're saying we would have be able to use whatever the the back portion of the building and then find a second building that can house the rest of the children in their in their classrooms did i is that right tony yes that's correct okay and is that and how many classrooms is that that we're looking to fill our so that we need to relocate right now we have 15 that we have relocated but um to have them all together we we're looking at 18. oh at eight okay and then are are we looking for to to keep them i mean i maybe this isn't the place that we're looking are we looking within greenwich or do we
252need to look outside of greenwich such as our you know neighboring stanford for a location we're looking we're looking everywhere that is close enough that it's an okay bus ride for children um and i i did share on the call this morning because people have asked me um you know i think it was two two years ago when stanford had to take over an office building and to very quickly turn it into a school site um i spoke directly with the person who did all of that work but that building no longer is sitting in the same format and that they are using it for a vaccine site so they ripped out a lot of what had been done to create a school and they just did that a few months ago we are we're
253looking at all different types of environments i know i understood um and so when do you think you'll have an idea of what new place and do we have an appreciation for what this would cost we don't at this time um you know that's something we have to negotiate and then uh once we get to the point if there is a site that it looks like it could be okay the next hurdle is always getting a contract through legal um they have they look at the language very carefully and it has to be approved through the legal you know to through the town department okay and with all of this anticipation work now we don't think it'll be done in september but when do we think it'll be done done by we just don't know
254i guess that's a question for maybe dan yeah i mean we don't know that answer until we even know the design and what the timeline is okay all right thank you miss olsen yep thank you um so there's a lot of you know probably families on here in north miami's families that are hearing for the first time that their kids are going to be as are we that their kids are going to be displaced come fall which is um a hard pill to digest so you know and i understand there's proper procedures and and you know it goes through a process so i'm not i'm not fighting that but if they're just i guess it goes without saying but any possible way that we can expedite this you know to be a top priority um
255to just make sure that we're staying on top of each each stage along the way to keep it moving as quickly um done right obviously but keep it moving as quickly as possible i think is goes without saying is is of utmost importance here you know um we need to i'm fully in support of this and i think we need to we need to um expedite it all right mr kelly and quick question just to further elaborate on mr shear's point if we put the six plus million dollars or so whatever the number is into this building now and i believe we're scheduled to do a renovation on this building in 2026 uh basically as i said i think i know the answer to this question any money we put into the building now uh
256uh will not be a reduction in the total renovation that we're looking in 2026. is your professional opinion that would be the case that all depends on what the design is in 2026. you would think if we're doing in line with julian curtis old greenwich school if we're doing a a redo of the building to try to gain another 25 30 years out of the property uh it's more likely than the patches or renovation we'll be doing now uh will not be useful uh in the uh in the 2026 renovation uh is that is that what you would think no i i don't think that at all again it really depends on what the renovation includes but you're going to need a ceiling you're going to need fire separation between the floor in the attic
257so we're redoing that uh you've got three-year-old uh air conditioning system i don't think you're gonna rip that out again we're we haven't even begun to look at a feasibility study for uh for uh north miamis so that doesn't so i mean all that all whatever we put in now can be uh you know part of the program so um i don't think what we're putting in now uh would be ripped out i mean we're not putting in any uh new finishes other than a new carpet in the media center uh i i think we'd be fine it again it really depends on what the uh what the program is going to ask for okay that sounds encouraging thank you all right um you know i know there's a lot of questions about the the
258dollar figure that you can't answer until you go and continue to do the work i guess par part of our taking this up is the uh the schedule for the other bodies in town um the rtm votes on the budget may they generally don't take other items if we waited until the june meeting obviously we would be the ones then setting the work back which we certainly don't want to be doing so i think that's part of what's driving us here um i guess you know tony sean dennis goes without saying as you get additional information about the the cost in in any direction you know clearly we want to know um if additional monies are needed uh you know we know that's problematic to add it just we'd have to go through the process
259so the way you construct your your biz as you learn from the stadium experiences is very very important um i don't see any other hands i'm going to go ahead and call the question uh the motion on the table is to uh is to approve the interim request for north mianis in the amount of 8.1 million dollars so bernstein is a yes um downey yes uh yes kelly yes kowalski yes olsen yes here yep and stow yes great that passes unanimously thank you just process wise i have been talking to the bt about scheduling a meeting uh the document went to the rtm uh so that they can send out their call materials i think they post it online now um once the uh we'll schedule first with the bt budget committee then the full
260bet and then we'll be on the uh the docket for the april rtm meeting so this will move forward a pace and i presume there'll be lots and lots of questions as we go forward and you know the closer uh we we get having designed the more answers we will have all right with that then i'm going to move to our next action item which is the policy updates uh miss downey i think you are you taking this separately um yeah i think it i can be persuaded i was going to propose um that these are second reads for policies 9273 proposed and 93 27.1 um i'm going to move them both together just for simplicity and time unless anyone has an objection to that no i think we need to take them up separately
261okay that's fine so i'll start with 92.73 i'm gonna move um this is it's already been read uh at the last meeting and so for action for approval by the board so 92-73 let's start with that one wait a second i'll second it thank you all right discussion i'll point out um i'm sorry um i just wanted to point out that it was requested that the town attorney's office look at both of these policies and they have said that both are in good legal order and legally acceptable so i just wanted to make the fellow board members aware of that fact so it was requested by a board member and it's been done and resolved um okay thank you all right ms kowalski i see your hand thanks so i just um we're taking up
26292.73 first correct okay so i apologize wherever i'm looking my camera is one place my screen is another and my notes are on another one so i'm not don't worry about it don't no offense take it my eyes are not shifting for any particular reason um so i just i i look at this one and and i understand from our prior discussion in our last meeting that these were done um and you've been working on them since september and there was something that cabe had also passed you know in reading these i it just seems like we're trying to legislate civility right um and i think uh you know tonight in particular and lessons learned we just all need to be civil with each other and because those should be our norms and we have
263norms that we are already governed by and we have a a code of ethics and so i'm just this seems to me to just it feels like it's just stepping too far um for something that we should be legislating for i am and also because i i feel like it lacks a sense of standards and how one will be necessarily judged and who is the the judger and executioner on all of this um you know my plain and simple term terms of this is you know society works because we have societal norms right we've all agreed it to behave in a certain fashion and that's just what we do um the penalty by which that we would have if we are if one feels we're not acting in a civil fashion in one way shape
