001[Music] so all right chairman fletcher do we have all of our board members present i am looking right now to see one two three four i'm counting eight you see eight okay let's see the five counting me there's one well if you see the eight then i'm gonna i do see eight board members i just don't see no there's michael branda mm-hmm [Music] amy's in though i don't think mrs yap is here yet well that's right that is who we're not seeing okay well it's seven o'clock and we have a quorum so i'm gonna call this meeting to order it's december 15 2021 the time now is 701 pm this meeting is called order and as you are able please rise to your fleet for the feet to the flag of the united states of
002america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god indivisible with liberty and justice for all okay miss craig would you do the roll call michael miranda here danielle drast here dr bruce fletcher here beth manky hutt wagner here richard lavery present peratti here sam sharma i saw his name i didn't richard here i spoke with mr sharma tonight he should be here he is sam just on mute yeah he's here yep i'm here jessica weaver yeah anastasia yap here everyone's present thank you very much well at this time we're going to move to our item b the presentation of awards and proclamations so dr brummett take it away thank you very much we have many things to celebrate this evening so i'm thrilled to do so um at our lap this
003is our last formal board meeting of uh 2021. so looks like someone was trying to present there anyway our first order of business is our everyday hero award and i am pleased to announce that it is going to michelle pizzafarado who is the uh who was a teacher at elizabeth greene she was nominated by brian d rocher i hope i pronounced that correctly ryan writes that most people know how difficult the first year of teaching is with curriculum family communication and creating your own classroom that being said this is my first year of teaching i could ask could not ask for a better teammate and grade level partner than michelle pizzafarado from the daily check-ins from my classroom doorway to initiating a strong professional learning community michelle is an all-around professional as i glance into
004her room each day was tailored to meet the needs of all students and their vast learning needs the content learned in that classroom is not just what comes from teachers college or investigations but it is infused my apologies it is infused with identity and personal discovery work as a district our goal is to close the achievement gap michelle believes that in order to close that gap students must be aware of what makes them truly special and unique she not only exposes students to different ideas but celebrates who they are in every interaction i was extremely fortunate to be offered a position in the town of newington but i'm even more fortunate to have the opportunity to work with michelle so michelle i do see that you're on the line you will be receiving this lovely
005everyday hero plaque tomorrow and we are thrilled to award you with that i'm going to give you a virtual round of applause and everyone around the table seems to be clapping and as luck would have it mr marciano is on the line because we have another lovely uh award coming up soon for your e-green school as well i'm so excited dr bruhman i am so proud these they are awesome team and they work so hard together and michelle is a is a beautiful soul and wor is awesome teacher so thank you yes i was very struck by that nomination and uh you know supporting a new teacher during covid during all of our work this year is just amazing dr fletcher would you like to um solicit any comments or should we do with that
006at the end what would you like to do well if that's the only presentation why don't we take a moment now and give the board members an opportunity to share as well as uh some of her co-workers if they're in here and they want to say anything and also i would like to just ask everybody if you are not speaking please mute your microphones we don't get too much background noise thank you uh miss hutt wagner hi just um wanted to say thank you so much i know um as a teacher myself that um it is a crazy year um certainly and um to be supporting first-year teachers is just so incredibly important um and just thank you for that thank you for setting a positive culture and climate um you are absolutely an everyday
007hero thank you very much and miss weaver love fest is back i'm so excited with our new board um the everyday hero award is something i think that's really awesome and it makes us really be really the everyday heroes that don't always get the recognition that we think they all deserve because everyone's an everyday hero in our district but it's so great to hear this and i always learn new things and it's great that the community learns new things about our teachers so i'm so excited um and congratulations i echo best sentiments um we know this is not an easy year it is not easier than last year by any means so we just really appreciate all the work that you're doing and it's always wonderful to hear um you know how you're helping out
008not only our students but our teachers as well it really means a lot not only to us as board members but to our community and to our students so thank you so much congratulations and welcome to the everyday hero uh legacy that we have going now thank you very much is there anyone else i don't see any more hands so dr brummett i'll turn it back to you i didn't know if uh miss pizza would like to say anything um before we turn up we do our next presentation i do have a crying 16 month old in the background um i can handle it i just wanted to say thank you to brian and our team alicia brian and myself we've really found a nice great uh cohesive group working together so i'm so fortunate
009to have the team that we have and we're i don't consider myself any sort of hero by any means um and this one kind of caught me off guard but i just i'm so fortunate for my team and the people that we work with each and every day at green so and newington in general thank you thank you so much michelle it was a pleasure to hear all those nice things about you and uh thank you for your efforts to support your fellow teachers all right well tonight seems to be an elizabeth green night um a few months back i received some exciting news in my inbox that elizabeth green was going to be honored by u.s news and world report so here's what i heard about egreen school they of course identified them as
010a public school uh at the time they had an enrollment of 284 they're a little bit higher than that now they serve uh students grades pre-k to four and at the time that this uh acknowledgement was noticed they had students 62 percent of their students students scoring at or above proficiency in reading and math so that was a high level accomplishment the other reason why they were being acknowledged is because the school actually has some of the highest diversity in our district more more than 50 percent or about 50 percent of the students in egreen are other than white so we have a diverse team over there egreen and we have um 40 percent are economically challenged so i believe u.s news and world report wanted to acknowledge that even with some of those some
011might consider some challenges egreen has written risen above that and created some fantastic results and having visited there many times been in classrooms talked to the team the teachers i know that everyone there is extraordinarily dedicated to the children they work really hard in their professional learning communities and they do some really fantastic work around social emotional learning which i believe has all contributed to that so they're considered in the top 200 of all elementary schools in the state of connecticut and they are considered one of the best elementary schools that u.s news and world report did honor so we are extraordinarily proud of what they've been able to accomplish and so excited that we got them this nifty plaque although you looks backwards when i show it to you it's very nice we will
012proudly hand it off to mr marciano and his team tomorrow uh perhaps we can i believe he's already mentioned this at a faculty meeting but if he hasn't i'd be more than happy to attend a faculty meeting and present the team with this well-deserved honor and then they can proudly hang it in the front foyer of the school so anyone visiting e green will know that they are an award-winning school who do amazing things on behalf of our children and you know have really worked hard to get this type of success so i will now turn it back over to the dr fletcher to see if he wanted to garner any comments from the board okay congratulations agree now wait wait virtual applause all right back to doctor all right so miss droves i just
013want to say congratulations that's awesome um never an easy task so uh thank you from for doing that for our kids and for our town thank you thank you and miss weaver okay i just want to say as an e-green alum this makes me so excited um i should have brought like my 2004 graduation t-shirt that probably doesn't fit but um no it's just it's a wonderful wonderful place and it's even more wonderful because of the staff that we have and the teachers that take care of it mr martiana you've done a great job and i just applaud you and your staff it's been an incredible ride just these past few years to watch all the things that are being done um and yeah i'm totally biased a hundred percent that it is the most
014elementary school um but now we just have a plaque to prove it so i'm glad that's the case so congratulations thank you very much and miss up wagner um also an elizabeth green alum um second generation elizabeth green kid right here and i did my student teaching at elizabeth green so that school holds a really really really really special place in my heart um i've always felt like family walking in there my grandma actually um used to be the librarian's helper i'm going like way back when the library was in the basement of the school um so she has some really cool stories about that so um amazing school all of new england schools are but just being able to walk in there no matter who you are and you just feel um you feel
015like a big hug um and so that's that's because of the dedication of the teachers um and administration and families all working together it's just a really beautiful thing so congratulations to all of you and um please echo that to all the teachers as well yes congratulations and i know that there is a former principal of elizabeth green in the meeting tonight and i'm sure that she is very proud as well am i right mrs kraus all right so mr sharma hey i just i just wanna just want to thank mr marciano and the whole team at that school thank you for making us proud good job okay any more board members anastasia yap please go ahead hi i just want to say congratulations to everyone this is super exciting um yeah that's all i
016want to say congratulations it's awesome thank you very much all right dr brummett do i get to speak i'm sorry do i have to raise my hand i'm terrible oh i didn't see your hand i'm sorry please please i just i i um i'm so glad u.s news finally caught up and uh caught figured out what we all knew on my team is pretty fantastic and i'm very excited to accept this award but i i'm humbled by the people that i work with and by the students that i serve and by the families that i work with they are amazing and each and every one of them contributes to making our school uh the i i see it as the best place in the world but um our real goal and what we talk to
017kids about and what we want to accomplish is being better than disney world a place that excites uh uh kids it inspires kids to learn and and and be excited about being in a uh being in this place and working with the the staff and and with each other so i appreciate um all of the congratulations um and on behalf of my staff and my students and my families we thank you for all that you do and um appreciate uh this this recognition thank you you're welcome congratulations again all right dr brummett well we're on a roll tonight now this is not going to be about e green uh we're going to switch our attention now to john patterson elementary school uh a few months back i received a letter from the students of miss
018sanzo's grade one classroom and this is a little bit of backdrop we were uh making some plans over at john patterson to fix uh their parking lot over there we've had you know for quite a long time we've wanted to expand it and also repave it because it's not in the best of condition and many parents are concerned about parking over there as well as staff parking so the kids got wind of that as as did miss sanzo because they were worried that when we were to expand that parking lot it may impact the beloved shady the tree now it's important to know that ms sanzo and her class spent a lot of time with shady the tree that's a tree that is front and center on the side of of i've been over there
019to make sure i understood which tree was shady the kids go out there they read under shady the trees certainly with all of our mass breaks now and other protocols maybe not right now but earlier in the school year and last year they were utilizing that as a mass break area and they wrote me this very wonderful letter that i wanted to share with the board of education dear dr brummett we heard that people want to cut down trees here at john patterson to make a parking lot one of those trees that might get cut down is our class tree named shady we do not want shady to be cut down shady is a place where we go to read books write stories play games and take breaks it is fun to watch shady's leaves
020change colors in the fall we also release our monarch butterflies under shady sometimes the butterflies land on shady's branches and leaves we have also buried some caterpillars and butterflies who died under shady to help the earth if we need more parking spaces at john patterson school maybe parking lot can be made around shady and the other two trees or maybe a smaller parking lot can be made instead we hope you understand why shady is so important to our class trees are also important to our community and planet they are homes for animals and insects they give us shade when it's hot outside trees are trees help us to breathe by giving us clean air thank you for reading our letters please write back to us and tell us what you think so i also each
021student also sent me their own letter with a drawing of shady the tree as well as reasons why they love shady now i'm going to read the names of the children in the class and if they're on the call tonight because they were invited can they please raise their hands so that you get recognized by the board of education landon anthony riley arya jace kb abby aviana parker sienna max roman holden jacob grace ida and noah so i was so impressed when these students i didn't write them back i went straight away over to john patterson school i went into their classroom and we talked all about this and the students were very pleased to hear that their voice matters so we are going to do everything we can to uh not bother shady when
022we work on the parking lot at john patterson this spring and summer so we are and ms sanzo has been a wonderful advocate and really worked with her children and we all know that ms sanzo and her class are big fans of shady so i'd like to turn this back over to dr fletcher to see if he wanted to solicit any comments it does appear there are some hands raised okay uh i know that we've got some of the students their hands are still raised i'm not sure if they want to speak or not if they do they leave it up and i'll call on you and boy they disappeared quick [Laughter] all right so we'll begin with uh miss droves hi guys i just want to tell you all how brave you are and
023i love the fact that you stuck up for this tree that happened at my school too they were going to cut down a tree and my students they're a little older than you they got together and they did the right thing so keep using your voice keep being who you are and you're the reason why we're all here so congratulations guys i'm proud of you i know that's not easy to do all right thank you very much and miss up wagner uh i am so impressed by all of you that is a really really beautiful thing that you did um and my son goes to preschool at patterson so i absolutely know shady and him and i have walked under there several times um and i just think it's so special i think it's wonderful
024how you all used your voices and spoke from your heart and really helped this beautiful tree so i want you to keep up the great work and i'm just so excited to see what you all are gonna do someday because my goodness if you're doing these things at this age wow big big things to come so wonderful wonderful job and happy holidays to all of you thank you very much and mr leveriere hi good evening questions for dr brunette what was the student's first name who uh whose letter you read please the letter that i read actually was the class letter that well the class letter the whole class wrote it and signed it and then each student or many of the students sent me individual letters and which teacher was that from that was
025from mrs sanzo who she is on the line tonight i see her um she's just waving right now she is the teacher and she um obviously is a big advocate for children and wanted them to have a voice in and something that might happen to their school so that's kind of the progression of this uh event okay thank you yeah all right thank you and we have a student representative james and daddy please go ahead it seems as if we have a bunch of uh june uh student board of ed reps in the in the call this evening yeah um that that that that was very hard especially because i was in mrs sanzo's class when i was um a week first grader and i i remember that i don't know how many times we
026were underneath the shady uh reading but i just it was it was the best of times god but i wouldn't do to go back there um but yeah just great on the students hi ms sanzo jack says hi um uh just wow great on you guys all right thank you very much and miss you up hi everyone my son also goes to don patterson and you know shade of the tree um he released butterflies under there he's awesome so that's awesome i was gonna say congratulations and thank you so much for being brave and you know sending in those letters and thank you i think it's awesome all right thank you and ms peratti thank you dr fletcher um congratulations to you students i think that's amazing what you did you saw a problem you
027wrote a letter dr romer responded and i think that's awesome i think you should continue to doing that tell your parents to do the same thing mrs sanzo thank you for giving your students a voice and and saving shady thank you all right is there anyone else that would like to speak perhaps the teacher mr sharma well i just just want to reach out to everyone um you know what you've done is so inspiring so keep it up thanks thank you very much thank you everyone hi stephanie sanzo um and i just want to thank dr brummett for um i know it's such a busy time of year but she came i think the next day after receiving the letters came right into the classroom and took the time to talk to the kids about
028it and it just really showed them that their voices no matter how little um do matter so i mean the whole experience was very meaningful to them and fell right into citizens global citizenship and community and um persuasive writing so it couldn't have been more meaningful it could have been you know more of a perfect time for that too for them to experience that and for for the results um that ensued to to come their way so it was it was it's just been a great experience and kids hi jimmy hi jack um kids even in the school have heard about it and will come by the classroom and say oh we heard about shady we heard what you did for shady so they're so proud so thank you everyone thank you okay looks like
