001mike's spooky things let's go thank time's off too but i'm muted does that make a difference okay let's try it this way that's why i always have someone here because it's always something yeah try again okay good evening ladies and gentlemen we now have our technical difficulties fixed i'm calling this special meeting of the newington board of education to order as you are able please rise for the pledge of allegiance i 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 please be seated okay we're going to begin tonight with our roll call michael branda danielle drove here dr bruce flatcher here beth maggie here richard leveriere seeing [Music] richard are you there maybe they
002have to unmute at 603 anastasia said there is no sound that was before uh sam sharma here jessica weaver here anastasia yaff here amy peratti richard leveriere well we need to hear from them yeah we yep we have to hear from them audibly they just said they can't hear anything have them log out and come back in then because everybody else is working now and they may have their computers muted completely not just the mics well yes okay so what we're going to do right now while they're working on their issues hopefully it gets fixed here real quickly we're going to open it up now for public participation uh if you are here in person and you want to speak you're going to be allowed to do that you can call in by telephone at
003860-665-8659 or you can raise your hand in the zoom meeting and we will call on you we do limit civil participation to three minutes so if there's anyone in the room that wishes to participate you can please come to the table okay i don't see anybody online we don't have any phone calls coming in uh for the sake of expeditious meetings we want to move on okay hopefully richard and amy get your issues fixed so at this time we're going to move on to agenda item c which is our new business and right now we're going to have an update on the strategic plan and the board and superintendent goals update [Music] all right i think so i can point to the board i'm going to relocate myself i hope that technology serves me well
004all right i'm going to go to the end of the table i think it's my best bet hello i can hear you now sorry about that guys very good so it sounds like we're all in audio range now all right good evening board members tonight i wanted to present at least the informational part of my evaluation in public session because i wanted folks who are tuning in from home to hear about all the great work done this school year because what i will share are my goals and the board goals but they didn't happen in a vacuum and my team around the table tonight mr freeze see mr giacomo it's miss davis um are all part of that i know on the line we also have miss uh freeman and wendy um maybe joining us
005later she had to attend a funeral this evening so just as a reminder this portion of the evaluation usually happens in may or june and it's a self-assessment that i do part of it will be an exec session but in terms of the public information i'm sharing that's what's happening now afterwards we go into executive session to cover a couple agenda items the board can ask me any specific questions they want and eventually the board needs to draft a report i believe uh dr fletcher has chosen the authors of that report and then the final evaluation is presented to me at some point and it is subject to foi so that is an important uh component to understand so i wanted to start with and just i'm sure the board noticed around the room the
006posters that i've referenced uh and other board meetings are on the wall here the posters are representative of all seven schools and each of the posters has on it the goals for the schools which are all extremely similar and we will talk tonight about what we've done to attain those goals so feel free to look at those at your leisure but i'll be covering a lot of the information that's on those posters within my comments one of our big efforts this year is to promote collective efficacy it's part of our overarching goals but it's more of a belief system as well because both administration and teacher efficacy is extremely important and many educational researchers would put agree with this quote that the most valuable resource that all teachers have is each other without collaboration our
007growth is limited to our own perspectives and i think those of us that have traveled around the district this year have certainly seen evidence of a high level of collective efficacy and i want to tell you i've seen it at all seven schools and some ver in varying degrees and again things that i'll talk about tonight are the efforts that we're making as a team to grow the district grow our student achievement and so the strategies that we have been invoking for the past year are meant to do that i will tell you we are going to share with you some very good improvements i will also tell you that we aren't satisfied that we know we have more to do we also don't have s back results yet those are they're coming in and
008dribs and drabs but in terms of analyses they're not going to be ready until june or july probably july from what i heard from the state department of ed today but again we're our goal is dramatically improve results especially in light of the pandemic's impact on our kids hopefully this is also part of the posters that are around the room but our mission and it's not unusual is to have our students be highly prepared for life after graduation and contributing members of their community but we also set a mission statement that that we're going to cultivate a strong and ongoing partnership with our families and our community to ensure an equitable educational experience for all students and our educational community will support social emotional and academic growth of all students nps students will have a
009strong voice in their school community and will graduate with a passion for their post-secondary plan with the skills outlined in the port river graduate and below that is the portrait of a graduate which again has appeared on these posters and these posters are in every classroom in every school every hallway every meeting room we also set a district goal to reduce our achievement gap especially for those who are historically marginalized and underrepresented and that is through our access to high quality education that is rigorous relevant and engaging and we believe through our theory of action that plcs were one lever to do that this year because through the plc work and i'll define it a little later in my presentation teachers have a opportunity for that collective efficacy that i referenced earlier we also set
010a goal that all teachers would be functioning in their plc's and the goal this year was to get to a level five or higher which i will also define a little bit later in my presentation here are the goals that we all agreed to uh shortly after the beginning of this school year and they are pretty pragmatic goals because we wanted to increase student achievement across multiple measures and we did had a lot of different ways we were going to go about that we wanted to create or address unfinished learning by equitable educational practices for all students making sure all students have access to high quality instruction equitable access providing structures for our mastery-based learning processes providing training for administrators and staff on culture responsive teaching practices and strengthening our partnerships with families and community
011members to support these goals and developing high functioning plc's and to continue preschool expansion planning so now i'm going to talk about the work that we have done relative to equitable educational practices and high quality instruction access one of our biggest moves and it was a very uh expensive movement was through the use of the esser grant monies we have added a significant number of staff with the goal of having them enhance our acceleration efforts so that was the goal of all the people on the next two pages who we hired and in some cases it was existing staff that we reallocated to a different position in other cases it was new staff that we hired but we have had tremendous success with our coaches at the high school this is the first time in
012the history of newington high that i'm aware of that we have had coaches at the high school and you know i will tell you there was trepidation about it because it's a new concept but the right people thank you steve and kim are on the bus because these these folks are knocking it out of the park and i didn't even realize this until the teacher of the year ceremony but christine gamari who's our stem coach was the teacher of the year in torrington in 2021 and she was a finalist for state teacher of the year so she is a superstar lenny's been with us for a while but he got repurposed as a humanities coach the two of them are just an amazing team eileen francolino has allowed us to expand our credit recovery opportunities
013by doing some work with a platform called edge annuity so her role got expanded and she's also supports our summer school for credit recovery as well lauren derubo was a reading teacher i believe you saw her present or at least her team present here at the board meeting a few months ago back we enhanced our math intervention services we added el positions the board is well aware of our el population which now are called ml continues to grow we're close to nine percent ml students here in the district we added an additional case manager anna reynolds and board certified behavior analyst expansion at virtually all of our schools and just for those of you around the table that don't know board certified behavior analysts really help teachers develop behavior plans and strategies for children who
014are struggling in that way and i will tell you that we have seen behavior struggles significantly this year more more than we've ever seen before and i believe it's a direct link to the pandemic the anxiety the stress as well as students who were mostly remote for a year or more they had a hard time coming back into the routines of schools and last but not least the remaining positions or programs added with this money include another case manager who serves patterson and wallace for special ed reasons our equity and inclusion specialist dr hairston and our ess program expansion at wallace that's effective school solutions which the board has seen present before they've been at the high school in kellogg for a number of years but wallace was a new addition so mastery based learning
015is excuse me has been making great strides and in fact in many ways the work of that committee as an isolated committee and not not isolated but a set-aside committee is largely complete earlier this year at my mid-year i shared with the board the timeline of progression of mastery-based learning and again this was largely overseen by kristen freeman i know she's on the line tonight but i want to just to focus on the next this year and next year as to where we're going with this and this is very important and mastery based learning is a very equitable way of teaching students because you really get to this the skills that they're still needing and kids can accelerate so our kids who are coming out of the gate having more skills can accelerate and our
016kids who are struggling can work toward those uh standards at for a longer pace if they need to so we have provided professional learning communities with a lot of training that have supported this work we've also had a district-wide commitment to educational equity and that's some of the work that mastery-based learning has also embraced and you'll see a lot of overlay here which is intentional we want the board to see and the community and all of our teachers to see how coherent we are each program is working toward the same goal with some different strategies we have introduced the african-american literature courses in the black and latino studies courses highly successful and very popular courses both full each each time they were offered we've done a lot of work with courageous conversations and where that
017really comes into play is when we're sitting around the table at a meeting particularly plc's and we notice that a student of color or special needs student or any student is not achieving at high levels we call it out we say could it be because of their circumstances and i want to be clear with the board all students we want all students learning at high levels we're not forgetting all students but what we do is if there's a chance that race or disability are playing a role in students poor achievement we do talk about that more transparently than we ever have before and we'll continue to work on that we've also worked really diligently through the support of our hcd office and wendy's office kristin's office about a lot of training relative to culturally responsive
018pedagogy we've we're going to going forward and you'll hear more about this later is continue to work on what we've started this year but one of the things we noticed is we have to kind of fine tune our srbi process which is the scientifically based research interventions which really is some people think it's all those are the kids that get the extra help no it's really a holistic look at our tier one instruction what everyone gets how are we doing with cultural pedagogy how do we respond to kids who are not doing well how do we look at it through an equity lens so it's a very comprehensive analysis of how we're doing business and we'll continue to do more of that next year we'll also continue our courageous conversations work next year and educators