264or alarm is we're like you know we're elected officials we are then not elected right we we don't get re-elected i think to be honest i think this is a lot what we're seeing um in in washington which i don't want to bring to greenwich and you know we see what happens when one side or the other for purely political reasons and purposes launches attacks on one another and and this is what this feels like this gets to um you know and i said it earlier tonight and in my other comments if if there is an issue where we think that we are not behaving appropriately i think the the proper use is to pick up the phone and to have an adult conversation um and even if you don't like the person and we
265realize tonight there's probably a lot of people that don't like each other on this board but to pick up the phone and have that conversation um you know when you're looking at this it just seems to me that this all renders itself to what could possibly be a kangaroo court um and not to mention i i think it stifles minority opinions and it seems to be a push for the tyranny of the majority so i just i have grave concerns over this i know christina you went to town council and that was at my request that i because i felt uncomfortable with these um and i appreciate the the opinion gotten i i have some reservations with that i mean no disrespect to town council but on these levels i am not sure that this
266is their expertise but thank you for for asking all right is there any other discussion on uh 9273 um karen i i hear what you're saying but at the same time um i think the it's always good for more communication and expectations to be communicated clearly and i think this is this is a list of expectations and protocols and sadly you're right there has been um what's going on in washington and that's perhaps why i don't know you know what prompted cabe to talk about it um but i do i don't i don't see a downside in quite the same way that you do but we can agree to disagree on that yeah i know i i i i i'm you know i hear what you're saying i appreciate that christina and i look and
267i went back through because some of these policies i'm not sure i don't have 9273 in front of me but i know it referenced other policies so i feel like we're just we we have the appropriate policy and framework out there that governs this and i think that this is just a layering on and getting a little too for you know a lack of comfort into how far we're going to go um and i just don't think that something like this i think this skirts a line that i'm i'm really uncomfortable with i expressed this uncomfortableness several weeks ago and i had emailed you about it i just because i i feel like that and particularly here when there's no standard for which you're judged it's all of a sudden the standard of what everybody
268doesn't like all of a sudden and that's what worries me that we run down a very slippery slope that you get a a group and and i'll just say a a group of four or five that have that feel like something that was said or done or certain behavior isn't acceptable and now all of a sudden it is now um you're going to be judged harshly because you have five people that disagree with you um that's what i worry here i do think that the policies that that we have in place and the policies that you've gone through and i know you've gone through to clean them up are precisely what this this body needs and has and those are appropriate and this one steps too far for me mr sheriff um i think you
269know look i've been on the board a long time um this you know the board at various times has been completely dysfunctional um i've talked about that many many times and it always drifts into um what we saw earlier tonight it always drifts into that and um it's really dangerous um it um people have tried to put in civility because christina i don't have a problem with this where it's listed as a set of expectations okay these expectations that are listed here are the expectations that i've always understood the board should operate under i i don't agree i don't agree with a bunch of them but i've always understood it i've been as an example very respectful of um the board speaks for the board and if i'm speaking in the public i need to
270make clear to people i'm speaking as an individual as an example um the other thing that's always bothered me on this board is there are questions my colleagues many of you ask i think they're outrageous totally out of bounds and and i've seen many board members over time bully berate staff but the way i've always handled that is i may hate the question i may hate the behavior but i respect the board's members right to ask it i never try to cut off a question and never try to cut off somebody's going too long i go too long i persist in questions when i don't get answers and someone's evading an answer i just think this is a really dangerous slippery slope it worked before because in our board uh we didn't have this um
271you know censure and reprimand and what have you and i agree with karen we saw how this got out of control in our federal government and it became essentially a political weapon now we have to rely on the good will of people to use it uh censure reprimand whatever appropriately but there's a long history of this board not having that this listed as a stability code and i won't be on the board when this occurs could very easily lead to somebody saying i want to send you a reprimand because i don't think you complied with this particular item in a code and that civility is a very loaded term it's a very loaded term so i got to tell you i can't support this because not because of its intent its intent i think is
272good outlining expectations is good if this were listed as um expected responsibilities of board members i would support it but this could so easily turn into a cudgel and rip apart the board it's just a remarkably uh bad idea i realize this policy doesn't talk about how we're evaluating what civility is and that is a really bad idea because it leaves it open to anybody's interpretation it's just as written it's a it's a super a bad idea it's it's trying to restrict people and this is going to happen because people want to behave properly between each other this is going to civility on the board is going to happen because people treat each other properly it's not something you legislate i i mean i realize i i can tell where this is going already i
273expect this will go uh six to two but maybe i'm wrong but i just i i warn all of you who are going to be here longer than i am you're setting us up you're setting this board and future boards up for trouble we are stewards of a legacy i recognize i am the steward of all the people and chair people and bored people who came before me this is fundamental it seems like it's trivial it's not i would not uh do this in its current form i would rather move that this gets returned to the pgc for some modifications and clarifications all right miss hirsch sorry um i was just going to say you know when we received this uh from cabe which uh has been fully vetted also by them and i think
274it's been adopted by quite a few districts throughout connecticut they also included some um information as to the where's the whys and the policy implications and it does speak to some of the things that you uh mr sharon ms kowalski were discussing but it does specifically talk about uncivil the policy implications that uncivil conduct does not include the expression of controversial or differing viewpoints that may be offensive to some persons provided the ideas are presented in a respectful manner at a time and place that are appropriate and that such expression does not material disrupt and may not be reasonably anticipated to disrupt the educational and or meeting process and such different differing viewpoints are permitted within the freedom of expression guaranteed by the first amendment um so you know again i i you know i
275hear what you are both saying but it is clear that this was already vetted for for those concerns um and uh they went further into discussing you know that numerous studies have taken place reviewing the effects of incivility on workers satisfaction organizational integrity pro and productivity and can be linked to increased job excuse me linked to decreased job performance and satisfaction that safe and civil environments are are essential to board student and staff achievement and the free exchange of ideas uh to is essential to the quality of the educational process um so uh it goes on further about conversely uncivil conduct like other forms of disruptive behavior interfere with the board's ability to fulfill its appropriate leadership role and with the student's ability to learn at a school's ability to educate its students um and
