BOE Business Meeting 2023-1-9

001(board members chattering) Are they ready for us? We're good? Yeah. Okay. (gavel thuds) Good evening, I call this public hearing to order. The purpose of this hearing is to invite members of the public to comment on whether or not the board should adopt changes to the current senior tax exemption. Newly enacted legislation permits the board of education to raise the income limits for qualifying property owners from $29,000 up to a maximum of $50,000 for a 50% exemption. At the board of education's business meeting on December 5th, 2022, the board discussed this legislation and attached to this agenda is the draft resolution to amend the income eligibility limits for the partial tax exemption for seniors. I invite members of the public to come forward to speak on the senior tax exemption at this time. Okay. Seeing

002no one in the audience to speak on the senior tax exemption. I'll turn it to Zoom. There are no attendees at the moment on Zoom if we want to give it a second. Sure. Still no attendees. Okay, let's go ahead and, sorry, let me pull up my agenda. Okay, then we will go ahead and close this public hearing and we will move on to the budget presentation. Good evening to everyone joining us for tonight's annual budget presentation on staffing recommendations and budget assumptions. Thank you for taking the time to be here. I call this meeting to order and note that all members of the board are present along with Dr. Patrick and members of his cabinet. I would like to note that while there is no public comment period during this evening's budget presentation, there

003is opportunity to hear from those present during the two public comment periods that are part of the board business meeting that follows. And with that, I will turn things over to Drew. Thank you very much. And I extend my wishes for a good evening to everybody in the audience and at home and to the board and cabinet. So tonight is the start of our budget process, talking about staffing recommendations tonight, as well as the broad overview of the budget development process in general. So the focus of tonight's presentation will be sixfold. First, we'll talk about the development process and what we take into consideration in coming forward to you with budget proposals. Second, we'll talk about some specific staffing recommendations. And I'll just say a word about that. Really, the reason we start the budget

004process with staffing recommendations is because staffing accounts for the lion's share of our spending, roughly 80% of our budget is captured by our staff and salaries, benefits and associated costs. And that makes sense. We're a school and our function is to educate students and that involves teachers and teacher aides and custodians, bus drivers and principals and the like. Third, we'll go into looking at our current staffing levels and our projected enrollments, our 2023-24 staffing requests and recommendations. We'll talk about those in two tiers. Our projected staffing levels and projected enrollments for the future. And then our budget overall, our budget development timeline for the remainder of the process. So to start with the big, big picture, basically our school budget is a means to an end, and that end is educating our students. It provides

005our financial resources to operate the district and to try to help achieve the goals that we've set forth, including through the strategic plan and other priorities. Really thinking big picture. And the next few slides or slides I also showed at our budget forum, our public budget forum back in November. Our mission, the thing we're kind of working toward every single day is to sponsor each student's full development, enabling our youth to be effective and independent contributors in a democratic society and an independent world. Now that of course, is an excerpt from a larger statement, but I think that captures a lot of what we're trying to do. We're trying to provide a world class education, make sure our students are well prepared for the futures that they will encounter, provide them with opportunities to flourish

006in their learning and thinking about the whole student, the whole child, all aspects of their learning and wellbeing. While a little wordy and complicated, this graphic really kind of shows really how we're organized and to some extent, how we're expenditures are organized. We're organized to provide excellent teaching and learning to our students and that circle is at the top. That includes our class sizes, our course offerings, our extracurriculars, our professional development, how we improve our curriculum and our instruction over time. Of course, our teaching and learning also comes with student supports in the form of special education, our multi-tiered systems of support. That's what MTSS stands for. Our counseling, working toward wellbeing, our community partnerships and so forth. And of course all of that is supported by our district operations, including how we focus on

007safety and security and emergency management, our sound fiscal stewardship, our strategic planning, recruiting and retaining excellent talent, and of course instructional and information technology, which is a big part of who we are and what we do. This is overly simplistic, but I think it can be helpful especially to those sort of new to this process. But really, as I said, our staff is really what drives our budget and our program drives our staffing needs. And at its simplest form, the major staffing driver at the elementary schools is the class sizes we maintain. We try to maintain class sizes of no more than 22 students, classroom and grades K through three. That goes to 24 students in grades four and five. We've run our special education programming along the continuum of services at the elementary level.

008And of course we have our encore specials, programming and PE, art, music and all of those Spanish language, all of those extras, those important whole child activities that we engage in. At the middle school, the staffing model is driven by our house and team structure. We break a large community into smaller communities to help to know kids well, know them better, kids stay together for the course of three-year, over the course of those three years in middle school. And that is a big part of how we need to staff it. Of course, we have our special education continuum there as well, our encore programming there as well. And our co and extracurricular activities district run that start at the middle school level. And then at high school, that model is driven by our diverse course

009offerings, our opportunities for kids to make choices as they work through their four years of high school. And again, there we also have our special education programming and our co and extracurriculars, which of course in high school take on an even bigger part of kids' experience through athletics and clubs and activities. We've talked about this a couple of different times and in written communications this year we've kind of focused on this transition year as connecting our wide community, thinking about our individual goals support the larger mission, teacher goals, school goals, student goals. We've been focusing on wellbeing, mental health, inclusion, belonging, that's the wide. And of course, community coming out of the restrictions of COVID into a more familiar time. We've really tried to focus on welcoming parents back into the classrooms, restarting programming that