019are learning about what's called the ready for rigor framework which is another way of getting at real equitable educational practices and then we're going to develop a grade 5 standards based report card for implementation in 2324 and in grade 6 it'll be 24.25 so the work is ongoing but we've really gotten a good foothold on it and now the work of this committee will combine with some other committees and kind of streamline the process a little bit all right let me go back into my presentation here okay and again i this is sort of a reiteration i won't go into all the details but i because a lot of this i've already covered in the mastery based learning update but you know i think you saw when steve presented a few weeks back the significant
020amount of in service work we've done this year in addition to what's already been mentioned we've had crack here and they've worked with all administrators on diversity equity and inclusion training uh we've had folks attend a collective collective efficacy institute we are developing together with dr harrison's office and hcd office a summer equity university and for those of you that have not seen it we now have an equity website which allows folks to not only see our theory of action relative to equity but also typically there are spotlights during some of the special events throughout the year we've had black history month women's history month autism awareness we have a nomination form if folks want to nominate someone for our equity award we're giving out the first one at our big event on june 14th
021so this is just a kind of a hub of all equity resources and some training and other resources so it's just another effort for us to provide this service to our families and our students and then i want to also spotlight on the next slide how we've used some grant money for other equity activities in addition to the positions that you already saw we have people that are using different services to expand the work for all of our children so we have a language line opportunity now which has really revolutionized how we do business whether it's a family situation where a parent needs translation at a ppt or at a parent-teacher conference last week we had um when we did the art show there was a family that needed translation at that so we use
022a couple services but the language line allows you to have on the spot uh translation so you could have a parent come into school you don't even know they're coming you call this 1 800 number and immediately you can get things translated we have jeff helming ran a program at anna reynolds strengthening family and community connections with the everyone's a writer program spotlighting some awesome writing activities and a lot of these things did appear in my reports my weekly reports jen freeze uh got some training on lgbtq issues and then she provided or linked up middle both middle schools with training in that regard our teachers at the elementary level have done some work with two different math platforms reflex math and dream box an effort to give kids all kids more access to math
023instruction in a different and different way on a computer very engaging kirsten devlin at martin kellogg did some sel work with the roots to rise program and everyone did sel work she just did some some different things to enhance the work at her school jesse dalton which i believe you saw on one of my updates ran a family diversity book club exposing all of our families to different authors of different cultural backgrounds and paul kemp had initiated a program called spotlight on music which is a really engaging way to get students to learn different aspects of music so that's again the all of these benefit all children we've also worked really hard to strengthen our partnerships with families and our community we are now at the point of developing what's called a welcome center at
024our high school we found through our communication with our ml department that we sometimes had our students start school and we didn't know they were ml and i might be sitting in class for a couple of weeks and obviously missing instruction because sometimes parents didn't fill out the paperwork correctly or maybe they didn't understand the paperwork so we're going to develop what's called a welcome center where we'll have staff staff it will be a full-time secretary she'll be also part of our residency and registration department but she'll also go the extra mile with families who might need some referrals you know do i need to refer all the social services do i need a referral to a pediatrician because a lot of families struggle with getting their child a physical right away and that keeps
025them out of school or maybe they don't have all their immunizations so all of those things are going to be available so we'll have a secretary staffing it full-time and that's an existing position they'll just expand their role and then we're going to get a special task where some of our certified staff can provide consul or support to that center we also have a family and community partnership committee two of our board members are on that michael branda and anastasia yap and we'll be continuing to expand the membership of that group they're planning to do a survey after meeting with dr harrison today we'll probably do it in the fall and it'll be a survey that'll be both our families as well as community members to find out what folks perceptions are of our efforts
026we also have as everyone knows a big event on june 14th the board is of course cordially invited part of that event is it's different segments going on concurrently is a session called coffee talk and that will be members of our community coming in to talk about their equity efforts within their um mission statements we've got folks coming in from the police department from our town planning office from one of our local churches melanie enfield from the congregational church is going to talk about the work of her church we also have the habib family who you've met a couple of times that's the young boy that was the impetus behind our adding of eid al fitter to the calendar we also have a really great relationship our schools have a tremendous relationship with the senior
027center which you saw in that senior pairing that some of our kids had that writing group that was in one of my updates and the food pantry many of our schools have done amazing work with food donations this year um you saw that ruth chafee has a little food pantry now in their front of their school which the kids are donating to that constantly and of course modifying the school calendar i think was a very good will gesture for our community and i ever since we've done that i've been getting a lot of outreach from different organizations so back to the plc uh discussion we have plc's just for folks that aren't familiar with what it what they are is a group of teachers and administrators who meet and the goal is that they are
028looking at evidence of student learning and they're developing strategies to build on strengths and weaknesses and this is for all children so a teacher will look at her class holistically but she'll also look at it or he will look at it by student individual data and they'll impact they'll analyze and implement strategies see if they're successful or not and then apply any new knowledge to what they've learned to new strategies and what's really neat about this process is i might be in mrs jones's class but i'm in a plc with my entire grade level and even if i'm not in your class other teachers on that team are kind of offering insights so it's it's not just everyone's focusing on their own class they're focusing on their whole grade grade level and in some cases
029from the principal perspective and some other service providers the whole school so our goal this year was to get to level five which is shifting the focus from teaching to learning really looking at how are kids learning and what are we doing about it dissecting their work analyzing the strengths and weaknesses and then identifying areas for improvement to preschool we our status quo for this year we are as everyone around the table knows we're going to move john patterson over to excuse me anna reynolds is going to john patterson for the two years of construction but i think it bears repeating that we've almost doubled our enrollment in the last three years in pre-k and i'll tell you right now ruth chaffee is full for the fall already and that's why if you look under
030our current programming we are status quo but this summer lou and i are going to go over and meet with bev lawrence because at some point we're going to have to open up a second classroom there not next year but hopefully the year after because it is full and it's not even september yet part of my role is to show the board what has have been the gains in student achievement this year obviously it still wasn't a typical year but it was probably the most typical year i've had since i started here with regard to quasi-normal except there still was a fair amount of quarantining due to covet even as recently as this week but um you know part of the work that we've tried to do this year is support students to help them
031manage the impact of covid accelerate their learning and support their social emotional well-being and again i've already mentioned how we leveraged our esther funds to do that but now i want to show you some of the fruits of our labors and also quite frankly some of the areas that we still have to work on any of these types of uh programs and i've done i went to harvard back in may for superintendent retreat and i heard from a speaker who literally was a superintendent out in wisconsin and she discussed her work out there similar to our work right now and she indicated it took her just about five years to really see that major major change i think we'll see changes you know incrementally as well but it was really cool because sometimes you go
032to these conferences and it's like kind of theoretical and ivory towerish but this individual she's a professor at harvard now but she was a superintendent for for at least five years and really kind of talked us through from the ground floor up how that all worked so with the help of wendy krauss i've summarized some of our data for the year so i i think you can notice under this bar chart that from the fall benchmark to winter to spring we made some nice steady increments and though we had hoped to get to 90 this year was very ambitious we are very close to 80 percent in both those areas which is sort of um the national norm for any type of universal screen you really want to get your kids to 80 percent proficiency
033on these screeners so i would i will be i think we should be very proud of our pie charts going up pretty significantly you can see how kids started in the fall and where they landed a few weeks ago and again they're still learning since this chart was developed but it is encouraging to see how the kids have gone upwards now this is an important analysis and i'm hoping i can do it justice this is a wendy original but we spoke of it and i think i can explain it so our goal this year if this chart were looking the way we wanted it to it would be either blue or green with no red so you can see we did that in some areas our goal was to decrease the achievement gap for black
034and hispanic students as much as we could be we wanted to get to at least a five percent reduction of the achievement gap so you can see that in k to four for black students we have no significant discrepancy in the area of reading and in the hispanic group however we did see unfortunately that gap increased by a little bit by about two percentage points in grades five through eight both for black and hispanic students we decrease the achievement gap by five percent or four percent depending on the column that you're looking at so here's uh black students and this is hispanic students and in the math subgroup area we decreased in k4 we decreased the achievement gap for black students by eight percentage points and for hispanic students by five unfortunately for grades five
035to eight it increased slightly now one percent either way is not a big deal but you know we're still trying to get that to decrease and that didn't quite hit the mark there but we are making some strides in a positive direction but clearly we have more work to do we also look at from price for a high school perspective since they don't take those same benchmark assessments as the k-8 students do we look at failure rate how do kids do passing their classes so as you can see and we looked at it pre pandemic and post so during the 2021 school year we had um six percent quarter one six point seven percent seven point four percent so you can see it went up throughout the 2021 school year over here um in 2122
036you can see we've had a much smaller failure rate but still not you know we'd like to be zero uh and certainly reduced but ironically in the uh gap analysis we didn't we saw a similar gap with our black students but a little bit more for our hispanic and quarter one and quarter two uh that they fared better than the uh general population are black students hispanic a little worse and then in the quarter three which is sort of the last data point we have we have a gap analysis of 0.67 for our black students which is lower than the general population but hispanic students had a slightly higher than the general population so again if this were a perfect world there would not be the gap there or would be minimal so again something
037that we're still working on for all students we also ran we had um enough grant money left this year and actually we got some additional grant money that sometimes with the way things are going right now in the state you just suddenly you're getting this notification of additional grant monies we decided to run an after school program at the elementary level and middle level and high school level so we had 60 kids at each level elementary and middle and they received extended learning time in both academic and sel areas and we had a good you know we had pretty good attendance there i think spring is a tough time because you have many competing sports things the high school ran mostly in sel and art kind of art therapy for lack of a better word
