001I'm going to call to order the Brownsville Community School Corporation Board of School Trustees regular meeting of February 8th, 2021. Please stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. To the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Please join me in a moment of reflection. Thank you. Consent items, Dr. Snapp. Thank you, Ms. Shelton. We'd like to take just letter A as a separate item, and then we can group B through E together. So this time, ask approval for the minutes of the January 25th meeting, 2021, please. So moved. Second. I have a motion and a second. Any questions or comments? And all in those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. I'm sorry,
002one abstention. And then I would also request approval of items B through E, please. Do we have a motion? Second. Motion is second. Any questions or comments? Hearing none, all those in favor, signify by saying aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Communications. Operations update, Mr. Voigt. This evening I was going to give a quick update on where we are in free and reduced meals. That was a question that was asked from the board, I think, last month. And the answer to the question is that we are seeing an increase in free and reduced participation. We have actually filtered out the at-home learners because we realized that that was actually offsetting some of the numbers. And so when we did that. Sorry, I can't look at you and look at the paper at the same time.
003That when we did that, breakfast reduced participation levels have risen by over 12%. Pre-participation only rose 4%, but what's interesting about that is they are now almost at the same level. Before there was a big disparity between the two groups. Now they're together. And both of them are running in their low 40s right now. That number is moving around, obviously, but right now it's in the low 40s. On the lunch reduced participation, it also moved up. um to the free group and i think that went up by about eight percent so we are making inroads on that we did see a decline in participation in the month of december and in talking about that with um Jordan Ryan, we believe that part of the reason for that is we had so many students on quarantine
004that the number of students that were actually in school to be able to participate in the program was reduced in the month of December. And so it'll be interesting to see what that data looks like in upcoming months. We are having to merge free and reduced information at a power school with information coming out of the food service package. And so it's a little difficult to get this data pulled together, but we are doing it on a periodic basis. And we will continue to do it through the school year. The other thing I just wanted to mention briefly, school safety is a topic that we are frequently concerned about. And I just wanted to report that the Department of Education about every three years randomly selects one of our buildings to go through an audit.
005This year they selected East Middle School. Chief Wing met with a representative from Department of Education, and we went through that audit with nothing to be adjusted or corrected. And what's great about that is every one of our district buildings has the same policy, the same emergency preparedness plan. The only thing that changes is site-specific information. And so if we know one passed, we know that they all passed. So that's a great thing for us to get that taken care of and move on. That's all I had for this evening. Thank you, Mr. Voigt. Brownsburg Education Foundation report, Mrs. Dearman. Okay, try to be a little louder with this mask on. So I rally for our Kids Galathon, which is represented by Falcone Automotive. This will be a virtual event on Facebook Live and BCS
006TV on Friday, March 12th, and it'll start at 6 p.m. We want to consider, or for you guys to consider, how you can participate in this fundraising event. Since we can't have it live like we usually do, the huge gale-a-thon, we've come up with a plethora of different opportunities for people to get involved and to support BEF. So there will be a big raffle. You can buy a raffle ticket for $100, and you can get a chance to win $10,000. We're only going to sell 200 tickets and so you have to hurry to get your ticket because we plan on selling all of those but that's a pretty big pretty big raffle. And then the silent auction which will be opening February 26th and it'll go through March 12th. You can participate in that and