010may have taken a halt, field trips and the like. And that's been a focus. And we'll keep this in our minds as we work through this budget process. And we do have an existing strategic plan that has a number of priorities reflected in it. Some of them are listed here from the standards and the units, multiple perspectives, critical and creative thinking. These are all areas of emphasis that are reflected in the goals that have life in the work of our faculty and staff throughout the district. So that's an underpinning of what we're thinking about when we plan for a proposed budget. Okay, turn it over to Stuart. Sure. So in addition to all of wonderful things that Drew talked about that are in the background and in foreground of when we discuss the budget, sort

011of what are the nuts and bolts on how we get to the numbers at the end of the day and what are our considerations. So tonight we're talking about staffing requests. Later on when we get into some of the budget sessions, we'll talk about some of those instructional budget drivers and other budget drivers within the budget. And these are the things that we look at when we talk about those educational efficacy, of course, impact on student education outcomes and achievement, alignment with mandates and best practice. You'll see later a request for a high school custodian that's really best practice when we compare due comparables. Alignment with strategic planning and education priorities. Dr. Patrick spoke about that a few slides ago. Staffing efficiency, how are we using our staff at the best. And perhaps there's a

012different way to apply staffing in another year based on different priorities. And of course financial impact. Non-instructional departments, we developed those budgets. When I meet with the different directors throughout the course of the budget development process, which occurs mainly during the fall, we still look at consistency with a strategic plan and overall district goals, again, those operational standards and best practice. What are some of our historical spending norms in purchasing efficiencies? And I wanna say just because it might be a norm doesn't mean that's a norm we want to continue. But where have we come from and where do we want to go, but to having an understanding of our history. So what are some of the budgeting efficiencies that are currently in place? Well, a big driver on our expenses is our self-funded healthcare

013plan. Although it's a big driver, it's also provides a source of savings when you compare it to like plans throughout the region. Optimization of staff. That's that staffing efficiency continue some of those conversations that we have throughout the fall with our principals and directors, are we using and putting our staff in the best support of our strategic plan and our goals, maximizing state aid, BOCES services, transportation, expenditure based aides. We do get aid back from the state if we spend it the correct way, such as through BOCES. So that's always a conversation. Gee, if does BOCES provide the service, if it does and it makes sense for us, let's do that because we get almost 50% back on the dollar in the next year. And if you look over time, let's say in the last

014six, seven years, you'll see that BOCES, eight number actually increase 'cause we've been driving some expenses in that direction. Timing considerations, facilities, technology projects, and even some staffing decisions. You know, do we wanna do it all in one year or is this something we can spread out over two, three years and does it make sense to do so? And let's do that because it sort of smooths out that big expense. And sometimes it allows us to study that project maybe a little bit more in depth rather than sort of jumping all in and not really being ready to implement it all at once and all in one year. Cooperative agreements with the village, of course we have our maintenance, garage facility that's shared with the village, which does save the district quite a bit of

015money in the village, of course. Cooperative purchasing, different types of bids. Purchasing agent Linda Panzano does a great job in the business office, making sure that we're taking part in all the competitive bidding and different types of cooperatives throughout the region, state and national, and we do that with vigor. Technology advancements, Jeanie and her team, making sure, and she's doing a great job. You'll see when we talk about her budget in budget session number two, looking at different types of softwares and are we still using them or are we not really? And we wanna direct those dollars elsewhere as our educational programs might move in a different direction or in an advanced direction. And of course, energy consumption. Always looking at, you know, LEDs, new boilers, other sustainable type initiatives. And I think you'll hear

016a little bit about that when we talk about our first budget draft here in a few weeks. Then just a reminder of our process and sequencing, budget deliberation development, that development part and deliberations internally have really been happening since August of this past summer. You can even say it's stretched back to last year a little bit because we do do things organically and sometimes very slowly, but it allows for a lot of in-depth discussion and development. So by the time the board of education and community see our recommendations, rest assured that they've gone through a vigorous internal process to get to that point. Budget discussions, again, we're starting that here tonight. And now continue throughout the spring, board of education, administration, community, all we invite feedback throughout the process. We typically get about a hundred

017different questions from different community constituents. We like to share those and get that feedback and information out to the community. So by the time we get to May, everyone feels though they can be an informed voter. So again, that's just sort of putting that to a picture throughout the process of our budget discussions, really inviting feedback from everyone. We started with those budget focus forum, our first one back in November. We'll sort of complete that circle when we get close to finishing up the budget process in March 27th. But we really do find those sessions very helpful. And again, just more budget influences. In addition to everything that Drew said, all these other considerations and influences throughout the budget process. A lot of these are mandated, different labor agreements have requirements, mandates from the state,

018of course, the citizen impact. What are the CPI changes? What is the tax cap going to be in relation to what real expenses are doing, which is certainly a challenge and challenge in the current environment. In school budget, simplistically you could break it down to three major categories. Educational program, all the capital expenses, which is not only facilities, but also all of our debt service related to past projects in the administration of the program in total. And that's formally known as a three part budget. And what are some of our other considerations? All of this as a comes together, ready for that first presentation and the first draft number, staffing needs. We've been talking about those again since last year and throughout the fall, all those contractual obligations are self-funded health insurance as the experience