038program and that was not as well attended because again high school kids have a lot more after school choices but for those 59 students we had really good attendance and i don't have the data yet but wendy and i will be looking at that over the summer to see about the impact but literally we identified our most highest needs students and they were supposed to they would be invited into school after school to stay about a half hour 45 minutes to see how they fare you know with some individual interventions all right and then we look at our survey data as another measure and overall we're staying pretty steady in a good way parents largely feel they're getting good communication about their child's grades we were down just by one percentage point last from 89
039to 88 um this one we want people to disagree with and it's a good thing we found that most parents do feel their children are treated equally regardless of their race and um the schools communicate with parents of diverse backgrounds about what they're hearing you know in a way that can be understood and hopefully that speaks to our use of different interpretation strategies translating a lot of the things that we send home and then um we kind of picked apart the survey question that asked about how parents perceive their children are treated regardless of their race or ethnic background and you can see that overall you can see we're very high and then if you break it down by different subgroups the area where we are struggling a bit is the perception of our black
040families they're only about 76 percent felt that was true hispanic parents felt that was true at about close to 90 percent level and some of our parents didn't disclose their their ethnic background so we don't know how they fared or what their thoughts were you know there is this misperception too about um whether our students of different ethnic backgrounds actually have parents that attend conferences but the reality is they they do we have high participation rates among all of our ethnic groups at all conferences so this just so you understand this chart this represents parents who came to three or more conferences throughout the course of this school year two or one zero is a very small number so i think we we can take pride in the fact that we are reaching all of
041our families and they are comfortable coming in for conferences and um you know one of the things we're still working on with teachers is when we initially pose this question about how do you perceive children in your class who are of a different ethnic background and a lot of times the initial reaction is well i'm colorblind i treat all kids equally and that sounds good on face value but in reality it they do need to kind of look at you know all kids as individuals and whether or not they might need something different if if their ethnic background is different so that's where that question we're getting a little bit better you wanted people to disagree with that question believe it or not and i know that's kind of confusing you want people to disagree
042with a question but we want people to kind of through our different trainings we've done you know i do now understand that i have to kind of look at my class through a cultural lens um no it depends on the question so the top question is um whether you disagreed or strongly disagree where there's more data points this has been survey data for five years where there's fewer data points it's over two years so the most recent data is in the far right hand column yeah you're correct we don't have headers which would have made it a little bit clearer but um so the top line is you know our goal would be people disagree with that we don't want teachers to be colorblind we want them to look at their classroom and look at
043individual needs so last year at this time 36 percent disagreed with this now we're up to 54 percent similarly this is another question that we wanted people to disagree i try to keep in mind the limits of students abilities and give them assignments that they can do in other words kind of lowering the bar and we want teachers to disagree with that we don't want you to lower the bar we want you to find a way to meet students where they're at and kind of raise the bar so last year 20 percent disagree with us this year 25 still quite a ways to go there i did want to show this data point teacher perceptions this year and it didn't surprise me at all based on the kind of year we've had are that they're
044not too keen on our discipline system at the school levels last year we had about a 70 approval rating this year only about 50 percent i will tell you that this has been a really tough year for behaviors and i think when the behaviors are tough i think teachers are concerned about the discipline system i i have a feeling that that's going to go back up again next year and again we are going to put in some other structures to support teachers but safe to say it was a difficult year for student behavior challenges but we are adding some different programs next year the school is sensitive to issues regarding race gender sexual orientation good news there is there's a high level of agreement there and then response to events in the world how comfortable
045would you be having about conversations with your children about race in the classroom most teachers are feeling more comfortable over over time so i mentioned earlier that our goal this year was to have plc's operate at a stage five or higher and right now we are many of us probably probably all the administrators in the room right now have observed plcs uh consistently at various levels throughout the school year and um although the data is still coming in right now we i believe we have about 75 percent of elementary teachers believe they met or exceeded this goal and that's up more than 10 percent from the fall data point all right now it doesn't want to advance against all right then the last couple of slides are again we talked about the rounds process it's
046very important for our ongoing work our social emotional learning efforts the central office plc work we actually have our own plc at the central office level and we talk about district data the work at all the plc's and we want to uh you know definitely model what we're asking teachers to do we do it at a different level here in central office i want to also mention some of the work that i try to do in my efforts as superintendent i do evaluate all the principles that that wasn't the case when i arrived but i believe it's important for the coherence of all we're trying to do we did a lot of work this year both myself with the board about our budget analysis with lou uh trying to be as transparent as possible we
047developed strategies to save money like the early retirement incentive plan we've had to leverage the non-lapsing fund to it did reduce our budget asks the health benefit credit utilization the uh managing a zero percent budget this year as well as some of the mou's we're trying to do to collaborate with the town the tutor versus certified staff reallocation wherever we can we would hire a certified staff member versus a tutor but we also know that we need to expand our parent and tutor retention efforts which we'll talk to the board about momentarily we also have tried to use our grant money to maximum potential to maximally benefit the students we've also continued our ongoing security enhancements and capital improvements and as you can imagine we've fielded a lot of questions about security since the most
048recent events in texas i'm also very active in the in the community both here in newington as well as the greater uh connecticut community so here in newington i'm a member of alpha delta kappa which is a charitable organization of teachers beth minke is on there with me mike we collaborate with human services in the transition academy they collaborate with the the human services to deliver foods to probably 80 families every couple of weeks in town i'm a member of the community foundation of greater new britain where i learn about some other uh efforts in our community to enhance people's opportunities we have formed the parent and community outreach committee that's still you know being developed and refined the promotional video that i shared with the board a few months ago that is kind of
049rolling all over the district right now and if people come to town hall and wait in the waiting room at our offices they get to watch the video um i'm fortunate that my ratings from staff and parents about my communication and vision are greater than 95 percent agreement that that is a strength of my office hopefully the board feels i've communicated a lot with the weekly updates when you call or email making sure you are aware of district initiatives now tonight i focus a lot on data but hopefully through the course of the year you've seen action at our schools what are some of our points of pride at all of our schools making sure the board's aware of any changes in state or federal regulations advising the board on legal implications and notifying the
050board whenever there's emergency i wouldn't want you to see an ambulance at a school and not hear from me about why i was nominated by last year's board for uh superintendent of the year and i was a finalist and leadership standards i do work really hard together with bruce and the board to have outreach bruce had done a great job outreach with the mayor i've worked with the town manager on the roof projects and solar panels together with lou i've worked with different members of the town council and department chairs here at town hall parks and rec collaborates with us on a lot of different issues the softball field enhancements and some other things out that way and we're working on some programming next year for our teacher tuesdays we work with the police on
051many issues training and they're going to be part of our coffee talk tom planner and i meet a lot they're doing a railway project this year that i was on the committee for but now one of the teachers is on that committee and she's giving them some good advice about how to make it educationally relevant for kids to want to go visit it when it's finally developed we work with the library all the time because of the pandemic we've worked with emergency services all the time and we work here collectively with the engineer most recently on the john patterson project but we're also in a consultation with our town engineer about some green efforts be it green buses or green electric charging stations that we're looking at and i think everyone's very familiar with the
052anna reynolds project we've provided some updates to the board it's finally happening they're packing up this week and they're going to start shoveling ground the day after school gets out i am currently the president of the harford area superintendent association though i am going to be soon to be past president it's i'm handing over the crown i'm uh now on the caps executive board is vice president ccsu advisory committee a junk professor i'm on the caps teaching and learning committee as a co-chair i'm also very active on the caps legislative committee because i really get a lot of good information about new laws that are coming down or new grant monies i keep a lot of i'll keep my eye on that all the time i've been i've been appointed to the reading leadership implementation
053council by the commissioner of education we have to get every district in the state of connecticut has to get a reading program that they use approved by the state and this is the committee that's going to choose which reading programs in the state are meet those standards so i'm reviewing several reading programs over the next two weeks and eventually in early july the state will release the the names of all the approved reading programs each year i typically have two interns and i think you've met both of them through the course of the year and i serve on the advisory committee for intergovernmental relations which keeps me connected to some state legislature folks as well as different um governmental and town and board um not really town on board but really government and relationship between
054government and schools and how to kind of keep at the pulse of that and next year we will continue our work with plc's srbi the overlay between those two processes continue with our culturally responsive pedagogy continuing to focus on wellness both for students and staff and we have formed a committee with i think steve probably about 10 folks who are interested and we are opening up a behavior program at wallace we're transferring some staff around to support behavior challenges at both schools patterson's had a highly successful program for many years but when the kids leave patterson they typically go to a middle school and don't have that level of support this program will allow for that and as i mentioned before but i think you can't mention it enough that we've done a lot of
055safety and security enhancements by the end of the summer every school will have what we call a man trap where people can't get into the school without having eyes on them at least twice every school will have that in place with the exception of anna reynolds because it's going to come as part of the building project we have had a lot of outreach from wallace especially since the texas tragedy occurred so we're heading over there this week to i mean there is as the board knows we put in our capital plan that wall seems to be renovated but um you know until that happens which is years away i believe we have to try to look at some interim steps so we're going to look at that very soon and we're we're looking at our
056new uh diagram for next year this is our draft model but it really as you can see plc's operationalizing with srbi is really what this is all about so anyway that is um my quick i guess not so quick passion practice and persistence is going to be our mantra all right i will stop there i'll go back to my seat and if there's any general questions otherwise we can talk about anything more than that in uh executive session okay danielle oh i'm sorry bruce i just have a question about your um i your um website i went on yes for the equity there's no mention of like and it's the same i understand we need to close the we need to include everyone there's no mention of pride month which i'm disgraced by there needs
