001regular meeting for monday december 13th 2021 to order please rise for congratulations followed by holy silence i pledge allegiance to the lack of the united states of america and to the republic for which it stands one nation under god thank you allison reed um thank you mr secretary and do we have modifications to the agenda i do not have any modifications to vegan mr secretary of emotion i do have a motion to read cheer calls for a motion that the hartford board of education modified public comment time allotment for participants for five minutes to three minutes for the december 13 2021 board of education meeting so moved by mrs paul supported by dr borders who we have discussion here in cnn thank you mr secretary all right good evening i'd like to welcome all in
002attendance and for those to those who are viewing via youtube this evening thank you for being with us um i'd like to congratulate the middle school robotics team for going to the state lead congratulations to that group and their advisors amy smith and dr jeremy myers and i'd like to thank my fellow board members for the last year of sitting on the board you know it's hard work there's some tough times and it's been a good year we've made it through so and last i'd like to wish our students families and staff members and fellow board members a um happy holiday season and um wish you guys all the best so thank you and move on to administration and the surgery okay to start with i want to take just a few minutes and we
003will talk a little bit later in the agenda about safety but just to recognize uh the tragedy act for high school and our heart goes out to that school of the families the staff and everyone involved i know school safety is on everybody's minds at this point and we have decided as a board mr bess and i in in writing the agenda to talk about school safety as an agenda item later on but i do want you to know we have a safety committee that's been meeting and we were talking today within our committee about seven years we're coming up on the seven year mark and so we we have actually gone through our crisis plan several different times and i'll talk about some of the things that we've done to help keep our kids
004our staff safe here in our preschools some other better news so our robotics team is competing at the state meet this weekend friday and saturday so good luck to the robotics team as middle school robotics both of our teams made the state meet this year it's at the keller arena i believe the opening ceremonies are around 3 30 p.m they are going to live stream it as well as being they have they are allowing some audience into the arena to watch if you've never been to a robotics competition it is it is crazy it is really fun it's a lot like going to a i guess an athletic event the way they set it up live music robots competing kids dressed up it's just really fun um our holiday concerts are happening so middle school
005band and choir both performed last week and they did an outstanding job we have our high school band choir are both performing thursday at 7 in the auditorium if you can make it out that would be great our school play occurred last weekend they did an outstanding job i thought that the students as well as the director sean harmon all should be getting accolades for the performance our holiday project which is a tradition here at huckabee continues and the holiday project in general helps families in need during the holiday season and it's a little different this year our classrooms in the high schools specifically are doing they're each collecting a certain item for the families and so one classroom might be collecting you know mittens and scarves another classroom might be collecting uh i don't
006know food items and so each classroom in the high school is doing that on top of wild wild spark elementary which did a toy drive a actually have a little breakfast that they do for proposed study families so i appreciate that that's under the direction of develop who is a retired teacher continues to do a great job i want to remind the board election of officers as well as setting dates and time for meetings is in january at our organizational meeting so start thinking about officers are thinking about dates and times and meetings right now we are seven o'clock the second tuesday of the month and of course we have four officers of the board that we will have to elect and then the last piece that i have online is superintendent evaluation i am
007recommending that we do that at the end of january the third or fourth week there really isn't uh there isn't a timeline except for it has to be done during the school year um typically we did it in december but selfishly i'd like to push it off to january it's been a really busy last couple of weeks so i think we would be better off by pushing out just a just a touch and then we'll schedule a day for that you've got english and i think that's all i have for communications discipline mr secretary we have two communications to the board first is from mr jarrod campus hello everyone i apologize for not being able to publicly mention this in person but it's concert season in the canvas household and i'm playing dad tonight i
008want to thank everyone especially mr ridgeway for all the conversations and support in regards to the music department and helping recover from the pandemic i look forward to many more conversations of this nature with you all and i can't wait to see where our program goes happy holidays jared kavis and choir director harvard great middle school this is from mr craig eaton that starts with hi my name is craig with battlefront masks i'm ready to ask that you implement universal masking i have provided this board of information that proves that mass work it's time for this board to be proactive and not reactive this board has ignored science for too long on that subject and is putting untold lives in danger on october 11th bobes said that uh covet is 99 survivable with about 2700
009rupee students he is saying that 27 students is an acceptable loss um the statements like that and these that put health safety and welfare on the staff and students at risk for getting covered the mask is meant to protect others by catching the watercraft blocks which carry fell within the mass before it to become a aerosol august this is not 100 effect there but it's one of the many tools in our also arsenal to help keep the staff and students stay safe just because it's not 100 does not mean we should go with the zero percent option of no masking with no mask on individuals a respiratory infection is free to transfer from person to person but no barriers in between to stop the spread the cdc and the michigan department of health have both
010recommended universal masking these are the experts that we rely on to keep us safe michigan is currently the worst state in the us we're covered at this time our hospitals are all wrong the cases and emergency rooms are converting ambulances to other hospitals because they cannot care for any more patients federal teams have been deployed to help with the hospital crisis in michigan currently calhoun county has a positivity rate of 22.7 that means it's about one in four tests uh taken to come out positive to be low in transmission that would mean there'd have to be less than five percent we're almost five times that amount currently we have all the tools we need to combat this airborne virus and the most simple is face mask currently as it stands you allow people to come
011in and spread their violent virus freely with no mitigations whatsoever to have a safe school environment you must implement universal masking when you allow this to go unchecked in the schools you send it home or other family members may yet sick and hospitalized hospitalized we need to do everything we can to stop the virus and keep the staff students and families safe in our community thank you for your time all right mr secretary ms reed any updates from you i do um um safety of them are occurring and they don't feel like they're students that are making those should be able to return um any suggestions thoughts that we haven't heard okay thank you for that all right he will move on to district updates and start with chris and mrs williams what do you
012mean you hear me okay all right so just a quick update and we're in the process our team for preparing for january 7th the way our professional development is set up we have five required days annually for all teachers and then there are separate requirements for teachers who within their first five years this is one of the rare times this one at the end of the year where we're all together as you may recall our e3 typically is in the fall educate and power equip we have moved it to the middle of the year for this year and then we i got input from the teachers at our curriculum council and they would like to see it remain in the middle of the year so we're excited we have some well-known speakers that will help
013us to learn deeper around our professional learning communities i will be trying to pull the video in if you're interested the link has a video we're not going to watch that here today but it's a way for you to to gain knowledge around what does that culture look like under talent recruitment as you know we're working to explore future michigan educator update you do have in workbook and in your packet a course proposal and that course proposal aligns directly with the initiatives of the state to get the word out there both to our students as well as to people who might look for a different career option maybe a paraprofessional or secretary or someone else that would like to become a teacher we are spending some time having calm lunch and learns and there are
014four sets and we have had two so far um where students who are interested in our district our high school students they can come and we have different speakers and can answer questions on more of a um one to two setting so mr greenman came to our last one and talked about opportunities for our young people that might like to coach and then we had in a previous one we had um kyra rabbit from her educational academy at the career center and she went into more detail talking about that program so currently um our sophomores who may be interested in trades or the programs that the career center offers they learn about that we feel that that's too late so this course proposal that's in your folder that i'd like you to vote on in
015january allow students it would be an elective course to dig deeper into what it might be to be a teacher so there's course outcomes it's through most of it is through michigan virtual so we would have a teacher that facilitated that learning and we would provide opportunities for them to get in classrooms and so there's that for you one of the exciting things this last week we had a young lady who came to the lunch and learn and she's a senior so she won't be able to take advantage of this course because it won't be until the fall if it's approved but she said mrs williams what could i do to get into classrooms and we're going to work with her and others um because that can happen we can make that happen with parent
016permission and of course i said you have to have all your assignments turned in there's some criteria but she committed to me that she was going to make sure that happens so i'm excited about the possibilities for that um e3 i talked about that multiple tiered support we're just continuing to enhance our understanding around what does it look like to have high quality tier one in the classroom and then how do we meet we know that our assessment scores are not where we want them at all and the only way to respond to that is to pay attention to a what is our resources we're using how are we one of them being our time in our classrooms and so we're focusing on understanding what does that look like in a high quality classroom to
017be responsive to the learners that are not where they need to be benchmark wise on this report you'll see two well and one of our previous staff members they're going through eight days of cognitive coaching which is a set of tools and it's really an identity shift from when they're helping so the two people michelle tooman and carrie who are mtss coaches they're learning a different way to show up for their colleagues um instead of just telling them what to do they're learning ways to ask mediated questions and the philosophy behind that is that we have resources inside of ourselves and to be able to verbally process that they can feel more empowered so that's exciting to have more people that are trained in that pbis as i said our transportation department is working on
018getting their signage up they will be going continuing to go through some training and we've had several leaders in that department step up they are short staff right now but they're still continuing to do good work and learn around pbis um really the only other thing i mean the rest of it's there verbally is the mi-fi so this is really imperative that we work to get as much to 100 of our students it's only done every other year and basically it's assessing anonymously risk factors so a notification did go out to parents both at our middle school and high school they can opt out and so then i included a link in there so you can see our data from two years so we will middle school is working on that this week and our
019high school will be doing an assessment or it's an economic survey in january things that's all i have like i said there are links so we've got hard copy obviously the links don't work if you want to dig into some details on the future michigan educator and that proposal you can collect those links do you have any questions from anything that i just sure thank you mrs williams you're welcome president uh facilities and mr robinson good evening um i submitted a report as well a couple things that um you'll see us we're bringing back and hopefully i know in january at least one of them may be the end of january and the other are our two bids that we'll have out right now one being the school or the pool party high school danatorium
020scoreboard and video system that's up and out to bid right now and we're hoping that well i should have post bids done the bids are due the 30th i should have post vids done that we can be ready to present something to the board in january and our normal board meeting for that for approvals we do have some money that was uh shout out how they had donated raised um from some private folks in the district that are it's going to help a great deal of this project as well right now the video board does not work at all in the pool we've done everything i can to make it work i've just been unable to do so it is the original board that was in the building so it's you it's getting up there