029there are no other hands raised up so i will turn it back to dr brummett thank you dr fletcher i am now just going to quickly present my last honor for the evening the this year something i've wanted to do ever since i became a superintendent i worked with mrs fiola to do a holiday art contest for potential christmas or holiday card design and i was so thrilled to get a tremendous response i probably received over i've lost track 300 to 400 entries and boy oh boy was it hard to decide uh there were so many wonderful wonderful entries i asked some of my office folks to help me make some decisions and tonight to honor those selections that were made i chose one entry from every school that entered so each elementary school had
030entries uh and the high school i allowed two uh honorees there and i want to also say before i show the designs uh is i have sent these out to many many people they've gone to all members of the town council the mayor the town manager folks at town hall while the board members got them i also sent out to all of my harford area superintendents who i spent a lot of time with and i saw several of them recently actually yesterday and they said dr brummett i love those cards they were amazing they were so impressed with the quality of the cards and i'm continuing to send them out and i'm going to send them out to every administrator in the district um so your cards are going everywhere and also i forgot to
031mention all of our winners i am going to send them a copy of their own card because we took their design and made holiday cards so now each awardee will win or we'll get one in the mail next probably late this week or early next week so without further ado let me show you the winners first winner is claire perrault from ruth chaffee and her design is coming up as soon as it stops swirling look at that she's in first grade and it was just a very bright and wonderful design so clear all is our winner from ruth chafee uh let me go back our winner from john patterson is callahan hotchkiss and her design is coming up momentarily sorry through the she goes by cali he's in grade three and look at that very
032warm and friendly holiday card i'll tell you on this on these holiday cards everyone is smiling broadly it's very very exciting to me from elizabeth green school we have gabby alicia and there is her design coming up and she even incorporated some lovely sentiments about peace and love i thought that was a wonderful sentiment for the holiday season and we also have from anna reynolds samarth swain and his award is his designs coming up momentarily here there it is and what struck me about this design is the best holiday gift is my family i thought that was a beautiful sentiment we wrote happy holidays so again a very nice holiday and then our high school award winners this is a ninth grade student from newington high school faith defrancis and this was a beautiful kind
033of forest design with these intricate snowflakes i was just thought it was unbelievable borderlining on almost a professional job and then last but not least is our last uh winner from again newington high school a student by the name of benjamin niez and his design was really cool it was like a fox walking through the forest in a snowstorm so you can imagine with these amazing winners all the others that i looked at it was so so hard to pick but again these students have done their school district proud by creating these designs taking the time to do it and i would like to thank their art teachers mrs fiola who's our head of our art department could not be here tonight she had a family obligation but i believe we have at least one
034art teacher here is it deb simon so again they were very helpful in getting this organized and and i can tell you the feedback from the community and from anyone who's received the cards thus far has been extraordinarily positive so i will turn it over to dr fletcher if he wants to solicit or receive any comments okay yeah first of all i want to say thank you very much because i received mine and one of the types of cards that i love the most are the ones that are handmade and i always hang on to those i have a place that i'll keep it after the holidays are over so thank you to all the students that participated and congratulations on the winners and miss weaver i just want to say congratulations i think we
035have some of the artists on the line tonight so wanted to say congratulations to you all and they're beautiful i have to give a special shout out to my cousin faith because she is a fantastic artist and no bias here i did not know she was picked um until until yeah so um it's you know i can't even draw a straight line so um it's always impressive to see um what creativity all of our students have i think one of the the great strengths of our district is the investment we have in our arts program um and the artists that we produce uh you know one of our favorite parts is seeing student art in our art shows and i think this is a really great way to to showcase all of the talent we
036have here so well done to everyone online and not on the line um it absolutely made i know a lot of people's day it made all of our board's day as our last retreat we got those special cards um and we each got to see a different one so it's always great to see the talent not only at the high school but down to the elementary level there's so much amazing creative creativity and talent in our students so we really appreciate it and i know a lot of other people receiving these cards will appreciate as well so congratulations thank you very much and miss peratti thank you i actually have mine right here from uh samartha anna reynolds so i just wanted to show everybody how beautiful the card actually is but i think everyone
037did an amazing job it was a great contest dr brum and i think i hope you do it again because i think more students are going to love the opportunity to have their pictures sent out across the state and country even so um thank you for this and congratulations to all the winners all right thank you very much i miss you up hi everyone i just want to say thank you i got married you know my card also they're beautiful and you guys are fantastic artists i can't draw at all so um thank you and congratulations you guys did an excellent job thank you all right thank you and mr levariere hi i got uh a card too i want to say thanks claire it's a beautiful picture and congratulations to all of the winners
038thank you very much and mr sharma i just just want to thank everyone i mean those are beautiful cards so thanks a lot a great job everyone it looks like one of our students has their hand raised mr alicea or miss i'm not sure is isaiah alicea the name on here so go ahead yeah it's actually ileana that's my son's i didn't realize i was signing under his when i thought but my daughter gabby um was one of the uh chosen cards so i'm excited to receive mine in the mail soon and i want to congratulate all of the students and it was a surprise i didn't even know she had entered into the drawing she talked about it but never told me that or showed me until i got the email from the school
039saying she won i was like oh wow so that was a nice surprise and wasn't sure if it was going to be an opportunity to be able to purchase any of the cards um even to give out to family members and stuff like that i don't know if that's something that um can be can be done i hadn't considered that but i will uh see if i have any leftover of the designs and then i can let the families have anything that i'm not going to use so that way they can use them okay that's great i showed a couple family members they're like oh can we buy them i was like i have no idea i don't even i didn't even know about it so i'll find out but it was a great program
040and she was excited so i'm sure a lot of the other kids are going to want to do it next year it's great thank you all right thank you and it looks like dj uh hello everyone good evening so we are summer's parents from annual renault thank you for uh selecting his card and he feels so excited about this and this is a nice forum to interact with everyone for the first time thank you for inviting us and thanks happy holidays to all of you same to you as well and miss perrault hi i'm claire's mom just wanted to say thank you she's really excited about it especially wanted to just give a shout out to mrs gaida she's a wonderful art teacher and we're grateful um to be in a community that values the
041arts thank you okay thank you all right so uh are you finished with your presentations dr brummett uh whoop you've been muted ms sigmund would you like to say something i saw your hand raised yes thank you i just wanted to say thank you dr brummett for showcasing our students work it was so meaningful it was so um the kids were just very excited about it certainly on the high school level i i'm i'm sure even more so um verbally enthusiastic on the elementary level our high school students can sometimes be as i call quietly excited but i know it meant a lot so i just wanted to say thank you on behalf of the art teachers and the students who participated and thank you so so much and thank you miss sigmund and i
042apologize i did not see your raised hand on my screen or i would have called on you oh no problem at all okay okay dr bruhman all right well i think we've had a a full plate of honorees this evening thanks again and congratulations to all honorees i'm now going to put the powerpoint back up there because it is time for public participation so let me just get that up there in case we have any folks that um want to participate from home okay so i just want to remind everybody that this is public participation and it's on any matter that is related to board responsibilities and we are going to limit civil participation to three minutes okay looks like we have some people in miss carson hello hello how are you all start with
043my name and my address please hi i'm alison campbell i'm at 20 valley view drive in newington um i want to thank you all for allowing me to address my concerns with you tonight um i come as a parent obviously here in newington um and i'm very concerned about the priorities of the administration currently and the direction that we're heading in we all know our children lost an entire year of education and i commend our teachers i know they tried as hard as they could but we know that missing entire year virtually has put them behind their test scores are falling mental health is at an all-time low socially behaviorally and they are still bound by these draconian coven measures with the future of our students at stake rather than emphasizing you know how are
044we going to make up for lost time how are we restoring their finite childhood the superintendent has chosen to email blast us consistently about getting our children vaccinated where we can go to get vaccinated we've decided whether or not we want this we do not want to receive these emails any longer we want emails about what's being done to restore our children's childhood and are they receiving the highest quality of education it's being made very clear through the correspondence to parents that dr brummett um i'm gonna ass that's a doctor of education i don't believe that's a doctor of epidemiology feels comfortable giving medical advice and pushing this unauthorized gene therapy on our children it's a very personal decision and everyone uh oh i'll stop there the the superintendent i'll address that first is being
045come way too comfortable um reaching inside this you know the parents homes and pushing this agenda only about twenty percent of parents in connecticut have decided to vaccinate their five to 11 year olds they are well within their right to do so but that being said the vast majority of parents are not comfortable doing so at this time we do not want to be pressured we don't want to feel discriminated against and i've also seen board members posting on social media facebook encouraging parents to mask their uh children outside of school to vaccinate their children outside of school as taxpayers we did not elect you to tell us how to parent our children i will decide if and when to ask my child and if and when to vaccinate them we have elected you to
046hold our education and our educators to the highest standards possible and to give a safe and equal learning environment my takeaway point in all of this is that i would like to stop the focus on masks and vaccines we don't want emails about them anymore we want to catch our children up and we want to restore their childhood they only get one thank you so much for your time and merry christmas and thank you for your comments merry christmas and sarah yaser hello thank you yeah i'm sarah geiser and i'm from 54 east robins avenue you guys can hear me okay yeah we can hear you awesome um i just wanted to quickly start off by saying congratulations to the newly appointed members and thank you for being a part of the decision-making process for
047our children i'm here tonight um along with allison uh to talk about mac masks and vas vaccine mandates for some of you this will be the first time you get to listen to me and for others it's not um i'm here mainly for parent choice i'm against masking our children but i believe in our constitution and of life liberty and pursuit of happiness i believe that everyone has the right to choose what is best for them i have sent numerous mass studies in an email correspondence months ago and i'm willing to go out on a limb and say it was probably about six months ago and yet here we are still continuing this i would like to remind everyone that a mandate is not a law so therefore no parents students or schools are actually
048breaking any laws by not enforcing the mask rules i want to remind people that masks are a medical intervention and you're supposed to have conform informed consent to make medical decisions and there was zero informed consent given only force wear the mask or you lose your right to a free and appropriate education we're dealing with two years of coercion as a special education teacher myself i see the damage kovit has done on our children and i'm not talking about the virus itself children have had a they have a 99.997 percent survival rate of the cold virus i'm talking about lockdowns remote learning quarantine and masks 93 of communication is non-verbal and yet we're here going to crisis situations with students that have behavioral issues and we have to de-escalate them while both wearing masks and
049you can imagine how this situation is not helpful or or comforting or maybe it's not even a crisis at all maybe it's the student um during a phonics instruction that can't discriminate sounds because the masks lowered the voice by seven decibels you need to give parents the right to choose the department of public health are unelected officials so this means that unelected officials are writing plans for schools which i have to say the courts in pennsylvania just recognize this as unconstitutional and i can only hope that connecticut follows suit and i hope that's really soon i also want to quickly point out how proud i am of the ellington board of education for their letter to the department of health not only do the ciac winter masking rules make zero sense like basketball has to
050wear masks but wrestling don't they're discriminating and these policies are shameful and i urge newington to follow ellington's lead there is such a push for equity and inclusion and it seems that this has gone out the window with kovid on to the vaccine i'm uncertain as to how many families know that 40 seconds left please that their right was taken away by connecticut um i want to remind you that this vaccine is only emergency use approved it's not approved for adults emergency use vaccines should not even be inexistent if there's other treatments and there are and there's many and i just want to say that if you mandate this there's there's going to be people that will pull their children out of school including myself so i'm running out of time and i had more
051but well thank you maybe you can join us next time i sure will thank you all right and we're going to move on to dana havens hi oh let me take my camera on hi dana havens 113 stoddard avenue um sorry got a massive headache oh i know i want to speak towards um this covert thing too but not like the previous speakers i do um i'm concerned um i've had so far my kids have been in contact several times uh since has started they've been able to you know scan and stay and thankfully we've had nothing um but if they did have to quarantine the fact that they can't join in on their classes when we have such extreme technology in their schools and at home now i think it's ridiculous um i know
052it would be difficult for the teacher if they had just one student at home to teach that student but could they not at least just stream the class so the kids can listen in and if they have any questions they can get answered later in the in the afternoon or even the next day but i know both my children if they miss school they get a little panicky because in you know in high school especially if you miss one day you miss a lot especially if it's an odd or even day um so i was hoping that maybe you can consider doing something for the kids that have to stay home thanks thank you mitch ma thank you very much miss havens and we have next up ali lamont if you could state your name
053and address please hi it's actually uh ryan lamont uh another uh profile uh glitch with with google um 33 coachman lane and similar to what dana just said um we're just curious what the the real um policy is with the district regarding children under cor under quarantine orders um you know our experience currently is that um there is some teachers are posting assignments but we're receiving no instruction um which seems to be giving students that are unlucky enough to have to quarantine a severe disadvantage and i'm not sure um if if there's any way to catch up on instruction that they're missing uh or it's just uh we we have to try our best at home to keep up and you know i'm sure some families are better able to do that than others and
054it probably creates some some equity issues as well so that's that's all i had to state thank you okay and thank you very much mr lamont okay if you don't mind if you guys would take your hands down after you have completed appreciate that very much it looks like there are no other people from the public that want to share at this time i just want to address that we listen to everything that you say and we will discuss that as a board and if it's appropriate somebody will be getting back to you as soon as possible that is typically our policy to do that okay so thank you all again very much and now we're going to move our meeting on to item number d which is our consent agenda so this is the
055approval of our minutes from the meetings on october 13th november 9th and november 29th so if i could either have the secretary or another member of the board move the motion to accept them i would entertain it right now i moved the motion to accept the minutes from october 13 2021 the regular session second sorry about it we got three of them we let's do all we can do all three okay i approve um i a motion to approve the minutes from november 9th 2021 and a motion to approve the minutes from november 29 2021 board retreat okay do i have a second second okay so miss weaver has given us the second any discussion on this item okay i'm seeing numb i will move for a vote all those in favor say aye any