057to be more training on pride i went to a national honor society um banquet thing you know where the induction they refer to he and she there was never a they there needs to be a lot more training and it's so focused on one or two areas and you need to do a better job i uh we have done a lot of lgbtq work this year and we're working on a um gender neutral bathroom at the high school but we can certainly expand our work on pronouns i don't know that we've done a ton of work on that steven uh um would appear that way you do you really do and i noticed it a lot like just man trap and i know that's the name of it but like it's pervasive and everything i
058go to i have not heard proper pronouns used for many students and it's so wrong so and that's a a group of students who there's high suicide rates there's high depression we need to worry about all students like you said and i want to make sure we're doing that absolutely i will tell you that on all my apologies using proper pronouns but clearly if there's if that larger group presentations that's not evident then that's where we have to go with it so my uh appreciate that feedback uh excuse me dr fletcher this is richard can do can i get can i just ask questions with a couple questions before we go to executive session yes i was just getting ready to call on you your hand is up go ahead thank you i i apologize
059for interrupting procedurally uh um um dr brummett with the so-called man trap or two-fo two-factor uh entrance authentication if it's not if we're not going to have that at um at reynolds can we have a can we have an officer there to make sure that there's not any uh additional risks over the next two years yes we do have we have a security officer there and we do also have a buzzing system so no one gets in without being buzzed in however the um you know it is not as secure as the schools where you're buzzed in and then you're in another holding area and then from there you have to get buzzed in again so that's where reynolds is still lacking but you know obviously when we have and there'll be a lot more
060eyes on the entryway next year especially because we're under construction so we are we do have some other strategies we use to keep it safe but um long story short you know that that's really all we can do right now until the renovation is complete but we do have that buzzing system which i think is you know a very good system to use and there is cameras also so no one comes into a school without being seen on a camera but i don't know perhaps we can go offline maybe and talk about this in more detail before because i know we do have to go to executive session but i did want to chime in with that sure thank you all right jessica oh i just wanted to thank daniel for bringing that up and
061echoing because i think it is like a huge omission i think not just as the it's the schools but also like the town wide i mean i think we all could do better but i think one of the things i wanted to highlight and that'll probably lead into our next agenda item before but we as a committee talked a lot about that particularly in our language of our policies so it's incumbent upon our policy committee as well and i'm very glad um you know we're the ones on this but i think in general um one of the things too you know like aapi month was it on there and i think that's been a huge south asian population uh continuously growing and i think yeah i did not see here but i think you know
062particularly in the wake of covet as well you know that's been a very jarring issue and i have you know a lot of friends who have experienced that just within the community not saying within the schools but i think um to your point we can always do better but i think it's something that is really evident particularly among um those of our students that are most vulnerable in yeah do them i think it's one of those things particularly in this time um so but i just wanted to also thank you for the presentation i think data is really helpful and i think one of the things we could do is probably ask more questions um i don't think it hurts to ask for questions as much as people hate filling them out i think it
063would be beneficial um and i just wanted to kind of follow up with that in that lens i know you did like kind of like a survey out to parents and that similar survey um and just wanting to see how on an annual basis that will be and if those kinds of questions can be included not just race gender ethnicity really just looking at you know the types of um data points that we're looking at if we could have more of them i think it's just beneficial to break down just as we broke it down by race we could break it down by by other things because i think you know when we talked about policies coming up it's disproportionately impacted by gender usually um you know those types of things that um we can
064just be more conscious of so i appreciate the surveys a lot and i just wanted to say thank you for that particularly to um these are sorry i will finish my comments but um should do it jessica weaver um started uh evaluating principles that's really helpful to know um and i think a lot of the public would want to know you know what those look like in terms of you know people always wonder like oh or you know we who's evaluating who and we evaluate the superintendent but who's evaluating you know those top administrators as well so um i did not know our principles were not evaluated before that so no they were just not by the superintendent okay more so what i meant um but i appreciate that point and just wanted to say
065as well as to the point of discipline i think overall i've heard from teachers across dish that take a look that this has been a very difficult year not just district-wide but statewide countrywide um and i'm curious to see if we could maybe get more frequent numbers on those things just because i feel like it it changes all the time and trying to pinpoint those or isolate those impacts um or you know root causes is going to be difficult but i would be curious to see um if there's any change you know quarter to quarter on that because um it just feels like overwhelming i know for you in general because it certainly is it's been a challenging year and i will say talking to my colleagues throughout the state we have all had this
066experience so it's one but it doesn't mean we're going to throw up our hands and say right with it what can we do to make it better thank you um thank you so i i just wanted to look i guess at that 49 of teachers um that felt school discipline um programs um are effective only 49 right so kind of coming you know anecdotally from from my own experience as well i think because of due to covid um i think a lot of those behavioral uh situations are also stemming from some real serious social emotional need that our students have um so i would just be interested i guess to see if our teachers if there is a venue where they and i mean perhaps it's it's a survey perhaps it's um roundtable of leaders
067i'm not really sure but just to kind of look at some of that behavioral data where is it happening how can we target it what supports can we put in place do we need to kind of tighten up transitions to make sure that our kids feel safe because i think that our students are craving structure right now because it was a year and a half to two years of who knows what's happening the next day and i think that is a very scary feeling for a kid whether they'll name it or not um and so i would like to hopefully be able to look at that um and then maybe just for teachers to say like why 49 you know are you not feeling supported are you not feeling heard what would you do differently
068and i think that a lot of teachers um are just in nature i think teachers are very like um solution focused so perhaps they have some ideas and i don't know if there's team leaders or some type of a venue where they can come together and kind of put some things in place like some kind of real consequences looking at how we're doing restorative um to to set us up and be really proactive for next year because i think this year through no one's fault all over the country felt reactive um i don't think we knew what we were dealing with as educators and we i think all educators put in 110 this year and um only a few days left keep chugging here um but then also i always have to plug and i
069know that newington does a great job of this but just making sure that our teachers are cared for their social emotional needs are cared for as well because it is a heavy lift to make sure that our kids are physically and emotionally safe every day so at the end of the day just how are we taking care of our teachers as professionals and as human beings as well i think is really important and thank you for all that i know newington does a lot of that um but just continuing to do that i just want to put a plug out there because i think it's super important that the human needs of teachers are taken care of too i would agree that that is part of the impetus behind steve and i forming a committee
070and actually mr brandon brought it up at a recent board meeting as well i will tell you before that survey came out principals already knew it was going to be bad because teachers have come to the principles all year long and said this is just unbelievable so all year long we've been trying to make modifications but you know there have been councils there have been different school-based committees so i think a lot of the principals are starting to look at a different way to do things and again similar to our change at the high school with this grade 10 team some of the other changes that are happening at some of the other schools so my belief is that it will get better next year but yes it's certainly not the kind of uh end
071point that i'd like to like to have no way thank you um also just kind of food for thought as we're going forward do you think and i guess this is also a question for you mr farisi but do you feel that we need additional um bcbas or social workers or counselors or like what can we what can we do to to make next year better like 49 it's just like and i i know it spell everywhere but it's it's a tough way to end the year i think and i want to see newington has some of the best teachers anywhere and i want to see them all return and i want to see them rejuvenated and feeling validated and so do we need more manpo woman man human being power i fix it that's
072that's that's real life learning people um do we need more human power i guess what can we do i just this is like big on my mind i don't know when i want to be proactive and do what i can from this seat i mean i'll start and then i'll let steve certainly answer that um certainly we some of our bigger challenges this year came at the middle level so we are making that behavior program it's going to be housed at wallace but we believe it'll serve both middle martin kellogg and wallace we did add the bcbas this year we knew it was going to be a tough year for behavior and that's why we added the bcbas i mean i suppose the answer to my opinion would be sure i'd love more social workers
073the high school social workers are maxed um our social workers are busy our school counselors are busy our school psychologists are busy i love more staff but in lieu of that i think there's some processing we could do and then i'll kick it to mr farisi for any thinking he has on it no i think that's a great way to transition more processing more ability to kind of draw the connection uh between how we do restore and get back to a place where everyone feels safe comfortable emotionally you know both staff and students and how we reconnect that through kind of the staff student administration lens and triangulate all that so i think it is about working more collaboratively listening to one another and being able to work together to to improve that throughout the
074school so um i'm certain there are some areas where we could bolster maybe you know some efforts if you think about you know i do think about certain psychological services that we have and how at some levels it seems to be a little bit less than maybe others and we might need to reconsider some of that but i'm not so sure it's all about staffing then it is about realigning practice getting the feedback you're talking about really listening and trying to implement strategies that continue to work and also we have to realize though that it took time to kind of get here and it is going to take a little time to to kind of keep working our way back so i think i think it's a combination of all that there's no one targeted
075answer that i can offer but i think if we we continue our efforts and keep our eye on that i think we have a great opportunity to get there uh miss you up um so i have a question in regards to some things that you maybe danielle and beth said what do we i understand where you know we put bcbas in the middle school what are we gonna do in regards to elementary school i mean i'm not a teacher obviously i'm a banker but i think on the elementary school level there are some services that um have you know been brought to light to me that we're struggling on uh we don't have enough speech pathologists for children who struggle with speech i had a parent come up to me today and say that her
076child couldn't get speech at all because we didn't have the staff for it and her child has special needs it's just that they didn't have one for the first grade that could accommodate her child why why is that if you could have that parent call me um because that would be something that is uh i that that's hard for me to rectify with what i understand but i would i like to speak to that parent directly because we have if students eligible for speech pathology they have to get that service bottom line so there has to be something that we need to kind of sort through here i also in my own experience having a child with a severe speech toy um and this is my own personal testimony have fought to get additional speech