021in age the other one of course that everybody knows about is the hac project for the high school documents are done um and the bid process is in motion right now i'm thinking they're getting it up this week or early next week um and we'll know more from that and we'll have something in january on that and i will update further as i get firmer dates on that we're working on that right now a couple other things going on um we received a bunch of the furniture um that's being installed in some of the classrooms um about 160 deaths and shares for all three elementaries and the middle school so we're working on that um we are for snow rule which has been really nice this year so far so we're not complaining about that
022at all um tomorrow i think it's supposed to be like 60 tomorrow on thursday so i don't see any snow unfortunately it looks like a white christmas either but um the men's book project i've been out there on a few occasions now uh and most of you have probably seen that building it's going up um they're doing a good job and we're trying to we're keeping on top of that as well all the permitting is up to date and the proper documentation and everything has been filed and so we're good to go with that um that's really about it unless there's any questions of me questions from mr robertson all right aaron we'll move on to finance and this over my ear good evening i have attached pretty much the same reports that i've been
023sending you since starting and the first one is the cash balance report i just like you guys i did want to mention the general fund in payroll another thing that i wanted to point out was the debt funds is somewhat high right now and that's because our we are summer we collect summer taxes and we pay interest on november 1st and then we pay interest in principal may 1st so for a few months we'll be it'll be high and then when we make those payments in may it won't be anymore the next one is just a list of the check registers and then the general fund summary is this the same thing that you've been getting it's just a list of the original budget that carol had made and then where we're at as of
024the end of november and then the percentage everything if you take a look at it um it makes sense you know the tax levy being 99 uh the state revenue we just started getting so that's why it's lower the federal revenue actually i just made a draw on federal so the next one will be quite a bit higher if you just um get the grant so you have to spend it and then you get reimbursed for it found on the expenditures um what i like to look at is the percentages and everything is pretty much in line with where it should be except for the instructional related technology and that's just because there was nothing in esters in the original budget but when i update the budget you'll see that and it'll be right on
025track also um i don't know if you have questions about that the next one is the school lunch fund i don't i don't give you that one every time but i just wanted you to have a snapshot of where we were at in november and show you guys that our revenue is up there but with a great program where the students get to eat free um the federal revenue right there is where that's our reimbursement and so we that would be through october which is what that is and then the expenditures are through november those are the reports i had the only other thing when you met with the finance committee on thursday was so srs3 is due i know we've been talking a lot about esters we've talked a lot about astros one series
026two esters three report is due in two days actually um and so we have had several meetings on on it and i finally was able to put it put the numbers on the page so i just did a quick summary um of support services so 1.6 million is what's been released to us which is two-thirds of the total and there's really five groupings that we use support services which is mental health part partnering with our commonwealth health program technicians additional support specialists ea eab global which is what is it resource-based information and extra help contract tracing and phone calls another big one is the addressing and learning laws including summer school after school programs and transportation for those programs technology laptops for subs laptops or techs some software microphones for the middle school paraprofessional chromebooks
027and possible bus cameras operation and maintenance the ppe the mass for the bus uh extra cost to sanitize additional custodians at hlm carry and some of the hvac system and the other thing was some furniture i know um jim had just talked about getting new furniture and that came out of esther's two money and then there's even more that was built into that made for yeah the biggest thing i want to say about the essers money is this this one is for 22.23 and so this is very preliminary we have to start somewhere and we will continue to get stakeholder input because you know this is partial of the money there'll be more money coming to see how the money can be spent so we'll continue to get input from our stakeholders throughout so we
028just think as a finance committee a part of that committee that reporting how what we're thinking out loud in public i think is important so people know what we are potentially going to spend money on it but as the street is not this year's money it would be for the next fluid well esther's one uh occurred really on the very first part of totally when we were in virtual that march of 2020 range and we were able mostly to spend the money it was getting things ready for cleaning pve supplies um we bought those 360 machines there was mostly that that type there wasn't a ton of money in that first round about 250 000 which is significant but it wasn't as much as 2.5 million and then the next round essers 2 was about
029a million dollars and that's where we did our summer schools were playing for summer school again this year we had lowered our classroom sizes we had quite a few teachers specifically in elementary school i know that some staff at the middle school high school are saying lower our classes also some of that money is some of the stakeholder input that would definitely have to be heard but we did do that which i thought was a significant thing last year we continue to get into this year so esther's two really is kind of this year's money um can't think of anything else on top of my head that's there's lots more that we've already presented summer programming and summer program was uh it was a big amount for learning loss we're looking at potentially doing an
030after school program in addition to our summer school program and we think that that one could be successful as well something i wanted to say is 20 investor funds is required to be spent on um addressing learning laws so summer schools after schools any questions from the silver meyer what should we expect to have a budget update approximately so my goal was january and it could still be january but we had a huge part of our budget is con grants and consolidated apps and they've just released those numbers and we i don't have numbers yet to do that in order to carry over what's the main part so at worst it would be in february and i'm trying for january but i just haven't i don't have the information to be able to all right
031we do have our student account from the fall count and it was slightly above only budgeted so we did have a loss of students from the previous year but it was slightly i think it was five students above what our budget was so that was good that we were conservative and then obviously with the revenue we pretty much know all of our sources of revenue coming in um the only one we really don't know is what the casino money or the building is going to be and we'll find that out hopefully in february all right thank you uh mr maynard and technology all right um talked a little bit about our device deployment for this year last couple meetings and now it's time to start thinking about next year already um in order to avoid
032the situation again when we're waiting six months to get our devices if not longer it's recommended that we order early again but we don't need order right now much like everything else in the world things have gotten more expensive chromebooks that two summers ago had paid 160 dollars for are now 240. um and the google licenses we have to buy one of those maybe chromebook but 24.32 and the computers for the high school haven't changed a whole lot but the good news is the state contract pricing is due to come out late winter march april-ish and they're expecting the prices to be a little bit lower because that's when the state does their bid to get that low prices so right now you know we need almost two hundred thousand dollars for these three grades
033of computers and i'm expecting that to be a bit less when it comes down to it but just to get that on the radar um like the high school devices if we bought them today we would actually get them because they're in stock but they tell us if we wait till you know july to put in a purchase order we're going to be in that quarter situation so so we're just going to keep an eye on that and kind of you know see where the best time to jump is but so my general plan every year is to buy computers for wood grades first grade fifth grade and ninth grade that's the when they get to each building they get a new computer and then they keep it for four years and then our plan
034is to sell off the old ones because they're about past useful life at that point and then replace them each year and kindergarten uses touchscreen chromebooks that um we're kind of replacing on a more as needed rolling basis um just to keep things clean so it's three grade levels every year to be precise um some of the network issues we've had lately so we've had a few outages off and on largely attributable to our firewall which is up there in age it's no longer supported the good news is we have a new one bad news is in order to install it we have to get another piece of hardware installed which we also have bought but is delayed until february at this point so we are working with the vendor to see if there's any
035mitigations we can do in the meantime to tame down some of the stuff that's happening basically the firewall can't handle that much processing power and so when it gets too much traffic it starts to give up the ghost so we are working on that um that's part of our e-rate project is the new other hardware we have to replace and that was hopefully coming in by now but has not so we're hopeful that that will come in on schedule at least in february and the vendor is waiting to install it um other upcoming items the high school cafeteria av system has been ordered we are waiting for parts eta on that we're expecting delays again but it's just one of those things um we're hoping to get that going and we'll have a similar system
036to this room as far as the touch screens to control it turn everything on if we can make it real simple this is a button to push pick the project to go make the screen come down make it easy for everyone to use um this room as well we have a quote we're working on getting a permanently installed camera for streaming these meetings so make that better and one of the big ones waiting for is a massive battery backup appliance the size of a dishwasher that is meant to keep all of our servers running and eventual power failure which we're told might be coming by spring for christmas break so if that happens we're hoping it lines up with the time when people are here to get it installed because that's a great time to
037do it but if not we will find a time that is a vital piece we've also got boxes and boxes and boxes of batteries for all the battery backup units that are spread around the district which are also desperately needed replacement so we're actually looking pretty good uh the next big thing i think i mentioned in the previous meeting is we're going to want to replace our server infrastructure at some point i don't have pricing yet we're still waiting for the vendors to get back to us on some ideas and that doesn't have to happen this year so it's just one of those things that you do every so often that's getting timed so questions from mr winger all right then presentation and school dress code [Music] thank you for thank you this can allow
038them to feel more comfortable if they have a hood or something to possibly hide behind and this can help their learning to go further in the classrooms so when we started this we actually created a presentation as you can see on the screen to address the policy and on our first slide you see that we have the current we have the current policy language and this shows uh this shows what our policy looks like as it looks up as of now and uh so right now we can see it that there are no hats and hoods allowed except for religious region reasons and we're looking to change that so in our presentation we looked at different dress code policies from other schools and in these dress code policies we look at the hat policy many
039schools don't actually have a hat policy that are around us so for example at this school the just book policy just says that it should not obscure the face so if you look at it they do allow hats and hoods as long as they're still able to see your identity or discover who you are in case they need to we show this for a few other schools such as portage who also do not mention hat goods in their dressing policy at all and they also don't really have any restrictions on hazards this is also seen in kalamazoo and then this is also seen in a few other schools like lakeview for schools who do have to have great policy then um there is a lot of rules with that we have seen there has been
040some pushback at the schools against that or it is not enforced so some students may uh receive discipline for while others are not so this is an example of marshall they do have a dress code for house and hoods they say that it's not allowed to be in the building unless it's approved by their admin so for this policy we just have a little bit more information on the slides about how much it can cost to do different hair types and the reason why the student may not have had the hair ready for school and for this in order to try to gain support for this policy we actually completed a few different petitions so we have a online student petition for community members and students which has over 700 signatures at this point and
041we have also asked teachers at the high school and over 90 percent of teachers are okay if we do get rid of the policies and other than that i i just want to applaud you with taking the step to take action and and move outside probably your comfort zone and in doing this research i think that this is an excellent presentation i'm very proud of you and your your group thank you i just want to make sure that everybody audience and board knows i had told the board that we were not going to take action tonight we um typically and you'll see in our policies coming up we typically take actually three times reading something to look at a policy but we do it we think we appreciate the information so that we can start