056opposed motion is carried okay we'll move on to item number e which is the superintendent of schools report and i'm going to turn it over once again to dr brummett thank you dr fletcher it is my distinct pleasure to uh bring forward virtually uh steve farisi our assistant superintendent and um dr gerald hairston who is our equity and inclusion specialist they have been uh they along with many other members of our central office team and i think kim davis is on the line and wendy and kristen freeman have been on the front lines doing our equity work in newington and i'm also really proud to say that newington and the board has decided to work on equity not because we've had any major incidences in the district or any situations that have caused us to
057have to react but rather we are dedicated to making sure all of our students have an equitable educational experience that's part of our mission and that's part of the work that we're doing we do have an achievement gap that we're working on diligently and that is some one of our more pressing matters but i'm proud that the board is supporting these efforts to make sure all of our students are getting what they need here at school regardless of their economic status racial status and what have you so without further ado i'm going to turn it right over to dr hairston and mr faresi so thank you dr brummett dr fletcher and all board of education members for allowing us the opportunity to provide an update on our district-wide efforts to promote equity in equitable practices
058here in the newington public schools i am beyond fortunate uh to be accompanied by dr gerald harrison our um you know equity inclusion specialist as well as the great members of our team kristen freeman wendy krauss kim davis who all worked very hard uh to promote our equity efforts and lead us through this district work um dr hairston specifically uh and i are excited this evening to be able to share with you an update on our equity infrastructure and systems that we are developing as kind of the title implies this is a general overview of the efforts that we're putting into place we always ask that if you ever have any very specific questions following this presentation to please reach out to either one of us and we'd be more than happy to chat with
059you about our continuous efforts district-wide but to begin i was hopeful that everyone could just take a moment if you do not already and just kind of pull out a pen and a piece of paper so i'll give you a second or two to do that and when you are ready if you could please just jot down uh what comes to mind immediately when you're asked this question and i'll give you about two minutes to do this so just jot down what immediately comes to your mind when asked this question that's for everyone on this line i see there are 27 people so let's see if we can all do this how do you define equity in education so i'll give two minutes for you to take a minute and jot that down uh you
060about 30 seconds left all right if you could just come to a close with your ideas um two things i'd like to share number one two minutes feels like an eternity when you're just sitting in silence and number two if you were able to get a comprehensive definition down of what equity means in newington public schools uh in two minutes i'm i'm very impressed and i'd love to get you on one of our teams um but i was wondering and dr fletcher i'd love to solicit your support with this i was hopeful that we could get a few people just to share some of the ideas that they put down so i see some people are raising their hands and if you're willing to raise a hand that would be fantastic if we could take
061about three or four people and dr fletcher where i could use your help is it's hard for me to see and present at the same time so maybe if you could call on a few people that would be very helpful to me all right let me begin with miss drost okay it's not all inclusive because you only gave me two minutes mr parisi but all students are given access to the content and meeting all students at their entry point and the content reason represents all stakeholders in the classroom thank you so much god i do i i think i'll take that all right mr levariere so to me equity in education is the uh the fairness and outcome versus equality which is the fairness of opportunity and i think a quote that does come to
062mind though is bill clinton where he's talking about uh it's not how uh it's not where you end up but it's how far you come from where you start thank you very much sir all right mr brenda so i put down um creating an equal opportunity for um for students creating academic fairness thank you very much uh miss hutt wagner uh you might be muted got it um similar um to mr rose ability for each student to access the curriculum and content and receive instruction without barriers in the way but instead appropriate supports in place fantastic thank you thank you very much and next up is sam sharma now i gotta ask sam very quickly are you dr sharma i was told you might be a doctor oh no no i'm not all right all
063right um so yeah the way the way i see it is like um i see equity um what what it means would be like equal access to same same quality of education no matter your background income or race thank you so much all right just a few more we have ms yap uh anastasia you might be muted we can't hear you sorry and you might hear my dog in the background i apologize um equity in education is when all students have access to similar resources and are treated the same that's right okay thank you miss weavers more dr fletcher i got just uh two more fantastic do you have we have time oh yes of course all right um yeah since we're all you know this is like the class it's just going around the
064board table uh the virtual board table i guess we'll do that um i i guess mine it will be redundant but i think it's important that we um it's meeting students where they're at each and every student at every level that they're at and i always think of um the the images that are used that we often use um it's more of a visual rather than words and then also the idea of um where everyone starts at different spots in a and if i race i'm going to very quickly share what i wrote down maybe just a little bit of a different angle it's everyone having an equal opportunity to access the necessary tools and to help receive a profitable education and miss piranha thanks i didn't want to be left out um so i
065said everyone getting the tools that they individually need to meet um their goals common goals very good thank you so much okay so i think as you as we listen to each kind of individual perspective we hear a lot of commonalities a lot of themes that that resonate throughout and some differences too right and maybe some some lens that we bring to what we would define equity to be uh especially in education and maybe in in the newington public schools um one thing that we've done is engaged in you know multiple activities in multiple opportunities to continue to promote equity in the new england public schools over the past few years um so as some of you may be aware and maybe some of you newer board members have yet to kind of see um
066these are some of the ways in which we've engaged in equity uh currently um and when we do this work uh we do it either in teams or in school so at some times we've developed our understanding of cultural competency um whether that be as committees like our professional development and evaluation committee and then in schools that's been um shared out and we've facilitated summer book clubs around diversity equity and inclusion and many people have participated in those and some have not um we participated in statewide um diversity education equity and inclusion networks some of us and we've created and hosted a culturally responsive teaching online learning module where educators who are going to write curriculum would engage in this learning module before they write curriculum to have an equity lens to apply to it
067we've supported and participate in culturally responsive leadership development we've administered an equity and inclusion survey to students and staff so we can garner and better understand what equity means to our students what it means to our staff and what practices are possibly coming across as equitable and which are not we've redesigned focused district goals and our mission our mission statement was redesigned last spring and adopted and is now online which includes a serious focus on equity we've enacted policy revisions to include equity and greater inclusivity which have been recently passed as early as this august we've established a workforce diversity committee that's really working to analyze our recruitment retention efforts among our workforce and we've implemented courageous conversations about race book club district-wide to try to engage more people in understanding equity specifically as it
068pertains to race we've deliberately been pulling data apart by groups and trying to talk more about it and see how we can change some of the inequities that we see and we've engaged in mastery based practices which we know help us close kind of the equity gap in our curriculum and instruction so these are some of the efforts that we've engaged in and what we've come to understand is um through our efforts while good we lacked kind of a collaborative foundational understanding of equity so this year our greatest achievement to date has been the development of a working definition of equity in the newington public schools one that will ground all of us around the work and provide a foundation to support all of these efforts because like you all we were all coming to
069this work previously with various definitions and again although we had common themes that ran through it we might not have had that one definition to really ground everything we do kind of something to really build a strong house on a foundation and so with that um we can share with you our working definition of equity and this right here is what it what we believe it means in the newington public schools that educational equity means ensuring just outcomes for each student raising marginalized voices and addressing the imbalances of power and privilege and that is adopted from great school partnerships it's a little bit changed from a definition that they've promoted but it's one that dr hairston has worked very carefully with many stakeholder groups within our district to build out this definition and develop systems
070that will continue to drive and sustain this work so without any further ado i'd like to introduce you to uh dr hairston how you all doing if my voice starts to wavers because i've been talking all day and so i sound a little bit like a a a bassist from an r b group so i apologize uh that is not intentional um but just let me know if you can't access my voice so yeah i mean i don't know and i don't again i apologize i don't mean to step on protocol if i'm asking for more engagement than it's typical under this structure but certainly if you have any questions about the definition let me know but um you know i think it's probably best to not be remiss about you know where my thinking
071in this work comes from and this is not an attempt to proselytize anyone you know believe what you believe or don't believe what you don't believe my mother happens to be a past a minister um my grandfather who passed a year and a half ago was a minister as well so a faith tradition is what i come from so you might hear certain um ideas come from me that are things that they may have said like you know a house divided against itself can i stand or something like that and so what i'm about in terms of equity is born of that upbringing which is essentially unity that that takes work that diversity is an intentional part of life and humanity but it takes work to to have it work in concert for purpose and
072so that's the way that we tend to use this working definition not to preclude any other existing definition just like you all submitted definitions in two minutes none necessarily better than the next all having certain components in common but we wanted to make sure that we had one voice one unified voice that would organize us when we're taught when we're talking about utilizing our resources because our resources are finite if the covert has taught us anything it has taught us that you know we conditions don't last um but but unification can and doing things together can and so we have figured out that that's going to be our grace moving forward the extent to which we can unify around our resources toward a collective mission um so that means that we have to do some
073work to to make ourselves get collected and aligned one of the things that will do that is if we acknowledge that i think it was said by two of the definitions that there are certain ways that you can start out in education that can condition you more rapidly towards success one of them is where you start out how you start out we know that if you have a further distance to travel and you only have a finite time to do so it matters if you're further along in that in that journey than someone else who may start further back and not have enough time to catch up so we know that our ability to reconcile distances between standards and where students start off relative to a standard isn't necessary is our work and we know
074that because students don't all start off in the same place some are privileged because of the pace of things because of what needs to be known that they come with a lot of that and so that's a privilege it is also a privilege to be in a situation where you can identify very readily in terms of language or other components of identity that allow you to have a natural affiliation with someone who's teaching you teaching is a lot of things it is deeply relational and especially in times of duress it is deeply intimate and so the less hurdles that you have to climb to get to someone who's giving you something to dr fletcher's point of value that will benefit you the easier it is for you to move through that journey of learning over
075the course of 12 or so years and for some students longer so we want to make sure that we diminish as many of those hurdles as possible because we know that students didn't ask for those hurdles to be erected but they depend on us to make sure that the race can be lean and swift for them um and that the unnecessary barriers aren't there for them if we can do our best help to support them the power just just is is best recognized in the ability like we saw today for you to be able to show up and be counted so from something as consequential as a card to be able to see how you see the world in front of other people who have the ability to say i see you and i affirm
076that that's a powerful thing about how you see the world to be recognized that your vision is important to us for someone to bring that to the fore and acknowledge that you have a contribution in the arts is powerful that space doesn't have to exist that's not everyone's scope of intentions but for us to say that it matters to us expression that it matters to us that expression isn't just the written word nor is it story it's just your perspective that is a powerful thing and we've created a power to give to students to show up the other way that power can be is that you get the you get the ability to sway something in your direction so we know that we have to have parental engagement you know that's not gerald or stephen
077that's the research talks about how important it is to have parental and community engagement in the enterprise of schooling it helps to make it more inclusive the more we can gather assets from from the families that we serve in the community that we serve it helps us to understand how to shape instruction so that kids can take it again to dr fletcher's point and do something with the information in where where they live and how they live it's highly contextual so in order to do that um we have a real intention to be proactive in terms of the capacity that we establish and in being proactive we want to create a wide base of capacities amongst staff so that we are readied as we increasingly become diverse and and kind of live in this moment
078whether it be covert or our current profile as a district we want to be able and at the ready to be able to not just deal with what comes but maximize what we have that's a broad base of capacity it comes in terms of teaching and learning but also custodial work but also and also secretarial and administrative support so we want everyone to be at the ready to receive their sort of um their sort of work and equity well but we also want to make sure that as much as that in itself is a work and a journey and process where we fall down we want to be responsive not reactive so as we build a stable platform for everyone to participate we also want to make sure that as we venture along in that
079journey of creating stability that when things do fall short we have an ability to erect a system around an individual a group of individuals who have a need and support them so that they can stay in the journey so responsiveness and proactivity are really our linchpins in terms of the culture that we want to build for equity um i you know i don't i don't want to you know take a ton of time and i'll i'll try to not read to readers but let me just ask you to just kind of gaze over the visual here and as much as you're probably already tired of hearing my voice let me see if i can just summarize some of what you might be looking at so our entire network is really is really based in two
080key areas one is what what educators do and are capable of influencing um relative to the essentials of their role and in leadership what school leaders and district leaders can influence in terms of equity relative to their role and what they're faced with every day in terms of tasks and charges so on the you know the the educator side we've organized a group of 12 educators or 10 educators i'm i would be the 11th to talk about some of the things that are com are bubbling up amongst teachers as they try to engage in really excellent and equitable education what can what can happen is data can be a way that we can access our progress toward our outcomes and so it also helps us know that what we need isn't necessarily at the it
081isn't available or what we need to know is or is not at the ready and data we use data to tell us a lot about ourselves through what our students are achieving and so uh the equity team's work is going to be centered on that to make sure that we are progress monitoring we're monitoring the ways in which we're moving forward towards our success in terms of student performance so achievement gap you know is a broad umbrella and it encapsulates various kinds of student performance but you know some of the key ones would be behavior performance so pro-social behavior skills um another area is scholastic or academic performance um you know benchmark qualifiers how students do in terms of you know grades and assessments and then social emotional development so it's not just it's one
082thing to be able to exist in a space socially and know how to do school it's another to know how to get an a especially if you're close to it already it's another thing to do so with a safe mindset intact over the course of years of instruction so we want to make sure that we're securing all three and and that has to come through healthy educators as well so we're thinking about how to again create that broad base of capacity and readiness in our educators and who better to do that than educators themselves so that's what that group works on the readiness and health of a thriving educator base our focus area is at this point relative to again our goal of equity uh that first one says race ethnic and cultural linguistic diversity