077and some of the feedback that i've gotten was i have too many children on my case so that's feedback that i've gotten just my personal own testimony i mean can we hire more speech pathologists and more bcbas at the elementary school level i understand we have budgets we have things like that but if we're having some severe behavioral issues can we add those i mean and i don't know how it works i don't know if they're contracted i don't know if they're permanent hires i don't know that but how do we add that early intervention we always hear is key correct and no matter what it is so why can't we get more of that at the elementary level well we do have bcbas at the elementary level in fact when we added more staff
078at the secondary level it gave the staff at the elementary level more room in their caseload to deal with more students every elementary school has a social worker every elementary school has a school psychologist every elementary school has been board certified behavior analysts as well as behavior technicians that work with children so um we analyze our staffing every year relative to our special ed students who might have a mandated service so we also did add through the special ed grant a little more speech pathology time so i would you know i have not heard from special ed that students were in any way short shrifted but i can certainly chat with them and then again please have that other parent call me so i can address her concerns thank you miss weaver i just wanted
079to quickly add on um i don't know in terms of you know how often we can do these surveys and quite frankly i know they can be cumbersome but in terms of doing that i think maybe offering an opportunity for qualitative feedback to match the quantitative maybe that might be helpful in terms of offering some space that we can be able to say okay we have the number data and reflect it i'm just putting on my evaluator hat when i do like you know girls programs i'm like oh do these match the the just the likert scale like okay we just have this this and this um maybe that i mean again i'm not saying it's the silver bullet but to best point in terms of just like getting insight from stu from you know
080even students who are struggling you know saying like they don't feel x y or z about um you know their comfortability in school or that kind of thing i think it's important to be able to just get the qualitative aspect of those because sometimes data is like you said it it shows us that 93 here but then the breakdown shows us different things so maybe to be able to get a little bit of that color we did do a mental health survey for the students at newington high school this year and mrs tigneau and i are going to meet with the teacher that helped implement that to review the results and make determination about supports that we might need to add at the high school i am working with dr hairston to do another survey
081that survey does have questions about gender ironically um and we are looking at it for more of a narrative answers to kind of glean more details as you know anyone that's been in the survey worlds when parents anyone looks at a survey they're going to say how long is this going to take me to complete and you know that's why we have to kind of balance that out but this survey that we're still cultivating with an outside folk consultant will have a combination of um you know ratings but also an opportunity for folks to get put a little narrative bless you and i know you'll get you know response bias and all of that but i think maybe if you know those passionate about the solutions like you said well absolutely that's that's one of
082the reasons why we want to do both parent it's going to be parent and community so some of our community partners can kind of chime in about their impressions as well and maybe just a um follow-up finally um like the amount of surveys you've done is a lot so just to be able to maybe present that and say how many surveys you've done would be helpful just so we know because i know there's like a million that are out there i'm not asking you to like centralize it all but just to be able to say like we are tracking that and you've been able to give us that kind of data to be able to say you know this is what we've tracked you have obviously five years of data for some of those points
083i would be helpful to to have that kind of in a place maybe on the equity inclusion site to be able to say you know this is what we had this is when we added more questions on those types of things just to be able to say like yeah we are looking at these things and if we're not this is what we will be looking at you got it about your surveys thank you happy to do it um like i where are these i mean i read the the the principles update every week religiously looking to see if my kids got through the month so i have to go all the way to the bottom well played tara where are these surveys even coming out because like i saw some of your questions and i'm
084not saying you haven't but i have talked to like teachers like some teachers were concerned about like the calendar and they're like i never got that survey i'm like i don't know what to tell you and like we went based on the data we got that's where we're going i'm same with people in the community with those surveys they're like i never got that and they blew up you know news i got lots of screenshots about that that um you know well i didn't know that there was a survey and i wouldn't have done that i'm like where are these so where are these surveys so i guess is my question that was like that was a jessica weaver question sorry the surveys went to parents and teachers and they went out multiple times i
085believe each principal tells me they sent them out through school messenger at least three times yes so the only reason a parent wouldn't get one is if they don't have an accurate email on file with us um and we do look at error reports too and i don't think we would see a lot we didn't see a lot of error reports so i don't know how parents did not go ahead kim you want to embellish that answer parents all of our principals we ask them to put it in their newsletters um classroom teachers it'll depend on the classroom t-shirt but sometimes they put it in their classroom letters for parents to fill out in the past we've done it during open house we put kiosks out unfortunately we haven't had it in person um not
086open outside the parent teacher conference um but we do that and then for staff who give them time back into me to and are they in like multiple languages and multiple so like so having it on the district and we have this conversation on our policy like having it on the district website people aren't going on it like they're like they're just like so that's and school messenger like i know i got the i know as a parent i got one because i remember filling it out and it was the one about like how many conferences have you come to i'm the zero i didn't want to waste a teacher's time um but there are times that i haven't gotten them and i do have school messenger so i just and i'm not saying i'm
087not blaming anyone i just want to make sure that we are getting data from as many what's the easiest way to get that data is just i just want to make sure that we're addressing that at some point not tonight but yeah and i will say another opportunity that we're going to offer next year i i send home all my notifications in the top five languages in the district if you don't speak that language you wouldn't get it in that language you have to kind of select it but next year we're going to switch to a module called parent square which many districts in this area are using um some of our administrators from southington kind of pointed it out to us so that will have a lot more users i know i'm sorry my
088apologies um but we we do believe that will be another way to get more access so i think we're at the beginning stages of making ourselves as equitable as possible with access to all of our stakeholders so i think parent square is going to be a really good asset for us okay mr sharma i just got a quick question for dr permit um when you send these surveys out do you is there do you crack like how many folks responded to these surveys and is it everyone is it maybe 60 70 i will turn that to kim she's our survey analyst i don't know what the exact number is but we've had over a thousand um guardians so over a thousand uh surveys were returned which is about a 25 response rate which by survey
089uh metrics is not bad it's it's it's pretty good actually for return rate um and it goes like as i said multiple times so if you kind of didn't pay attention the first time you're going to get it at least two more times directly from school messenger next to your parents square you do so you get three votes we have three kids or two now 25 that is correct and then um i know i saw a slide um i think there was a survey that you shared about teachers in our district that i mean how if they felt supported was can you share that slide what was the percentage of student teachers that felt um they were supported by the district as far as the behaviors not being taken care of was 49 that actual
090question was their confidence level or satisfaction with the school's disciplinary policy the there was a percentage point about folks and their viewpoint of central office and the superintendent's office that was a 95 um satisfaction rate but i i think you might have been referring to that discipline data point yeah the 49 percent so yes maybe maybe the next year next year around maybe uh maybe when you send out the survey maybe like give them more choices in terms of what you know what made them feel like they were not you know maybe some so we can so we can just get some more data and some more ideas in terms of what's on their mind yeah i probably could already get that for the board maybe i'll provide an update because the principals have done
091a lot of work um even since the surveys gone up when like i said when the surveys went out they did know the results were going to be problematic because of the way this year has gone and they were making changes ongoing not just waiting for the survey results go ahead kim yeah and then in terms of the 25 response rate so maybe next year we could try and do something where you could get like a higher response um maybe some out-of-the-box ideas of how we can increase that so i i just wanted to share that the um surveys are disaggregated by school and each school building has their own set of data that their school improvement team looks at so anything that's rating really low those are some of the goals that they put
092in for their school improvement plan thank you kim that's a very good point that's these drive our improvement planning for next year thank you did you want to add anything steve that was it okay all right very good it's been a very good discussion a lot of good questions so uh we have to move on here we have to move into some action items and then we're going to be going into executive session and we can further discuss some of these things there if it's necessary so we're going to go to agenda item c 2 at this time these are actions on board policies and i'll give everybody a moment to get those up or maybe i'm talking to myself c2 [Music] okay so since you're the chair of that committee i'm going to let
093you lead the way okay so most the board of education approved the revisions to policy 5122 assignment of students to classes as recommended second all right the motion is made and seconded discussion questions okay seeing no discussion i'm going to ask the clerk to call the roll michael miranda yes danielle drought yes dr bruce flatcher yes beth monkey wagner yes richard levariere abstine as i'm not familiar with it amy peratti yes i'm yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yeah yes the motion path says eight to zero with one that abstained eight yes one abstain okay let's move on to number two move the board of education approve the revisions to policy 5132 student dress code as recommended second motion is made and seconded open for discussion all right mr leverier yes um was there any um
094as to ms dro's comment about the sleeves um and the shoulders was that uh addressed in any subsequent conversations or revisions since our last meeting can i address sex yes please go ahead and address that i'm so sorry i i don't know what you're referring to for sleeves so you were you were so you were saying at the last meeting that you wanted the the shoulders to be covered by sleeves that came up in conversation and i agreed with you and those words never came out of my mouth oh my god okay and like i wanted to do halter taps now i got 80 sticks at the thing okay well i don't know i don't know these fashion things so like anyway but like there was some there was some kind of conversation about shoulders
095and sleeves no that was discussion but uh if you want to see the policy in its revision you need to go to the fifth page in this sheet for c2 okay i don't know what happens here [Music] there's nothing said about shoulders being covered nothing about straps uh something about straps okay hit me with one okay so keep your mind down oh is that where it says don't pose a threat kidding um students must wear clothing that includes both a top with sleeves or straps so a tank top would be okay a shirt would be so what this idea was was that you couldn't wear two although i wanted every 186 to me a tube top would not be okay so the straps and the sleeves are in there that hasn't changed so it's um