042the discussion process of vfa policy change is going to happen but i don't have anybody to think that we're going to make a decision tonight and we don't it's a done deal it's more of the whole process yeah i just want to echo the statement about the work that carla and the members of the race committee did they began by gathering some information for themselves presenting it to myself and the high school administration and then from there we met again and we call it followed up with what other information is out there that can help us and that's where the student petition came in the staff petition came in um which i believe you know you've been included with that information there uh and then carl and i sat down and um decided like okay
043what is the language looking at all of this what fits us you know based on this information and so we included a proposal to omit the section of our handbook which refers specifically to the head and headward policy to replace it with a much more simpler statement which we feel is more inclusive for all students that would meet our needs so if you have any questions for me i'm happy to answer those as well so administration is supportive of this change yes so the only question i can think of is you know after you leave high school you go to let's say the real world but the work world and there are obviously most jobs out there are going to have some type of limitations on what dress code looks like how does this necessarily
044prepare our students for what lies next it's a good question which is why when we uh carl and i and members of the race club were discussing this we brought that point up exactly you know part of the reason we have dress code is like any organization you have some um guidelines for how you dress and how you show up and uh we all recognize that that's there but if you'll notice what we didn't admit is the discretion of the building and certain classes to have restrictions on headwear classes like physical education lab based classes where hats or hoods might be obstruction to safety specifically that is you know an area where it could still be restricted um but we also recognize you know things have changed you know our society has changed and i
045do believe there's a lot more acceptance in the real world for headwear to be worn so if we feel like if students can be more comfortable in our building for learning which is our purpose then why not you know follow the model of some of the schools in our area and nationally and view headwear differently i think the biggest challenge is going to be the shifting of our adult learners to how we can you know still meet the needs of our students while their has implementation what would be the ideal time for you to implement a change great question i'm glad you asked i know we have another board meeting early in january it's still early in the winter season and so i would advocate that we make policy change for the second semester of
046the school year um so that way we could implement the process or the new policy for the second semester each year we come to the board in the summer with a revision over our whole handbook that would include the dress code so we would have information from the second semester of this school year to look at what impact hats and hoods and headwear have had on learning so i would have information and if any of that information influence the dress code for the 22-23 school year then i can bring that to you at that time mr anthony you've probably taken into consideration but i just want to say all out students that may have a head down during classes could you try to sleep not be able to identify kids accurately in a you know
047a bad situation or scenario with hoodies i'm sure all that's been considered but where do we land on that at it's a good question um yes all those have been considered and that's been one of the challenges that that i pushed back against students who have asked i think anybody who works with surveillance and or you know building safety and security would recognize it is more difficult to recognize students with hats and hoods on although usually there's enough identifying marks to be honest with you when our students are in the building that we can identify our students regardless um it does take some more work uh i talked to officer mackey to get his input on that um and to be honest with you the masks have actually been a greater hindrance to identifying students
048than probably had some of this men at this point so if i'm being honest that's what most of the schools and officer mackey has asked and spoken to some others and that was their responsibility my only confidence not about this particular issue but just policy change in general and i assume the policy commitment is up but any policy we have was created for a reason so subsequently any change in policy has to be justified i mean so there were some there were some causal factors out there when we created this policy so as someone who's going to eventually vote on this i'd like to know what what was the rationale for the policy to begin with and what's changed in our environment that would cause us to want to change that i think that's just
049a normal part of any policy change so again that's kind of how i view these things yeah we and we have looked at the policy committee um that's a that's a broad question to answer i would just say typically the um policy was a reflection of what was traditional societal norms at that time in an educational setting certainly and i think carla's presentation addressed very well if you read it and look through it some of the rationale for some of the changes to be more inclusive more equitable of an environment i do think we need to consider alternative headwears and a lot of our students feel comfortable wearing hardware especially if you look at how important image is to a high school student to really a student of any age and the impact that care
050has on an image and the security that a hood or a hat could provide a student could certainly help them feel more comfortable in their learning environment it does seem that quite a few of the teachers and staff members have signed the petition which i thought was impressive so well done on that side of things excellent presentation and pretty well-rounded so thank you very much thank you carla all right we will move on to comments related to agenda items remember playstation name and address three minute maximum and we do have another comment session before action is miss foreign um i had it for the agenda because i believed that there was some lottery sent to the boards that criteria for everyone today about staff money kova days uh those weren't read is it okay if
051i still speak on that issue sure so good evening and thank you for listening i'm here tonight to ask the board to consider giving teachers ten token days now i know that the district doesn't have to even offer this i get it i can only hope that the district can consider this request because we are told that we are better than average we're told that we have the best staff so i'm hoping that for the staff who gives their all the district could consider those 10 days now i've told our members and overwhelmingly they want the ten cove days don't get me wrong we do appreciate the district's proposals um but there are some issues that it doesn't address five days doesn't cover a quarantine 14 last ten five days ignores the issues of child
052care and unfortunately you can't take your kid to day care because if they have a proper coping they're not allowed a handful of staff already had sick days taken from them so even with the five days there's no rollover incentive but really this is for our new teachers five days does not provide an incentive for new teachers to stay if they're going to be doc pay because they are quarantined or isolated what stops them from going to a different district with the covit days they won't roll over and hca is willing to give up the attendance bonus saving the district money do you have to do this of course not at all yet think of this schools across the county the country are having staffing issues so my question is this why not do something
053different to stand out and show that you care about your staff if no other district is doing covet days that is an incentive to bring more staff to harbor freight so let harpercreek break the mold um that's all for my comments i don't know if you wanted to read the once percent anything that was sent to the thank you mr colbert good evening good evening my name is charlie fulbright and i am a current board member and former president of gala creek pride i am here today on behalf of battle creek pride for those of you who don't know battle creek pride is the local lgbtq plus organization here in battle creek we serve as the entire city to include all four districts when i went looking on your website for some reason it slipped
054past me but currently your policy under section bylaws 0 145 titled discriminatory harassment it says other prohibited conduct conduct includes that which has the purpose or effect of creating an intimidating hostile discriminatory or offensive environment on the basis of gender religion race color national origin or ancestry age disability height weight marital status and or any other legally protected characteristic battle creek pride is asking the harper creek school board to revise their policy for the district to add sexual orientation gender identity and gender expression to your discriminatory policy i'm sure we all could say that we would not tolerate discrimination of any kind so now yellowcreekpride is asking you to not just say it but to put it in writing in your district's policy in 2019 the michigan association of school boards made a resolution to
055their own policy adding sexual orientation gender identity and gender expression it says and i quote the michigan association of school boards supports equal rights for all and the masb urges immediate action by all district boards to adopt implement and enforce policies protecting students from violence discrimination harassment and bullying for any reason including but not limited to race ethnicity religion disability gender sexual orientation gender identity or gender expression battle creek pride wants to follow up with not only you but the other district of alaba that hasn't updated their policy yet so far two have out of the board thank you for your time thank you mr halperson thank you very much for your time i did want to talk a little bit about the mask discussion a few months ago we had a very similar discussion
056i'm very interested to understand at that time we talked about new information that we would would be the basis for bringing up the conversation one of the things that concerns me greatly is it's starting to trend into the territory of oppression in oppression by its very definition is unjust or cruel exercise of authority or power today we're in an environment where we have a choice i personally believe not to have my children live in fear they have a much much higher incident of perishing in a car accident or even perishing from sunstroke however i exercise the ability to take them to school in my car take them to activities in my car throughout the country as a matter of fact i also take caution of allowing them to play when it is very hot outside
057i just want to make sure that they're able to experience things and live in this world without fear i believe that the current policy enables parents to make that choice and i would commend you to continue that policy unless there is significant information that changes the course of the discussion thanks yes i've been coming here since the school started talking about the same thing i am hoping to eliminate talking about kobe but i want to ask you all do you all know that our state is beyond capacity for mental health intakes and they have to use the er and the er hallways to hold patients before anything opens up for them i have a friend who her 21 year old son tried to commit suicide over the weekend he is currently in her er awaiting
058a room in a hospital and this is all because of this endemic because of us all of us following and mandating all of this the quarantines the isolations sorry copit is no longer endemic mental health is in the u.s the er visits for attempted suicides and minors have increased by 50 compared to prior to the pandemic it has not been discussed enough the effect of this pandemic the lockdown's oscillation and the quarantines have on our kids kids do not receive adequate coping techniques their mental health is still developing and isolating them is not good for it i am in contact with many parents across the state in different school districts and the one similar issue they face is the increase in behavioral issues the school face we need to do better for our youth they
059are the ones that hopefully will take over our position your positions can you imagine the state of this country if we do not take actions and do better by them thank you mr eva i can't eli kent and uh under that 191 w drive i didn't come up here today with any statistics or anything like that just the voice voice of a parent we're against mandates we've discussed this before that parents stood up here before and told you guys no mandates for masks we mean it now we meant it then we're going to mean it tomorrow we do not want mass mandates allow the parents parent or children and decide what they want you want to wear a mask wear a mask if you want your kids to wear one let them wear one do
060not force us to make our gift away and that's all thank you thanks mr randy miller so a couple things um first this is a hack policy so i work in the real world and we're allowed to wear hats every day to work as long as we're appropriate and we have a guideline for that so our dress code is we can wear hats i wear a hat every day and this is going to be appropriate for for our company so it's going to be a vendor it's got to be one of our customers that we can't be in derogatory or defensive second thing is the mass mandate i'm with everybody else i think as my right as a parent decide what my child needs to wear doesn't need to learn i don't need somebody telling
061me what's right for my child it's my my decision it's my choice of what i what i do and how i keep my my children not everybody else's and you're a big master we watch you touch your mask 20 25 times since this meeting is harder you're touching it or touch everything else yeah that's possible you didn't need to address the board that's fine so anyway so people up here i i set my keys so that's that's what i have so i'm against the masks and uh it's my choice thank you okay so i just try to come once a year um for the play target team so thank you very much we had another successful season uh second team high school team in the track championship again for the year um in the state