007you can see that on the BEF website. And then we're having a thousand family challenge. So what we're hoping is we can get a thousand Brownsburg families to only donate $25 to BEF to raise $25,000. And I think we'll have a ticker on the website showing how many families have donated. So hopefully we can get a thousand families to donate $25. And then there's a virtual scavenger hunt. That is a free activity and you can learn more about that on the website and its corporate partners. And you can enter a drawing to be one of 20 winners for $100 cash. And that's the gala fund for our kids. The Metamorphosis Award, essays are accepted until Friday, February 10th. All students are eligible to apply. One student will be chosen as a recipient. An award includes
008$100 cash prize. And so you can see the BEF website for more information on that. And then our annual graduate walk brick special. That starts February 14th, continues through March 19th. Order a graduate walk brick. and receive $10 off when you use your promo code GRAD2021. Bricks must be ordered by March 19th, 2021 to be placed in the ground by graduation. An awesome gift for your student who's graduating. Thank you. Thank you, Mrs. Dierman. We have high ability placement reports. I think we have some building principals here. Yes. I think Mrs. Johnson is going to start us off, and then we're going to go through elementary, middle school, and high school. About four to five minutes with each group they've practiced to make sure that they'll stay on time. And so this month, we're talking
009about high ability programming all the way through high school and how our students do as we break out into the various subgroups. This starts a series of presentations for the next five months as we look at some areas that we're quite honestly we have students that are underrepresented in and so Mrs. Johnson go ahead and kick us off please. Good evening. So my job today is to talk to you a little bit about the context behind our research project. And so just to steal the thunder from my colleagues here. we're going to be telling you that our high ability classes do not represent our student demographics. There's underrepresentation of students of diversity. And so when we look at this, we wanted to ask the question of why. And so I'm giving the research, the context
010behind that why today. So the first important point to note is that our African American students are not represented in our gifted programs. This is not isolated to Brownsburg. This is prevalent across the country in educational systems. And so what's interesting about this is not only are African American students not represented proportionally in our high ability classrooms, they're not making adequate progress compared to other subgroups. So not only are they not having been identified, we're not closing that gap for them. So the question is why? Why is that happening? The most prevalent theory behind that is the deficit thinking model. What is the deficit thinking model? Basically that's blaming the victim in education. What that means is instead of saying, looking at the whole context behind a student, we are saying the student did not
011reach this score, therefore they do not have access to high ability without taking into consideration the systemic inequalities or social structural inequities that might be existing. We're just taking into consideration the score. And so again, educators are inherently good people. We're trying to make good decisions. But in this situation, we're saying the student does not have the aptitude, therefore they do not get access to the high-ability classroom. That influences our behavior as educators. The first thing that happens is students are given less access to challenging and rigorous curriculum. If they do not have access as a kindergartner, it gets harder and harder as each grade level progresses for them to close that gap and be able to join the high-ability classrooms. The other important thing to take into consideration is that teachers are not referring
012or they're under referring our African American students. Another concept that was really interesting in the research is that the idea of giftedness is a social construct that we have created. It aligns with societal norms of excellence and potential, and who creates those? The majority. And so the people that have the cultural and social capital are the ones that define what giftedness is. Therefore, the idea of giftedness can in and of itself lead to inequities. All of the research says that the crux of this problem is our identification process. If we look at our identification process and really think about who we are giving access to our high ability classrooms and making sure that we're looking at both quantitative and qualitative data, we'll be able to close some of those gaps that exist in our data.