083learning so we are newington is like other sectors in connecticut increasingly diverse and so we want to know what what does diverse mean does diversity as i alluded to earlier ultimately equal immediately unity it does not it takes work and so we want people to be equipped with all of the current understandings of what happens when you put different people together in an educational milieu what are some of the things that we need to know about how to create access how to create pedagogy how to inform instruction how to utilize our resources effectively based on what those diverse needs might be that gestalt of information we know can be focused down into any one of those areas there are cultural needs there are racial needs there are racial conversations cultural conversations and we want to
084have as as ready and solid grasp as we can around each one of those features of how diversity might show up for us family and community networks i won't belabor the point but we are working diligently to make sure that we are locked in with families giving them really purposeful opportunities to connect with us and inform what stephen talked about in some of the pre-existing work some policies that we do some leadership opportunities and making sure that we have the impact really secured in terms of home we want parent we we sort of imagined school to be a continuous experience that what we have in terms of an eight to nine hour time period between um teachers and educators and students is really an extension of what parents hope for their child at home so
085we want to make sure that whatever we do in terms of establishing a readiness to participate in your in your in home and community environment whether it's 8 or 18 is contiguous to the extent possible with what with what you hope at home we want math to be applicable we want ela to be applicable to the broader environment of newington but also to connecticut into the world so we do our we do our level best to make sure that we're pulling parent expectations parent ideologies into as it fits appropriately to our standards-based work uh book clubs there are many ways that people can engage in the development process toward a more equitable you to more equitable instruction equitable mindset one low stakes way is to engage people in learning communities together what we believe is
086that no one can do any great thing alone and since we're always already in community we want to make sure that we're house unified not divided and our best way to do that is to secure folks into small learning communities plc's professional learning communities is one way but we want to make sure that people are supported to take risks in their learning and not be perfect but to be on a path so that they can receive a measure of grace from their colleagues as they make mistakes and venture and try to reconcile what they knew with what they know with what they're gonna know and that that takes an incredible amount of grace especially when you're working alongside people who are maybe at a different place in the journey we try to diminish pride and
087um uh and use more um and use more again grace and also empathy so that we can make our mistakes together and they don't feel problematic but they feel like an opportunity to learn so while we're doing some of this work we're doing a lot of culture um building that we're reframing some of the ideas about what had been language that might have been a detriment previously and we're trying to use it to our advantage now one of those is failing we want to make sure that failure is an opportunity my wife is a researcher i you know dabble in the sciences myself and so i want to make sure that that we understand that failure is a part of growth it's in fact tells you where you are it's a measure and so we
088want to make sure that that's okay purposefully okay the last area under educator work is our pipeline development so we want as much as you all we had two people i think who said that they came from uh egreen and we're very proud about that so we want to make sure that newington is developing its internal diversity using the students that come from new england public schools we want to hold you as long as possible because as you as it showed and this is also just out there understood and known but you demonstrated it it's nice to be able to come back and see yourself in what you went through and so we would like to increase our diversity purposefully not from pulling from other regions necessarily but have our students who have come through
089newington public schools build a love for their experience here a love for the community and come back pulling from pulling instruction from that loving place so that's what we want to do that's how we want to diversify we don't just want to increase numbers we want to have one early access programs that we're that we're talking about with the university to try to get them to try to institute some um curriculum that will allow us to get students to understand what teaching looks like as a career but also extracurricular opportunities that might get them to talk about some of the challenges that they might host in terms of trying to engage in that process so we really want to grow your own as much as we want to cultivate the diversity that we already have
090so we're also going to encourage folks to get in community together there as well around their affinity as um you know folks who might come from non-dominant or non-traditional communities into education some by race and by culture and we want to create affinities around those things and so that we can understand how equity can be also a presentation of our staff in terms of our diversity on the admin side just two quick notes um one of the our major work is to have a small group of administrators be able to inform some of our major leverage points for change so as much as educators might be venturing into these zones of sort of capacity building and pedagogical structures we want to make sure that we've got some opportunities around them to give that some coordination
091so the educators can learn together and be together but that structure typically doesn't come from educators themselves that comes from administration creating a culture that allows for that to happen so our two primary points of culture and structure are plcs and data teams now the reference to the just to the left of plcs and the box under admin council is school improvement team and you'll see safe school climate just under data teams but they're really iterations of the same that top equity council is primarily going to be utilized and is being utilized to develop really solid what are called problems of practice which is if you can take a data set and and your knowledge of a school culture and your understanding of an educator and their students you can form a really rounded idea
092about what causes something to happen that is desired or isn't desired in terms of an outcome and the problem of practice is really how you frame the thing that isn't desired and your resolution to a different end but you need data to give you some evidence as to how you've come to the conclusion that something's wrong you need a very clear finite statement about what's wrong and what needs to be different you need to understand what capacity you have in the educator what capacity is needed and necessary what support gets it there and what will look different in terms of student performance again having a fully fleshed out problem of practice that's situated in academic performance behavior performance and social emotional development that's our aim but we have some educators who have seen and done
093that kind of work and right now we're coalescing around how to make sure that their skill sets and abilities around forming really solid problems of practice is diffuse amongst our leadership community the plc's actually start with data teams data teams would be one of the one of the best ways for you to take problems of practice at a very macro level and understand how the district is doing thematically so an example is third grade performance in ela across all third grades at the elementary level is a macro outcome a problem of practice would look at that performance across that grade level across the district but again that's macro that's not as situational or contextual as it would be as ela at egreen but we know that that's necessary because we want to understand how the
094district has has created a situation or culture where equity can thrive or where we can achieve in equity out of an inequitable situation the plcs are a more contextual version of that because we do need ways that teachers can respond more quickly and the systems can respond more quickly to what's happening in a particular situation a particular school so that gives us that's a more sensitive a more sensitive aspect of the data teams doing a lot of the same work in terms of creating creating instruction and approaches from data and information but again it does it at a more local level so what you what we would hope is that both of those spheres of decision making a plc that's more localized and a data team that's more macro have the ability to be nimble
095but also be operating within the boundary of efficacy based on what we based on the evidence that we have that's a capacity to be built and systematized but that is that side of the system just like the other side of the system is around what we do within the systems that we create as leaders i'm going to shut up i don't know if structurally it's intended to ask questions but i feel like it's necessary perhaps are there any board members that would have any questions for dr harrison right now go ahead miss up wagner hi thank you so much for um that presentation i know i believe it was either you and mr freeze to mention um the survey that was being done i think it was said with parents and students and i just
096wanted to see um if that went out yet this year and if it's like something that will happen multiple times a year or just once a year and kind of what's done with um that data because i think that's that's really interesting so i i don't mind uh fielding that dr harrison and then if you want to add on please do um so last year we did administer an equity survey to students and to staff um the annual survey that goes to families um did include a couple questions in it so we expanded upon that a little bit uh to have some questions around equity uh inclusion and diversity however you know the two true surveys that were brand new went to students and staff um that data was called in a lot of it
097was presented to the strategic plan in committee in may of last year and a lot of that information then drove not only this work that dr hairston has shared with you but also some efforts that occurred from that meeting last may which would be um changes and improvements in our mission in our goals in our district improvement plan um as well as some it drove some policy changes that occurred that the board passed in august so we do continue to use that information to help guide us it will be administered again this year later probably the beginning of spring and it will be administered annually around that time okay and mr branda thank you dr fletcher um first of all to the entire team i can't really express just how grateful i am for this
098work i think um dr harrison despite your your voice troubles i could probably listen to you speak on this for several hours at a time so please never apologize for that um i i have something just to bring up and it it falls in in equity and accountability in this slide but not entirely but i don't know another time to bring it up and and uh just for reference a few weeks ago i asked dr brommett and dr fletcher if maybe due to all the work that you and steve and kim are working on could we create a board committee that reviewed the things that we have the power on so specifically our policies to see where are our gaps in in our own policies in terms of equity and inclusion um and so i
099preface that by saying for those new board members that don't know i'm a dad of two daughters and my oldest is actually working on a school project at john wallace about policy changes in schools and and one of them that she and her friends have brought up is the dress code and what i have found interesting and it's through listening to you dr harrison at you know the beginning of the year and now my own lens as a dad of two girls is that i don't think our dress code is very equitable to be honest with you um reviewing it it was created in 2001 um i don't think many people i mean jessica weaver just talked about she was in elementary school in 2004 or whatever she said so we're way back in our
100in our dress code policy and i think um you know i think it would be great if we could allow obviously this important work that you're doing dr harrison and it looks like you've got a great team but maybe if the board has their own um group that looks at certain topics or policies and sees how we can fit in because i do think specifically on the dress code i think that it could make female students in particular feel very marginalized at times and i think that there's a lot that we can do as a board to kind of clean up the language in there and make everybody feel a little bit more um i guess included in their school community by not being you know attacked by what they're wearing because maybe somebody doesn't
101find that it is acceptable um of course with certain boundaries but i think we're all on the same page there so i'm hoping we can have that discussion at some point or maybe start a committee dr fletcher to to look at some of that stuff and maybe if dr harrison's able to to help us out in his huge spare time that i'm sure he has but um it would just be something you know maybe we could work with the building administrators and ideally some of our high school student leaders perhaps could help us on that to to just make sure that we're we're doing what we can to have policies that are equitable and especially things that impact our students and their and their day-to-day insider schools um but overall honestly i i love this
102work um i think that it's i i'm lucky enough to have seen the kind of early stages of where we were going and and where we are now is just so impressive and i'm so thankful to just be able to watch it from from this seat so thank you all very much thank you mr brandon yes uh dr bruman and i will discuss that in our next opportunity i think it's a great idea all right next up is mrs drost okay um first of all i i agree that we need to talk about that but i do think it falls under um hold on i got to unraise my hands under the student policy and the in the board policy it's almost like an umbrella of that policy committee um in addition to that can
103i it can you share because it's really hard to see on the screen um i had i know i could you're making it bigger thank you i appreciate that um i had asked for um something that dr uh doctor mr freeze no who was it i don't remember um i had asked for the presentation ahead of time that mr farisi had sent and showed at some conference it would just be good to be able to read it so i can really get my head around it so at some point if that can be shared that would be appreciated okay thank you and ms yap hi everyone thank you for your presentation um i have a question um to gerald in regards to the early access program you said you were working with the university which
104university were you working with uconn okay that was my only question oh thank you yes ma'am okay thank you and miss weaver uh well first off yeah i'll echo mr brandon sentiments thank you for all the effort that you're putting in i'm really excited about this work um and i um really appreciate especially as a data geek i do appreciate that and i think you know a lot of times um dr berman alluded to this at our board retreat as well um how that is it's a funny thing because it can always say one thing and not really tell the true story or tell a different story than what's actually happening and i think it's really important that we focus on the aggregation of our data um i think it's really really important and i
105appreciate the schematic because it gives us a real sense of how entrenched this work is and what that effort is going and i think yeah i actually i mr brandon bringing that up is a great point i personally have been subject to that dress code um and and ways that yeah it was kind of traumatic but um you know i think in that space too i think like there are things a lot of students have come up to me and talked about um you know i'm not sure where it falls under two but um you know our lgbtq plus a um students you know having having their say and how uh you know things like mental and sexual education health um how uh we're using pronoun education i think like you know a lot of
106students have come between particularly in the past year um and you know was we're wanting to talk about that kind of issue and i think you know sometimes with these types of issues we're always wondering where it falls in and who could be responsible for that change or for that kind of education because i think it falls under book clubs falls under the pipeline it falls under everything i think um so you know it's one of those things where it's just one point of equity but we're looking at so many different things so i appreciate this as like you know i think we're all just kind of soaking it in that's why there there's not as many questions now but i think um because it is a lot so we appreciate that work but i
107guess if you can speak to any of that kind of like where this this is headed um you know in terms of does this change um you know what teachers are looking at when they're creating curriculum and that kind of that kind of thing okay thank you miss weaver and we have miss peratti sorry having issues did um did did you want to respond to any of jessica's questions first or i'll try i just i was trying i was just gonna ask could you restate the like the question one more time i know it was in there but i just want to make sure as you said a lot also then said a lot and was like there's a question in here let me articulate it i guess in terms of you know um as
108we look um in different topics under this umbrella i guess i'm kind of looking for like what's the implementation timeline and kind of where that falls um like what's the time horizon we're looking at and kind of who is ultimately i think you're you're the point of accountability but um you know where is that falling into a bucket like if i use lgbtq plus ia issues as a as an example is that across buckets or are you the like point person like where that accountability falls to time and point of accountability that's a that's a pretty good it's a pretty it's a pretty amazing question i may not have a pretty good answer um but i'm gonna try so the the thing that you're looking at is a arrangement of ways to detect something so
109imagine it's like um um a science it's a like a lab so you'd have multiple ways to identify identify a very like the variations on a kind of cancer one way is that you could excise cells and you could look at the way that the cells formulate under what conditions do they prosper but that's only if the cell exists already some some another way scientifically you can look at it as pre-existing conditions like what kinds of things cause the body to generate the proclivity to you know uh the the formation of a cancerous body but that would be like at the progenitor stage like at the beginning of it another way would be like sort of once the once cancer has metastasized or or not you know how do you start to make it regress