062of michigan we took 15 kids down to ohio for this year we had six of them maybe nine of them that decided they wanted to do the whole shebang because they lost last season so we were there for a solid week in july in ohio um they did well they had all so thank you for that oh there's a couple of you in this room that have been here since this started this is pretty cool i told you back in 2011 2012 that if you gave these kids a chance you could have a kid that went on to college and shocked their way through school we finally did it oh lord and behold it was our youngest that was never going to college stop putting money into my ira is i'm not going we had
063his open house thank god we got him through high school mr anthony will contest to that um wake up something else we're at [Music] so you went from a kid that you gave the kid a chance that's awesome we have more kids now going i can do that it's keeping them in school it's making them finish it's keeping them eligible this kid now that was never going anyplace i mean i love him but he hated school he's enrolled in insurance he's gonna be an insurance adjuster in the agricultural field so for that thank you so much [Applause] all right i'll move on to the consent agenda mr secretary chair calls for most of the harvard creek board of education approved the consent agenda as follows through the general fund checks school services home checks and
064the student school activities fund checks importance for the less discussed approve the november 8th 2021 meetings as review meetings been moved support mr barry smith supported by mrs allwood do we have discussion hello i did see one spot that higgins in the budget committee it pictures the word policy mr barry smith yes dr jordan yeah seniors mrs yes mr jason smith yes mr myers absent mr martin i vote yeah okay as i said i was going to talk a little bit i i don't want to get long-winded but i do think this is important i think it's important to folks are listening at home as well as our board members because we we've had a safety committee for for a time but we have new board members who weren't as familiar with what the safety
065committee did or does um the committee is not the only thing we do for safety but it is a group that meets that is focused on safety we started off originally we had an event at the school i'm not sure if you remember if you've been around a while you might have we had a bomb threat and evacuation and then we sent all the kids home on a school bus and after that event we said okay we've got a lot of work to do because we need to be more organized we need to make sure we know exactly what's going on so our school is required to have a uh his response ban or crisis responsible which is this red book that we have and we have rewritten that three times in the last six
066six years unfortunately as tragedies happen we learn more and so we learn how we should address how we should prepare for and how we should react to emergencies now this book isn't about all about active shooting that's one piece there are many other things that could happen within the school that that policy book does address i want to talk today specifically about active shooters because of the tragedy in oxford and to make sure people feel like you know there are things that have happened for us to be as prepared as we possibly can now the committee has been made up of several groups of people law enforcement first responders we even had or we had state police we also had a person who was with homeland security for a time and then of course our
067school administrative staff our police layers and officers are the leaders of that group and they continue to push the envelope and ensure that we have the most up-to-date plan that we can in place mr boves has been the board member since he has been a school board member safety is his passion he's been a driver to ensure that that group continues to meet there are times um when we feel pretty safe when we have lulls between tragedies where you know we you know maybe get lacks a little bit i think that beau president best has throughout the entire time been the one that said no we have to continue to push and think that things that have happened at first you know we had lots of ideas and they cost lots of money we were
068unsure of how we were going to do some of those things one of the very first things we did is we added a second please lay as an officer we have one at the house at the high school one house the middle school but they also serve our elementary buildings but they're housed at those two buildings other things is we grow grants and specifically officer rich mackey wrote a federal grant for about 225 thousand dollars and then a state grant for about 200 000 the federal grant was specifically for communications we felt communications was a area that we needed to improve because we had a lunch room i'm sorry we had recess monitors that were outside that didn't have access or communication with the inside we have pe teachers going outside we have buildings in
069different locations so we want to all communicate together and so getting radios and we and with the federal grant we purchased approximately 100 radios they use um a sequence or a frequency that this that the police use in michigan um so we don't need the towers that you might see at some schools you might see our towers still sitting at the bus garage we haven't taken it down but we don't use the towers anymore because these are much more reliable theoretically if we tell um if we tell the right people i think the state police we could have our buses have those radios work all the way to the upper peninsula upper peninsula of michigan so they're really effective and then obviously they work within our area um each building has their own channel looking
070at their own program their own channel there we go that's about every channel but we have a district channel as well that we use when an emergency happens so if we have an emergency everybody charges the emergency channel so we can all communicate together so that was a big piece training for our police layers and officers was also a piece of the federal grant and the state grant we thought was really important because we did not have secured vestibules at the high school in middle school and so those were installed they actually were completed during the 2020 covered year and so now they're they're in place all of you know that we have buzzer systems that are all of our buildings those have been in place since 2009 but if you went to the high
071school before or the middle school you were buzzed into the school so theoretically someone would have access now you have to turn and go into the office before you have access which makes it much safer we also purchased a device called our raptor system where we can check driver's license now you'll notice we don't have as many visitors with with the with over years but when we first got the raptor system if you wanted to come and go eat lunch with your child we would run your license it would check some of the registries in michigan to make sure you're not a sex offender to make sure you don't have any outstanding warrants things like that and then you would get a name edge that you would show that you are properly able to come
072into the school district now like i said we don't have as many volunteers so we haven't used the record system as much but it is ready and willing and in place to use uh just looking at my notes i don't want to miss any of the other pieces so a big part of the safety committee and getting ready for safety is to have a plan and so the plan has changed over the years and i don't want to go into much detail of what our plans are because we don't want the perpetrators to know what to do or what what to be prepared for so i don't want to go into a huge detail but enough details for you to understand um we think as a school district and then when i say we the
073safety committee led by our police lay as an officer that the first thing that we need to do is to secure in place and so in cooperation with the emmett township police department we did a fundraiser i think it was four years ago maybe five now where we bought something called night lock devices and you may have heard that at the oxford high school they also have these devices and what the device does is that you can put it within the door it's in every single classroom it's actually in almost every every room in the entire school district but you put these into the door into either the floor or to into the location that it goes and you cannot open that door you cannot physically as a single person poke in that door and
074so it secures the people inside that room then we have to just simply make sure that we don't have you know people in a line of sight so we go through processes with training with our teachers and they're the coaches in the room they're coaching the kids up over what to do i don't think i'll go too much more detail as to what the coaching is but that's the first thing but we don't want to just sit and hide that's not that's not the whole thing we have hype the next step would be to fight if we have to and the last piece is to flee if necessary now if you listen to if you've watched anything about public spaces they say to flee first the reason that we don't say the fleet first is
075it takes two to three minutes for the police or the first responders to show up at a school shooting and that's based on all the tragedies that have happened over the last 20 years and so it is it is upon us as school officials as teachers and staff in these in these classrooms in school secure those kids in place for that two to three minutes and make them as safe as possible so that we feel that that is is critically critically important we do safety drills of course every school in michigan does we had a safety committee committee meeting today we talked about making sure those drills are more realistic because we want to make sure under pressure situations that all of us our staff our kids everybody involved can react in a pressure situation
076it's easy to do a drill when everyone knows it's coming and just kind of walk through it we want to make sure that the drills that we do are meaningful and getting are getting us of course we do fire tornado along with lockdown lock battery drills we have talked about a refresher of our training now officer mackey did send out an email to the entire staff with an update as to you know reminder of this is what you do in those situations because it's been a bit since we've had our last training we try to train every other year and so some of our teachers said well it's you know it's been a year and a half let's let's do a refresher now so they're going to every staff one at a time to make
077sure that they have a face-to-face refresher so that staff can ask questions if they have them and exactly what they should do during the event of the worst case scenario and when you yeah when we hear the word lockdown that is our worst case scenario we have other other types of drills that we do besides lockdown but lockdown is the worst scenario that we really want to prepare prepare for um i don't think is there anything else that i would like to let you both am missing anything today lot about the school safety party we'll talk about the crossbow in a second not that i think about i would add that the night lock device was used in uh in oxford so something that we have here was used uh to potentially save lives and
078oxford so those types of things you know are could be you know great effectively we have actually looked at a lot of other things one thing that we're looking at we we have a couple hundred cameras in the school which is helpful if we could upgrade our camera systems to be face recognition and things like that that may be helpful but i want to talk about threat assessments for a second because you know i had seven call a lot out specifically to middle school parents that you know there was a threat that we were investigating when we have a threat and sometimes the threats are are fairly small other times there are are fairly scary and no matter what kind of threat comes comes forward we do the same threat assessment every time the police
079our police lies and officers are made aware and they immediately start the threat assessment process they ensure that the person you know first of all they check to see if it's a credible or a not credible threat and i don't want to us to be confused when we say it's not a credible threat it doesn't mean the student does not get disciplined i think i would like to have a discussion as a board but we want to have a zero tolerance on threats to our to our kids safety our school safety and we want to make sure that that we have discipline um for kids that decide that they're going to do a threat many times they're joking they might say here they say that i didn't really mean it but unfortunately in these times
080we just can't stand for it and we have to move forward on with the rescue coming to play so i did want to mention that before mr smith just i guess a comment a question or recommendation i shared this repo i i just think this is such a critical issue i'd like to see a safety update as a standing agenda item on our board meetings i mean there's not a lot to do to discuss fine but i think i think we ought to keep it out in front of before in every meeting and then just a question relative to the threat assessments um i think everyone's read about what happened in oxford and and if you can share i mean i think most people are aware of the rather troubling pictures of the students drawing
081just about how would something like that have been handled in harpercreek with our current assessment right i don't want this to mean that i'm critical of what happened in oxford but the way that i would see it in the same exact situation i believe that this was solved by a teacher went to a counseling office we want to make sure and we've talked about this in the last week with our staff to say you know if you see something say something just like we say to the parents we want to get it up the chain so that it gets to a point where it gets addressed so the counselor would then tell probably their building leader if it's the principal or assistant principal and that i would i would say would kick us automatically to
082a threat assessment is this person a threat you know we would go through processes by which we search backpacks blockers you know all kinds of different things that we go through a very thorough situation i don't know how much detail i want to go because i don't want if somebody's a perpetrator to oh okay i'll hide those things but we want to make sure that that threat is not in the building right now and that's the first step that happened the second steps are you know things outside what's what has happened over the last period of time is it credible does the person have the means to carry this out at this moment those are the types of things that we are deciding really when i say we as our police officers are doing that