019of that plan goes really drives the budget and how we think about next year and years after. As we think about putting a budget number together, what are those historical spending patterns? What are the inflationary impact? The conversations that we have, especially with some of those departments that are largely driven by purchases such as facilities that are really being impacted by inflation. You'll see some of that when we present our budgets here in few weeks. Projected state aid, other non-tech revenues for the upcoming interest year. So interest rates are going up, so maybe not so good, but on the revenue side, that is a good seed. And you'll see that our budget number reflecting that. Where are we overall our fund balance and our reserves, we've drawn down a little bit in the last couple

020years or last year or so, so that has to be a consideration. What's our long-term plan as we look not only into next year, but the next couple years as well. Where are the tax levy cap limit calculation showing, what are enrollment projections versus our staffing and keeping true to how we staff in the elementary buildings and across the district in those new initiatives. We are not short on good ideas. We have a lot of really bright people and come up with great ideas and things that grow organically, but they do come to bear and when it gets to that point, we like to present them as part of our budget. We have building specific budgets, so separate buildings, each of the buildings have a per pupil allotment that doesn't come into a lot of

021money, it's only really buying supplies. So I go around and meet with each of the principals as they submit their budget and they allocate those dollars to support the sort of the day-to-day expenses in the classrooms. Non instructional budgets, again, I meet with all of the directors and we develop those. Dr. McIntosh, athletics, special education and you'll see those in their presentations in budget session two, primarily. Employee benefits, it's a big number. Lisa's busy at work putting together not only the current year projections, but also next year's budgeted dollars, TRS, ERS, health insurance, social security and the like. Debt service budget, those are largely known. We don't have any prospective projects on the docket, say for what may happen with the auditorium and all those other projected revenues, other than tax lev is primarily county

022sales tax and state aid. And as I mentioned, the big driver, our pension cost roughly $10 million in the current year's budget. A function of how much we spend in salaries, TRS is projected to go down a little bit. So we're somewhere between 9 1/2 and 10%, that number should be coming out soon. So that was relatively good news and ERS is 13.1%. So it's sort of a double edged sword. If you recall, we did use some of our pension reserve and current year's budget to smooth out that expense so we wouldn't realize the full savings of that. However, certainly it's going in a better direction than going up so we wouldn't have to draw down on the reserve or add to the budget proper for next year. (members speaking indistinctly) Yeah, and then just

023a reminder, I always like to put that in there, what does 1% get us or not get us? Our budget 1% is about $1.73 million for every 1% increase. And on the tax levy side, a $1.6 million is a 1% increase. So just an idea of what that gets us. Okay, and we'll turn it over to Carol with the current staffing. Thank you. So before we move forward, we're just gonna take a little step back. Dr. Patrick mentioned this at the beginning, but I think it's worth mentioning again. And that is that all district employees fall into two categories. So we have certified employees, those are the employees that hold educational licensure through New York State Department of Education. That would include teachers, administrators, our guidance counselors, librarians, psychologists. Our classified employees hold a title

024in the Westchester County Civil Service. And that would include clerical staff, custodians, technical services, and our business office personnel, things like that. In the staffing slides presented tonight will look at both groups and the changes in staffing over time. For the purpose of staffing in the world of HR, we talk in terms of FTE or full-time employees. So on this slide, the staffing count or the number of FTEs is presented over a 10-year period along with student enrollment data. The blue bars represent the combined totals of classified and certified FTEs. And the line plot reflects student enrollment. I can draw your attention to that last bar or the column on the right hand side of the graph. In this school year, 2022-23, the combined staffing is 665.1 FTEs with a student enrollment of 4,677. This

025is I think a helpful look at staffing and changes over time by key components of district staffing. So if we start at the bottom and work our way up, the blue section represents certified staff at the high school level. The red represents certified staff at the middle school level. The light green represents certified staff at the elementary level. Within the elementary level you will see that purple box there, 105 that represents the number of sections, elementary sections we have. And then the green box represents the number of special ed classes. Let's see, that orange bar there represents the district wide, I'm sorry, the district wide certified staff. And the turquoise section represents our civil service staff. So I'd like to call your attention again to that last column on the right hand side of the

026graph, representing this school year, '22-23. Again working from the bottom, moving up at the high school, we have 162.4 FTEs. At the middle school, we have 114.6 FTEs. At the elementary level, we have 206 FTEs, 105 class sections, 21 special education classes across the district and 160.22 FTEs within our civil service department. So we have a total of 665.12 FTEs district wide. Okay. Oops. Sorry about that. So on this slide, we are only examining the number of certified staff. So those teachers, administrators, guidance counselors, et cetera. The student enrollment data, you will also see, again, you will see how this change, what the change looked like over time, going back for a 10-year period. So each bar represents the count of certified staff. The line, again, represents the student enrollment data. So the bar to

027the very right of the graph provides information for this school year. In the 2022-23 school year, we have 483 FTEs and our student enrollment is 4,677 students. Okay. We're just gonna highlight and look back at what we budgeted early on, what we actually have in FTEs, and then what the increase and decrease looks like. So here you see the budgeted staffing for '22-23. At the elementary level, we budgeted 205.3 certified FTEs and had an increase of 0.7 for a total of 206 FTEs. So the increase at the elementary level was due to increased enrollment and required hiring for a point for art. One point, excuse me, a 0.1 physical education and 0.2 music staffing. At the middle school we budgeted 113 certified FTEs and had an actual number of 114.6. The 1.6 increase was due