110looking at different kinds of therapeutics but this is that this is like a this is an entire lab spread across a network which for our terminology is a school system so that you can detect all kinds of inequities but what you need first of all is the lab you need a way to measure it and so your point about data is so if we ran so any of this is accessible so what we'd want to know is relative to our performance that tim's tends to pipe up in the ways that we collect data grades mid-year reports finals that's our enterprise is to make sure that kids are actually achieving academically but before that you can collect all kinds of situational data that will tell you that you're on the way to failure or success so
111we can infuse measures that will tell us is your identity a factor in the way that you are achieving effectively social emotional well-being behavioral health academic health right now we just had to establish a system but in terms of what will come is that sensitivity to different kinds of indicators that will tell us your health in this system one of them will be your identity health around your your sexual orientation or sexual identity or gender identity of rather biologist that was very helpful thank you thank you did that make sense did it help yes yes 100 yes ma'am thank you so much for your question all right thank you before i do another false start are you all set yes yes thank you thank you thank you i also had similar questions to jessica so
112i'm glad that you were able to answer that as well um i'm just you don't have to name names but the the equity team and the admin equity council were those um volunteers or were they assigned i'm just curious how the the teams are put together so my other brain is a coach particularly football so we went on a recruiting visit so it was essentially you know i met with stephen to talk about virtues of a successful system in terms of personhood so what characteristics do people need to bring to it one is data intuition another is diagnostic capacity another is underlying equity understanding another is you know pedagogical knowledge and capacity another is systemic unders understanding systems and systems change so we we organized that and we talked about educators who did ways that
113educators could demonstrate those capacities that led us to a list of names and then we i went out and recruited those folks i sat with them and talked about the work that we would do how they envisioned the work and whether or not they saw alignment just like we would a safety or cornerback or a swimmer and we we gave him the cell we need your work we need your brain and and they all said yes okay thank you and we will come back to miss yap here you have another question or comment question hi um this was in regards to um michael brando and um jessica in regards to dress code you guys know i'm relatively new so i was wondering did that fall under the student policy committee um before i was just
114asking it sorry um it would yes so normally that it would but that policy my understanding is it was written in 2001 and then different schools can adapt or adjust the policy how they would like so you know for for my liking to miss miss draws point yes i would like the student policy committee to to maybe discuss implementing but i'm thinking maybe we need to bring a group of externals either through building administrators high school students maybe middle school and then maybe some board reps to kind of look at that language and look at other policies and then make our recommendations to the student policy for implementation just just so that we have because the student policy committee will have a ton of other things to to kind of go over so i was
115just looking to maybe shift to have a little bit of an equity and inclusion mindset on a specific committee for policy but yes my understanding is that would be a policy decision that this board would then approve based on recommendations from student okay so uh i don't see any more hands up any more questions i want to close out this part of question asking right now we still have a long agenda ahead of us so dr harriston if you want to wrap up saying anything more just thank you all i appreciate it okay well thank you very much for the presentation mr farizi thank you all did you have something more to say mr farizi i am all set and just wanted to thank everyone as well and always dr brummett for supporting us in
116this work all right and thank you all so very much okay so now we are going to move on to item f in the agenda and the first thing will be a report from the facilities committee so mr levariere if you are prepared to bring that report hi uh good evening um so a couple of things i was just uh looking over the proposed uh recommended motion i i don't think that it's ripe to make that motion that was uh recommended i want to talk about just very briefly um if you were to look at the facilities report page six and nine patterson elementary there's two um two separate line item costs that are like widely just out of control two differences they almost balance out way too much going on there i think it
117needs a closer look um if you were to look at priority three on page nine of nine i think that the um proposed granted it is a lower priority item i think that the cost proposer is um much much much too high i think that we should look at potentially doing um one field uh i do recognize that there's a benefit from turf there but like you know that's a lot of money and with uh on page five of nine um i think that there's conversation that maybe we need to have as a board going over the tuition receipts because we are getting more significantly more money the last two completed school years um i'd be interested in getting more information about what the trends that we can expect for uh potential additional revenue if
118that uh if if that trend continues but also at the same time any potential costs that may need to come with hiring teachers with uh new students coming in uh lastly one question like what what are you looking at the that's how the public knows because there's this document no we know what you discussed during the meeting this document which is the facilities it was in the it was in the packet the the handout for tonight just just so people on the the public board of ed facilities standing committee meeting december 14 21. and it's the cip yeah are you discussing the revised version okay hold on everybody yeah let me just finish so um and do not address each other directly please you have to direct it here during the meeting apologies i just
119didn't know what he was looking at no no that's fine we're not going to go out of order anymore here sure and uh one thing that i would like to maybe see addressed uh before making a recommendation is potentially lighting at wallace uh parking lot it's pretty dark there uh i think we could use some more lighting there that's all i got uh ms drozd uh was uh also um president if she has anything i would uh maybe defer to her okay dr brummett you're muted dr brown sorry i didn't know if miss drost wanted to jump in before i did because uh she was present last evening yeah you're muted miss rose doctor well you're unmuted but we can't hear yeah she's having some audio difficulties i think can you hear me now now
120yes yes all right so we had a really good conversation last night um and we did discuss those things so i know that um dr brum and mr jack moetz were very accommodating and giving us some updated information on a pretty short notice so um you know but we did have a lot of conversations everyone was very open about the conversation and we talked about all those things that richard just discussed okay so dr brummett thank you uh and and for the good of the folks that are on the public call here let me put up um this document let me make sure i'm presenting here i don't think i am actually give me one second i i was glad to hear that um mr la verriere believes that it's a little too soon maybe
121to put forward a motion to vote on the plan i think that's a fair suggestion because i do believe there's more information that we need to discuss um i understood he had we don't i don't recall questions about the john patterson facts and figures last evening so we'll need a little more information about that but i did want to draw the board's attention to um two items that we were asked to do some follow-up one is on this page um mrs did ask if we could look at maybe some different scenarios here and i'm going to turn that over to mr jacomo it's momentarily the committee also and what this page is is simply our current utilization of the capital monies uh within the board cip account so we were asked last night to look
122at a different configuration we have some discussion points for that yet we don't have charts the other thing that the board will ultimately have to vote on is the transmission of the five-year town cip plan to the town for their consideration and uh potential approval so that was another large discussion item last evening now we were asked to do some follow-up on that one was what are the uh expenses that are included in this 904 thousand dollar technology line and that includes uh grades play five and nine chromebooks because every year that cohort of students as they age into that or come into our system they are given a chromebook for the first time and then they use that chromebook in the case of kindergarten they use it through the end of elementary students use
123it five to eight in middle and then high school students use it for four years that line item also included ipads for special education students the laptops are for both middle school and elementary school teachers and the desktops that were referenced in that total referred to a replacement cycle for two art labs at the high school while we're limiting the number of computer labs we have district wide there are labs that still need to continue on at the high school because they have very highly specialized software for art programs and engineering has their own but we're talking about the next cycle to art labs and then infrastructure would be things like um replacing our display panels uh throughout the district we're gonna do those in rolling rolling amounts to make sure our display panels stay
124current those have a longer life cycle than other things uh other computer items but nevertheless we do have a replacement component on that and then there are also included in that nine hundred and four thousand dollars um document cameras which are used to project items that teachers use them a lot in the classroom so um the other question that we were posed last night is what is the balance in this insurance fund we collect fees from parents it's optional but parents have the option to send in a fee to help ensure that if for some reason their child inadvertently damages a chromebook that they can get it replaced or repaired with no additional charges that account currently has 181 thousand dollars in it so it has built up to a pretty good amount so there
125is the question that was posed last evening by the committee was would there be money in that account that we could apply toward this 904 thousand dollars um given that large balance we could recommend that we take a hundred thousand dollars out of that and use that to pay for the warranties that we have to buy with all of our chromebook purchases they don't really come with a lot of warranties so we have to buy warranty that allows them to continue to be protected for the number of years i believe it's a three year warranty so that but that's an additional charge so again that's something that the board would need to consider i do want to state too and it came up last evening but the whole board should hear this we really don't
126have a home for our technology purchases right now they had lived in this cip plan for many many years about two years ago there was a discussion at a cip committee that no longer exists that it should not live here because it doesn't have the requisite life cycle and thresholds i i believe that that's something we could take issue with because while the most we have laptops or chromebooks in active service is about five years depending on the grade level they still live on in the district they go to and this was discussed last evening uh back to technology headquarters and then they're used as replacement devices um and then we harvest parts out of them so they do live on for seven years which is the threshold for this line um however that decision
127has already been made so we have approached by we i mean dr fletcher and i have approached the town manager as well as the mayor about where what where can we go from here about technology because for the last two years we have received no money from the uh cip for technology and no money in the operating budget so um you know at this point we are still hoping to meet with the mayor the tom andrew didn't feel the need to meet with us at this time uh we're waiting to we're hoping to meet with the mayor next i believe it's next tuesday the 21st to discuss you know where do we go from here with technology um lumay i'm going to turn it over to lou momentarily to see where he can address some
128of the possibilities there but again ultimately the board will be voting on this as well as how the board cip would be projected in the coming fiscal year so i will go back to the main screen here it looks like there may be some questions um dr fletcher i'll i'll turn it over to you to field the questions i know lou will have some additional remarks about questions were asked about turf and questions were asked about um again looking at a different uh arrangement for the the board cip thank you sure all right thank you it looks like michael brando you have your hand up thank you dr fletcher um dr fletcher just i know we were going to kick it over to lou so i wanted to get this in beforehand and hope that
129lou can help out because i know we have several new board members that it might be helpful before you dive into specifics to to just give like a cliff notes version perhaps of uh public school reserve cip the town cip and the comparison to the operating budget in terms of how each one is funded because i think as we have these conversations that might be helpful for some of our newer board members to get a better understanding of of these dollars on these projects okay thank you dr brummett i think that you would be better at addressing that than i would yes i mean we did go over that last evening but i think for the good of the order i will ask lou to um speak to that issue as well kind of differentiate
130between the different uh pots of money that go into the cip account process so um i don't know if you want to entertain me we got one more question well actually two if we can try to keep them as short as possible so that we can get this presentation maybe some of these questions are going to be answered but i will give you uh miss yap i'll give you an opportunity hello i just have a question um and you know i'm relatively new um so i keep hearing about the technology fund that's wanted um and i i'm i'm hearing you say that you know they're not giving you any money was this something that the board decided on did the board say we wanted a technology fund or are you saying because i know you
131said you have a meeting with the mayor so did you just decide to create this or was this something that was already presented to the board before well i'll i'll answer your question we're not going to create it dr bruhman and i we're going to get information pertaining to it it will be up to us as a full board to determine the direction that we take after we get this information so our meeting is basically informational okay okay all right miss weaver oh yeah i just wanted to say um i didn't know if we wanted to put this back into the last item maybe because i just our student reps haven't given the report i don't know if this is falling under our new business facilities report or we want to put it under line
132item d just not not a point of order but just wondering if we want to put that under just because we have it's a long way anyway i just didn't know if this fell under last night's committee meeting or where we'll be going over the same stuff in line in our item uh well this to a line item f at this point okay i just didn't know if like you know we were you know right the rules of order if we're going to item six or not i don't want to get a turn okay well we're we're talking facilities so if we can keep it focused on that related to that i believe that's what mr jackmoritz is about to do here so okay all right if i could if i could ask dr brown
133to just uh allow me to take the screen for a minute when you ask for the cliff note version i have a little graphic that really illustrates this that's very simple and uh beneficial for everybody to get a quick look at so let me it's all years mr jackman okay okay okay can everybody see uh graphic with uh green beige and yellow boxes on it yes okay okay so this is the cliff notes package right here uh very simplistically and the board event will generate requests which are completely appropriate for the operating budget for supporting daily operations but as well as they'll have capital repair requests that could go to different places depending on the uh arrangements and financial facilities that are provided for the board of ed uh in this illustration this is the
134current setup uh that there is between the town and the board of ed so on our side we have two places for requests to go that are under board jurisdiction board control for decision making and the town cip program is the third option but there are three subsets to that for where money can be allocated based on the financial uh decision making and planning that the town chooses to use so i'll start on the town side first with the green boxes you know where uh the basic uh landscape of that is uh anything requested has to be twenty five thousand seven year useful life and uh you have a portion of those that are pay as you go projects which mean they're funded each and every year in total by the town as part of
135their budget adoption you will have the technology reserve which is not uh accessible to the border bed that's only for town departments to acquire equipment and technology devices that fit their long-term planning so they are able to do more equalized budgeting year after year so if they put aside 300 000 year after year for technology the year they have a 250 000 expenditure is offset by the year they have a 350 000 expenditure so they have that mechanism that's in place for them to draw on for continuity of operation and then you have the third part which is bonded projects where it goes to town referendum uh there's long-term financial decisions as far as the bonded indebtedness the town wants to take on for different projects in different long-term planning and all that is strictly
136the jurisdiction of the town when it comes to the board discretion obviously everything going through your board operating budget is completely on the decision-making purview of the board so even if the when the town gives the board a cut or an adjustment in their budget uh a final adoption all the town has the authority to do is just say what the adjustment is either up or down it then goes back to the board of ed to make the final adjustments to balance to whatever the town authorizes so if you have a 50 000 gap between what the board requested and what the town authorized the board has that final responsibility to reconcile that as they finalize the budget cycle uh the board cip account is something that was generated as an ordinance uh probably 45