013And so at this time, I'm going to turn it over to Mark Johnfania, who is our, no, Dr. Hoover, for elementary high ability courses. Good evening. So on behalf of the elementary principals, we've been working on the, obviously, the elementary high ability identification process. And we're not going to read all this to you, obviously, because we know you have the presentation. But we do want to point out some key parts. Really, this first part, we're looking at the assessment piece, the programming, and the professional development, if we had to kind of look at the three pillars that we're really focusing on. On the next slide, you'll see that, as Mrs. Johnson explained, On the left is our high ability population for Brownsburg for the elementary and then on the right is the general population for
014the elementary students at Brownsburg and you can see about a 15 point disparity and that's in those top two columns and that's really that difference that we were talking about that Mrs. Johnson referred to. Really this next slide is really kind of the key part of what we're doing. As you can see here What we're really focusing on and some of the changes that may take place, we're still in the process of developing that, but looking at things like local norms versus national norms. Really looking at different ways that we can adjust our assessments and our screening process in order to hopefully make it to where it catches more students of diversity and also those that are performing at the highest levels. And then as you can see there, what we're going to be focusing
015on, in particular on the next slide, Dr. Jessup, is really that identification process. Right now we use a metric driven quantitative factor. We use scores and basically in grade one all students are screened and that's kind of the on-ramp to our high ability program. What we're really looking at trying to do is to look at more of a qualitative piece whether that be rubric based or something else that would be in addition to our metrics. That was really going to be a key part of our assessment program and then really that professional development piece for our particular at the elementary our first grade teachers. providing them with as much knowledge as we can with how to identify intelligences of other students that is not metric based so forth and then really looking at professional development
016across the board for all of our high ability teachers you can kind of see that in our findings that we really want to do differentiated instruction as well and then on the next slide you can also see that we have a plan for the upcoming school years we do put tentative on these because we're still doing this at the work in progress we're working with our central office staff as well as our principals and assistant principals as well as our teachers to finalize our program. Great. Are there any questions for the elementary? You'll find out which qualitative measures you'll actually want to use. When do you think you'll find out which qualitative measures you would like to use? Well, the hope is that throughout the course of this year, we will continue to research. We
017have one called the Hope Assessment, which is one that we've looked into. We've looked at some universities that are locally developed. Is there any way you can provide us an example of the board someday? Show us what that would be like? Absolutely. Thank you. Good night. I was just wondering, have you guys had a chance to study any other school districts who have kind of done these same types of assessments and looked at what they could do? Absolutely. So Mrs. Banaloo, who worked with us on our team as well, that was one of the things we utilized. Mr. Smith, for data purposes, of course, and then Mrs. Banaloo, actually one of her key jobs was to look at various districts around Indianapolis area and Broward area. So she looked at everything from IBS to Wayne
018Township to Pike Township to others. and quite honestly our current system is actually more sophisticated than most most do not have a two three and a four five system at every building like that as far as assessments and screeners most are using dibbles at the elementary level or some other facet of testing so we actually feel like we're kind of ahead of the game when it comes to assessments we want to take it to the next level of hopefully bringing more students any other questions for mr hoover okay thank you thank you principal at East I'm going to go ahead and talk about our middle school identification starting with our status statement and a lot of the things that you'll hear from me are going to be similar to what you just heard from Dr.
019Huber as far as what we are looking at is trying to get our population in our high ability classes to mirror our student demographics across the board and so Looking at those different things we also want to make sure we've included some information there on Indiana State Code when it comes to high ability classes and gifted and talented students and what those expectations are. So as we look at the data from middle schools, one of the things that is very clear is that our black and African American students and our Hispanic students are in our high ability classes at a much lower percentage than what we see. And so if you look at this graph, you can see that in our white and Asian populations, the top part of the graph is our high ability