276it goes in a little further which i can continue to read sorry are we missing a member but um um anyway it talks about the whys the where is in the house and discusses some of the concerns that you guys already addressed um but it's clear that they've already vetted vetted this for that um and as i said i know it's certainly been adopted by other districts just to give you background miss kowalski sure karen i appreciate all of that you know and one of the things for example i don't understand trouble have trouble with is for example if i look at meeting protocol right to ensure that board it says to ensure that the board's meetings are conducted with maximum efficiency and effective members will you know come to meetings adequately prepared who's going
277to be the judge of whether or not you're adequately prepared how are we judging that um the other interestingly enough it's you know not interrupt each other during a debate you know that didn't happen tonight so you know this is going to come up all of the time and i think that look we have to so does that mean that because someone got interrupted during a debate by someone else that therefore we have a violation of the policy and how's that going to be handled well just to answer that you know we follow robert's rules and there are very specific detailed uh discussions on you know on that within robert's roles as well all right i think that's all the hands i'm just gonna add to this i view this as the job description quite
278frankly when you sign up for uh for for running for a public board especially this board i think that that is the job description and that is what we ought to be evaluated against i'm not saying that the board should uh should run off and uh and use it as a cudgel but i do think it is a a good explanation of the expectations of board members all right mr cher peter oddly i agree with what you're saying i don't know why it is entitled job description then why is it titled civility code i mean that i mean that's my whole problem with it i like this document because it tells people what the expectations are particularly people you know who have never served on a board before unfortunately when i came to the board
279i'd served on a board before but that's a learning curve there are people here who have no experience in their professional life on serving on a board this is a learning curve and the learning curve is steep so i think this thing is beautiful as a document of the job description and the expectations um that's not my problem with it at all it's i take it at what it's titled this is a code of civility and we have seen this over and over and over again going after people for violations of civility i mean it's so prevalent in washington i can't stand it so just to be clear so is your only objection to it in the title that if it were re-titled as board member expectations you support it as a document just to
280understand yeah because my concern is christina as i've said yeah i think there will be subsequent people who will i can see this happening all of us are dead and buried off this board we're not dead and buried in real life but we're off this board okay let's just say that i could see somebody i could see somebody reading this and going uh they meant civility when they and you violated civilian i mean i've encountered that more times than i can count on the sport you know not just about me about other people trying to do it to other board members and i've seen it happen and i've seen it by the way it's an equal opportunity thing i've seen it done to democrats i've seen it done to republicans it's none of that so
281my concern is and i'm done talking about this my concern is how it might get misused in the future by how it's constructed other than that i love every bullet that's on the chart so peter do you want to make a motion on the title because i i'm not i i don't object to your ch to the change of the title because if it's if that is a stumbling block i'm not sure karen would agree with you kowalski but letters i'm sorry let me look at let me look again at the document i guess i look at it because i think megan wants to speak as well so all right so so we'll let megan talk and then we'll circle back peter oh i just yeah thank you for the work that's gone into it
282and i um you know we did have a chance to to look at this and and talk about it beforehand and i you know appreciate you went to the extra step to you know check with the attorneys and um went i think above and beyond so i'm i'm in full support and i don't know uh karen kowalski if you wanted to weigh in about the title i don't know if your objections run deeper do you want me to make a motion to move this forward i didn't mean to make it a federal case no no no no no no but i mean i'd rather i'd rather that's good because we presented it two weeks ago and i and i'm only hearing this comment now which we could have had a discussion about before now but
283i'm fine to have the discussion now but i'd rather it not necessarily go back to pgc if the if the only real issue is kind of the title of the policy i would rather amend the motion um or amend the wording and have people sign off on it and we move forward for a moment and then we'll deal with yeah yeah i'm just telling people i i can i can get on board with that if it's changed to you know this is the job description this is the expectation well we just create if we if instead of the word civility code if we say um board expectations of board members or how about board member expectations it's cleaner with less with letters i'm fine with you all right so peter do you want to go
284with the motion yeah um which do you prefer christina i actually like mine not peter okay fine okay here let me flip a coin then you say how about expectations for board members how's that that's i just think board members expectations is okay so i believe that we modify a proposed policy 9273 title from civility code to expectations of board members so peter before we take a second that's a motion to amend correct i'm going to make sure michael gets that right for the minutes yes okay motion it could be expectations or is it other four four okay it doesn't matter to me expectations for board members i think four is cleaner thank you my motion michael is to modify to amend thank you propose policy 9273 uh to change the title from civility code
285to expectations for board members christina do you want to second that also i was just as i'll second that okay any discussion on the motion to amend the title hearing none i'm going to take a quick roll call vote bernstein yes downey yes first yes kelly yes kowalski yes olsen yes yes hence down yes all right so the motion in front of us now is to adopt the policy 9273 expectations for board members seeing note for their hands i'm going to go ahead and take the uh take the role for instance yes downey yes yes kelly yes kowalski sorry i missed what you said uh the motion is as amended oh yes board members thank you um olson yes uh cher yes and still yes okay great that passes eight zero uh christina lunch guide
286with the next motion okay so now i'd like to move the adoption of proposed policy 93 27.1 which has a number of subsections but the first of which reads board member use of internet social networks so i'm going to move as revised from our last meeting and is there a second for that motion a second all right miss joe thank you uh discussion miss downey um just um the town attorney while she said that she that well the member of the chinatown's office said well it was legally in order she expressed a few concern about two items in the appendix to the policy items two and four which you can see the revisions we made and which she has also said alleviated her concerns with those two provisions so all right discussion ms kowalski so
287i appreciate that the changes that have been made i still have some concern here you it seems to me that under the various titles for which there's a piece right it's board members use of social network and then compliance with public records laws okay compliance with freedom of information act okay social networking websites um i don't there's parts of this that i don't understand for example on the social networking websites you know board members need to periodically review the importance of maintaining proper decorum in an online digital world as well as in person in this game of emphasis to the board members use of facebook twitter and social media this does not seem as well as the next paragraph regarding code of ethics it seemed to derive solely as me as a or any of
288us as board members but rather us as you know karen kowalski christina downey as citizens of greenwich and citizens of the u.s irrespective of and it seems to suggest that i can't have an opinion outside of my position as a board simply because i got elected to being a member of the board that somehow i have lost my ability to have an opinion about anything for that matter because this is not the social networking websites and the code of ethics provisions under those titles in the language below them go beyond just your work as a board um which would suggest that i'm not and i'll go so far as this look if i want to say something specific let's say i don't like president biden and i think he's a if i go and say