137years ago where school operations would tend to generate some revenues in the course of the year you would have building use fees for private organizations using the buildings you would have tuition payments made from families and parents who had kids in school many of those were from families who would move out of town mid-year but they wanted their student to finish that year's education in the newington school system so they pay tuition for the reindeer of the year uh but most prevalent in the last five to six years old six years has been the uh substantial tuition generated through the open choice program for reimbursement to the town for special education expenditures uh provided to the open choice students uh coming here so that is settled up you know in may and june early part
138of june they will reconcile out exactly what the total cost of those that placement support is across all the kids in open choice and bill the city of hartford for it the revenue receipt of that will either be right at the tail end of june or it will roll over into july and over the last uh three or maybe four years ago we were clipping along about 250 000 a year for that type of combined tuition and special ed reimbursement but in the last few years it's really exploded we've taken on the substantially greater portion of tuition of special education uh support on behalf of the open choice program and this is the location where those revenues when they're received are deposited into so they all go into the board cip account the key factor
139that we have to keep in mind is the board cip account has a cap of one million two hundred thousand dollars on it and as our revenue base grows uh in this area uh we tend to have to turn around projects in a much faster fashion otherwise we'll be over the cap now if we're we don't have the ability to save uh two or three years worth of revenues to put it all together in a really big project we're because the rules of the plan were established years ago uh it was meant more to be an annual supplement to what the budget is for the district so it tends to be very flexible and nimble as our decision making and the needs of the district are changed even from the beginning of the year to
140the end of the year so that's kind of the cliff notes i hope i didn't take too much time on that but yeah is this uh visual comfortable for everybody that's here okay yeah certainly i can make this available next time this is just part of a working document i had here but it was right on point for your request okay very good thank you okay all right so question number two uh and i've lost track i can't remember the question right before i went over uh to present this i'll give the screen back for starters i know you were going to still address lou the carryover questions from last night about that's right okay fields and turf and also the different scenarios with the uh board cip okay right so the three questions that
141were posed uh to the commit from the committee last night to us to go and research uh the first of those was an inquiry about uh the combination of the value of a turf field uh the relative cost of operations and there's also questions about drainage of our athletic fields and how that would uh be part of a uh turf field you know situation so i i was in contact with bill demaio who is our parker recreations director uh this morning uh reviewing uh these questions and i also went and reviewed our architectural drawing archive to pull the drawings for when the fields were built and what the design was for drainage that was there and what might change if a turf field was ever installed so starting with the benefits of the turf field
142are number one is the extended use and you do have something that will not get tired not get beat up not turn into mud after a couple uses and can be just used and used continuously to maximize the uh practice resources for the teams uh extended seasons based on um just really having no snow on the uh trip fields and uh general playability of the field compared to grass or mud or just poor conditions that happen in the spring in the late fall that are here mr demayo did not have specific cost numbers available for this type of analysis today but basically he said you know the maintenance costs on the turf field are definitely less every year however you have a much higher initial investment so on balance he really viewed is kind of
143a cost push that the money you invest up front you get back in future reduced maintenance costs but over the term of the life of a field of 10 to 12 years it probably would break out even but your real big benefit is the play time that you get that you've quintupled the access to that field for the benefit of all the teams athletes and just general community members who might have occasion to use it the other benefits are you know the on the practice fields if you're able to even move some practices to the turf field you beat up the other fields less in general everything stays in better condition on the grass because there's fewer events going on and day-to-day hard practices that are there and then mr demeo also pointed out that
144the uh as right now our baseball softball lacrosse teams in march and april are using columnar mirror for their practices in early season activities that would really not be possible until mid-april when weather conditions would be you know much more favorable to you know start really using the uh outdoor grass fields uh on any ext you know recurring level so um those were the key points that he made to me as far as on the field drainage you know i analyzed two specific areas because i wasn't really exactly sure which uh where the question was posed it was to alumni field or to the soccer fields that were there so over the soccer fields uh when they were rebuilt in 1988 there is a drainage system that is immediately in in between each of the
145force fields that are there so there's three individual drains that are common to the uh heels there on either side as well as a final drainage system right along the fence line where the parking lot is at the front of newington high school which is called the student parking lot the general slope of the whole area as you can tell when you drive up a veteran's drive there's a gentle grade to it going up the hill so that also helps create the crowns and the runoff so that the water can be dispersed to the uh overall storm drainage system and keep the fields playable as possible so it does have drainage on all four sides of all four fields that are there okay um on the football field those who've been up there the actual
146grass field sits inside the track that surrounds alumni field and there is a drain system immediately along the inside rim of that track which services both the track and the football field uh the football field itself is crowned off where if you're standing on the sidelines you can see that there it goes up to the center of the field and then gradually tapers down on the other side that natural drainage helps push the rain water off to the perimeter drainage system and you know there is drains entirely around that space so it's uh you know a very effective uh drainage system that's there in addition mr demayo told me that if a field was to be changed from grass to turf with the type of existing drainage system that we have uh they have a
147technique what's called uh setting up a herringbone uh drainage system which really provides a number of small depressions along the uh entire surface of the uh turf field which really allows the entire field to dissipate and shed tremendous amounts of rain water in a very short period of time so uh there would be very few occasions where you know the field would be rendered unplayable because of very strong storms uh you know it really is self-policing at that point where it would be uh you know a problem where if you had three inches of rain in an hour the field's not playable for six hours you know basically within 30 minutes you would probably be back to normal now that's there so those are the key points of information i was able to discern today
148uh if there are other questions or information needs on this i'm going to have to accept any questions right now on it to forward follow-up mr brenda um thanks dr fletcher i'm not sure if this is a question for you or for richard or dr brummett but what's the timeline in terms of deadlines as to when this would need to be approved because i understand the motion's not going to be read tonight so what what is the deadline for that and is the facilities committee meeting again in the future thanks uh there would be nothing immediate on this uh when you have a chance to for the full board to really review the capital improvement plan it's on page nine of the document and that's for long-term potential bonding you know we have uh established
149the starting number of four million dollars for the project which was going to be both alumni field as well as the uh vast space that's behind the tennis courts uh yeah on the lower section high school where we have substantial playing space for multiple sports for the extended seasons of sporting activity obviously this still has to go through the vetting of what will be asked for if it ends up being one field where it would be at either veterans field or maybe there's a need to do one of the soccer fields you know all these decisions are going to be part of the ongoing conversation that the facilities committee will have and will be brought forward uh you know at a meeting you know sometime in a few weeks from now or the next meeting
150in january you know it's not fair for uh us or anybody to ask for a vote for the full board without really getting a chance to vet this and see and ask these type of questions to know what's there so and on this particular where was ranked as number three this would be on what would be the bonding consideration schedule so we would need the town support for this they may choose to go with the pay-as-you-go program um you know this document that we put together really gets the conversation started with the talent as far as uh making longer-term decisions and what will move and what will not and i believe the question was asked as to whether the facility somebody would meet again i would say absolutely uh we've got much more to discuss
151in fact um that by then dr fletcher and i will have had our meeting with the mayor and we may have some information about the town cip and where technology may fall so that that will be helpful information so i believe we would recommend a meeting right after the holiday break and the town had asked us for the cip plan um by this month we will have to reach out and say that we need some more time to deliberate um so i would probably send a memo off to the town manager indicating that we probably won't have the plan approved until january um in terms of the timeline issue that mr brandon raised okay okay uh would you like me to move on to the second item which was the uh current year board cip
152request okay uh in the packet of the 10-page report for what the proposed plan is page six of that is the uh proposed reallocation of this year's uh resources uh to better match what's going on where the needs have migrated to and uh just how operations are going you know as i mentioned earlier the board cip account can be nimble we have a number of categories and classifications that are available for use for us uh that allows us to put the money against the most important priority at that point in time if desired you know we do write a script or uh determining a basic skeleton of where we'd like to go but these are always subject to change based on urgent matters urgent needs that come up um as well as opportunities that present
153themselves which uh with you know a level of financial resources can you know make a real difference for the school different district so the question that was posed to us last night was is there anything that can be done in the reallocation of this year's uh current cip profile of projects and potential work where enough money would be could be allocated to include three buses into the current year cip board cip proposal that could be acted on and that would really be a plus and minus equaling zero so if i'm going to add 300 000 in the vehicle line for school buses i've got to make reductions equaling three hundred thousand dollars across the other uh active programs so uh one of the i did put together you know the approach i was going to
154take on this there were about 10 projects i would uh i adjust downward to uh make this happen for buses six or seven of them were smaller dollar values i'm talking 25 to 40 000 in the allocation for the year which really are reactions to what is happening each year that would be carpeting painting furniture needs you know we don't have those identified specifically as yet those during the springtime would be gathered and we would find out what the needs are and we would react to a poor furniture replacement or you know carpet that needs to be replaced in different classrooms around the districts or repainting work you know all these are things that are looked at in the you know february march april time frame for making decisions in may to get these things
155uh planned and done so that things are ready to roll for the start of the next school year yeah that's not always the case but you know that's you know kind of the cycle of uh we're building and adjusting our current plan and then executing it shortly there afterwards okay uh i'm pleased to say that what was viewed are really the key elements that were in the plan that being the uh continued support for the roof work at the high school which was already done uh went through uh we have security vestibules uh planned for ruth chaffee and for john patterson for later just aft starting next year we have money for the redesign rebuilding of the parking lots on the church street side and on the rear of john patterson for being done next
156summer we have a hundred thousand dollars earmarked for the restoration of the track at the alumni field and you know the other projects have been diminished you know in different amounts to get us to these levels and that would allow us to put in the uh three buses into the board cip vehicle line item so you know it's a plus and minus equaling zero but it reshuffles the resources to address the needs and the concerns of the board at this time so this does also have impact on other parts of the book so that is needs to be done once we sort of have a consensus about where we're going because they have to adjust other things as a byproduct of this consensus so uh this is really providing an uh alternative uh uh approach
157for utilization of this year's uh board cip uh money compared to what was originally uh passed and or approved in past a year ago so any questions i don't see any questions okay okay all right moving on uh the third item uh was the question about the technology reserve where there's 181 thousand dollars there now over the last few years we've added uh service warranty programs through the manufacturer of the devices uh for chrome workbooks that we buy um each year to replace and uh supplement the fleet that we have you know and talking with our technology director today he was telling me there's about 4 700 devices earmarked for student use as well as additional chromebooks for our paraprofessional staff and other uses around the district along with our uh fleet of spares and
158replacements that are here so there's you know well over 5000 devices that we're managing in the chromebook arena that's here uh when i spoke to mr holland about this in the the plan the this year you're saying that there's over 2 000 chromebook damage uh tickets that i've gone through and these can be minor things where uh you know key isn't working right uh you do have crack keyboards you know motherboard problems that are there but in total the the sheer number of items that are floating through the recycling process uh to keep all the kids in the working chromebook is substantial and by doing that it was a bit impractical for us to try to do everything in-house ourselves by brokering off uh this work we have you know you know a high-powered resource
159available outside so we can turn these around quickly minimize the downtime the issues and all we really are managing ourselves are those devices that are out of warranty at this point so it gives us a much ability to have a leaner staff and we're able to manage this really successfully you know for uh the benefit of the kids and the staff in looking at how this has unfolded with the insurance reserve over the last couple years we now have enough money in there to actually use the reserve to purchase the warranties on the devices we get you know right now we're getting this year's 55 000 that have been received in the fund maybe that'll tick up to about 60 by the time the year is done because it's basically most 95 of the money
160is received by october 1st for each annual cycle and as we're looking at our replacement number of devices we would probably average around you know it's about seventy dollars a contract for a uh warranty three-year warranty and if we're buying a thousand devices a year on average uh that's here that would be seventy thousand dollars we could draw on the reserve to pay for and then we would just have our out of pocket costs for uh repairing out of warranty devices or if we need to fill a specific hole on an emergency basis for buying a dozen chromebooks for some place because we're caught short we would have that resource and we could see you know how long we could sustain that we may drop off a bit in the value but it would give
161us an approach that would allow us to then buy chromebooks through the operating budget or whatever financial facility is provided by the town for this at a lower cost because the chromebook itself is probably 350 and tack on a 70 dollar three year warranty we're buying right now 420 by splitting that it will help us manage our budget requests and the town's ability to uh know that we're out shopping for the best available deal and utilizing the insurance reserve to really fulfill the full spectrum of needs that we have in this area so any questions [Music] uh miss you up um how much is the extended warranty uh last time we went out for warranties was 70 a unit i don't know what generation of chromebooks that was though it's probably a generation eight might
162be a generation nine thank you and this grows muted again [Laughter] i said dr fletcher may i ask mr giacomo what's the question right that's not what i'm supposed to do is go through you that's correct okay so um lou how many times can you and you probably don't know this answer but if you can ask craig how many times did this did the district utilize that extended warranty uh in the last year i would say we had of the two thousand devices i bet eighteen to nineteen hundred of those went back out on warranty claims to the manufacturer or his agent okay all right miss shop you have another question sorry i left my hand up accident okay all right i don't see any more hands so we can move on okay i don't
163have anything else for discussion at this point unless there were uh clarifications or uh i was off point on some of the information i gathered since last night well i think we're good now i do too thank you okay so it's my understanding that we're not going to make any motions at all concerning this tonight so we're going to just move this agenda item forward to our next meeting in january and that will give the committee a chance to meet again as well okay so does that conclude the information it does conclude the facilities uh report to be continued so okay thank you dr fletcher all right so the next thing we're going to do is we're going to move on to our student representatives if they're still awake and still with us we know