083and they get whatever help they need you know we have our police lays and officers but there's also detectives there's other police departments in the area that that will come and help i will tell you if we have an event and we have that one bomb threat six years ago and there was probably i don't know 30 different police cars from at least four jurisdictions that came in immediately as soon as they could to help in any possible way i know that they will do that as i said that two to three minutes before they get there is the critical piece of time mental health is another piece and it's a piece that is hard i know i just heard a public comment about how it's hard to get mental health services right now and
084so um we you know myself especially mrs williams but other folks in the school as well we re-engaged and before this happened we re-engaged began the school year with some of our healthcare providers in the area to try to ensure that our kids have the health help that they need give to parents especially when we see there may be any places where they can call but we would really love to have health care providers our mental health care providers in within our school district that are from these agencies now we wouldn't do it without fair permission but we'd like to have that access so that we could get the kids help that they need and so we have engaged with some groups i think you've heard during the the essers that i have we have
085engaged with dr commonwealth and they actually work with our youngest learners our elementary kids i think it's it's probably best practice that we help kids at the youngest ages because mental health issues um just typically you know over time you know the severity worsens as well as you know what happens worse and i know people are worried and scared you know i listen to kids the last couple of days i've had the good fortune of being in the middle school most day most of the day both days and you know there's there's kids that are worried and scared and we want to do everything we can to make them feel feel better and comfortable at the middle school specifically we brought in i don't know if there was four or five edmond township police officers
086all last week that came into support to help people feel and hopefully lessen some of that anxiety as we move now the safety committee isn't just all about uh active shooter training we also talk about other things and one of the big projects that we have uh safety concern that we saw is kids going across beta lake road after school to go to you know the place across the street to get you know food after school and so we are in process and we have already authorized the money to put a crosswalk in we're working with the county we talked to the county today where exactly to put it and talking about widening our entrance up a little bit as well and then a pie in the sky dream that we have and you know
087we've had a lot of these that have came to fruition is to do a walking path around the entire property here that would be for community use you see that at different places in valley creek or even in the area and that would be connected to our crosswalk so that kids are especially middle school that's what our biggest worry is our middle school kids would have a you know a sidewalk for lack of a better term but a walk to walk on that safe and cross safely so that we don't have to worry about them being hit by a vehicle you know that's another piece of the work that's done by the safety committee we talk about a lot of things it's not just simply the active shooter training although right now that's our on
088the top of our minds we try to really think about how else could we make our our kids our staff and everyone safe open up for any questions all right we will move on to the school year update and the osha emergency temporary standard okay i feel like a broken record they've been talking about this for two board meetings and we had scheduled several board meetings right now there is a stay in the federal courts on the mass mandate this is for uh employees and so what it would mean if someone wasn't vaccinated they would have to test once a week and and or where mass is being challenged in courts it has been suggested by our attorneys our school district attorneys that we do not move forward until it gets through the court system
089and so we are in a pause there was a period of time two weeks ago where i sent out a communication to the board that said they're telling us we've got to act now we haven't got it we have to have this in place by a certain date and then they change their mind because um i think the court case will take a little longer than they anticipated now we need to be prepared we have communicated with our staff of the possibilities but we are waiting on the policy i think everybody's taking a look at it we would choose option two if we if we ever were to put the policy in place option two is the option in which people have the test weekly test option as unvaccinated employees so the other option is
090that you would either have to be backstage or not and you have to remember we don't even have a good spirit of what we feel about choice as a district is there any questions about that this is the first time we've talked about it with it in front of us okay everybody's really up to speed on that okay we'll move on to the 19 data okay and i apologize to mr smith he's not gonna be able to see this so i'm gonna try to get the data on the screen i was doing pretty good up until i got to this now pull it over as i said i apologize jason i don't think you're gonna be able to see this no worries and i'll make this a little bigger yeah it's the same it's the
091same charge i know i probably broke the record looking at the same kind of charge for for what our local cobra data is i'll make a little bit smaller so we can see it do the whole thing and so the chart basically goes through positive cases total uh and then the total number of 14 individuals since we started school it's by school building and so for example i don't want to read all these but feel like elementary there was there has been 33 students and seven staff members who have testified for coven and 263 students who have been in quarantine at some point throughout the school year and each building wildsmart elementary sonoma the middle school high school are represented our total number of cova cases for students is 298 positive cases and staff is
09242 and the total number of quarantines at this point is 1968 students and 15 staff one thing that i know that some staff members had wanted me to make sure that i had talked a lot about support is remember a quarantine isn't a one-day event typically if a student support team they're quarantined for somewhere between now with testing specifically two to five days you know it's a seven day test out option there's also if you don't test out you have a 10 day so you could be in quarantine longer but each quarantine does represent several days of time and many staff are concerned about the learning loss the time that they don't have a certain amount of kids in class so maybe in my class of high school students i have 30 students in my
093class 5 are gone for quarantine the next weekend another different three are gone the next week in a different three or four con and so they just say it's interrupting that they're learning quite a bit and we i think we know that that core teams are are probably the most effect the most effect on our students the next column is the number of quarantine students or staff that became positive and so that number continues to increase over over time we're at 87 as a district and that represents 29 of the total positive cases or four percent of the total number of students who have been in quarantine does that make sense for everyone but four percent is four percent of um people uh i guess kids in quarantine became positive the other side of the
094coin is 29 of of kids that are positive were in quarantine that'll make sense but i want to i want to present the information fairly on why don't you have the number for staff i could first i could divide it out if you want there's no reason i think people were working were more concerned with with the student a percent because the number of staff total wasn't as big earlier when i started this but i can definitely add that i appreciate that like that but sorry that's all right i shouldn't respond um and then the next is current this is as of last week so i the current dashboard uh for the school is week by week that matches most of the other schools surrounding us and so you can see the current cases from
095last week so this would have been you know i did this at like eight this morning so the current positive for beatles we like this four wildest part as and has nine students last week that became positive sonoma four the middle school had seven high school had seven for a total of 31 students and you can see the staff there was one at wildless park one at sonoma one high school and then there was one other building other building could be maintenance transportation administration building there was four and then a total number of quarantines right below that i will say the total quartes is 77 last week it's about half of what it's been um and i we think that's because of the test and stay option so students can do contest every day and
096stay in school we had a quite a lot of home test kits for a while now the mdhhs is no longer providing home test kits for tesla stage and so we are going to be testing in school we have enough test kids to do that but students would come to school and be tested in the morning before school started if it's parent choice completely total parent choice you don't have to um choose to do that if you don't choose to do that then it's a 10-day market and then finally i always have to compare the districts on each time i'm going to make this bigger so you can see it so the district comparisons for the districts surrounding us that that are more like us you know size-wise i didn't put athens on there surrounding
097us too but harvard said 340 positive cases marshall 151 lakeview 346. valkyrie public 226 and penn field 302 and that was from their websites and then they also have their quarantine numbers with the exception about a republic who does not publicize their foreign fees so you can see where each district lies and then the proportionate so i just did a quick proportion if everybody was the same size as harper creek this is how many positives that they would have so we'd be at 340 marshall 154 lakeview 228 featherweight 165 and 10 to 408 and then the proportion of quarantine so if everybody was the same size as our creek we can see what those numbers would look like rob you believe that harper creek is being um while other districts may not be as well
098i don't know if i'll say the word diligent i'll say i think that we are doing more testing than others other school districts um we've gone through i believe as many test kids when lakeview was in the test and stay program because they were in that program about a month ago they were definitely using a lot of tests but now they're not in that same program because they have a universal lasting so they don't have to 4g in classrooms so they're not testing as much but i think that we test more than most districts based on my conversation with superintendents and then since we've been doing the daily testing over the last about two to three weeks the quarantine members like you said have dropped by about half looks like we're about well similar specifically
099this specifically this week when i say this with this past week that happened um we did have a high number i believe it was a week after thanksgiving um so i need to make sure that that you clarify that but in general it has been lower each week since we started starting the testing program that is true so just so just so i understand that has the option to come to the school each day get tested they go to class if they're positive they become you know they're listed within our group and then they have a 10-day isolation period and it's always recommended that they get a you know the rapid tests are not as accurate as the pcr test that you would get out of the doctor's office so we recommend they do that
100and again that it's still parent choice but of course we have no way i mean we can't attribute all of the positive cases to school right we contribute to many different areas right yeah within the i guess the spreadsheet of the entire school year i've tried to keep track of school and home quarantines and then you can see that who becomes positive from a school or a quarantine and no not all that definitely are attributed we have had outbreaks of business school that have been documented by the healthcare but yeah i don't want to say anything that's going to sway anybody either way a lot of times if coker comes into a household many or most of the people in the house will become positive that seems to happen that's true uh but we've also
101had situations where students have uh it appears contracted over the high school that has happened just being open and honest i don't have any uh specific data other than what i share weekly with the staff as well as the school board with the accounting data that comes out every week we see that we keep track of that you have you can receive data from other folks you look at those that data as well we can see that uh there is a there's definitely an object of proven in the state of michigan we may be the highest um in the country at this point and you know i think all of us need to understand that we need to be as diligent as we possibly can comments thoughts mr jason smith anything from you that doesn't
102mute here no i appreciate the uh the comments that the audience has has made and uh appreciate the continued updates uh maybe to backtrack just a bit i i would agree with uh what mr barry smith said in terms of safety update i think that going forward would probably be uh advantageous but relative to this i think the public has come out and spoken relative to the coping situation i'll be specific seems like uh they've come out and spoken in terms of choice so i'll leave it at them thank all you there's nothing further on kobe 19 that we'll move right to the sister topic of masking discussion yeah so each escort being we have put the medicine discussion on um again i want to make sure that i am representing everyone within our district
103every day i send out common notifications i personally do that and i receive information back sometimes i usually two or three comments many of those comments those two three comments on each each of the days that they send it out are typically saying you know we need to do something many people are saying that those people are saying that we need to consider masking i want to make sure that i am representing that you know the group that is telling me that and you've also received i know some emails and i do want everybody to know when the board receives an email so it can come in different ways typically it comes through the general board email that's on our website and all board members do receive any email that comes in sometimes people send