028to a 0.6 increase in English as a new language, so those services for children and a 1.0 teacher on special assignment. Budgeted at the high school, we had 161.4 FTEs with an increase in actual staffing of 162.4. The increase here was due to an unanticipated sick leave. One of our teachers. So the subtotals for certified staff reflect the budgeted staffing across the district of 479.7 with an increase of 3.3 FTEs. We look toward the bottom of that graph. So we budgeted 21 district-wide FTEs and had an increase of 0.9. So this school year we shifted a position held by Rachel Mosley from a classified position to a certified position once she retired. So Jeanie Crowley, who's the the director of Technology and Innovation replaced Rachel. So you'll see this change also reflected in the civil

029service count, which we'll discuss next. In this staffing group, we did find a small savings of 0.1 FTE due to the reduction in staffing, which was required by IHM. We originally budgeted 0.6 FTEs there and they actually only required 0.5. This school year, we budgeted 161 FTEs and actually have a count of 160.22 FTEs. So that again, is a result of the change in position from classified to certified for the director of Technology and Innovation. We did have an addition of 0.22 FTEs for technical clerk. So as you can see, we budgeted for a total of 661.7 FTEs and with actual FTEs of 665.12 for a total increase of 3.42. Thank you very much, Carol. Okay, so we're gonna shift now to the staffing requests and recommendations for next year. And this slide just shares

030again some of the things that were mentioned earlier that go into our rationale behind the proposal. What are we thinking about? What is important? What are we weighing, costs and benefits against? So of course, educational efficacy. If we're gonna make a staffing proposal, we want it to the extent possible to make a measurable positive impact on our students' lives. We also think about how are our students doing? What are the outcomes and achievement look like? As I mentioned earlier, we're thinking about connecting our wide community as a touchstone, those types of positive things and advancing the goals in our strategic plan. Mandates and best practices, you're gonna see a proposal that's really directly tied to that, the custodial proposal, but thinking about observing internal and external mandates and best practices. Strategic planning and educational priorities,

031and then of course staffing efficiencies and overall thinking about what the financial impact. So these are all in our matrix of thought as we evaluate way and decide which staffing proposals come forward for consideration. This is a sample of a request sheet that we use as an internal tool to understand and discuss recommendations of staffing that come through. All the schools and departments follow a similar template. We think about the background and the rationale for the proposal. Is it an addition, a change, a reduction, a substitution from something we're already doing? What's driving it? How does it relate to our strategic plan, our goals, our mission. And then we think about what's currently in place. What are the impacts of this new staffing, are we thinking about everything we need to think about? Does this

032staffing ad have a downstream impact in some other part of the operation? And then how are we gonna keep track of whether this was a good idea or not if it does come to pass. So all of our positions that are proposed or staffing proposals have this as a backup and we'll talk about that. Once we have a collection of staffing recommendations, we work to try to organize them into two or three tiers. So tier one requests are ones that we really stand behind immediately for this next budget cycle, when we weigh everything, when we think about all those guiding principles, we come to the place where we say, this is really strong, we wanna put this forward to the board and the community for consideration. Sometimes proposals come forward, they seem like a really

033good idea, they are a good idea, but maybe they're just not ready to be fully embraced or maybe they're dependent upon more research, more study, more information. So those would end up getting kind of put into a tier two, we like to talk about those because we think it's a good idea for the board and the public to hear about these things, even if they don't make it in the budget. 'Cause sometimes they might just be a year off and then you'll hear about it again. The community will hear about it again in a subsequent year because we have the additional information we need or we really understand the problem we're trying to solve better. And tier three would also be not recommended at this time and those might need be further off, right? Be

034two years off perhaps, or may never come back again. So just keep that framework in mind as we go through these. So here's a summary. So I'm gonna spend a minute kind of talking about everything on this particular slide briefly, and then we will go into more detail about what each of these proposals, what the rationale is and what it entails. So in the category of student support, our single biggest staffing request is for $200,000 to support our elementary social-emotional learning program. We'll talk more about that in detail, including why we're proposing cost to cover consultants for next year and not full-time, FTE or district employees. We have a sound rationale, we thank for that, but we'll come back to that. A second proposal is act in the student support domain is actually also tied

035to the proposal. They're interconnected. The proposal you see on the right under the administrative column. So we're proposing a halftime committee on preschool education chairperson to help meet the needs of a growing workload in that domain. And we see that as tied to not a addition of a person, but a conversion of one of our teaching positions that is a chairperson for special education to a 12-month administrative position. And again, Eric, we'll talk about that rationale and why those two proposals are connected. And then in the operational domain, as we've hinted at a number of times, dating back I think to November, we are proposing the addition of a full-time custodian, a Tuesday through Saturday workload for the high school. A version of this was a tier two proposal last year and it has remained

036critical to us and now it's coming forward as a tier one proposal. And in part it's tied to a response to the comptroller's audit that we talked about last calendar year in December, just only a month ago. And then the final operational position there is similar to a number of these positions we proposed last year. We're kind of trying to get the right work and the right title, so we do have an aide who supports the English and social studies departments at the high school retiring. And really that work is clerk work and we'll talk about what the nuances or differences are there, but that does have a budget impact. The chart at the bottom there entitled contingency positions describes FTE that we annually reserve as exactly unknown needs. We typically budget for these. When