164they have to get up very early tomorrow morning so do we have them i don't know who's going to go for it yeah i'll let jimmy get started today so okay yeah jimmy gets to go first um so first off um aside from all of the math the numbers and the money being spent um the music and arts program are new in high school so um right now uh the big ticket item is the fact that into the woods the musical is the casting has been complete thank god i know everyone was on edge about that one and rehearsals will get started after break in january uh other items include chamber choirs going on their new york trip this friday um the 17th i'll be gone all day um it's a nice nice little getaway
165where we're going to be doing a performance workshop yay and we're going to see the broadway show chicago that should be fun um chorus concert december 20th for those who are who are interested in an orchestra concert on december 16th as far as sports go so the sports report uh basketball are the first game or was sorry december 14th which i believe was this tuesday um games are to be played with masks on uh they are hoping that as the season goes on this will change because well playing with that song isn't exactly the most fun experience in the world um but safety overall as far as the cheer squad goes there is no winter cheer season happening due to the lack of coaches uh post the post fall season um some incident happening there
166um as far as the indoor track team goes um our first meet is going to be this friday and saturday um we also completed a team wide toy collection for ccmc which was completed and delivered on sunday we had a lot of team participation which was really really good and yeah we will be wearing masks at our first meet though um as far as as far as hockey goes we they recently completed a jamboree against cheshire where the shield and connor had and they had a fundraiser on december 10th which was last friday at the newington ice arena boys swimming uh they're they're currently having a tour drive for the connecticut children's hospital uh and it'll and an alumni meet on december 22nd um upcoming slash past events which these are both past so past
167events um so today was our wacky wednesday for the month which was wet ugly sweater day and actually we had a very very large amount of participation from both staff and students which was great um and we had pajama day on december 2 or december 10th sorry um which basically was if you donated a dollar to your homeroom um you got to wear pajamas for the day and all the proceeds went to the children's hospital so all good there vidiq i'll pass the torch to you yep so just to summarize some of the clubs um for deca the competitors are working on preparing um we've been completing role plays uh both with um the two advisors as well as student peer editing and we're also completing the written exams those going to florida are working
168with the advisor to prepare for the trip and make sure that everything is worked out for that and at our last meeting we made fleece tie blankets to donate to the children's hospital in time for the holidays uh women in leadership they are currently holding a donation drive to collect personal hygiene products for the victims of domestic abuse at the prudence crandall center we have began debating for debate club the first debate was held earlier this month around the topic of education and we had a lot of students provide interesting perspectives on education concerns that we brought up during this debate in terms of student council which would be us we have split into different committees spirit government slash administration community service and appreciation days and all the committees are currently working to get the
169ball rolling the spirit committee has planned to decorate part of the school for the winter holiday season today we made a backdrop for um to take pictures for ugly sweater day which was a big hit it was in the cab so during lunch waves and open students could take pictures in front of it for the yearbook and just for their just for them to have the service committee is collecting suggestions and they're going to be deciding their next project soon and the crochet club has begin their meetings and new members are being taught how to crochet and they're trying to decide on their general project for everyone right now in terms of academics and honor societies social studies honor society has informed their newly inducted members and we elected officers at the last meeting the
170induction ceremony is going to be december 21st national honor society we are continuing to work on service projects especially during this time of year english national honor society is doing an annual fundraiser of gift cards or monetary donations to support families in need in newington we have also started a other project which is seniors to seniors where high school seniors send letters to senior citizens which is just to spread some positivity and build some connections um science national honor society we had our first speaker and we decided to start with somebody in our school we had miss freeze um she spoke to the members of this honors study about being a volunteer as an emt and she answered all the questions people may have and kind of just explained how that works and moving on
171to just a couple general things um a student elsa raymond um has taken the initiative to place period and personal hygiene products in all the women's bathrooms and uh the concept she is promoting is you take one and replace it with something if you are able to um and this is an important thing because at our last meeting um we had discussed this as a part of student council and now we are we have reached out to elsa because this isn't something she should necessarily have to take on her on up on her own and if she needs help we are more than willing to help if that's in a monetary amount or just making sure everything is being replenished and this is just a huge thing because prior to this you need to if
172you want products you need to go to the nurse where you have to write your name down and the quality of the products isn't necessarily as great which this is being refilled by girls who know what works for them so it's pretty important and a lot of dress code talk today but the new dress code development is that brimless hats and hats that don't cover your face or ears are now allowed and i didn't realize how big of a difference this would make but i have noticed in huge increase in students being thrilled to wear beanies and such especially during this season and dress code is one of the topics that the government administration commissioners council would like to work on especially with women leadership because they were the ones responsible for the change with
173the hats and that's everything i have today sorry that was a lot we uh didn't get a chance to present last month so well thank you very much now i'll open it up for board questions and we'll start with mr branda hi sorry i went off camera my computer is just kind of choppy so um but really quick um jimmy your report and your energy at 9 30 at night after a long facilities discussion is much needed so i really appreciate it um i i think it's interesting fedesha that you mentioned the dress code um as you hopefully heard earlier i've got some concerns there so it's interesting that all that is tying together one thing i wanted to point out because i'm not sure if you both are scheduled to be here at our
174next meeting but dr berman did let us know that we will be discussing the school calendar holiday stuff at our next meeting so i'm not sure if you were scheduled to give a report then but even if you're not i would love to have you both um attend because i know you both shared some some you know important uh perspective on that so i would love for you to be a part of that discussion and then lastly really quick because i know you want to get out here i just wanted to congratulate you vedicia on the newington life article um it was so wonderful to read and really just shined a light not only on you as a tremendous student and community member in newington high school but it just you know for me personally
175reading it just made me so proud of our town and so proud of our district that we have people like you growing into such tremendous leaders so congratulations to you thank you all right thank you and miss weaver uh as always just incredible incredible work guys i really appreciate this um and your energy at 9 30 at night yeah it's working um yeah really excited for into the woods i love that musical i'm so excited i saw miss wagner and i we were just talking we were like what's the musical do we know it and i know i was like gonna get cast around now so um i'm just really excited to hear that amber is always a great trip i may see you in new york this weekend so that'd be great um and
176just really appreciate well one jimmy your sports report if you know this doesn't work out you have a future there yes pm's right down the road um but really appreciate as always the thoroughness of your report i thank you so much for that i think you know i was just thinking you uh you you asked for service ideas and um one of the things i've been thinking about is is actually i love this idea and you kind of like you jumped ahead right to my idea of seniors to seniors i think our senior population could really use a lot of um attention from from our younger uh generation you know a lot of the outdoors i knocked on they just really wanted someone to talk to and i think um we've got a lot of
177talkative students out there so i think it's a great idea not just letters but perhaps visitations as well um you know when it when it's safe so i think that that's a great great idea and i'm just really glad to hear that and um you know i think in regards to also just the period products you know i think it doesn't need to necessa this is a really great initiative but i don't think it should be on the girls to have to to get good period products so i hope we can you know kind of work on a solution to to find ways that we make these more accessible than having to go to the nurse and make them of quality i know that's an issue not only at this school district but school districts
178across the country i work with advocacy groups on period poverty all the time um and it's something you know colleges work on and whether it should be funded by student government or by um you know the board budget um i just think it's something that we could have a deeper conversation about so happy to to do that with with the student council and women in leadership club which i'm really glad to hear launching and doing great stuff so just appreciate all the thoroughness guys um and look forward to our next meeting thank you very much mishap wagner um i just wanted to know as you as you both were reading um your reports i heard toy drives letters to seniors work with women's shelters food drives just the amount of community service and giving back
179and um i just think students pulse on real world issues and coming together to solve them even in little ways like this is just absolutely um commendable and really shows um [Music] true true leadership um and so hearing that tonight just really um really warmed my heart i would love you both to come talk to my sixth graders um just about some of those things that you all are doing um uh very interesting about the beanies it made me think of jughead jones i don't know if i'm dating myself on that but that's what it made me think of uh and thank you both for being here as always your perspective is so very valued um and i think it would be wonderful to have your perspective um as we go forward to talk about
180the the holidays um as was mentioned um so and then after this go get some good sleep thank you very much and miss drost very super quick so uh vadisha just let you know there are grants and offered by the state to pay for um feminine products so i don't know if you want to talk to tara about this take no sorry i shouldn't refer to her like that um or someone in the central office i can get you some links and some information about that so just let you know and i just have to say jimmy i love seeing you out here i've known jimmy forever it's so he's this energetic all the time so i love you okay that's all thank you i will definitely reach out about that all right thank you
181very much and mr sharma hi vadisha and james thanks for thanks for the update and i mean the stuff that you guys are doing it's so inspiring so thank you for your leadership and thanks for the update right miss rose did you want to say something more or did you just forget your hand oh here we go all right beat it up my computer doesn't work it's tired okay all right thank you very much both of you for your report we appreciate the updates we look forward to seeing you the next time around go get some sleep okay so now we're going to be moving on to uh item f1 and that is the report on the staff allocation for 2021-2022 dr brummett take it away and i will take it hand it right over
182to mr farisi uh thank you so much dr brummett and thank you all again board of education for allowing me the opportunity to present again this evening this is our staff annual staff allocation report for the 21 22 school year and really the purpose of this report builds the foundation for as we now move into um looking at building out next year's budget um seeing where we are right now and grounding ourselves in where we are today helps us then uh look at what our predicted student enrollment will be and what our staffing needs will be as we move forward into the budget process so today is about where we are now and so this is kind of a high level summary of some of the following information that is outlined in the report that
183you have in your packet f1 um what i'll be going over today is a high level summary of full-time equivalent positions by program and school staff ratio comparisons elementary class sizes middle school class sizes in the high school class sizes so i'll kind of give you a broad landscape of what all of that looks like right now and then again this will drive us into what we need to look for for next school year so in regards to staffing this summer all the way up through october 1 hcd worked very hard with our other leaders to fill 50 positions 36 of those were certified staff 34 contracts and two long-term subs those positions were based off of seven resignations six retirements eleven transfers uh one memoriam and one dismissal as well as ten new positions
184which comprise two special education teachers two ell teachers or ml teachers uh one math interventionist one equity and inclusion specialist whom you met again this evening dr hairston one pre-k teacher one humanities coach one stem coach and one reading teacher so those are the 36 certified staff we also hired 14 non-certified staff those were based off of six resignations three retirements and one transfer which included four new positions two digital content specialists and two board certified behavior analysts or bcbas so those are the 50 positions that we filled between last school year and this october one to make sure that we had all of the staffing that we needed for our students this school year there were a couple key drivers in those decisions particularly in some of the new positions that i explained those
185included changes to student population in our changing demographics that go along with that as well as the impact on learning due to covid and some of the changes in the landscape of the education that we can provide right now so i know you've seen this during your board retreat but i thought it pertinent to share again this evening in regards to some of the shifts and demographics that we're aware of as you look just throughout time you see that coming into this school year we're at our highest percentage of students requiring special education our highest percentage of students with 504s are el or now ml multilingual student population is at its highest as well as our free and reduced lunch we've increased our our open choice population to 110 students and our magnet school population
186went down by five when you just take out the um multilingual students and you just look at you know what does 7.1 really mean it's approximately 276 students in our district and you can see here by school how that breaks down so elizabeth green and john patterson have some of the highest multilingual student population in the schools and then you can see how it varies throughout you know the other schools the other seven schools in district so those are important key elements to take into account when i share with you earlier what some of those new positions that that came in and help support it as well as some of the coaching to help support teachers in all areas of the organization be effective not only with multilingual students but all the varying demographic shifts
187in our population of students so when it comes to student enrollment we took a look at what would our anticipated enrollment be for this school year and it was geared at 3897 our actual enrollment as of october 1st which is what we report to the state was 3900 students so a very close uh prediction to what our actual numbers are so that's what we use to base all of our decisions as far as what our classrooms look like i like to talk about some of the major staffing changes to accommodate all of the needs that i've just shared so far so if we look at the program or school which would be on page two of your report i have highlighted in yellow some of those changes for you you'll see two areas that didn't
188get highlighted in yellow which i wish had which would be instructional coaches and speech clinicians so if i could just share with you some of those major set staffing changes that occurred between last year and this school year we increased our math intervention services at the elementary school so you'll see right here we went from three interventionists to four for this school year at the elementary level you'll see a few changes at the other levels as well and those are predicated on schedules so those wouldn't be new staff or a change in staff like a reduction or an addition they would be based on interventionists who either picked up more intervention assignments or actually took on a whole class assignment because sometimes we allocate an interventionist to teach one class throughout the day um and
189though that would account for those variations um also a highlight of the major staffing changes include our instructional coaches as i mentioned earlier we did um for the first time ever approve the hiring of two coaches at the high school level uh a stem coach and a humanities coach those coaches are working really hard and are highly welcomed at newington high school in our area of wellness we actually reduced staffing we had a retirement last year and we realized a need to only bring back a certain portion of that so we did not bring back a full-time person to replace the retirement we just brought back actually the same person at a point two um we uh did increase in the area of reading coaches um what we did here again is we were able
190to improve uh in what you'll see in the area of our reading department the reading instruction to help support uh literacy so we had elementary literacy teachers that were 0.75 we had three of those positions and we improved those to 1.0 which would equate in the total to the additional 0.75 that is to help with our students who are struggling with reading at this time in the area of special education we also made an improvement and i shared with you that we did hire some new special education teachers in the area of multilingual education we also hire two new staff to improve in that area and help with our supports for the growing needs and of our students we did also um increase our speech clinicians by 0.5 to help improve in that area where