020students. The bottom part of the graph is going to be our student populations and so on. we would really like to see those orange and blue lines be equal all the way across the board here as we look at our student demographics. And so those are two areas that obviously we need improvement in as we move forward. The second part of this that you heard Dr. Hoover mention as well, teacher professional development and identification. When we look at our add-on processes, so teacher recommendations and how that plays into students getting into our high ability coursework, we notice that, again, our Hispanic or black or African American students are recommended for those courses at a much... much lower number than what we see in our other demographics. And so we are going to look at one
021of the questions we need to ask, how do we help our teachers through professional development and other means identify those students so that they're getting equal access to those high ability courses? Again, just looking at specifically our world language, that is an offering that we have in our middle schools for our eighth grade students to start high school coursework through our world language classes. And the big things to point out here is that if you look at the top of the graph or the top graph there of data, you will see that again, while our student population over the last three years, we've seen an increase from 12 to 15% in our black or African American students. When we look at that bottom, number we will see that we've actually seen a decrease from 9%
022to about 7% when it comes to students who are qualifying and enrolling in our world language classes. Just one more indicator and thing we wanted to research and look at is how we can improve moving forward. So our research questions, why do our populations not mirror our school-wide demographics? How do we increase access for our minority students? And do we need to adjust the placement criteria for our testing? Do we need to consider a different placement test? Again, many of the things that we're hearing, we use some of that same data and testing that we're using in our elementary school for access at sixth grade when students are entering middle school, and we're seeing those same issues develop as far as students having access to the course. So action steps, the big one for us
023this year that we're looking at immediately is to increase the number of students being screened for our world language courses. Previously we used a number of different data points including ILEARN and ISTEP scores as well as English grades and English language arts classes to see who would actually be able to take the test and so we this year screened all of our seventh grade students were able to take the placement exam to have access to be able to get into our world language classes and we're looking to reconfigure the appeal process to diversify our appeal board so those are the two action steps really we're looking forward this year and then based on the research we continue to do continue to move forward towards our goal any questions thank you mr piskey thank you thank
024you very much i'm here speaking on behalf of the high school but i do want to thank the elementaries and middle school for the work that they've done We get those students and they come to the high school and they're prepared whether they've moved in or whether they've gone through the similar to identical. Our goal, like their goal, I do want that first part. The goal of Brownsburg High School is to appropriately identify and sustain students of color in our high ability and advanced placement courses with the diversity in those courses, in those classes, being proportionate to our overall student demographics. So let's take a look at what we look like right now. We started in 2016, we ended in 2020. I know we're in 2021 school year, but we're kind of equating this to
025our AP data. If you have just a second, you can look at all the categories that are there. BHS has seen a steady increase in the enrollment of minority students with the expectation that that trend will continue. And so you can see on that chart, and again, from that, it's our goal that we will have each ethnic group represented to take advantage of our high ability courses an AP course or a dual credit course. So how do we identify and or recruit students for the advanced courses? At Brownsburg High School in the 10th and 11th grade we give what's called a PSAT, preliminary SAT, practice SAT, whatever you want to call it, to all of our students. From that test there will get a result you will get what's called an AP potential score. Okay,
026so then Brownsburg High School takes that AP potential data from those tests in the 10th and 11th grade, along with the teacher recommendations, student interest, prerequisite performance to schedule our students the following year. So here's really the quantitative research that came out. What happens with the group that has scored well or they've shown it on the PSAT? And what about our group at the high school that may not have shown it exactly on the PSAT? So those are the two things we're going to look at. So first slide is what happens when they show it. Over the last five years, between 80% and 85% of our students that showed AP potential at the high school have taken and gone on to enroll in an AP course, 80 to 85. So that stands to reason that
02715 to 20 percent of those students that showed potential did not. Okay, what we have dug into is the fact that if they didn't take an AP class, they took what was called a dual credit class, a class where you can earn college credit while at Brownsburg High School. We have 24 of those and 26 AP courses. So if you take that into consideration, there's about 30 students each year that did not enroll in a rigorous course. And so we really went student by student and looked at those and tried to figure out what was there between those numbers. And I'm happy to report there was no racial disparity between that group of 30 students over the last five years. So most importantly, if they demonstrate the academic abilities on the standardized assessments, we're assuring