104me an email that says please share with the board or some people send me emails and i ask people can you can i share this with the board so i do all those things so your voice is heard on every portion of you know this discussion and i want you to be aware of that the board is seeing and hearing from you as a christian any thoughts i'm asking this time just bearing this up with some of our previous conversations you know i'm uh thankful for the update um safety safety committee i think we all agree that there's there's a lot that goes into keeping our kids safe over the past year we spent a whole lot of time talking about mass when i think about all the other things that are realities out there
105depression mental health bullying vaping so i'm happy that we're gonna have a safety update any thoughts all right i just say that i remain remain in the camp of masking optional um you know i like the thought of ever having the right to choose including our parents and other respective students and i i don't know that we've seen any new data that would uh you know move us forward with to change anything on the masking side of things so that being said if anybody else has any comments all right we'll move on to the music program okay um a few weeks ago uh we got a new stakeholders together well first of all uh before we did that i sat down with our current directors of music um and we had a just a conversation
106about the music program and ideas for the future what we could do to improve what we could do when i say improvement through participation improve quality you know the whole gamut and then we had a meeting with stakeholders and i thought that was really good uh we met uh for a couple hours and we talked about a lot of things and lots of good ideas some things i i knew some things i did not know and i think that there were some passionate people in the room that really want to see our music program you know be as best as we possibly can and so i created from the discussion a proposal i shared it with the board so that you can take a look i'm going to hit the highlights for the people that
107are here in attendance first of all music directors we currently have two full-time music directors we did have three mr eric hanson had retired as a choir director our two current full-time directors have expertise in instrumental music not in vocal although they are both qualified and certified to do vocal and are doing a good job of that at this point they do recognize for us to build a program we need someone that's concentrating on vocal music and so the first part of the proposal would be to hire a full-time choir director um i think that is imperative it's also imperative we get the right person we make sure that we find someone that's going to be able to build a program mr hansen did a really nice job of having a quality program and large
108participation numbers and that's what we want to see continue another thing that we talked about was a concern with integrated arts that we had began this year and what does that mean for music are we getting enough music education at the elementary agents and so one of the things that we talked about is the directors would sit down with and help the integrated arts teachers understand the imperative i'll call them power standards we're going to use the same language that our students in k through 4 need to have to be successful and build programming when we get to middle school other things that we that i heard that were compared to the exposure to the arts um here at harper creek we don't have as much exposure to the arts as we'd like to see
109and the parts that i did not know are avenues that we could do better with is community partnerships we have organizations currently in valley creek and in the kalamazoo area in the general area that will come into the school to do music education and we actually talk a little bit broader we said arts education but music education specifically to the school the calendar symphony orchestra is an example that i know that they're coming to sonoma elementary they came to film in the past well let's have them come if they were willing to wireless park and bla there's other partnerships within battle creek that we can tap into kellogg community college offer their their services we talked a little bit about the brass band of battle creek and what services would they offer they're actually doing
110an outreach program to specifically high school middle school age students but we want to ensure that our students are exposed and then the last exposure is our own kids why not have our own kids go down to the elementary and perform for them our middle school kids our high school kids performing for elementary kids and we went a step further and we don't have the details on the plan yet but we have reading buddies where kids go and read to other kids what if we had music buddies where let's say a middle school band class goes down to an elementary school they perform and then they sit down with an individual elementary student and show them their instrument how it works their excitement for it same with vocal music we think that that is got
111a lot of legs that could that could really do a lot of good and be very powerful for the young kids to want to emulate the older kids and making sure that we do that we know that we need to have a i would call it a marketing campaign specifically for our fourth grade parents as they're going into middle school so they understand the importance of music education they may not understand that the brain development is enhanced with music education there are research studies that show music will enhance specifically mathematical learning but also scientific learning when kids are older so i think that it is it's critical that we market we tell people we help them understand how that's going to work i could see our administrative staff and our music directors working together to
112come up with here's the information and then sharing that with parents to say why it's important and to continue to promote that for both that bad importance and then middle school we currently in fifth grade have a general music class where they learn instrumental vocal and all parts of music in the fifth grade and all kids take that class in sixth grade then kids would make that choice between choir and band i think that that's critically important that all of our kids have the opportunity to have music continuing through the middle school again there's going to be a point in time when kids make that choices we're going to have to educate and help people understand what that choice looks like and feels like for their child i think that maintaining participation is important at
113the middle school level because when they get to seventh eighth grade now they're choosing between other possible interests that they may have so we want to maintain as many kids as we can in the program i think all of us are impressed when we go to events and we see large groups of people playing or singing at school districts and we want to have the same we want to make sure that we have that same participation numbers if we lose a music student in seventh or eighth grade we typically don't get them back in high school so we've got to promote as well as offer fun for those kids why do you want to be part of the program and some of the things i heard in the meeting was you know it's you're part
114of a group you're you're part of a as a team that same atmosphere where you're doing something together and you're staying together in your building and i think that's critically important and then in high school the first the first part is hiring a choir director i think that's critically important but the second part is a board that we can make sure that we continue to offer courses even when even if course sizes are low in the in the beginning we need to build the program and keep our courses going i had to put specifically four courses uh we also on top of the four horses which were um marching band and ensemble so marching band is in the fall ensembles in the winter spring jazz band varsity choir honors choir but we've also had a
115trouble choir in the past and we've also had a more of a general type music class in high school as well so we want to build those programs but guarantee this first floor and then build into the other one as we have i see the new director is going into middle school and high school to build the choir program our numbers are very high in fifth and sixth grade right now and we could have two teachers splitting those classes up and that would help you know fill schedules for for for our directors there's a little bit of concern that they would teach outside outside of music and hopefully it was popular enough that we had so many kids out kids that are interested that we're teaching all all music classes for those three people and
116i hope that we can continue that the last piece i guess is the overall music support in our community our board of education commitment and we need to commit to music programs financially i'm not saying that we haven't in the past but we need to make that stance that we will commit to our music program financially one of the things that comes up is uniforms and ropes for required other things are instrument purchases some folks it's a barrier to instruments and we do have programs where people donate instruments we have some instruments here at the school that we own and maintain making sure our instruments are maintained just having all the things necessary to be successful one of the things i would like to put out there at the table not to decide tonight but
117i think that we should commit somewhere around fifty thousand dollars to our um our uniforms and role purchases now we need to buy new band uniforms and we need to make sure we support the choir as well so that we're ready and we're doing that and we're going to support other purchases within the district with our casino built money i think that we should we should do the same the board has committed uh 5 000 a year that we were banking for uniform purchases specifically for band acquired but we may have to put up front some money to buy the uniforms um now that are necessary and then finally the last piece is community education making sure that our entire community is educated on the importance of the arts and we improve the arts within
118harper creek we don't want to we want to make sure that we understand the appreciation this is what my my vision my vision when i see things are what i actually see i want to go to a play like i did last sunday and have the auditorium completely full of people like just completely full bursting at the seams i want to go to the van passer the choir concert and see the same and i've seen that over the years here at harbor creek and in all of those aspects we just have to make sure that it's important to us that we're not just getting parents coming to performances but we're getting lots of people who just wanted to enjoy and and and see the artist but part of that is us as a school district
119promoting ourselves because i would bet if i asked the audience did you know there was a school play last weekend i bet many people would say i didn't know i just didn't fly off no so we've gotta do a better job of promoting and so i think that's a piece of the pie that i can do a better job with our um with our communication director and getting the information from our directors of music and arts so we know what's coming up so we can really promote it out there so that's my proposal for tonight i think for the board it's uh giving me the nod that we are going to do a higher acquire director and then as we bring forward budgeting items that we we consider that we support the arts just as
120much as we support other programs in programming in the district directors we're not sure if this is the right time of year to hire we want to get the best person we want to have a committee a a committed committee to get the best possible person to potentially start next year with that position that's that's or we have students that will be graduating college and that typically happens in may and go through the process but if we got out front of it and people knew we were looking then we could get the best i think that's that's another way just happen tonight because i do agree that you know education and music is that the downstream benefit of helping learning in other areas and i think we've also got a lot of great resources here
121in battle creek i just went to the cereal city concert band performing yesterday and they were fantastic [Music] yeah i guess the only thing i would say is the stakeholders at that meeting with their passion they were the ones that were driving the discussion of what we need to do and why it's important just be perfectly honest with you they were the ones i want to be supportive i want us to be the best of everything that we do but that group of people i think always had a lot of passion promise that passion moving forward your community involvement mr moyers wanted to be here this evening but he was already in the american legion with the choir promoting the choir liberty so we talked about a little bit too of community events and the
122things that we do and we want to be part of and then they did that the uh i'm sorry the uh heart creek optimus parade our band is is typically the one of the leads in the play right in the parade um and you know we want to support that group too they're very supportive of all of us so really no action but i want you to know that's the intentions moving forward so i will be bringing eventually a person to the board i probably will also be putting within the budget an amount of money i know that the band boosters specifically start with when i know how much they can count on and so i'll have conversations with the group so that they understand where the commitment level i feel i'm going to ask
123i thought the proposal was well done and i'm very supportive sooner than later yeah one of the things that we've noticed in hiring teachers in this market is that we do have applause within our contract in which people retire early by march first they get a little bit of incentive but that incentive helps us say okay we have these jobs open and we go at our recruiting and events and said we have these jobs available and we can get them home i agree with you i will say you like the thought of hiring somebody that's fresh out of school even though they might not have the experience they can take a program and build it with that enthusiasm and something they can create over a period of time but yeah well i think having a