096under basic dress code 1a yes that's up higher i'm sorry yeah okay has to have a sleeve or straps which is it's appropriate all right well if daniel's if danielle's happy with it then so am i danielle would actually want more all right so um miss you up better question um i'm reading a and i just want a little bit of clarification maybe from january so okay obviously all the time you have a very bad connection we're not hearing you they're shirts can you hear me now yes can't hear you hold on can you hear me now yes yep okay so obviously fashion changes and i see that it says um on a we're still on that one on that it's intended to cover undergarments so what about what if they don't wear undergarments what
097if it's a type of shirt that doesn't require it i mean there's some shirts that um with obviously with fashion changing that have uh straps i mean uh like sleeves but still look tube top-ish so i'm kind of a little like unclear about that there are tube tops with sleeves so is that allowed as long as it covers the breast i'm just asking a real question we actually did address that in our committee meeting and one of the conversations that um kristen freeman had with students she had a panel and she reached out and basically the conversation the outcome was you know there's nothing that says we have to wear bras um kudos to those young people who say that um yeah i mean if that's as long as it's not transparent you can't see
098through it if we can't force someone to wear undergarments wow okay i mean i listen i i have a family who are in pattern design so i know and i and i'm actually worried to be honest if you want my opinion i'm all for fashion i'm all into it but i know what limits can be pushed and i just feel it's going to start posing a problem because if i'm wearing a shirt and everyone's all different sizes and i'm not wearing undergarments but it adheres to your dress code of sleeves and covering my breasts depending on my size i mean i could just see this turning into an issue i mean who who makes the discretion as to what is allowed or not if i'm looking just at this i can wear almost anything and
099me and danielle we did have this discussion in regards to people of different sizes sometimes get treated differently so if i'm wearing the same thing as somebody who's maybe a lot thinner than me how is that going to work so can i address that part and then mr freeze is going to address the other part so one of the things and i'm very passionate about it and i'm not right i i i appreciated this dress code because i felt like if someone my size which i'm not on the screen so people who aren't watching i am not a small woman i don't a teacher has no right to say anything to me as long as i've reached this dress code and the reality of it is is larger people tend to get addressed by dress
100code issues more often because it's more apparent if i chose not to wear it under garment it would just be a parent so um you know we we took that into consideration and we said kudos to someone of my stature who felt proud enough to wear certain clothes because the idea of fat shaming and the idea of gender shaming was was at our forefront so um so i'm going to turn that over to so just to see if i'm allowed to comment so you're saying that we should have no issues from teachers and staff for women of larger statures adhering to this dress code i want to make sure this is publicly said because i could see based on you know this is drastically different than any other dress code we've had this happens every
101day if i'm i'm just gonna say if i'm 300 pounds and i'm wearing what you're saying is okay and i'm a lot smaller you're saying that the teachers should not send that student home if it adheres to this dress code because that's what i'm worried about i understand we're saying this but this happens every day to people who aren't of a certain stature they shouldn't accord you know so this dress code just to adjust so i work in another district and i know a lot of people know where it is but art this dress code is very similar to the one for towns that surround us and the idea behind it really is is about and if you the whole dress code is about like parental involvement and what a parent so what i and
102the conversation i had at the meeting was there's a child who's i i would not let my child well now my child dresses however she wants because she's 18 but when she was younger i would never let her dress in that way because of my cultural beliefs and my religious beliefs and my like very conservative nature this other child the things she wore is like woo and then i met the mom and i was like huh okay i get it it's up to the parent not up to us to make those decisions as to what is appropriate now along that lines this keeps it so that we are not showing anything inappropriate to the public because we don't want to you know just i can't go out in public without a shirt on if you
103happen to identify as a female which i don't quite get why guys can do in girls camp or whatever um so yeah so we did have those conversations and there's this and and we you know i'm involved in other towns as well as most people know um so we're just addressing if somebody um identifies as a female and a male and i'm looking on here transgender and non-conforming there are people who are identifying as other things so is that going to be okay as well because i think that should be allowed if this is going to be allowed yeah i i think to to this point is this whole dress code was made with body inclusivity and you can actually see it it's actually said in those words um and we talked about the differences
104of enforcement and how it's been and how we will be equalizing that enforcement and honestly this is basically so that everyone no matter how they identify will be comfortable in their own skin and what they're wearing that is the basic goal of this you can wear what you want within these limits as so long as you're comfortable and we want students and staff to recognize that it's a comfortability no matter what size no matter what age no matter what gender you identify as that is what this is because it has disproportionately been targeted at a certain gender and has been enforced on a certain gender particularly at a certain age when bodies are not exactly they stay in the same they're changing and we talked about that particularly you know middle school girls that's a
105very hard time high school girls it's a very hard time bodies are changing we're not comfortable so the point is to be comfortable because when you're at school your sole purpose is to be learning and socializing whatever but that is the goal here the goal is not to have it distract from others so that you're not comfortable in what you're wearing and as someone who went through body changes we talked about this and each one of our members was able to talk about this and you know miss rose was very uh adamant about how you know this is very similar to her dress code and there have not been issues you would think but quite frankly if you know i'm going off of you know we take data from other schools we did this as
106well we consulted the guidance department as well looking at other dress codes from other districts and you know what i think this is you know i think it's overdue um but i i certainly believe that this the main focus of this policy is for body comfortability go ahead mrs rose so to add to answer i think i i i'm not 100 sure your question but we had a conversation so there is um at the high school and i don't know if those students have graduated but there were students who identified as furries and they came just entailed and one of them and it's fine if that's what they feel comfortable in and they were allowed to do it last year one of them showed up at graduation with a tail and wolf ears super rock
107on if that's what they feel comfortable you know it goes along with our diversity right it's including everyone so and then as far as students who identify i think i don't know what wording you use like if you have someone who is biological male who wants to wear a skirt and they identify as female super rock on um i like i said i work in a district i have a lot of students who you know have gender fluidity and one day they dress in a skirt and one dress they don't and it's like super there's no question and it really makes the kids feel welcome and comfortable so that was our impetus to writing it like this so um with that are there going to be things in place in regards to um ensuring that
108the teachers are i mean this is a huge change for them right we've never had this in our school system all right you know our teachers who are they gonna you know consult with to say hey does this look okay are they gonna use their best judgment so i i'd be comfortable fielding uh that question at steve ferrissi um so right upon the passage of this policy that'll be incumbent upon us uh to engage in professional learning around this matter and we we spoke a lot about that as well uh that this is a variation of of what is currently in place and we do need to kind of close that gap with our own understanding and then application of it so uh that will be first on deck as we kind of move into
109the summer and open for next school year thank you upon passage of the policy roy thank you uh miss parotti thank you um i just want to say that i fully support this dress code um i think that the committee did an excellent job putting it together you know very inclusive um the current dress code as it stands is you know it's biased and i i think that it's important that we trust the students and trust the parents to dress in a way that makes them feel comfortable or send their kids to school in a way that makes the student feel comfortable um regardless of what that is and who they are and how they want to express themselves so i 100 percent support this um this policy and change and i'll be voting yes
110and thank you to the committee because i think you know i know we talked about last time and you did an excellent job you know thinking about everybody and putting it together so that it is fair and um yeah i think that it's going to be a good thing for a district thank you all right uh richard laveriere thank you dr fletcher um i just want to say that uh i do agree in a very small part with what ms weaver said uh in that we want to make sure that we're making students comfortable but at the same time um you know there is there is a fine line between getting out of control and i do also want to agree with her in another small part um specifically uh that we want to make
111sure that we have an a learning environment that is uh fostered above everything else my concern is that if adjustment to any dress code presents any kind of distractions in the classroom that's not something that i'm in that i'm comfortable being on the forefront of progressiveness with okay this dress codes i went through high school with dr with this dress code and so did anybody that's in this room uh that uh went to from to newington high school graduated with there's not a significant suppression of rights here this is like let's be real this this this is about this is about uh yes being inclusive but at the same time the most important thing here is fostering a learning environment i don't want to get out of control i don't want to have instagram you
112know influencing being what's taken over our hallways i want to have you know reading writing and arithmetic thank you dr fletcher thank you for your comments thank you everybody for your comments anastasia did you have another question no candice i did not okay all right thank you okay thank you i just i just wanted to thank danielle beth and jessica um and mr freezing everybody else but really as committee members at the board table i think the passion that that you brought to this topic and all the other ones but i think this one was probably one of the toughest challenges um and as i mentioned at the last meeting as a dad of two girls who are young who both expressed uh to me the fact that they felt that the dress code was
113a little bit biased towards females i couldn't think of better representatives to be on the committee so thank you all for your work all right thank you are you asking me if you can speak go ahead i just want to say a lot of this policy making was brought with personal experience in mind i personally went through a lot in high school being a short girl with long arms and couldn't buy the shorts i wanted to wear and got yelled at and sat home and we all had those personal experiences and this was informed by personal experiences majority girls who quite frankly it is a traumatizing experience to go walk in front and cry in front of your friends because you got dress code and then have to change your jeans in front of everybody
114and wear someone else's old pair of jeans because your shorts were too short even though they were appropriate and your mother would never let you out of the house without this appropriate aware of so um it saved me for a lot of years too because it affects your body image it affects everything and at a time when that's incredibly sensitive and we talk about mental health social emotional learning all of these things that is directly tied to that and is directly tied to how women are viewed and i won't go into this whole rant but it truly means a lot that we had the input from uh students current former and ourselves to be able to say this um both and i went to newington high school and i can say we both had those
115experiences danielle giving those personal experiences so this was not only you know data-driven but this was literally our personal stories in forming this so i want to thank the committee for giving their stories and for c for listening to our stories and incorporating that and i want to look forward to how this will be then implemented we have a lot actually in the policy saying that this has to be implemented fairly i know there was concern about it being implemented differently in different schools but we will be doing that to appropriately implement it at each level so thank you for all that put in this work all right thank you everybody for your input i'm going to ask the clerk to please call the question michael miranda yes daniel drost yes dr bruce fletcher yes