289that that suggests that i'm speaking out and now obviously that's a bad example but that would fall within the social networking and code of ethics and be a violation because i'm making a statement that may contain and maybe i used a profane word in describing my dislike of the president that now that has put this within the code of ethics and the social networking websites as a violation of those two clauses well the one that talks about i'm just gonna i i don't i hate doing wordsmithing during meetings like this and just i wish we'd had these discussions in a couple weeks since these first came up be that as it may but i have a designated time period here and like i understand but we could have we could have had discussions about this
290in the two weeks that we were asking people for comments but the social net networking websites provision really talks about it's a cautionary item it says you need to periodically review proper decorum it's not really there's no hammer being put over people it's a reminder that we need to be cognizant of perceptions on those social medias because as we all know notwithstanding that you know as peter correctly points out we don't speak for the board but because we are me but because we are members of the board um words that we use can be interpreted by others to have greater weight than maybe even if we give the disclaimer i'm speaking only as an individual not for the board of education so that one i see is just to give that is a reminder it
291doesn't really say it doesn't really say anything problematic to me okay the the next paragraph under the code of ethics that's the hammer board members will refrain from inappropriate conduct and making public statements on facebook and other social network sites and will refrain from any disparagement of fellow board members or others on a personal social racial or religious basis now i'm not so that goes beyond just your work as a board member but you christina downey as a human being sharing an opinion that someone else may think is a disparagement of another on a personal social racial or religious basis that would be a violation of this policy i'm sorry i'm just reading give me a second to read if someone else has a comment in the meantime i'm just reading it again so and
292i don't mean to add comments while you're reading but i would suggest that this policy reads a lot like a restraint on communication and given that we've just passed the other pro policy which gives the expectations of board members you've actually solved whatever problem you were attempting to achieve here without infringing upon one's ability to communicate without by be sitting on a board but otherwise having an opinion about something wait i'm sorry i didn't bother you there present sure so i think what was trying to be achieved here in this in this use of you know social networks and comply maybe a couple of these provisions could still stay in like for example compliance of public records of law but you're the the paragraphs in heat on this second policy that are governing speech right
293and saying what you should and should not say um don't it goes too far it's an it's a a prior restraint on speech but your the policy that we just enacted on the expectations of how a board member should behave i think our cover any concern cover might cover any issues that you have in this one without being a prior restraint on communication i don't think it they this covers other things it covers you know foia issues public record laws issues i understand it covered this one seems to be a hodge positive a lot of things that don't necessarily go together for example compliance with public records freedom of information act i get all that but social networking and code of ethics don't belong in this and maintaining confidentiality i understand what we're supposed to
294do that's an expectation of the board um i just this one really steps well beyond um i think well beyond what this board has the ability to control and i don't think that you you or anyone on this board has the ability to to control what i put on my twitter account um but that's what this actually says it does well maybe that wasn't the intention yeah but in the social networking website i don't think it just this is just a it's a cautionary tale so but in the code of ethics it does well would you if you struck out the words or others does that change your point of view i'm just asking i'm not saying you know we would do it but i'm just asking the question i would take out the whole
295provision okay i wish we had the ability to have this conversation prior to tonight um but other people have their hands up let them speak all right mr sheriff i hate doing this on the fly so uh i don't want to edit this thing on the fly um i just think you know look guys this will come as no surprise to you um i can't i can't come on board with this uh unless it's got a major rewrite to it because it's really clear what it is and um you know you christina i appreciate it you can talk about the intent and all the rest of it um look there are two problems we have right we just lived with one of them right this was never a problem on the board when we didn't
296have this mechanism where we could go after an individual board member for what they say okay i just had to sit and listen to and as did the rest of you all these people from the public say please send your peter's shirt for and by the way multiple of them said for his comments on uh social media all right i look we don't i have a personal profile on social media as do many of you do nothing in the board can should prevent me or prevent anybody from expressing a opinion in the public square as an individual and the way you police what they say is not a board it's policed by the electorate that if the electorate doesn't like the person doesn't like what they say this is solved at the ballot box so
297that's the mechanism we have to be sure every board member i i've said this i hear things joe kelly says and i hear things chris karen hirsch says and i just i can't believe they say him but you know what it's not my job to police that nobody appointed me because i'm on a board police seen that this is a this is a the way this is written and particularly you know the connection to ethics and what have you this is somebody trying to create speech codes and trying to create prior state of speech and the way you don't want to solve that problem in my mind is uh if somebody's got a problem with such somebody said pick up the phone and i've said this a hundred times pick up the phone call them
298and say hey i didn't like what you said here or there right um i don't think that reflects well on the board i'd rather you not do that or whatever that's the way this needs to get solved it doesn't get solved by creating this kind of legislation that creates nothing but free speech challenge problems we don't need this um [Music] we need to be sure we're not pushing people into their remedy winds up being in the courts that's the worst outcome in my book um so i realize philosophically some of you are in a different place or your political ideology puts you in a different place i respect that i i can't with the way this is written now christina and i realize you're frustrated by it but to be honest with you what i'm
299frustrated by peter frankly is that i presented these two weeks ago and i asked for comments and i didn't get any till tonight that's what i'm frustrated by because these are all could have been very productive discussions in we had a pgc meeting earlier this week i was available the last two weeks to talk about it and i got nothing i got crickets so that is nice hey i'm with you i'm with you sister i've been talking about the strategy committee for five times and i've sent more notes to the board and i've got nothing back so i'm totally with you on that 100 in your frustration it seemed you know we're all busy people i wish we could all work on what everybody was priority for everybody else but we are where we are
300and look it shouldn't come as any surprise i've said many times on this board i'm very concerned about efforts to try to control what people say even if i don't like what they're saying and besides that i that's why i said i'd really like to know if there was a legal opinion because candidly this thing is fraught with all kinds of uh free speech issues and as i say again i'm not planning to be on the board if it makes you feel any better the town attorney that was one of her concerns but when she really looked through it that's why we made the changes to the appendix so i i mean yeah i'm very respectful that you're trying to make it work i i get that i totally get it look i'm probably gonna