028that all our students are taking at a high level the coursework. So this is the key part. This is the part that was the most influential as we studied the research for us. What happens when they don't show it? But we know it. We know the students can take the coursework. So over the last five years, whether the students showed any potential on that test, whether that test was biased, whatever, they showed no potential on that. 150 students each year still took an AP course. That number also increases when they took a dual credit course on top of that. So really that's a good thing. 150 students, not based on the test, actually sat for an AP class. And so it's a good thing because those 150 students that we have pushed into the upper
029level or high ability classes, 65% of those are white. 35% of those are of diversity or of color. And so that number is higher than, which is all we want. We want to continue to reach higher in our demographics and what that looks like. Next. All right, so here's the thing. And this really does show we've been working on this at the high school for about three, four years. Dr. Jessup, Dr. Snapp, and I and everybody else have been talking about this. And we did a better job in 2019. In 2019, the one that's in green, you can see we have progressed in the number, this is AP only, the number of students that have taken a test. In 2019, we had 738 students take it. And in that year, that's where we most mirrored
030our demographic population. And so the problem is our best effort wasn't our most recent year. So in 2020 we went back down. So it's not enough just to get there and stay it's to get there and get better and grow and grow. So the next thing here's the other broader question as it gets towards wrap up for me. However, there still are inequities in the performance in a broader drill down of the ethnicity and race. Okay, so 662 students took the AP exam. You can score 1, 2, 3, 4, 5 on the AP exam. There are the categories, and if you look at the far column, you can see the count of students that took the exam. In the far column, the average, that would be the average score of the one student that took
031the two tests is 2.5, 3.4 Asian, 2.8, 3, 3.1, and 3.3. The bullet underneath, we must strengthen both our prerequisite readiness for our black and Hispanic students and professionally grow our staff so they can meet the needs of all of our diverse learners. Last slide. Our tentative action steps that I've been mentioning, again, continue to provide professional development and look at qualitative screeners, things that all schools have talked about, investigate potentially enrolling all students at a grade level in an AP course. are to take the AP exam. We may want to administer the PSAT at a ninth grade level. We should look at that and what that need. And then the last thing, in order to get more students into our high level courses, maybe we look to do some one semester type of things
032where students can enroll in those when it doesn't mess your schedule up quite so much. And I have an example there, ethnic literature. So that's kind of the presentation right there from Brownsburg High School. Thank you very much. I can answer any questions that you have. The state. The state pays for PSAT in the 10th and 11th grade. So if you go to the 9th grade, we would have to fund that. Okay. Can we go back a slide or two? Yeah, right there. Okay. So then ideally, we would like to have all of our ethnic students performing at the 3.3 average. Is that the goal? I would like to see more representation of all the numbers of all the groups. That's number one. And 3.3, I'd like to see it be five. For the white
033students too? All students, because it goes five being the best. We not only want to increase the 3.3, but we want all subgroups to continue to grow in their ability to take the test and their scores. And so don't think it just ends at 3.3. If every group was 3.4 or 3.5 or 3.6 futuristically, I would love that. Okay. And so when you talk about maybe doing the PSAT in ninth grade or doing some semester courses, we looked into additional resources as far as staff that it would take to accomplish what we're... Staffing, not so much. We can adjust some different things there. It's more of continued focus on making sure all groups are represented. Again, oftentimes you get a data piece and you say, well, are you sure? No, I can't. the question is
034has to be you can and you will and and you're going to really enjoy it they're going to be better for it and so that is a question we used quite a bit in 2019 we didn't use it enough in 2020. so i don't look for additional resources or reallocate some things psat cost if we went to ninth grade that would be additional ap testing in the 11th grade for english that's why i picked english is free paid for by the state any other questions thank you very much We now move to old business. As far as old business is concerned, I think we tabled the issue from the last meeting. It was a recommendation to realign administrative positions. I think we have two different situations here. We have two administrative positions that we're looking