037we present the budget book, we typically account for these in the elementary area of the budget book, but we usually budget anywhere between two and four contingency positions that are the need arises as we get closer, either to the end of the budget process or sometimes not even until the summertime where we see enrollment changes that drive section breaks. That's the most common use of contingency positions. So enrollment kicks us from maintaining our class size of 22 in some grade level and suddenly enough enrollment comes in that, nope, we've broken that, we need to add a class section at a particular school. That's one reason for contingency position. We also have special education programming that we've added over the past many years. And we've got students aging into middle and high school that we're not

038exactly sure what the ratios are gonna look like that we think, right now our best thinking is we may need a contingency for middle school special ed. We may or may not need one for high school. And then we would ask for a third thinking about elementary section breaks and the like. So that's the medium-ish overview of those positions. And now we'll move into the specifics and we'll start with our tier one recommendations with Eric. Thank you, Drew. I'm gonna spend the next few minutes talking about the social emotional support on the elementary school and then the two CSE based recommendations. As Drew said, the first ask is for $200,000 for consultants and I might more accurately call them contractors because they are gonna be working directly with students. So we're looking to contract two

039full-time equivalent social workers on the elementary level to engage in our two largest elementary schools, Quaker Ridge and Fox Meadow on an every other day basis. And then in our three smaller elementary schools on a two day per six day cycle schedule. Last year we talked very specifically about the rise in mental health engagement for students. We've talked over the years about the increase in number of CSE students, our number of elementary initials, our number of elementary kids needing counseling. Before I go into that, I wanna start with the main clinical interventionists in all of our elementary buildings are our school psychologist. Those school psychologists really have duties that fall into three main categories. The first being clinical services person, probably primary being clinical services. And that is counseling for students who need counseling, group

040interventions and working with students who are having mental health, acute social issues and giving that direct service to kids. The others are a role in managing the 504 processes in each of our elementary schools, including initials, reevaluations each year for all the students with 504s and they chair all of our non ICT special education students for the CSE process. And then the final bucket of, well, there's really two others. The last two buckets, they are the third in charge of our elementary schools. So beyond the principal and the assistant principal, they are the third in command of the schools. They often need to help with administrative duties if principal or assistant principal isn't in the building for some reason. And they also help obviously if there are behavioral issues that need a more interventionalist approach

041rather than a disciplinary approach, they certainly get involved with those pieces. And then finally, our school psychologists are responsible for a set of classroom visits to focus in on specific curricular issues that include bullying, social interactions, friendships, safety and sexual abuse lessons that happen on an ongoing basis. So they hold a very large role that's intertwined in and amongst many of the different areas in an elementary school. Over the past years, you've seen our increase in these needs and that kind of rises all waters for the elementary school psychologist if you will. But it also leads us to asking for this as a consulting or a contracted position because at this time while the psychologists have had to move into a more reactive stance, just as we talked about with the high school last year,

042we are still unsure what is the best way to parse apart exactly what help they need and can use. So we're hoping to use this next year to identify the best ways for these consultants to work. The initial thoughts are they would take over the classroom instruction piece of the psychologist job. In other words, doing those push-in lessons addressing mostly non-mandated groups for executive functioning anxiety, friendship circles, social skills circles, and doing intervention on acute situations that are happening on the days that are scheduled into buildings. As we go into next year, obviously we'll be evaluating that throughout the year to say what is one, the most appropriate amount of support that needs to be in each elementary school. And two, what's the correct professional to be there. We've picked social workers for next year

043because one, they have worked very nicely this year in our high school. They also kind of span both the clinical, the family support realm that can really be versatile. We may find in the middle of next year that guidance counselors or some other professional or additional psychologists may be the exact right fit, but we won't really know that until we experiment in the coming year to see how that best plays out. This really also came out of what happened at the high school where we were down a few youth outreach workers and filled the gap with consultants and then realized given the need kept them on and were able to use that as a proving ground for what the needs were in our counseling department in the secondary. So we're kind of recreating that on

044purpose rather than by accident this year. So that really is the rationale behind for the consulting. I'm sorry, I just shut off here. I would just add, many in this room might be familiar with our relationship with Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling Service and our youth services project partnership with them. That is not a program that has been in the elementary schools before. But nonetheless, Eric and I last week, had the chance to engage their director, Jay Genova as a thought partner in thinking through this. He helped ask some really good questions about what are we thinking, what are the priorities for this kind of work? What are the psychologists able to do and not able to do? And we look forward to continuing that conversation with Jay again as a thought partner in thinking about

045how best to envision this for next year, knowing that you may hear us back at this table a year from now, asking that to turn into employees of the district versus contractors. We don't know, but just wanna be fully transparent that that's a possibility. Also, just piggybacking on that, I think it's important we have a partnership with Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling formally and then as just a community partner, formally it's our youth services project. We are not suggesting we expand that joint village school board program into the elementary, but we're using Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling as a kind of pillar of the counseling community in Scarsdale as a thought partner in this and seeing if there are things they can offer as we think about this. We know it's not, it's separate and apart from