301get i mean it isn't gonna matter what i'm going to do i'm going to vote and other people are going to vote um i just wanted to express i i this is too tied up in ethics and somebody's got to evaluate it and somebody's got to decide what it is and i think by the way the other parts that are in there christina foya we already have a policy employee everybody knows what foy is the board doesn't need to repeat that that's an obligation under state law any elected official right if we're not following that we don't need a policy on that people know they have that they have that legal obligation they have legal obligation not to defame people you have the legal obligation not to liable people you know we don't need to
302replace duplicative policies that are well i think they're not duplicative because they're pointing out that the danger that what we don't think is foia or a meeting can become such in the internet world i think that's where those are actually quite relevant that you know four or five board members commenting on a thread on facebook creates a meeting that's not something people typically would think of and that i think for that i i disagree with you because i do think we need that when they're commenting as a board member when they're commenting as an individual which they have an individual right to and those are not abrogated because of this i mean this is this is where this gets more this is again if board members don't know how to conduct themselves properly and how
303to separate their two worlds um anyway i i've set my piece on i'm just being redundant and i i i don't uh you know let other people share their views all right misto so um it's lots of good comments um and whatever you know would have liked it earlier too but we are where we are um and i went through this with a fine tooth comb because i i hear you and um i'm not very active on social media probably my children are more than i am sadly but um i am this there's a few things one i've now spent a long time on policy probably a lot longer than i'd like um but we started to adopt cave policies because they were standards and we tried not to change them i remember and even
304the prior policy committees because then we start to lose like all of the the work that the connecticut association of boards of education put into this right so i always sort of take that as my first look at any policy and sort of say there has to be something to me that's sort of specific to greenwich that makes me want to change this that's number one um and then i liked especially that this went through town council and that was a good recommendation um by you know one of i think it was peter i'm not sure but um because she did highlight the um freedom of speech piece and that's where we i know spent some time in committee this week making sure and then i know christina you went back to town council again
305to make sure she was satisfied with it it sounds like they were um so that got me comfortable i think also having served on um you know company boards i generally feel more comfortable frankly as a board member when there is expectations on how one should act and have such decorum and yes all those things are there and you're usually not on a professional board unless you've already been vetted and that is understood and you've had background checks and all that stuff so that but i do think we are a public board and it's important to say yes absolutely i am fine with all of these things and i will um happily sign up to this so i did go through it i hear you but i am very comfortable with this policy based on
306all the review and um i know i'll be voting for it tonight miss hersh oh i was i was going to say i know that this particular policy as written without the changes even that we had made after passing it through town council um has have been adopted again by uh many many different districts throughout connecticut um so that that gave me some level of comfort because you know we passed it through are illegal and did make some um revisions based on those concerns um i will also note that i think it's really important for us to to be aware that we have um policies on uh use of social internet social networks for our students we have policies on internet social networks and you know use of internet social networks for our staff um
307and the reason that we as a you know pgc put this tour is because we did not have one for members of the board um so you know again we have it for students staff and administration so it you know it's exceptionally important i think additionally there has been a lot more use of social uh media and i don't think that this policy it's pretty clear that it's not discussing something as a a personal uh a page necessarily um it's pretty consistent when you talk about the code of ethics it's refraining from inappropriate conduct and making public statements um and i would assume that would be in in you know in more public groups as opposed to your private page um and it's again it's it's sort of a reminder of things that you know
308we do need to maintain foia we do need to not uh divulge confidential information um on social networks um as well because you know we are still required to keep the you know ferpa um as well as foia and again they're you know following that the other areas that you guys are discussing is are really guidelines and they're just i think to me uh reminders um you know and again this is you know if you're using it you may inadvertently violate you know you are you know it's important to to to not utilize social networks to conduct board business and um again i think that this is really in line with the policies that we have for students staff and administration and it's exceptionally important for us to have one as well in that regards
309um you know so you know that that was why i felt it was important and i supported it as well all right miss kowalski last comment and we can put this to bed obviously my last comment um okay karen just like just to follow up on a couple of things you said um look just because just because everybody else has done it and this came down from cave doesn't make it right it doesn't mean that we should do it and i don't know what they did with their vetting process or how they looked at this um it's kind of like you know the old saying you know if your friends jump off a bridge you're going to jump with them and so that's why i i i just don't think that works here the other
310point that you mentioned you said that um you you you think that this would involve you know not you know your public page as opposed to your personal page i personally don't know the difference of it but the key word in that sentence was you think which means it's not clear from this policy what it covers and what it doesn't cover which means it could be far-reaching and the other the last comment you said it may violate okay it may violate but who is the judge jury and executioner on that who's going to call me to task if they if i make a comment that um five of you disagree with so i think that this steps beyond in those capacities i think there are some good things in here and i think there are
311some things that are overreaching and um are potentially very much a slippery slope and headed down a very dangerous path i'll just respond to the one comment when i said something may inadvertently violate that's and you were asking who's the judge and jury it's not a judge and jury it's compliance with foia and it's pretty clear and that's why their wording is you know some of that use may inadvertently violate it it's not some of us saying what you're writing it's it's it's clear it's based on foia and it's like it's outside of foia what i'm talking about is the comments made on social networking you know just by an individual it has nothing to do with the foia provision that's being well foia counts on social media as well but it says that you
312must be mindful of foia when using social network sites and you may inadvertently violate if you're not vigilant that's it's not saying you will that you are it's it's you just need to be mindful when you are you know sharing information that's right but then it goes on to say board members will refrain from inappropriate conduct and making public statements on facebook or other social networking sites will refrain and who's going to be the judge of whether or not that conduct is uh and is an inappropriate statement that's vague and ambiguous well you know when it comes to certain things you need them to be slightly more open in that and i think i mean i now need to go back i'll read our board of you know that's the slippery slope that i'm talking
313about what is inappropriate to you may not be to me what is inappropriate to mr kelly may not be to mister i'm gonna go read the board's quote about this but it basically said it's consistent with the board code of ethics my guess is that it is the same language but again it's not i went back and i read 9271 and that statement there with respect to our code of ethics has nothing to do with this provision here that you're talking about they're totally different all right i think that's the end of the discussion so i'm going to go ahead and let's not eat out any emotions they want to make to mend or otherwise i'm going to call the question to a motion on the floors to approve 93 27.1 do we roll call