035to move into two other administrative positions. But if I have a motion and a second from the board, I think I'm asking to split those out first. uh we have one position that's the assistant principal at east middle school the hiring of that position and then also hiring him a vote on a coordinator of equity university i'd like to split those two out so i have a motion a second any questions or comments okay all in favor signify by saying aye aye okay motion passes so i think we're gonna Split those out. First, the assistant principal at East. I don't know, Dr. Snapp, if you want to take it from there. Yes, with the growing enrollment at East Middle School, the request is to add a third assistant principal position. Since this is a new
036position, policy calls that the board has to approve any new administrative position. And so I ask for approval of the third assistant principal position at East Middle School at this time, please. So moved. Second. I'm going to motion second. Any questions or comments? Hearing none, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Dr. Snap. Thank you. Mr. Polisky is extremely happy. And so I would like to draw our attention to the coordinator for equity and diversity position. I don't know that I could say it any better than members of the community did tonight. This is a much needed position. We've reflected on it. We've looked at it. We have a job description that begins to help address many of the questions and concerns tonight. And this is not something that's
037done lightly. It's not done because other districts are doing it's because something that we need to do for our students and staff in brownsburg so i recommend the approval of the addition of the position of coordinator of equity and diversity thank you do we have a motion so moved i have a second second motion second any questions or comments um i'll make my comments um so No surprise, this has obviously been a long haul. I want to thank the board. We have some very... good conversations and I appreciate that we do that and then we walk away and respect each other's opinions. I don't think it'll come as a surprise to the board or Dr. Snapp that I'm not in support of filling this position at this moment for two reasons and I wanted to
038share those. One is I'm very big on process and I would like the decision to implement a diversity, equity, and inclusion person to have been more inclusive. By that I mean... having a little more feedback from the entire school community. People have an opportunity to voice their opinions and thoughts. So I would have liked to have had more of a comprehensive and broader perspective on individuals, teachers, students, staff, their experience in Brownsburg as it relates to race and racial issues, as well as more specific. expectations, goals, and what we want out of this position. Again, I do think that that does set a person up for success. So for those reasons, I am 100% in support of Brownsburg looking at opportunities to increase unity in our community. We need to do that. There does need
039to be a focus. And I think there are multiple solutions to that, aside from just this position, that could be looked at also. But for those reasons and and teachers and staff who also could have concerns that have reached out. I just feel like there can be more diligence done before we fill this position, so I'm not in favor. Any other questions or comments? Actually, I couldn't have said it any better than Tiffany did, so she said exactly what I was going to say. So I'm going to echo her thoughts and same reasoning. Any other questions or comments? I will personally share I think it's absolutely time, it's past time that we get someone here to specifically deal with those situations. I think as a community and a corporation. And what I do is in
040my day job working in the education field. It's there's a there's a small group of minority applicants for for education positions, but I think that's something that we need to focus on and we need to I think having a Coordinator of equity University will help help recruit more minorities will address some a lot of the issues that the principals were did such a good job today of addressing so I appreciate everybody that I think we had 27 people or so that were on the committee that talked to some applicants. We had a number of people that applied. And I just want to thank everybody for their efforts today. And we need to make this a focus and moving forward and deal with these issues. And we are, I think, outside Marion County, other than Avon,
041I think we're the most diverse school community, which I think people outside of Brownsburg would be surprised to hear. And we're only... Getting more and more diverse which I think is a good thing So I think it's something that we we need to do and like I said, I think it's past time that we We do this. So those are my comments and the other comments or questions i want to go ahead and chime in on this also um you know i've spent a lot of time in the school district volunteering throughout my years and i made it no secret when i decided to run for the school board that dealing with these issues that a number of these families have talked about was why i wanted to run for the school board and i
042thought i knew what was going on until the process started when i started meeting with parents students administrators here in the school district and what i thought was just a big problem and i don't say that lightly turned out it's a major problem as i went through the process you know mr hilton throughout my process was telling me that you know i didn't need to meet with so many people but i made it a priority on my list that i wanted to hear what was really going on in the schools things that maybe i didn't know about and as i heard we heard these stories today it's it's very pertinent that we address this issue so i am 100 behind hiring for this position all right just echo what you just said mike as well