124hiring committee that's kind of awesome all right we move on to the high school hvac okay i know jim talks about a little bit the only details that i really have and i won't go into too much is that the engineering is completing the bids are going to go out i believe in the email i had said exact dates but around the end of this week the bids will go out it'll go out to bed vendors will come and take a look at the school through with walkthroughs the week we get out of school so next week um bids will be due around the first of january probably that's not the third january actually but after the holiday and then um there's a postmate meetings that hopefully we can get them fairly quickly and then
125we can bring to the board this is what we are looking at on the financial end this foreigner is working with pfm to to figure out exactly what needs to be in place so when we get the bids in and we say okay we're ready that now we have the financing on the back end so we can get moving on that it's probably going to be the installment purchase agreement and we borrow money from an entity and then pay that back over time we'll decide how much we pay back on an annual basis to see how long we want that to go it's not a loan you can't go to we are not allowed as a school towards a banking alone like a average citizen we have to either bond through voting we have to
126bond using our own finances or we can do an installment purchase agreement that's our choices that we have and pfm thought that was our best choice for this particular um project totally true i spoke to truman and it's actually part of the rfp process oh and so that'll be part of the rp that we are doing with uh yes oh okay i did not know that good job we're figuring that out it's kind of figuring out as we go type thing right now oh but uh we we can actually have todd and todd mcdonald csm and uh chris fry moreno with true got together today and they're finalizing those documents so it's just i just want to smooth we have deadlines in timely if we want to get the hvac project done for next school
127year we're going to make decisions in january it's just the facts of life and if we can do it we can afford it i say this board gets it done because it's been a long time coming that we actually say we got that one out you know done because it's a lot of conservative places so the drawings are done as i said earlier now they're in the writing of the specifications and cleaning those up and like like mr ridgeway said i expect it to be out in the next few days so and then then once we know that they're out they'll give them a week or so look through it then we'll do the pre-bid walk so i'll meet myself and uh folks from ses which is our mechanical engineer they're part of king scott
128and csm our construction management firm will meet together and take the contractors too so they will actually hand be able to look at both ceilings so there's no surprises and stuff like that so that we get accurate bids as well so that's a very important piece of it just like you know i don't want to regress the scoreboard but i have to walk through tomorrow with the scoreboard for the pools because i want all the contractors and it's mandatory so there's no surprises they are not shocked and when they come in later go oh wow we didn't see this before so that it's very important it'll also help keep our costs out so when it comes to additions and stuff like that emission of errors and omissions trying to eliminate close thank you any further
129there okay we'll move on to the ccd ph health technicians okay helen county department of public health health technicians so i i had a conversation with the health department about the process it takes to do contact tracing and the amount of time is taking away from our staff our specifically our office staff principal secretaries um our health aides that's their part of their job but it's just when it happens it overtakes the building for a few hours and so i asked what are other school districts doing and one idea that they had was that another school district next to us has two school nurses a little bigger school and they have three health technicians i said well what's a health technician well they said it's not a school nurse but it's someone that has a
130health background so maybe they have some schooling but they aren't quite there yet as a registered nurse okay so so what we would do and this would be sort of in a temporary basis for the remainder of the school year where we would contract with the health department from january to june with two technicians the cost is is going to be uh 51 811 dollars patchy we have said all along that we would use federal money where necessary to help our staff in our school and our kids and i think this would help all three because now our office have our principals specifically will be helping the teaching staff with the business of education instead of the business of contact racing and testing we're doing lots of testing you know i said that already and
131so these folks would help with all of those so i believe that the health department met and they approved hiring two technicians for harper creek with the caveat if we do the same tonight then they would go through the process they don't think it'll take long they're hopeful that they can have people in place right when we get back from the holiday break that's what they're hoping for they said they did not have too much trouble hiring those positions in the past um this would be money that would come out investors two and then we actually did that right okay i got ambassador street but we actually put more money in for the next school year necessary but i'm telling you i told the health department we are going to make sure that it's working
132for us we don't just want to commit to a year and a half we're going to come into a happy year and then we'll see where we're at if it does work really well then we'd connect with arrestees i do want to mention something else that's unrelated but it came up uh calvin county receiver received a cdc of health liaison and so the calvin county health department decided to give that to harvard crete that person ever create to help us with our processes so it's going to be another one that could be helpful no cost to us is just something in the cdc that person i believe is going to start next week is my understanding at this point now next week kids are out but they get acclimated i can have conversations with them
133those board members have asked you know i spent three hours or so on code every day and so hopefully that person will help me repeat some of that some of those duties um because a lot of this is reporting and keeping track of all the data and numbers behind these things and the reason i do it is because it had to be confidential when you first started so will that position be for the remainder of the school year or i don't know they didn't say how they didn't say they'd go as a lengthy time to be honest they just said that they're gonna they're going to do it for us for now now let's say that another school district you know has surges they may go to that other district how much can you fill
134yourself up and the rest of the administration concluding principles from the time you're spending with these two new folks and i think i think you know i would be down to just make sure the call-outs happen every day and that principles would be down to answer because you know we want to we're supposed to talk to those parents that are really concerned a lot of times people are upset their child is quarantined they don't understand they want to talk to somebody you know that's in charge and so they would go to that next person the principal but typically with the phone calls you know these folks that's that that's the whole matter how things are going to be a beast which we do i think would be good to get you guys back to doing
135what you're supposed to be doing rather than maybe numbers so yeah i think it's a good a good we can at least try it and that's what the federal money was for was to help with probably cocoa related expenses all right uh move on to committee updates and start with personnel okay personal committee met uh three basic things one increasing substitute teacher pay i sent an email out and i made an administrative decision i hope that that was acceptable to the group but i did we moved our pay up for every substitute teacher group we have what we call daily subs we have district subs we have retired teachers who sub and then we have long term subs and everybody's rates were increased somewhere between 20 and 30 dollars and i think that that will
136be competitive um not it may be the highest paid in some categories i i believe that there's one school district here that's paying a little bit more on their daily subs and we do but we are competitive with everything else it has helped us get new subs in and we're trying to get you know new quality subs as well i know that that is a big issue for our especially our teaching staff we talked about negotiating additional sick days or covert days for staff and you heard that um from mrs foreman but you also saw several emails from uh staff specifically teaching staff that i was talking about with their thought processes i mean negotiations with them some of our employee groups agreed the um the number that we said was five and we would
137do five initial surveys for every employee in the district um and so but it's negotiable so therefore we negotiated with each group some groups have agreed to that and some other groups have not agreed to that physical um you may ask what other districts doing some did nothing they just simply take sick days and that was our stance to start with and that was a concern of the board at least individual members after our last meeting that had came to me individually just said you know i don't know we need to do something and that was a response to that um but i think we've we've seen program higher than we thought it was going to be we really thought this year would be better in terms of numbers but it has not been and
138so i think that's worth it and i will continue to negotiate with any groups that have not so and come up hopefully with a fair fair agreement for that and then the last piece in the first half committee we did talk we talked about all of our employee groups have we've increased their pay to be competitive so that we continue to improve retain employees we had a group of employees individuals that happen to be in administration not principals or me but individuals who work in our offices that we had we had not done yet and so i have brought forward some contracts and i talked to the personal committee about that we were going to negotiate so that we were competitive with other districts we didn't want to lose some of our good employees because
139we were working we thought that was a good time because we did that with every other employee any personnel committee questions we will start the negotiation process soon with our teachers group um and so you can expect that we will start having a personal community first but then negotiation strategy meetings um as a board and closed session as we prepare for that negotiation retirement policy okay policy so we talked a little bit about switching public accounting from five to three minutes permanently we went through the neola policy update which i'm going to do in a minute you guys will really like to go through that but most importantly true in policy implementation i went through the first training on that i think it's going to be really good i think it's going to be a
140pretty seamless process the first part is i'm going to meet with the administrative staff that the policies deal with so that they can help me understand what we are currently doing with the options that were given bennett goes to the policy committee then we'll go through 13 pages of options some are easier than others but we'll go through the options that way this is what we think what do you think and there's going to be a few of them that are going to be hard decisions i'm just going to tell you there are some uh issues that i think are only things that the forward will have to decide not necessarily administration what do we believe in you know what should we do and some of those topics are going to be revolving around basically
141gun control within the school there are some options that districts have that's one of those issues uh issues with how how will the district handle uh policies revolving around transgender students that seems to be a topic throughout the country that people are concerned with so those would be the topics that we'll talk about the policy committee but then we'll bring forward the whole award for for conversation those just common things i'm sure there's some reviews the nice thing about the true powers is there's much less choices and it's much more prescriptive and it's easier for our administration to to actually apply it's also easier for our community to read we felt like menial policies were not easy to understand or read then finally the budget committee met we went through the the reports that you
142saw all the reports that you saw the only additional thing we talked about was the access food service fund balance and how we might spend that we brought in um mr rubinapp and um mrs obermeyer oh and and john's boss from charles came in and we just talked about ideas for spending that money we have several things that that we have that we have ideas on everything will have to come to the board for google if it's over ten thousand dollars equipment is easy um but if we wanted to let's say renovate one of our elementary kitchens that would be a big project that we talked about um talked a little bit about concession standstill that was something new that came up we think that that could be an allowable expense to help out um
143our concession stands that need some help we have quite a good length and you might wonder why as a audience member if you're listening it's because you know the lunches and breakfast are all free and we are serving many many many many many more kids like for example john said in the past we might have served three or four hundred breakfasts a day now we're serving 900 breakfasts today so it's a lot more revenue coming in for reimbursement um than we ever had it's a higher reimbursement also yeah it's interesting but it's a it's a it's a tough problem because we have to spend this money and we only have so much fun now we talk about it every year so when we get back to paid lunches and make breakfast we can go back
144to universal breakfast like we had started right before broken center so all kids could have three breakfasts again rob as this problem continues to occur we're going to start to look a little bit further out even two three four years as we see these continued access revenues and have a long-term plan maybe tackle one elementary every year or yeah that's what i my thought was doing because we did the middle school the high school's in pretty good shape because it's fairly newish but doing the elementary kitchens they completely update each of them and with the purpose of having our kitchen staff and cooks cook for our elementary kids instead of having fruit fries and ice cream that's always been our goal and we're cooking more and more and more every year as our equipment so