314bernstein as a yes downey christina you're muted sorry yes okay uh hersh uh yes kelly yes kowalski emphatically no olson emphatically yes cher no and stow absolutely yes and that passes 6-2 thank you very much in the uh 92-73 past 8-0 by the way i think i forgot to say that we're going to move on to our next action item which is the monthly financial and staffing report before i let sean talk i'll go ahead and make the motion to approve the monthly financial and staffing report is there a second all right i see that works for me sean go ahead take it away okay hello sir okay all right um i'll go right to the operating budget through february we're at 96.6 million which is a 59.1 percent attainment of our full-year budget of
315163.4 year-to-year expense is up 0.4 million or 0.4 percent uh driven by uh overall salary increases uh and higher than budgeted uh out of district and settlement tuition uh plus uh covet spending not yet offset by uh by the grants you know in munich i'll get i'll get into that in a sec um and partly offset by uh savings we've had to date in summer school esy transportation and the year-to-year impact of the pre-spend activity that we did in june on the capital side we're continuing to work down the available balances uh as of the end of february the available balance is down to 20.6 million dollars which is a reduction of 5.2 million dollars from a month ago um on a year-to-year basis we're down about 23.9 including the addition of the uh the
316appropriation on school lunch uh year-to-date revenue uh a million 347 which is uh continuing to lag significantly behind february last year when we booked 2.189 million a year a year-to-year decrease of about 840 k or 38 percent cash sales are down 1 million 595 or 84 reimbursements are up uh 743 k or 40 404 percent so way up on reimbursements as expected uh expenses are year-to-date 1.898 million which is down year to year by 406 000 or 18 drivers on the expense reduction salaries and food costs and uh and partly offset by unbudgeted transportation costs um in terms of the full year forecast um we as we've said in months before we're going to fall short significantly on revenue i would say it's at least a million seven uh expenses we're expecting to uh under
317run by 800 000 before recovering the transportation expense because we remember we've got that food delivery cost that we're going to recover with covid related funds so we'll under run with that recovery expenses should under run by about a million one uh after the recovery uh and then from a bottom line perspective uh we're looking to uh fall short to budget by about uh 900k before the transportation recovery and with that transportation recovery we'll probably fall short of budget by about six hundred thousand uh the next item in the uh package is just a uh an update on out of district tuition and settlements uh the latest assessment as of march 8 uh total of uh settlements and outplays tuition we're at 6.9 in terms of uh actuals year-to-date actuals plus encumbrances and we have
318some pending cases of about 700k so if all that materializes uh we're looking at about 7.6 million which would be 2.2 million dollars over budget or about 340 000 higher than what we forecasted at the beginning of the year um the next chart in the package um is a covid grant update and it's been totally reformatted you know the first column in the covid chart is as we have been reporting over the last several months all of the year-to-date expense whether it's supplies ppe uh services uh and then we have uh staffing the biggest of which is the certified uh staffing so and then the next four columns is how we are going to recover those expenses whether it's the s or one uh which was uh hundred and fifty eight thousand dollars uh the
319coronavirus relief fund which is a million two hundred and three thousand uh and then esser two which incidentally um we just found out on friday uh previously it was a 3.78 million dollars coming to us uh that now was updated on friday we're going to get 4.3 million dollars so we got an additional half a million dollars and then the fourth one is the american uh recovery plan which uh i heard this uh earlier in the um you know in one of the public comments there was a reference to a greenwich time article and i believe it was dan haar i think he's a associate editor for the greenwich time or hearst media a couple of weeks ago reported that greenwich was going to receive 47 million dollars of which 32 was going to come
320to the school district and i've heard many numbers over the last several weeks but nothing that high on friday we did get some confirmation from uh from congressman heim's office that we will be getting uh 10 million 215 000 so still pretty good um where where that money gets targeted for is uh as far as the arp we're just getting the facts now but we know that at least 20 of that 10 million uh has to address learning loss in the district and then there's they're targeting the remaining 80 percent uh there's a dozen or so specific areas where we can spend that money but they made it very clear that it's not to be used for supplanting the budget the funds the arp funds need to be used by september 30 of 24. the
321sr2 funds need to be used by september 30 of 2023 and the sr1 funds to be used by september 30 2022. um let me see if there's anything else i wanted to include in there um now that's that's kind of it just but the chart has been updated to show how we would propose to spend the money obviously on the sr2 and the arp those are you know pretty new news and uh so we don't know yet how we're gonna spend that although we will the the head count related the staffing will most likely be recovered through the uh s or two grant and then uh yet to be determined is how that uh arp grant will be spent and that's something we we're going to be working on over the next several weeks questions
322sean thank you for reformatting that this is peter bernstein um i think it's really really helpful to see it like that i guess i've got some questions about how much of that money is actually already received and how much of it will be received by june 30th because i want to make sure we're we're in a position to pay our uh our payroll for june uh you know i know i know money is going to start getting tight we're over on special ed uh right now until the interim comes through we're laying out money from north miami so can you kind of give us a sense of when that money is going to hit the uh in our accounts uh the sr1 758 has been received uh the coronavirus relief front of 1.2 million we're
323in the process now of of requesting those funds and the uh the 4.268 million uh will be uh finalizing how we're going to propose using those funds with the state and once we do that then we could actually request the uh the transfer of funds the arp i heard this morning on the way to work that uh some of those funds would be released to the schools across the country very quickly i don't know what that means but uh sounds like it's within the next month or so so is it yet to be determined is it your understanding though that we're at least through sr2 that we'll have those funds in in by june 30th yes because that covers off a lot of our our covent outlay which is yes yep exactly fantastic all right
324mr cher uh sean i didn't uh i i get a little confused in this conversation and the reason i get confused in this conversation is it's like we talk about the board of ed like it's an isolated entity with its own budgets and so i get confused by this because you didn't talk about the town of greenwich the town of greenwich has given us effectively a blank check for covid related expenses so i know you keep talking about covid related expenses like the only money we have is money coming from the federal government um so i get a little confused in this conversation and peter may bernstein's comment about cash management i don't understand that one either because i think the comment about the blank check peter quite honestly i mean you are absolutely right
325that that was committed um but that was before we found out about all these different grants so yeah well they would obviously use the grants to offset but if we run beyond the grants in any particular time they've committed to fill in all those gaps right and the last grant of roughly 11 million dollars 10 million um that may be restricted but the other three aren't particularly restricted yeah yeah yes sir two has some restrictions yeah but they're de minimis right so if they're really it's very broad in what can be a coveted expense generally so that's why i get a little confused in this conversation because we never talk about the amount that we're expecting the bet to infill and cover all these it makes it sound like we may or may not have