043i mean i work in hr and that's a hard thing to accomplish and having someone to purely focus on this is going to be a great thing for our community our kids and other school districts so i'm happy that we are moving forward with this I guess I want to add one more thing to, I mean, and I'm going to do a roll call vote here in a second. I mean, I think we kind of know just so we can get it for the record. Mean it there's nothing wrong with not everybody agreeing on everything and we've had some very good discussions And and we may not always agree on everything, but we do have robust discussions And I think that's a good thing and this is a this is a tough issue and people
044have differences of opinion And I I think I want to make it clear to everybody if You know, we have a couple of people that don't necessarily vote for this position. It doesn't mean that they're not supportive, and they've been very supportive from day one. So I think all five of us have been very supportive of moving these things forward and dealing with these things. But we, as board members, elected board members, we have to vote on things and we have to make decisions. So any other questions or comments? All right, so one. For the hiring of a coordinator of equity and diversity, I'm just going to kind of do a roll call. Mr. Wells? In favor. Mrs. Dierman? No. Dr. Friege? No. Mrs. Heffernan? No. Mr. Hilton? In favor. Motion passes 3-2. Thank you
045for everybody coming out and sharing with us today. New business. Recommendation to approve extracurricular transportation fee rates. Mr. Hacker and Mr. Boyds? Apparently the person who has the microphone does the speaking, so that'll be me this evening. This is the annual review of our ECA transportation rates. These are always done this time of year to be made effective for July 1 this coming summer. This year we are recommending that we increase the mileage rate from $2.65 a mile to $2.90 a mile. Included in the packet was the history of this rate, and you can see that it hasn't moved a tremendous amount in the last several years, and part of what we're looking to do is to make sure that when we're able to... this past year, as you might imagine, has had some unusual
046data. And so it's been difficult for us to really put our finger on it on exactly what the increase is, but we do know costs have increased and we want to make sure that we're not having a big jump in a subsequent year when we do have a good solid year of school year operations. So that is the recommendation. The balance of what you see in the recommendation is consistent with what the board has approved in past years. We recommend approval. Do I have a motion? I do. Second. Second. Motion to second. Any questions or comments? Hearing none, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Motion passes. A recommendation to award nutrition services, food, and commodity bids. Mr. Boyd. Ordinarily, this is done in May of every year, but the school district belongs to
047the food to school co-op, and the co-op has asked that these agreements be put into place early this year. And so we're asking for the approval this evening. This motion would approve all of our group purchasing contracts for the 21-22 school year. This includes the infamous milk and bread bids that Dr. Snap chides me about from time to time. All of the vendors have been recommended to be unchanged from past years. The food to school co-op board has already approved this, and they need each school district under DOE rules to approve this agreement in turn. There's also an amendment to the interlocal agreement for the 92 schools that this co-op represents. Over 194,000 students are served by the co-op throughout the state of Indiana. So the agreement is in the signature packet for the board
048to sign, and we do recommend approval of this contract. So moved. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any questions or comments for Mr. Voigt? Is there any way you can give us the cost savings for when we actually started the co-op and how much it saved us over the years? Let's see what I can come up with. Thank you. Any other questions or comments for Mr. Voigt? Hearing none, all in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Recommendation to award construction contracts for West Middle School Phase 1. Mr. Voigt. The last set of contracts we're asking for approval this evening are the first of the bid packages for West Middle School. This includes boilers, chillers, cooling towers, and emergency generators. This is an equipment-only contract. Our construction manager and
049engineer has reviewed all of the bids that were received two weeks ago. And as you noted in the packet, we are, after review by the engineers, there's one contract in bid package 3, one apparent low bidder that we are recommending be declared non-responsive. They did not provide an adequate quantity of a cooling tower. We can't have half of our cooling. And so that is why that recommendation includes rejecting that as a non-responsive bid and awarding to the next apparent low. All four of these are needed to be approved this evening in order for us to maintain the schedule, and we are within budget. As I noted, I think in the board packet, this represents $635,000 plus worth of contract. That's 2.5% of what the total contract value of the project will be when it's done.