046the YSP. We're friends in the village. (both chuckle) Yes. Yeah. Thank you. Do you want me to stop in between for any questions or should we move on. (members chattering) Maybe while it's fresh, stop and ask some questions. (member speaking indistinctly) Maybe 'cause there has been some good information. So I'm happy to take any questions on the elementary social emotional support proposal. I'm just curious, I know from just different conversations I've participated in the challenge of finding social workers for these roles. So I'm just curious, since these are temporary appointments, whether you're confident that scenario is a viable one. Meaning, the competition seems so intense now for these people, it's a partial year. So I'm just curious what the rationale is for not figuring out a different way to do it. Yeah, I think we

047have the best chance of consulting or contracting with social workers 'cause there is an arm of the social work community that works specifically on contract basis, so there is a pool of workers there. It was kind of thinking about what's available, thinking about the right skillset, but there's also some challenge. You can't contract guidance counselors. There's only a certain industries that have pools of clinicians that are there for contracting social workers, really seem to fit the bill for this year as being kind of a multi-talented clinician, if you will, that we can use to figure out what the best mix is. Thanks. Can you just talk a little bit about the belief of what the underlying drivers of this need are? Sure. Is it COVID, is it pre-COVID? Yeah, that's a very good question. And

048very similar to what we talked about in the secondary levels for last year. COVID has certainly been a catalyst, however, I don't think fully causal of what we're seeing from a mental health and wellbeing standpoint. Prior to COVID, we were seeing increases in student mental health needs, in student wellbeing issues. We started the SSP well before, the original SSP well before COVID because of that trend. And I think COVID both catalyzed that need probably caused the graph to point higher. But I think it really is an ongoing trend that hopefully we see plateau shortly. We could have a whole presentation on research on what the underlying social causes are for that. But it is an ongoing trend that I think we see more globally. Yeah, I appreciate that. I think about it for two reasons

049and two hats. One is the kids and the impact on kids, and the other is the financial impact. I mean, I'm not gonna weigh what's more important or not, but they're both impacts. We've added a lot of staffing. We're talking about staffing this year, maybe full-time. And I just wonder, maybe this is too big of a question to ask is it's a bigger than district district, but is there a process we can have underway to try to figure out some of these root causes and address some of them? No, I think that's a really good question, Ron. And what I would say is, I think in later in the budget process you'll hear Edgar talk very specifically about an approach to social-emotional learning and focusing in on drawing that curriculum, those sets of skills into

050our grades, on a longitudinal basis in a more defined and pronounced way through an approach. So you will hear later in the budget process that this is kind of a twofold look, how do we both intervene with students who need it now, but how do we also do the preventative care, for lack of a better term, to help students increase their threshold, deal with discomfort better, understand how to self-regulate in a little bit different of a way. Nice. I just had a question and I think you kind of answered it, but I think I still want to raise it. In terms of when you were talking about how to split up the resources with one person at Quaker Ridge, three days out of the six days and the other one at Fox Meadow and then

051the other one split, excuse me, between the other three schools. I was wondering if you were comfortable with that as the right allocation, but then you spoke about perhaps moving things around. And so I was just wondering, I guess when I think about Quaker Ridge and the caseload that might be there in terms of the number of students that are currently being managed, you're comfortable with? I am. I think Quaker Ridge and Fox Meadow both have anywhere from about 100 to 225, 175 more kids than our smallest school. With that being said, Quaker Ridge is interesting, some of their population there is obviously because of a larger number of ICT, those also come with additional staff, but they have a larger general population as well. So when thinking about breaking this up in this way,

052I do think this makes sense as a place to start and look at what the needs are. It reminds me, I didn't answer the second part of Ron's question, which was about financial impact. When we think about is this a post COVID bump or is this a continuing trend? I think societally it is a continuing trend, but the elementary level has been a place that was somewhat insulated from this type of issue to a certain extent that may be a COVID bump. And if what we see is numbers changing as we get a little bit farther out from COVID. There's also using contractors here allows us to adjust that need up or down as we need. I would just add small dimension to that, which is last spring, Edgar and I made the rounds at

053the elementary schools just to check in and say, okay, what's going well? What are you struggling with? What are the needs that you're seeing? Some of the things students were experiencing, maybe some more anxiety or social skills that were a little bit underdeveloped for the age level. And then we reached out again, kind of asking teachers about budget priorities and what they saw as some of the budget priorities. And this persisted, this question of supporting students in the social-emotional realm as the strongest single response from our faculty. And it's consistent with what we're hearing from our principals, but all of that has happened since COVID. So I think there's probably some of us who do expect some diminishing some of these behaviors over time, at least we hope. But nonetheless, we are committed to supporting,

054ultimately we hope a district-wide approach to the regular instruction around the sets of skills and dispositions. Kids need to be resilient and work through problems and challenges both individually and with their peers. Does anybody else have any questions before? Sorry, is it okay to ask a question from something earlier prior to Eric's comments, which were very helpful and I think Ron that was a great question. Just a point of clarification. I know this is something we went over last year, but I think it's helpful for the community to understand the staffing. I don't know whether it's best for Carol or Drew to explain it, but around IHM and why we provide a position at IHM. I take that one, yeah. So any private schools that reside within a local school district have the requirement to