326enough money so i understand that part my other one is really a question we haven't i think it was revealed in i know it was revealed in prior discussions of this we have numerous expenses the one i'm particularly focused on is special education expenses that we have higher expenditures we have to make because of covid right that's right okay so have you identified all those expenses and send that transfer that out of the special education general operating budget into the covet expense budget so that it would be covered by the town of greenwich well i mean i've looked into that and my opinion for what it's worth is that i i would rather not use covid grants to cover that because those expenses will be because they're related to special ed will already will already
327be getting 70 cents on the dollar back or the the taxpayers of greenwich will getting be getting 70 cents on the dollar back through the excess cost grant so i understand that part my point is is that the narrative over and over and over again has been we're short on special education we don't have enough money that's been what's been communicated endlessly it's what the public understands what i don't under and i get the whole point of you want to leave it over here procedurally so maybe we have some recovery from the state and and i get that part but it the narrative out there is the narrative in in amongst special education parents is the town of greenwich is underfunding um special education which i don't i don't understand that because in a lot
328of cases our increased expenses are the result of covid and if i'm not wrong the town of greenwich is fully committed to funding that in addition to our regular general uh a regular allocation for special education i i just i and i'm trying to find out is have you moved have you in the discussion with the town of greenwich have you said to him oh of this out of district placements and so on and so forth x dollars of that is marked as covid and if we don't get money back from the state let's say we get 70 cents i'm expecting the town of greenwich to cough up uh the remaining 30 cents of those dollars because it's in the covid budget it shouldn't be funded out of our general operating budget where we have
329to transfer dollars from some other general operating account into special education to cover that and that's what i keep hearing and and i i just that doesn't sound right to me if it's a covet expense it's a covet expense that that should not be co-mingled with our general operating budget and we have to eat into our general operating budget someplace else to cover that that's specifically what the town of granite said that they would cover and i want to be sure we're holding it to them and we're getting every dollar from them that we should well i'm going to have conversations with obviously with the the town as it relates to the out-of-district tuition i mean we've been reporting that on a monthly basis and that's essentially what we've been requested to to track it
330to report it monthly and that's what we're doing um and i think at the end of the year you know the intent would be to you know state our position as to where we are on that out of district tuition which was committed to us uh back uh about a year ago and as far as the as far as the the covert related related uh it's really not a material amount i think it's about twenty thousand dollars so if you factor in the seventy percent seventy cents on the dollar i mean we're talking we're talking about six thousand dollars okay i okay fair enough and i'll say this and this is my great frustration with what the administrators tell us we were in a meeting and they told us we had substantially increased special education
331expenses because of covet i'm sorry i don't when someone says that to me on a 160 million dollar budget i wouldn't think twenty thousand dollars is a substantial increase to covet i'm shocked to hear that that's the number so i don't know which administrator in the meeting with us told us they had dramatically increased [Music] i don't think i said that no i i i wouldn't expect it was you that said okay all right but you know so what you're telling me is we heard that in a meeting um i brought this up a couple times and nobody's disputed it and i appreciate you now sizing that at twenty thousand dollars i don't even know why an administrator even brought it up okay it's hersh um i had a quick well a quick question or
332two um i know that esr1 and s42 funds came to us with very specific details as to how to use them i know you mentioned with the arp that we know thus far that 20 percent of that needs to address learning loss for the arp yes but we don't really know we don't know the other specific areas for the other 80 percent we do we do there's a there's a long list that we just received on friday so we've got to digest that okay um yeah i'll go i'll go hunting for that um because i was gonna say i know you know we certainly have increased uh learning loss in areas that need to be focused on for all of our students and especially for special education students who um many of them have had
333in-person services that that they weren't able to get whatever but um for added would this cover out of district i don't think it does because that's not neces that's not covered related that's separate yeah that's that's uh not covert related um i mean all i will tell you is that as i said on the outset you know we're our our expense is growing year to year by 0.4 percent uh and and that's be you know some of the drivers are our overall salary increase but we do have a significant amount of savings so um we do have savings you know especially in esy summer school that's already known it's already booked and uh and then transportation continued we continue to save money there and i just don't want to accidentally use something to cover an
334expense that we know is going to be continuing for years you know for instance for out of district uh you know tuition um and then have it come back to us by a surprise but um you know and this is something again i'd you know are there things or requirements to cover for social emotional um support for our students i know we keep hearing about that is that is part of it yes absolutely that's a legitimate expense once we have the opportunity to see exactly how that can be used to support social emotional learning the anxiety that our students are feeling i really would like to to hear or have a more deep discussion on that so i know we've been asking and i know budget meetings we were asking about more support in those
335areas if we're going to get funds that can help cover that i'd like to see how we can use them yeah the only thing we need to be careful of is you know if we do staff up in certain areas we got to be careful that money runs out you know in 23 and 24. so if we're going to keep that staff on that new staff we're going to have to offset it somewhere else well anyway i look forward to getting more information and have a having a discussion on that thanks yeah mr try to take us home um just like one final question on these these are the expense numbers you have listed in your first column sean those are to date or they're projected for the full year uh for the non-staffing so
336non-staffing for the non-staffing it's to date uh for the um certified that 1.860 million that's a full year estimate so it's kind of a mixed bag do you think it'd be possible then if because if we're going to start having discussions about the excess you know these grants we probably should project out with the rest of the year on the non-staffing i'm sure you have it somewhere but to incorporate that into the analysis yeah the the the non-staffing piece you know kind of has slowed down as you can imagine we did a lot of purchasing in the in the right first part of the year um and i mentioned the certified staffing that 1.8 million that's a full year estimate um and we are continuing to get some like the non-certified that's police and custodial
337um and the uh certified employees you know due to delayed bp ppts um yeah i mean that's a lot of that happened in the summer so uh okay so maybe for our budget maybe for our budget meeting next week because if we're going to start brainstorming about usage of the rescue plan funds maybe we might want to just pull those up and then we at least don't want don't want to spend it twice yes yes thank you all right thank you all right with that i'm going to go ahead and call the question so it's to approve the monthly financial and staffing report first of all yes downey christine intermediate yes thank you mark yes kelly yes kowalski yes olsen yes share yes and stow yes all right one last action item uh is to