050We do expect to bring more bids to you at the next meeting in March in the second of, I think, five different waves of bids. So we recommend approval. I'd be happy to answer any questions on these contracts. Do we have a motion? Second. Second. We have a motion and a second. Any questions or comments? for mr void for the west middle school phase one bids hearing none all those in favor signify by saying aye aye all opposed motion passes thank you mr lloyd uh superintendent comments dr snap first of all i'd like to thank everyone for coming out tonight um i think that you saw the our principals do a great job of the first of five presentations about shedding a light on things that we as a district need to address and address
051them quickly I'm excited that the board approved the position because I think that person will come alongside and help us achieve those things in a much more rapid pace. I'm excited always to hear from our students. Allison, so thank you for coming up here. I know that it's not easy to get up here, and it's important that we hear from our students. I see some other student leaders in the back, and I'm glad that you're here because really when it gets down to it, we're here for our students. um it's that should drive the decisions that we make that we provide the best education and the safest environment for them and we don't want to ever do anything that makes them feel that they don't belong here and i think that that's important so thank
052you for the many comments tonight i'm excited about the future for brownsburg i also want to say probably the most frequent question that i get right now is what are we doing next year And believe me, if I knew, I would be happy to tell everyone. That is not a secret that I'll keep. But I want to put on the board's radar that probably about like last year, we really were kind of on pace for a June kind of decision about whether we were going to offer. hybrid what we were going to do and all those things and I think that's probably a good tentative timeline for us to begin to think about we'll have four months of the vaccine being rolling out four months of other data to collect and so we begin to
053look at the 21-22 school year probably that June board meeting will be kind of an important point in time for us to be making decisions so if there's data that becomes available that helps us make our decisions sooner I'd be happy to seize that, but I think right now we're probably looking at June as far as a timeline. So thank you. Board Member comments. Mr. Wells. I have none tonight. Mrs. Dearman. Yeah, I wanted to say thank you to Allie, too. That's brave. And really appreciate you doing that and sharing your story. And I'm glad you're here. And it's heartbreaking to think that you didn't think you'd see 15, but it's pretty cool. So thank you for doing that. I also want to say that I feel like the most important thing about tonight is
054how many people are in this room and engaged. and participating in the process whether we agree or not i think we could teach the world a little bit maybe about having some rigorous dialogue and walking away respecting each other so i am really really appreciative of everyone who showed up here tonight um to you know be heard or just to be supportive um i think as long as bronsberg can keep doing this then i think we can make a ton of progress so thank you mr german dr frigi I think it's important to note the fact all of us want a safe, uncomfortable learning environment for all of our students and staff in this community. That should never be doubted. Everyone here does. And we may vote differently on topics. It's just the nature of
055the beast. I mean, we are a five-person board, and that's just how things happen. But we move together as one board. So we move forward to this point. We make the best out of the situation, and we go from there. I do hope this position is successful, and it hopefully will be. Thank you all for all the people who did speak. It is not easy getting up there, no matter whether you're against it or not. So I applaud you for your courage to actually get up there, no matter what topic it is. So thank you. Thank you, Dr. Friedrich. Ms. Heffernan. just thank you guys all for coming um we do have some passionate conversations about different topics so it's nice that um you know the day we can all respect each other's individual opinions
056but still move forward together as a board regardless of what decision we make and you know just in the best interest of our kids so thank you guys all for working together and thank you guys all for being here tonight and i'll say the same things and then i i think also one thing that you know as far as one thing that i think we'll see some changes on the new quarantine rules that went in effect today we'll be seeing fewer kids getting quarantined as we move forward so that's going to be a big thing i know that's been one of the biggest one of the biggest things that we've heard during this covet process is that parents having concerns with what happens when their child gets quarantined i think we've done a lot trying
057to do some professional development moving into second semester and hopefully we've gotten better on that i think people put in a lot of work and just thank you to all our teachers and staff and everybody for for what they're doing um and i met with dr snap on wednesday evening and bragged to him how none of my three children have been quarantined and thursday i got the call that my daughter was quarantined so i figured that was that was that was bound to happen but just again thank you for everybody for coming out today it was a very important meeting thank you for all the administrators and teachers and everybody else that were able to make it out and for their presentations and We look forward to having more participation. And also, thank you for
058a lot of people that submitted emails as well about their thoughts on the position. So thank you for that as well. Do I have a motion for adjournment? So moved. Second. Motion is second. All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? We are adjourned. Thank you.