145that's it for committee updates all right move on to second semester school of choice okay at this point in time i am recommending that we do not open school of choice for a second semester i don't think it's a good idea for us to be bringing in more or new students in classrooms especially with kroger we do not want to overproud our questions any more than they already are we made some commitments to elementary and if we did school of choice we would be increasing elementary classrooms more than they already are and we don't want to say we ever have local exercises but really we don't have low questions so i think we at least have to honor our commitment this year so that's my recommendation i know our student county isn't high i hope
146it is the right current time i would agree okay we'll move on to yola updates as you know if you do three readings of vanilla this is the first one so i'm gonna quickly go through the updates when i say quickly i want to do them so you understand but stop me if you if you have a question here we go the first one is in bylaw 100 and it's talking about the absence of board members or i'm sorry the board members are participating virtually and we've asked every single group masb our home attorneys what is going to happen on this january 1st and they all have agreed that the only way you can participate virtually uh and vote after january first is to have a military is that military duty that's the only possible
147way you can participate virtually but you cannot vote it's my understanding of how that would work now another piece of the pie that i want to make sure that we follow mainly is the posted requirements if we have a member that participates virtually we have to announce that in our posting our postings have to go up at least 18 hours before the meeting and so we have to have a say in policy that anybody that wants to participate virtually has to get notice prior to that i would suggest by thursday because that's when sharon usually sends out the um the board book and we set the agenda so in the future after january 1st i'm going to ask that you inform us by thursday before the meeting to be virtual you have to do it
14818 hours before so that would be sunday morning monday ish if we do the last minute thing but i don't think that sharon and i want to come in and put a posting on that door on sunday but we'd rather have you just listen but you can't vote if you are virtual after january okay okay next policy is public participation there are some changes you know there has been board meetings have lots of public participation some of it got a little bit adamant or maybe even violent around the country we have not had that here but there is some changes so uh they changed some of the verbiage from from public comment to public participation that's that's easy but i put it inside of the board so you can see all of it but here
149is the gist i guess one is moving from five to three minutes okay we already recognize people to speak by the presiding officer but the providing officer may this is this this is new information interrupt warn or terminate a participant session when they make counts that are repetitive obscene and or comments that constitute the true threat i.e statements that meant to frighten or intimidate one or more specified persons into believing they will be seriously harmed by the speaker or some acting at the speaker's behest request any invention to stop talking and or leave the meeting when that person behaves in a manner that is disruptive of the orderly conduct and or the orderly progress of the meeting the orderly progress is something new and some boards were having to adjourn and start me the next
150day because public comment was taking hours five six seven hours and they're going to after midnight one in the morning with public comment and so if if if it's intentionally harming the orderly business we would have to write at that point to say okay we're going to move on because we've heard all of the comments i would warn though the presiding officer we never want to take away someone's freedom of speech we have to be very careful when we want to interrupt if someone is as we said being repetitive of seeing or uh beyond that everything else is fairly the same people can't audio or video recording the meeting that's legal we asked them to tell the superintendent beforehand we've had that in the past before we broadcast our meetings we have people in the
151front row that would do facebook live but they just cannot obstruct the nation i think everything else is the same as our current policy policy 3120 employment a professional staff it basically takes all the highly qualified language out of the policy highly qualified is no longer a thing it was a federal government thing people have to be licensed and certified but the highly qualified piece there is two or three pages of that policy that is crossed out that is old language so and that's a legal change revised school sponsored publications and productions is a replacement policy and neola is suggesting we form a committee and take some time on this i am suggesting we don't because we're going to change policies to true soon i don't think it's worth our time to do it we
152have not had issues with our um school sponsored publications what they're talking about are the new things that are out there on social media like blocks or you know we do hctv those are newish ideas and we want to make sure that when we do have a policy from troon that it it makes it so that our administrators and our students understand what the rules are when they can't end it so i suggest we don't do anything with that one 6114 cost principles spending the federal funds you know we have a large amount of federal funds coming in we talked about that earlier and there are some details of how you can spend that money they have changed and so this policy updates those details one of the details is you have to get permission
153from the body that is giving you the money if it's over five thousand dollars so if you think about all the things that we talked about most are over five thousand so we need to submit budgets and they have to approve them before we can spend and that's true with both of our grants anyway but they set the number at 5 000 now for that uh students finance and fees basically allows electronic payments things like credit cards debit cards paypal bengal etc for fines fees and charges so if we wanted to start opening a venmo account we could actually just overhear i talked about that this summer and um i don't know if any school has done it but we are ready and prepared to do it if we can and then there is a
154change a it spells out that a homeless student will not be charged fines and fees so if we have a student who is homeless they cannot be charged financially so that that's a change to our current college it's changed to i believe the law uh property inventory uh very similar revised policy includes new regulations and federal funds for any item costing more than five thousand dollars has to be approved so if you wanted to uh okay property inventory would be when we take inventory we have an outside company that does that for us for our larger items in the district they keep track of everything but we have to get prior approval for anything over five thousand dollars again public records is an obligation that we do not disclose a student or employee's address when
155the district receives a participation term and the policy committee we looked that up to see what that was you know we think that if someone is in let's say witness protection program things like that i think it's the attorney general is the one that doesn't participate in parents we looked it up but last year all right keep on going uh the last piece personnel files this policy always allows that our district employees can look at their personnel file and we will not release a home address or a contact information to a third party without the employee's written authorization the employee medical records will be maintained in the confidential files separately and we've done that anyway but that's that's somewhat new i guess for the policy and then it outlines procedures for employees to view their
156policy i'm sorry to view their personal life i think that's it chapter first first reading right two more ago that should be the last time we read the whole thing i would suggest the board really pays attention to public participation because that's important to our public and yourself it's spelled out in the board briefs if you want to have a copy i'll probably send that to you so you can be you know well versed on that part can i change over to trill as well well it depends i am hoping for a meeting in february where we say we're ready to move forward like the policy community comes forward says okay we're ready to make it happen and then voters wouldn't be curious to sell that uh that particularly marries up with the uh true
157policy yeah it's similar um you added new choices on minutes and things like that but i think it's very simple all right move on to new letters all right so we have four potential new hires first amanda bryant fifth grade teacher be a three we had a teacher that left the district so we had an opening melissa robinson kindergarten teacher at sonoma elementary she actually would start as an intro teacher at our rate of 200 a day and then when certification is obtained then go to a va one the state of michigan has become much more flexible and people becoming teachers in the classroom and they give time for people to be in a permit before they become certified we haven't had a lot of interest in jobs i mean there's not a lot of
158people applying and so we are basically as laura had said trying to promote people who want to become teachers within to the organization another one very similar vanessa hunt span a teacher of hypergrade she's in the same situation starting as a uh interim teacher and then intelligent typical thing they would go to obama as well and then finally chelsea zigler our super support specialist um that would be at sonoma elementary with a prorated salary of thirty one thousand eighty three um we had height we had decided to hire another student support specialist this person comes highly recommended from i believe it was a school district here and we felt that necessary we talked about mental health a lot that's a person that's hopefully going to help directly with students that are struggling with their behavior
159and that's that's developed all right i'll move on to comments from the audience please state your name and address i know i can't make a comment about the same thing so my comment is regarding the personnel retention i heard about the increase in pay and to be competitive with in hoping that we retain personnel in higher top town i heard that there was a pay increase for subs the district subs and the daily subs i also i think i maybe misheard it but that uh mr ridgeway was talking that there might be a potential increase for the administrative staff the payoff skill for support for the support staff it is something that needs to be talked about where the support staff make less than a high school student that can make working at calls or
160a tropical smoothie cafe is i can't even talk about it and i work as a support staff in this district and the pay that i get is one of the reasons why i resigned i submitted my resignation about two weeks ago and my last day is this friday i love working with the students and i work and i love working with the staff i work at the high school the students love me the students know me my my oldest son goes there my my daughter who's currently an 8th grader is so upset that i'm not going to be there that i'm not going to be able to make her lunch which i do for my son because i work in a special education classroom where we have all of the stuff available we are not
161competitive with pay for our support staff i have heard from numerous support staff from the care of that if why should they care really working here if their pay is so much slower than everywhere else um i heard from one parent saying that she can work at a dispensary and she can make twice what she makes here and she's been working here for a few years i've been working here for about two years and it needs to be talked about it really does the pay is outrageous and that is the reason why we're having the shortage and staff in the boxing department and hiring parents and any other support staff we are the ones that are required to tutor students and we get paid do you want to know 12 an hour to tutor students
162to tutor high school students that is not right thank you thank you we'll move on to action items start with cctvh health technicians it's easy for you to sign up that's right the chair calls for a motion of the harbor free board of education approved contracts to the kelvin county department of public health technicians effective january 2022 through june 2010. it's been moved by supported by mr barry smith do we have discussions here in the center please call the roll mr barry smith yes dr martyrs yes mrs oliver yes mr jason smith yes mr myerson christopher martin of obs and mr bess hello yes okay emotional caring all right i'll move on to the second semester school of choice mr secretary chair false promotion of the harvard creek community school board of education declined participation
163in schools of choice section 105 for the second semester of the 2021-22 school year support today has been moved by mr barry smith supported by mrs allwood do we have discussion i remember asking you know gail grant when she was working as usually it was around 10 yes mrs yes dr borders all right last action i did my leadership share calls for notion that the heart creek board of education approved the following contracts amanda bryant fifth grade teacher harbor creek middle school va three melissa robinson kindergarten teacher sonola elementary school until interim teaching certificate is obtained then ba1 200 a day vanessa hunt spanish teacher harper creek middle school 200 a day until interim teaching certificate is obtained then ba1 chelsea zigler student support specialist sono elementary prorated for 112 work days at 3183 otherwise
164salary of 51 898. all pending satisfactory completion of contractual and personal requirements as recommended by central administration so move [Music] all right and do we have discussion here is so we actually have we have two heavy light we have two taxonomies and one is based for the next yeah and i want to apologize to dr borders that i didn't cut gentleman off that was speaking earlier i was taking notes and looking down and didn't realize he was specifically mentioning that was not appropriate and my apologies so all right with that being said we adjourned at 9 27 pm you