055administrate and provide services to students with disabilities through what are called IESPs. And they're a little bit different than your individual education plan. They are individual education service plans. The district can go about providing those services in a number of different ways. Concomitant with our rise in special education, IHM has seen a rise in special education of kids that don't live here, but happen to come here from school. And require more services be provided to them. We moved from a contracting based model of providing that service at IHM to a halftime or last year a 0.6 IHM, special education teacher to provide mostly resource room consultant teacher services. This year that need, we're looking at 0.5, we expect that to stay relatively flat for next year. It was easier to hire on a teacher to

056provide those services. We then use that teacher in the afternoon as a full-time for sub coverage in one of our elementary schools. So it works out best for the district rather than doing it on a consultant basis, which was becoming cost. The cost became negligible between the two. And this just makes it a more consistent service for kids, but also gives us the opportunity to have that kind of onsite sub, which is really helpful. And I have sort of a separate question also for you. I wanted to understand, one of the things that you had said was, and maybe I'm misunderstanding this so please clarify if I'm wrong. The way I understood it, these contractors who are handling the SELPs in the middle school, these social workers would be working primarily on 504s and IEPs

057for students who are not in ICT and then. Sorry. Yeah, so this would be the elementary schools, The elementary school setting. Yeah, no, we would not have them doing mandated counseling through IEPs. I see. Maybe there might be a 504 student that it would make sense for depending on the issues. But in general, this would really look to move from kind of, when I say reactive, what I'm really talking about is the mandated cases have risen along with the intervention that psychologists are needing to do kind of on an as needed basis, has forced them to retreat from some of the proactive group, getting groups of students together who may have some social schools issues, who may have some friendship issues where there might be a group of kids who are having difficult divorces and

058that group would be really nice to bring together to help through a particular instance in their educational career. Those are the pieces that we want to see the additional support reengage with on a proactive basis. In the shortest way of saying it, the psychologist capacity has been taken up by more of their primary responsibilities, leaving them less time to do some of these other things. And we have been extremely well insulated during this rise in needs by the talent of our psychologists. And they do have such a wide bandwidth of ability and ability to engage students. I just want to put that out there, that our psychologists are pretty phenomenal and have really kept things and done an extraordinary job over this time period. Great, thank you so much for that clarification. I just had

059lost the plot in there. I think we're good. Okay. The next recommendation that I'm going to put forward with you, it's a twin to the next one and one kind of goes in hand in hand with the other. We've talked pretty extensively through the end of last year and the beginning of this year about the numbers in special education that have risen. We've expanded the continuum of services in the middle school and the elementary schools pretty substantially over the last five to seven years. We've also seen a rise initials elementary students. You can see there that we've moved from about 409 classified students back in '16-17 to '21-22 being 562, were at the 580 something mark. I didn't check it this morning, but that's where we are. So with every classified student that joins us,

060we have the need for a new set of special education paperwork, a new set of annual reviews, reevaluations, and then each of those students with the increased initials have another meeting. So our CSE chairs each handle anywhere from about 180 to 225 CSEs per year in addition to their other duties. You can do the math on 184 school year and what kind of load that looks at, they are phenomenal professionals who can really spend their time working with families, give each family the time they need to talk about their most important asset, which is their child. And what we're finding is we're getting to a point here on two fronts where the caseloads are getting too large. So CPSE is the Committee on Preschool Education. New York State breaks up special education and intervention into

061three buckets. For those children who are under three years old, the county administrate and implements early intervention services. We have nothing to do with that. When a child turns three, they enter the CPSE system, which is administrated by the district, but implemented by the county. So the administrative requirements there are to hold and administer all of the CSE annual reviews and initial meetings to coordinate all of the services and testing. So we don't have our people doing the actual testing or giving the services. However, between Renee and Kristina Beck, who's our primary CSE chair and CPSE chair, they are finding providers, scheduling providers, doing all of the meetings. We have anywhere from about 60 to 75 students in the CPSE system at any given time, which creates a load of anywhere between 100 to 125

062CPSE meetings a year. That part of the job is really in and of itself a standalone. The proposal here is really to move that to a 0.5 CPSE chair to focus solely on the three, four and five-year olds living in the district who have yet to come to kindergarten. And at that point, looking at the current staffing that we have as CSE chairs that are currently three, 2.7 FTEs, one of our CSE chairs carries a 0.3 load as a counselor at the high school. And looking to move one of them to a more supervisory role within the special education department. So in the past five years or so, we've had this increase in program. We've also had the student services office take over safety, security and emergency management. There has been a rise in custody

063disputes, unfortunately, there has been a rise in court orders of protection. There has been a rise in DASA, there has been a rise in many of the things that we all see as outgrowths of the wellbeing crisis that we are having across the country. Those types of situations are handled pretty exclusively by me. And safety, security, emergency management has also, of course, is his own body of work that's extremely important to the district and certainly takes up quite a bit of time. So what we have found in the special education office that has become kind of a bottleneck around administrative decisions. I'm the only administrator in the special education student services department. All of the other professionals that work are teachers on assignment. So we are looking to move one of these to a 12-month