338approve budget transfers i'll go ahead and move to approve the budget transfers as presented is there a second for that motion thank you mr kelly sean okay the first one is a transfer from uh multiple accounts totaling twelve thousand five hundred to uh and these are multiple accounts in central middle school to av equipment so uh purchases of av equipment at central middle school and using multiple other accounts and so that's the first one and the second one is a transfer of several maintenance accounts totaling sixteen thousand one hundred and thirty to uh cover the cost of uh boots which are required from a uh bargaining unit standpoint agreement and other non-coveted uh protective equipment and then the third one is a transfer of fifty thousand dollars within maintenance uh accounts uh from maintenance of
339building to building and construction materials those are the three all right thank you any questions i don't see any hands up for discussion so i'm gonna just go ahead and move right to a vote uh bernstein is a yes downey yes kelly yes kowalski yes wilson yes share yes and stow yes thank you shauna i presume we're gonna see more transfers as we get closer to the end of the year is that that well you know we have the uh the mass massive transfers that occurs in the uh july time frame but yes we will have more transfers right and and we're going to start to slow things down in terms of uh you know purchase orders you know we've already put out word to everybody that uh if you if you had a purchase
340order that was initiated back in uh you know the summer or september and uh you know most of it's been used and now you just have a balance in there we we need to shut those down we need to close them off to get a jump on you know where we're going to land at the end of the year all right thank you we'll keep an eye for that all right um we're at agenda planning anybody have anything yeah we'll uh mr sharon strategic plan i take it when you're ready got something else uh yeah what i i guess i i probably should have asked this question back when tony was commenting but i need to figure out if i would like to have an item on the agenda um tony is it gotten calls
341from parents indicating that we're training our staff um in i guess bias and racism training and we've asked them to we've asked the staff to read white fragility the book white fragility is that correct that's an administrative leadership team that has been reading this school year the staff know is the staff gonna is that gonna be extended to the staff in the future no we haven't discussed that at all okay because what um peter would i um our board hasn't taken up this question at all um this year which i think is a little bit problematic um but i think we need to before any of this goes forward i think the board needs to provide some direction uh to the administration on this subject and i'd like to schedule a session where the superintendent
342comes in and explains what she's proposing to what she has done and what she's proposing to do on um to improve anti-bias training in our employees i think we actually talked about possibly doing that in april so we can we can revisit that we have our chairman because i'll tell you if you're right here i think we were actually already looking to do that peter so thank you for calling that out when is it scheduled i think we were looking to do it at our april business meeting yes they're already preparing for the presentation yep so already got it thank you all right uh miss kowalski um thanks so i think along those lines um so i i've actually in the last week gotten quite a bit of reach out from parents in our middle
343schools particularly in one of the english classes that are being taught critical race theory as a require and as part of their required assignment were asked to complete a checklist written by peggy mcintosh to address their white privilege and i understand that this was presented to 11 and 12 year olds not 11th and 12th grade 11 and 12 year olds and i just i wanted to understand how this curriculum is being introduced and what why in the english class and furthermore that it would need board review and approval so i guess the question is to the extent that this is being taught where and how and then i think we need to have that curriculum brought in front of the board to have review questioned and get it approved yeah i might just address that
344it was one classroom um and there were some there were well i want to say one or two parents that had reached out to the principal this is not something that was across our district at all um and it was addressed with that parent uh one-on-one and it was not teaching critical theory it actually was bias which is in the curriculum and the survey was modeled after a survey that would often be used with older students but it was modified down four to be more appropriate for middle school and our teachers do improvise and create teaching materials um but it it's been portrayed differently i think than um what the teacher has been able to share with us that actually occurred okay well i just out of curiosity could i get the can this copy
345of the survey be circulated to the board that was used sure i mean i think i may have it i think she actually sent it to us yesterday great all right mr kelly peter i i think at one point uh we had uh talked about a building committee for phase two of cardio stadium project uh whether we could have one or not i'd certainly like to have that discussion because i am uh meeting with uh uh with the rtm or district nine about uh structuring uh their new wording on how they wanna implement their plan on building committees so i think we certainly as a board should have that discussion and uh uh and as i'm dealing with the rtm with it as well i i'd certainly like to be in line or in sync
346with that okay um we'll see if we can fit that into april or may and obviously yeah there's some time there all right miss olson yeah i'll be really quick i can't believe making a comment at 12 18 at night but um just tony you go back to what was being said about you know um uh the social emotional learning piece um i think it is really important that we starting as young as possible i know in a lot of schools in the school where i work in a lot of other schools so we do we do teach anti-racism at a young age so i'd be interested in that information as well i think it's um it's uh it's important and it it like like you said they do teach things that are age-appropriate all
347the way down to the younger ages so i'm interested in following up in that conversation as well okay mr cher alright you're muted peter sorry i just got confused by what mr kelly just said um as an item on building committees that makes sense to me the part that didn't make sense to me was working with district 9 on building committees on behalf of the board i don't i don't understand that well this is uh agenda planning but i think district 9 has reached out to to try to understand where the board would be interested in doing that and as joe rightfully noted we should discuss that as a board as opposed to an individual member so he's looking for uh yeah i would i would think that's why we need to discuss it as
348a board anyway this is still agenda planning so i don't think we're going to get deep into that right now well when when is this going to be on the agenda because i think we need to cease and desist with any conversations with outside bodies until such time as we have discussed it as a board and can provide guidance that's what i'm trying to understand i understand it they're not bringing it to the rtm until june so we will try to get it in in april if we can and if not we'll do it in may we will we will definitely find time for that all right uh and then miss hirsch you're muted this is what happens after midnight i'm tired so i apologize um i just wanted to note that karen uh kowalski
349and i had mentioned in our last update from the steering committee that we were going to ask to bring uh our discussion forward to the next meeting uh but i think we were going to be moving that not in april it will be some point in one of the dates in may i just wanted to so that if you had it scheduled you don't need to for the next meeting okay obviously uh you guys should just let me know when you have a better sense that we can put it on there and just to remind the board uh april 8 had been styled as a retreat obviously as karen just said pgc is not ready uh we're likely converting that into an executive session i sent the board an email about that so please hold
350that date on your calendar uh with that mr kelly did you have a motion you wanted to make well sure first happy spring everybody and i'd like to make a motion to adjourn this meeting i'm gonna happily second that motion and bernstein is a yes downey yes brush yes please kelly yes kowalski yes olsen yes there petersen and stowe yes all right thank you very much everybody especially the 29 attendees that stuck it out to the end have a good night night