116that's nike yes richard leverier yes jessica weaver yes anastasia miss you up right thank you all very much now we're going to move on to policy 6146.1 move the board of education approve the revisions to policy 6146.1 grading slash assessment system weighted grades as recommended motions made second ocean has been seconded it's open for discussion all right i'm going to ask the clerk to please colorado michael miranda yes danielle drove yes dr bruce fletcher yes that's nice yes richard laveriere yes amy peratti yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yeah yes martian passed unanimously very good we are now moving on to item number four policy 6152 the leveling and placement formally the grading policy moves the board of education approve the revisions to policy 6152 leveling and placement formally grading policy motions made second motion has
117been made and seconded in a discussion would you please call the role madam clerk michael brianna yes yes very good thank you very much number five policy 6141.52 [Music] move the board of education approve new policy 6141.52 challenging curriculum policy as recommended motion has been made do i have a second second motion has been made and seconded any discussions uh madam clerk would you please call the roll michael branda yes yes back to bruce fletcher yes beth [Music] abstain i'm not familiar with it amy peratti yes i'm tama yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yeah abstain i'm not familiar with it as well abstain okay number seven policy six one seven two dot one move oh sorry well go ahead as no please punctual okay move the board of education approve new policy six 6172.1 gifted
118and talented students program as recommended motion has been made second and seconded open for discussion change i would just like to say that these are the policies that were discussed at the last meeting and we're all in the last board packet so i don't have any questions about them necessarily but so this one was the one where we talked about um what are we on it's we talked about how this was in a response to legislative um mandates and there's a lot of conversation about the wording and how like who was responsible for providing this gifted and talented so i just want to refresh everyone's memory that that what this one's about thank you very much for the update uh mr laverier yes i'm very supportive of the new um gifted and talented measures i
119want to make sure that connecticut stays away from models that have been brought on by new york and i'm very pleased with this thanks thank you very much any further questions oh yes miss weaver i just want to clarify this does not mean we have a gifted intelligence program this just means we have a way of a process of identifying them in a policy by statement that we have to end that will be addressed in our advanced courses next policy these bleed into each other but just want to make it clear that we are not adding a gifted and talented teacher this is specifically to identify in the process of identifying gifted and talented students thank you thank you very much good to know all right uh madam clerk would you please call the roll
120michael brandon yes danielle yes dr bruce fletcher yes wagner yes [Music] yes sam sharma yes jessica weaver yes yes unanimously very good thank you uh moving on item number eight policy 7551 the naming of facilities um somebody like to read the motion move the board of education approve new it's like really the new approved new policy 7551 naming facilities as recommended motion has been made second and it has been seconded uh open for discussion seeing no discussion i'm going to ask the clerk to please call the roll michael miranda yes danielle drost yes dr bruce fletcher yes yes did not hear a response richard amy yes damn sharma [Music] all right thank you very much dr fletcher we missed one yes i moved the board of education approved new policy 6141.51 advanced courses as recommended
121did we miss that i have uh 25 two no five five one five one bad one okay where is it i got it i wrote the tally in the wrong place please forgive me has been made and seconded any discussion uh anastasia yap i just have a question um if i may address beth dr fletcher um is does this have to do with some of the books that we um approved uh or we're looking at for curriculum or is and for the uconn classes or is this something different my um because it says something about the advanced course program and you know some of that was in there is that what this is referring to am i totally wrong can somebody clarify that no it's not about any of that it wasn't it was about
122how students are like recommended for the advanced course and just to kind of give again in the policy meeting we had a great conversation there was something that was proposed to us about um like that students were behavioral and i'm summarizing behaviorally ready and we had a really rich conversation about um just it was making just because a student may be acting up in class um taking away that as a reason to not go into advanced classes and it was really just more like a prescriptive way to make sure that all students had access and we were looking at students as a whole to be recommended for these advanced courses am i remembering that policy correctly thank you if i could add i think it was a part two of our equity work making sure
123that all of the students have an access to these really high level high performing courses and and have the ability to access that type of high level education should that be where they um move forward and are they gonna so let's say i have a child who has behavioral issues but they're extremely sorry my dog are extremely gifted so are there going to be supports in place for them to be able to you know be in these classes or how does that work that's what the whole policy was really that's what it's about is to make sure that we aren't exhausting so yeah so they would be so um you know we had the conversation about you know that typical child who sits and is well behaved and just yes miami does a you know
124a great job and can study and and regurgitate out the curriculum um making sure that we weren't looking at just that kind of a student we're looking at the student who needs to be challenged who has the ability and to be pushed so yes those would be in place very good mr lavery here so my question gets back in the oh sorry my question wasn't answered maybe i didn't ask it correctly um for children who have behavioral issues is there going to be like a pair or something in place to help them you know in these programs that's my question yeah they answered the question yes to that and gave an explanation there there's always going to be support if a student has it in their iep correct they have to have support no matter
125what class they're in okay thank you okay mr laverier uh yes thank you dr fletcher um i'm not sure who this question goes to um but to i guess uh whoever um in terms of our equity and inclusion goals do we have different um different metrics that we may be evaluating to make sure that we uh get both the the best students as well as being foster an inclusive learning enviro environment like what metrics are we using i suppose for our equity goals i'll answer that we do track how many children take advanced placement or ece courses and we can also cross check that to race ethnicity gender and special ed status yeah and i just want to say in the policy it states that it's not limited to but inclusive of multiple holistic aspects
126not just grades but also teacher recommendation parent input student desire um we wanted to make sure that there's a holistic number and again it's not you know you need to check all these boxes it's you know one or multi-faceted um maybe mr fercy can read the actual but it's in the actual policy saying what we require of students in order for them to be in these advanced courses that's stated in the policy of how we do that again it should be multi-faceted and holistic i don't know if he has the exact i i do so indicators like gpa improvement over time scoring near benchmark on local assessments uh student interest and persistence criteria not exclusively based on a student's prior academic performance but using a totality of of work to date use of a student's
127prior academic performance must rely on evidence-based indicators on how a student will perform an advanced course and program and then as ms weaver shared you know it's recommendations from a teacher administrator school counselors and other school personnel as well very good all right well thank you very much uh i i you've answered my questions i'm going to be voting yes okay thank you mr sharma hey just a quick question on the gifted and talented program when when do you think it might might it might get started or initiated so that policy that was just voted on and approved is not going to be to approve a program that is going to be to approve the criteria to identify students as gifted and talented in terms of the criteria like do you have something you have
128a framework are you guys going to start working on it or correct uh once the policy well the policy is approved now now we'll begin to work on the criteria to implement for next school year beautiful thank you all right thank you uh miss yap did you have another question or just leave your hand up i don't have another question all right thank you so we're back to policy six one four one point five one uh the motion is on the table i'm gonna ask the clerk to please call the role michael branda yes danielle yes dr bruce fletcher yes beth yes richard levariere yes [Music] amy yes yes the martian passed unanimously excellent now have i skipped anything else speak now well i'm a very detailed person and i miss that so no i'm
129going to go home and beat myself up tomorrow okay so that concludes item c2 and that is the um all right and then we need to go to item c3 which is excuse me action on the budget transfer for 2021 2022 which is the current school year that we are in has nothing to do with the future budget and just a quick synopsis this is a very standard procedure for this time of year where we make transfers among line items to balance the budget to zero before july 1. so there is a motion there i will tell you and i'm going to pop up there was a error on the one that you received so we have a correct copy both projected on the screen right now as well as what we're going to pass
130around which i'll ask miss craig to do for me if you wouldn't mind so i will turn it back over to bruce dr fletcher to entertain any questions that folks may have and louis on standby as well all right so very good so are there any questions right now pertaining to c3 item c3 while you're receiving this new one you're talking about like this in general yeah at miss trost um it is what it is i know we need to do it so i just like and i had that i had emailed you about the same question um so like when we're like over budget i'm like something like math so we're 268 so is that so next year did we take into consideration that need when we increased on that budget or is that
131going to come back to bite us again next year does that make sense and i know that that's not an appropriate like you know terminology but i don't know how to say that uh that makes perfect sense um i do know that we were under budgeted in these items because of the low budget increase we had last year so they were designed already lower than they should be knowing that we would have to use the non-lapsing fund i don't know lou if he wanted to add anything to that discussion hey thank you dr bruhman the circumstances for next year will be very similar to where we started this year everyone can recall when the budget was passed one year ago for 21 22 there was a reliance of two million dollars built in on the
132non-lapsing fund which is four hundred thousand dollars each for the five big programs okay in the final motion uh the transfer request we based it on only utilizing eight hundred thousand of that two million dollars that allows enough money to roll over next year to cover the 2 million 25 000 we have built into next year's budget so we have we're starting essentially the same deficit position uh the factors that allowed us this year to uh be able to you know not need to utilize all two million dollars put us in a position to be able to do it for next year but i have no guarantee or certainty we're going to be able to replicate that again uh does that answer your question no like more and this it kind of goes along the
133same things of what i asked i think last week and i apologize that last weekend how am i doing last week i still have copenhagen i apologize um you know it's this idea of understanding where we're really at with the budget when we start the budget right so this i'm going to save this one so that next year i'm like i know exactly where we were kind of where we were where we're at i just want to make sure that when we're going to the budget and i you know stay true to my being fiscally conservative but i also want to make sure that we're providing that we have the evidence to really prove that we need the money do you know what i mean so like this helps right so like when you're saying
134we're 800 that we only need 800 000 not the whatever originally playing so like understanding really where we're at is very helpful so i just want to make sure that like so next year what i'll be kind of i spying is you know we have again i like math clearly um you know like we're looking at 4.1 million in the math is that what we're going to need again next year in order to keep math status quo it's not really about the required adjustment it's about what we need well next year in math you will need that plus your whatever built-in raises there are for the staffing costs and one of the things you need to recognize is that budget is underfunded by four hundred five thousand dollars for each of the five big programs