191we're seeing a need for continuous growth and um what we see here uh for newington high school is actually uh just an overall increase minimally to help uh support some of the increases in student population there so these are kind of just some of the major shifts in what we've seen in our in our staffing changes from last year to this year as we kind of go through and look at the staff ratios staff student ratios and what that now looks like in in action this would be kind of a larger spectrum of of what it looks like so i'll kind of just give you an example of of what you see here this is the pupil staff ratio chart and what you have if you just take the first row where you see 70
192and 69 in 2020 21 we had 70 staff in 2021 22 we had 69 staff and that's for elementary classroom teachers if we keep going across and um so what you're going to see on the last two columns would be for the 21 20 or for the 2021 school year the ratio is one teacher to every 19.2 students and similarly this year it would be one teacher and the ratio of students is 20.4 and you can follow this chart down and you'll see how it kind of plays out both for not just elementary classroom teachers but also elementary classroom teachers which now includes art music physical education and computer ed so the special areas and then total elementary school staff what the ratios look like when you add it all together so that would be
193kind of a larger big picture view at the elementary level when you take a peek right now at class size based on the october 1st enrollment this is what it looks like if you were to go across the chart at each grade level starting at preschool kindergarten grade one two three and four and then by school so you'll see elizabeth green has three teachers in kindergarten the average or the class sizes are 19 20 and 19. and then you keep going across to reynolds who have four kindergarten teachers patterson and chaffee and i'll let you take a look at this but this is all in your report so what we see here is that we have manageable class sizes there are some areas where we always look to see if there's opportunities for reduction for
194example chafing kindergarten at 20 um is an area that we kept a close eye on this year um but it didn't continue to grow we weren't certain if it would or would not um so this is a manageable size that we're able to provide quality high quality instruction while supporting it with a additional tutorial staff that are in that school and so we take a look at that and and we look pretty good there when you take a look at the middle school staff student ratio this chart is similar to the one that i shared before at the elementary level and what we're seeing here for this year is a ratio in the classrooms of 1 to 20.9 and then when you now add in all of the other areas like music wellness computer ed
195world languages it's one to fifteen point seven staff to student ratio and then total in the school is one to ten point one but that's inclusive of everyone even resource teachers that's not what it looks like in the classroom but in the classroom this is what it looks like in grade 5 as you go across at john wallace middle school which is at the top of the chart and then the lower end of the chart is martin kellogg middle school you can see our middle school class sizes uh i am pleased to report that this year uh the class sizes uh at the middle level are a tiny bit lower than they were last year um that is something we always look at um just to see how we're doing at the middle level and
196again these are all manageable class sizes when you look at grade 7 and john wallace you do start to see a few classes that are a little bit high um and and we watch those carefully and provide the appropriate uh tutorial supports that are necessary in those classrooms and similarly at the high school uh this is the chart that shows kind of the staff student ratio we're about in classrooms 1 to point four when you add in all the other staff it's about one to twelve point five uh and the total teachers to total classrooms is one to seventeen point or sixteen point seven and then this is in general uh what it looks like as you go through the departments what you'll see here is the student enrollment the number of sections and then
197the average class size and this varies based on a lot of the electives that we have so these are just the averages but if you go into classrooms you'll see anything from 15 students to sometimes 25 students depending on the elective and or the course it varies greatly you know the number in each classroom at the high school level based on all the options that students have so with that i would open it up at this time to any questions that you might have mrs i have a few all right first one how many students do coaches work with in a small group because i remember two years ago there was a like oh well they work with them every once in a while and then if they're not working in a small group do
198they ever actually co-teach so how much like contact hour does an instructional coach have with a child if you don't have that information you can get it with me and the second one when we look at the ratios um you you've muted yourself yeah it's my computer they gave me a bad computer on purpose because they knew it was going to ask too many questions um so the ratio doesn't count in instructional coaches as part of the staff and the reading teachers for the elementary school because she said it didn't for the middle school so does it for the elementary school that's my two questions if you don't have those answers we can you can get back to me thank you so much i think i would like to um you know get get back
199to you on the first question on the second question at the bottom of the um chart uh when it was the student uh pupil ratio uh staff people ratio uh that did include all all teachers all teachers in the building which would include instructional coaches and reading interventionists so yes okay thank you and miss hutt wagner uh thank you i just wanted to ask um you mentioned it wallace when you were looking at the seventh grade some of those 25 student classes i know you mentioned um [Music] that there were um some i think you said supports kind of put in place so i was just wondering what that would look like um like to assist those teachers and just making sure that um with a large class size that things are kind of maintained
200what does that look like thank you absolutely so um at all schools uh especially the elementary and the middle schools our learning tutors uh support uh the instructional program so they focus primarily in literacy and mathematics and also do our interventionists so what principals do in as they're working in what dr hairston was sharing are our professional learning communities and really looking at the data and how students are performing would allocate those tutorial resources to the classrooms that require the support so sometimes whereas a classroom may have 25 students in it um if if the teacher can manage those 25 students because maybe there isn't a grave discrepancy between the supports required in that classroom the allocation of resources might not be there but generally we do see that especially with the higher numbers in
201the classroom so then those folks would come in at specific times during english language arts or mathematics and they would provide a small group instruction alongside with the teacher so after the mini lesson is conducted and then students are either independent learning or breaking up into small group instruction those resources would be in there to support those groups or those students that require it along again with the teacher and similarly with our interventionists they might do push in during that time to support that okay thank you are there any other questions okay i don't see any more questions mr farizi all right well thank you all very much for the opportunity to present this information thank you very much okay we're going to move on to agenda item number f2 discussion and action to establish
202dates for review of the superintendent's proposed 2022-23 budget and that should be on page 20. if you're looking on your computer fletcher would you like the motion red um do you want to address it first miss burma dr brummett i was just going to post it i believe we reviewed it initially at a previous board meeting um so the dates have not changed i believe nothing changed as a result of that evening's discussion i'll entertain the motion i can do that go ahead uh move the board of education officially establish dates to review the superintendent's estimates for the 2022-2023 school budget to include february 2nd 25th through february 8th 2022 february 9 2022 february 16th 2022 and february the 23rd 2022 as outlined in the memo from the superintendent of schools second all right motion
203has been uh made and seconded i will open it up for any discussion that you may have [Applause] seen there isn't any discussion i will move for the question are we going to do it by roll call secretary right no miss craig there she is michael branda yes danielle drast yes dr bruce fletcher yes beth manky hutt wagner yes richard lavery air leverier yes yes amy peratti yes sam sharma yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yap yes the motion passes unanimously very good so we will now move on to item number three a discussion on board committee assignments are there any questions related to the committee assignments that anybody wants to ask mr branda uh it's not relative to who was put on what committee but um i noticed that on our chromebooks we don't have
204um the ability to use zoom for the town specific meetings and some of the committees are going to be run by town leadership so i you know what drew my attention was the shared services so i was wondering if maybe there was a way through craig holland dr brummett if you could find out a way that maybe we could install that or have the capability to get zoom onto these because when i tried it it didn't give me the permissions i will absolutely look into that okay miss you up i actually was going to say the same thing that michael brando was saying because i wasn't able to get on anything on the chromebook so i would like that as well okay all right thank you very much either you're all tired or you don't
205have any more questions yeah and no further questions we are going to move on to item number four which is an action item to adopt the superintendent and board goals so that is item f4 i can make the motion please go ahead move the board of education adopt the 2021-2022 superintendent and board goals discussed at the november 29 2021 board of education retreat second record motion seconded by mr branda any seeing discussion discussion oh we do have one miss weaver so i just want to say um i really like these goals and i think it's great um we went over these also just for the public snow we went over these um at our border street um where dr burma once again emphasized these i don't think they change much from the last time but
206it's just important that i think these are really good goals um and that we uh establish these yeah okay thank you mr laverier very briefly thank you mr uh chairman i think that with the goals we need to keep more of a focus on equality over equity thank you all right thank you very much any other comments and i will move for the vote miss craig michael branda yes dania drast yes dr bruce fletcher yes beth manky hutt wagner yes richard la verrier epstein you're abstaining yeah amy peratti yes damn sharma yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yap yes the motion passes by eight with one abstained okay thank you very much and we are going to move on to item number five which is an action item so f5 in your packet so if somebody
207wants to read the motion [Music] i can do it okay uh move the board of education approve the reallocation of funds from one program line to another as proposed by the superintendent of schools second okay the motion's been made and seconded now we'll open it up for discussion okay seeing no discussion i'm going to ask for the vote miss craig michael branda yes danielle drast no bruce fletcher yes beth manky hat wagner yes richard la verriere no amy peratti yes sam sharma yes jessica weaver yes anastasia yep no the motion passes six to three okay and we're going to move on to item number f6 discussion and possible action on the board cip this job do you have a question did we go over on the curriculum committee and um under new business did we
208skip a few there was no curriculum committee that met the only one was facilities committee and student representatives okay just want to make sure yep mr uh do we want to change the motion because we're tabling this or is this vote down yeah we were i thought we were going over this is this is this one that we're tabling and moving forward correct yes okay so he wants to vote down the motion or um right apologies that was a lifetime ago all right no it's best just to not take any action and i as the chairman i'm gonna move it forward okay so we don't need to discuss it all right so that is the last item for our discussion in action tonight we're moving on to item number g which is public participation on
209any matter related responsibility we want to give you an opportunity to share from the public but we are going to limit your participation to three minutes so you can call the number that is on the screen or you can raise your hand if you're here in the meeting and while we are waiting what i'm going to do i'm just going to ask if there are any further comments that any board members would like to make and miss drost you're all you're right on cue and i'm not muted i just want to um it was a a very good it was a lot tonight but i want to address something that happened about three hours ago and it was um i don't know if we if it's a board thing or if it's a dr brummett
210thing so if we are going to as a district require kids to quarantine right so we're saying to them like i'm just worried as a board member that we're saying you can't come to our school but we're also not going to provide you with that ability to stream so um i think it's something that needs to be revisited if we're requiring streaming i would like us to also look at requiring quarantining you know i i'm a teacher when a kid quarantines because they've been exposed i just turn my computer on and at least the kids can get my instruction um so that's one thing that i would like somewhere to have a conversation and second um so my last name is dros for the long o and a lot of people are saying it wrong
211so i just want to clarify it's drowsed um and i love the fact i love my neighbor dearly i don't know why how it's gotten changed over the years um so um that's all i just wanted to say that that's how you say my last name okay thank you very much mr branda so miss dros it also sounds like you're gonna need the chromebook replacement program based on how this meeting went so um but um just really quick um from i i think it was like the last motion that we did i just wanted to request that in the future you know from my vantage point it seemed like because we had three no votes on on that last item it would have been great to hear discussion on that as to why only to
212you know either maybe there were questions that dr brummett and lou could have answered or you know maybe myself and the others that voted yes could have been informed as to why maybe voting no would have been a better decision so i would just you know love to see us kind of work a little bit more collaboratively on some of the topics that that people feel strongly about that they they would vote no on and i appreciate the no vote um regardless but i'm just asking for a little um communication there so we can all work together on it thanks and good job dr fletcher first meeting tough one but you did great thank you thank you very much and miss weaver this is why you don't let michael brandon go first because he takes
213everything you're gonna say yeah i just think like most of our votes are unanimous and have been and i'd like to keep it that way so like if we want to talk about things i'm happy to discuss i know it's a very long meeting but that's why we're here we put in the time because we want to know what everyone's thinking so um that and making sure uh everyone's on view when we need to be on mute um because i know there's a lot of feedback uh this meeting so just because we had a lot of guests on so um yeah we need we need to work on that but hopefully we won't be um always virtual and we can we can see each other again um i just want to say thank you to
214everyone going through a full meeting like this you know it's like a lot but i think it's important um that the public knows about everything that's going on from parent input to um our amazing everyday heroes and all the awards and then the things that are actually going on in the school so um you know i'm looking forward to next meeting maybe a little shorter maybe not happy to be here anyway and congratulations to defector on your new meeting as chair thank you very much and ms peratti thank you yeah i just want to also say great job tonight i would also appreciate some discussion on some items especially if we're not all in agreement on them i'm just you know trying to learn and understand things so if there's a reason why the no
215vote happened you know it would be just interesting what what michael mike said um also with the um the quarantining and screen and stay and everything i know that there's a lot of parents that are getting different experiences so i'm not sure um you know we i might my daughter just went back to school from being quarantined and um i it wasn't a negative experience in my opinion but you know i know not everyone's getting the same thing so i think it would be something that maybe we can look at or you know just figure out something with the parents and make sure that everyone is getting um proper education when they are quarantined because it's unfortunate that we have to deal with this but um you know it would it's something that is important
216and we're going to have to deal with it for a little while longer so thank you everybody all right and thank you and dr brummett thank you and i appreciate uh miss pratty bringing that up i would like to have the opportunity to discuss that at our january board meeting there have been a big increase in um kids needing to do the temporary remote again as opposed to screen and stay because of our uptick in cases um and i've had to speak to i've i lost count of how many parents i've spoken to um about that so i think it'd be important for me to put that all forward to the board of education as well as some of our plans to make those who have to be quarantined have a little more consistent access
217to their educational experience so we've got some things in the works by january i should be able to give the board a complete picture and again we were knee deep in screen and stay and then we had significant uptick in code cases last week 36 so we have to weigh those cases in our decision making relative to whether to do screens day or quarantine so more information to follow and it would it will be responsive to many of the comments we heard tonight earlier in public comments as well thank you very much very good thank you very much i want to say thank you to everybody for your participation and it was a it was a long night but uh buckle your seat belts we have a few more like this that are going to
218be coming but we're going to get through them okay so at this time i will entertain a motion to adjourn motion to adjourn second all right motions baiting second in all in favor shut your computers off good night everybody you