135so you're starting in a four hundred five thousand dollar hole for each of those five they have to be hopefully good things happen during but during the course of the year to mitigate that but that's not necessarily the case i mean even you know with the you know looking at gasoline prices right now those are going to have significant impacts in next year's budget yeah right like along those same lines like the board of ed budget is you know under two support events yeah under 236 like will we most likely be under 236 000 next year also right no on that one not that was because of the big bump up in the uh open choice money to cover the tuitions for uh the magnet schools that's not going to be there it's a zero
136going into next year and then obviously employee benefits vary correct you have the 700 1 000. i guess my question would have been better of like which ones are they still gonna that are lower would remain lower i guess rather than the ones that are higher thank you thank you all right so i noticed we have two people online that have their hands raised right now but what i would like to do procedurally i would like to have the motion read and then we can go into discussion on the motion itself here i go move the board of education authorize the superintendent of schools to make the needed budget transfers which will reflect reflect an unencumbered balance of zero which may include up to one percent of unencumbered funds that will be directed to the
137surplus account at the end of the 2021 2022 school year all right the motion has been made and seconded by mr branda now it's open for discussion uh amy peratti i'm sorry i was trying to find my mute button um thank you so i just i lou kind of answered my question um but is would it be more helpful because i know that you know we're kind of we're using the non-lifting funds and those salary accounts would it be more helpful to kind of have the non-lapsing fund as like a separate item and i don't even know if this is possible but or you know at least a display that's saying like the math salary really is x amount but we're going to use this amount towards from the non-lapsing funds and then this amount
138we're asking from for the town or for from the town so it's you know so to danielle's point knowing how much do we have to spend in the math department on salaries versus how much are we spending just because we're using the rest of it to trim the non-lasting funds if that makes any sense i think the full i think what danielle's may be looking for and i'm sorry if i'm thinking for you but i think what um would be maybe helpful to see is um like a total amount that needs to be in the math budget or the art or um the other salaries okay the answer to that is yes to do something like that for the board if that's desired uh if you can visualize the financial statement as it's presented right
139now uh your last program at the bottom is community services one approach we could take is add one more program or line item at the bottom called non-lapsing fund that would be a negative 800 excuse me a negative two million twenty-five thousand dollars in looking at next year's financial statement so the other the other all the five big programs would be brought up to their total dollar amount or the 100 gross and you have that one land item the management of how that utilization would not happen until the final transfer in june you know that would show a zero in the non-lapsing line item all year long until we get to this time when we're settling the books and we'll know exactly how much that is we would not be drawing down on that during
140the year that would provide you the gross number you would be needing to look at by program with that one offset i would do that just basically as a secondary report to the official version with all the programs that are here um and that way you could have two looks at it and you'd be able to recognize easily uh where the uh money is coming from to offset the non-lapsing funds so we could certainly start that for you know the financial reporting next year enjoy yeah and i understand it has to be this way for the official accounts and everything but i think yeah having a secondary report might make it more transparent and just more clear how much we really do need to pay in salaries for each of the five departments and then
141what we're using from our savings i think that would be um that would be something very helpful and i just for clarification i did put up next year's program structure on the display so what i'm hearing is that we're showing you know this year and next year but i think it sounds like the board wants to also see how we're leveraging non-lapsing so we can we can illuminate that using this chart to maybe further provide clarification yeah okay so that's that's something that we can send out soon because we have this ready to go we just didn't do the offset piece thank you are you welcome uh mr sharma let's have a question for lou um in terms of like the non-lapsing funds are we close to like zero when we budget in like for
142the next next cycle next next year okay uh as of today the answer is no uh right now in the non-lapsing fund is approximately three million one hundred twenty nine thousand dollars of value and i will be drawing down or in the final reconciliation i hope exactly eight hundred thousand dollars which will then leave us uh a little 2.1 million dollars available in the non-lapsing fund to address future years needs right now we have baked into the budget 2 million 25 000 so we have a little bit of wiggle room uh at that point beyond that but only a couple hundred thousand dollars uh based on if it all goes according to plan for next year and then and then and then at the basically at the end of june when this year ends right
143we we will get like a one we will get like a one percent that's going to go back and do the non-lapsing funds based on what's now yeah no that will not happen this year there is no new money going in if anything i have to first put back in the 800 000 i'm taking out of the non-lapsing fund so if i'm able to between now and then save a minimum of eight hundred thousand dollars then the next dollar in every dollar beyond that i could declare as a surplus but as right now we're just drawing down uh the non-lapsing balance uh with minimal opportunity to uh add to the balance at this point so that means the next budget cycle we we cannot really tap into the non-lapsing front right i mean we won't
144have anything to tap into well as of right now go if it goes according to plan right now three million one less eight hundred thousand dollars which is the what this uh year-end transfer is based on will be around 2.3 million dollars of available funds in non-lapsing we are committed to to balance our budget 2 million 25 000 to get there so you'll have 275 000 or so that's available in the fund at that point and that can cover issues that occur next year you know maybe i have the good fortune being able to chisel away at it a little more and only take 750 000 or 700 000 from the non-lapsing every dollar i can save will leave an extra dollar in the fund for next year so and then and then beyond that
145like there might not be something that we could happen to them right not at this point now okay and then and then in terms of the salary increases like is it 2.7 that's like no matter if nothing changes what goes up like two points at 2.72.8 in terms of like salary all the contracts we have i don't think it was that high i think it was like 2.3 i don't have that information readily in my fingertips here i'd have to go back and look at that i thought it would so yeah i mean it'll be a good idea if you can basically the next time around just have that so so that you know we all know that hit nothing changes we still offer next year we have an increase of two point whatever three
146percent that's based on the contracts and the salaries okay yeah it's fine we can you know as soon we start doing that work in september for next year so yeah so it just makes it easier you know when people live you know in the town and for us thanks thank you okay uh any further questions i'm gonna let's move the question please go ahead oh yeah i'm sorry michael grander yes danielle drove yes dr bruce fletcher yes thank you yes richard leverier yes amy yes sam sharma yes all right thank you very much and that is the final action item for this evening the next thing that we are going to be doing is uh going into executive session now two things are going to happen i'm going to entertain a motion to go into
147executive session once we do we have to vacate the room and you have to leave the virtual setting that you're in right now and go to the other link that was sent to you and then we're going to convene in five minutes i don't know we have people this young person has been waiting i don't know are we allowed to move to public participation first or you may not do that jones um you here to speak all right at this point uh i would have waited till the end but if i could do that now that would be appreciated all right so i will allow for public participation participation at this moment right now if there's anyone else online that wants to participate as well we will allow that because once we go into executive
148session we have no reason to come out in public and vote so we're just going to adjourn from there so at this time i'm going to turn it over to you i'll give you your three minutes i just had a few things to say especially based on some of the things that were brought up around lgbt plus issues i'm one of the coordinators of the gsa at new england high school that's the gender sexuality alliance and i would like to first thank the work of a few people i've been working with including dr freeman and dr harrison and uh teachers who have really cared about this issue and wanted to push it forward and that this issue was raised and talked about now um but i did want a second the idea that there is
149not enough being done yet and the people in my community the people in my gsa the people i care about and my peers around me do not have access to everything they need to and are not being fully served by the district in terms of their identities it's really important that like action happens around this because you the issue of gender neutral bathrooms was brought up and that is something that's important and i'm extremely glad that there is action around that uh as it stands if you are someone who is not male or female or doesn't identify with male or female you only have one bathroom that is sometimes available that you sometimes can get the key for and there have been efforts by a lot of people to ensure that the access is there
150but it's still one bathroom on the first floor tucked behind uh like the the locker rooms and that that is an interruption to the learning environment it makes it so the student on the third floor has to walk down get there and get back up and so for that student it's an issue and it disrupts their learning um also along the lines of like the atmosphere of the school and the curricula as a whole health classes need to be more inclusive and i am very appreciative of the efforts that have been made to do that um and i'm glad that those efforts have been made but as a whole in regards to all classes lgbt because relationships identities need to be reflected in not just when they're directly talked about but in general as secretary
151joe's brought up whenever stuff comes out you very seldom see a singular they used in the updated dress code policy which i am extremely glad passed as he or she is used in the policy itself which addresses some of these issues uh at least the version that's in tonight's packet uses here shape um and that that's just a a cultural issue that like needs to be discussed when we're talking about anything and there are basic issues of understanding that are important to keep in mind uh when the dress code was talked about in terms of like uh if there's a a student who's like a signed male at birth who identifies as female and wants to wear a skirt they should be allowed to i completely agree with that if there's a male student like
152assigned male at birth who also identifies as male also wearing a skirt is fine so basic issues around understanding what gender means people and the differences between expression and identity and the importance of respecting that uh not just not just to like be kind but also so that students get access to the education that newington schools provides i'm a senior like i'm graduating tomorrow i will be leaving uh this district at least for four years and i i want those that i care about and that i'm leaving behind to have the best access to the education as possible so i just wanted to express my thanks for those efforts and that they need to continue all right thank you very much yeah go ahead i want to thank you jonas because they it like i
153we worked really hard and we missed it and it's really important that that people i'm sure we missed it if if we're told we missed it we missed it but um and i i i have learned so much from my students and from obviously i'm sure you're guessing my child right about understanding so whenever something is brought up um that's a really good point about you know it doesn't matter what your gender is if you want to wear it so i appreciate that feedback so it makes us grow when we're taught and we're taught by you people not by us people because we're clueless thank you all right thank you very much so all right we have no more public participation so at this time i will entertain a motion to move into executive session
154motion to move into executive session second motion has been made and seconded so we are now in executive session so that means that we're going to be clearing this room and i'm going to ask everybody to please leave your zoom uh meeting that you have been in and only board members can attend in this one and we're inviting dr brummette in mr gracie and miss davis as well oh and mr farizi and ms davis will be in as well so we invite you guys to come in all right so we're going to be five minutes and then we will resume our meeting in executive session i'm not so sure you really need to i don't i don't think so you