064position that would focus in on management of special education programs, take on a supervisory and evaluation portion of non-tenured special education teachers, and then focus on helping with the most intensive CSE students and chairing those meetings, helping those families find the right services and focus in that way. This would allow for a more programmatic focus within the special education department around supervision and balancing that with the process management of the CSE process. In a nutshell, and the way this works from a FTE standpoint, there would be a monetary cost obviously for the halftime person and then there would be a smaller monetary cost for moving an existing CSE chair into that administrative role. Those are outlined there. There are a couple of caveats here. Whenever we move from a teacher on assignment position to an

065administrative position, there is a conversation that must happen with our bargaining units around work that currently lives within the teacher's union, moving that outside of the teacher's union and ultimately a conversation about is that new supervisory appoint position going to be recognized and represented by a different one of our bargaining units. Those are conversations that have started in their infancy with an understanding of what the position is. And I think this ask has come from the professionals in my office as well as me. So there is a lot of agreement around why this is needed. So those discussions are ongoing and we'll need to come to fruition, but we think there is a good path forward there. So that's really two of those positions discussed at once. Does anybody have any questions? Actually, I have

066a question, Eric. So in the position that's converting or potentially converting from 10-month to 12-month, just so I'm clear. This wouldn't allow for program reviews over the summer, right? That would still be held during the school year with parents in terms of. So there are program reviews and meetings that happen over the summer regardless for students who we may be looking for a placement for a student who moves in. Different circumstances that force it outside of the school year that we would still look to have the vast, vast majority of program reviews, certainly annual reviews during the school year. It would not change in that way, but it would allow for more focus during the summer and preparation and planning, supervision of summer work this year. We will also look to run our own summer

067school program for our students who are in our eight to one to two class. So it would allow for a supervisory nature there. Okay, thank you. Yeah. You won't see that in the budget only because we're paying for it out. So we're paying for it in, there's gonna be really not gonna be authority in the project. There's not an expenditure change, but that is gonna be a programmatic change. Interesting. Great, thank you. Nobody else? Anybody else questions on this part? Okay. Thank you. The next request recommendation is for a 1.0 FTE high school custodian. You've been hearing about this in one form or another for the last few years since of COVID where we actually did add additional cleaners on a temporary basis. We ended up adding permanent cleaners in the budget. I think last

068school year was the first full year of that, and now we're coming back with a permanent request for an additional custodian at the high school. The rationale behind it is really multifold. First reason being just the sheer total square footage in the high school and also the A school. The areas of of cleaning responsibility, total average per cleaner is currently just over 43,500 square feet, much higher than the recommended levels. When you look at the level of cleaning, certainly we're not looking at hospital level cleaning, but we want to have a level of cleaning that's acceptable to our students and parents and teachers on a daily basis, especially with a little bit of a heightened attention to that in the past few years. The addition of not only a cleaner but a custodian really raises

069the level of that individual's responsibilities where they can not only sort of do the basic cleaning, but also have work orders, have some boiler type responsibilities as well, so they can pick that up. The other part of the rationale really takes into account the heavy usage of the high school. So not only is it the largest building, but it's certainly most heavily used from a facilities use standpoint, not only by our students, but also by our community. And it's not a Monday through Friday, seven o'clock to 3:30, it goes late into the evenings and certainly into Saturday. So our proposal does propose that this individual would come in in the early afternoon and extended to the evening, allowing them to perform cleaning duties and also pick up some work orders, but then also going through

070a Tuesday to Saturday to cover for our Saturday heavy facility usage, mostly for athletics, but certainly during the times of plays and different theatrical type things, individual comes would be very useful as well. So it's not that we don't currently staff that when there's a heavy need, we would staff based on overtime charges and we sort of saw some of that feedback in our comptroller's audit where our overtime chargers were called out as exorbitant. So this would certainly as a net cost, even though the estimated salary cost would be offset by savings and overtime and substitute to costs of just short of $22,000 and address some of those things that were called out in that audit. And I think it's really, when we're talking about overtime and substitute costs, at the end of a long

071day for any individual, are they able to perform to the best of their duties, it's very challenging. And also having a substitute, they might not know our buildings as well as a regular employee and certainly not able to pick up those work orders above and beyond what's happening during the course of the day. Good. Yep. Any, any questions? I have a question. Could you just remind me of the difference between a cleaner and a custodian? Sure. A cleaner is more of the daily cleaning of bathrooms, dry mopping floors, garbage removal from classrooms, cafeteria type duties. The custodian could be more hands-on where they would perform. We have a work order system so they could pick up a work order and do some light maintenance type duties, changing of bulbs in classrooms. So really picking up

072sort of that additional duties so it doesn't fall on a regular custodial staff and maybe be pushed out additional days. So when we look in those evening hours where it does get a little bit quieter, they're able to pick up some of that. There could be also some minor boiler type duties as well. Thank you. Yep. Just a quick question, Stuart. What would this person's time be during the summer? Same hours? No, they would revert back to a regular, as most of our other custodians do as well. So they would fall back, certainly pick up with a heavy lift during the summer and still do some of those work orders as well. Good question though. Thanks. Yep. Anyone else? Okay, and our last one, I will turn over to Carol. We'd like to recommend transitioning.

073Currently we have an aide serving in a clerical position for our English and social studies department. We would like to shift that to a 10-month full-time clerk that would be consistent with the other positions that we have in place doing similar duties. We actually abolish those positions early in June of last year and have filled those positions throughout the district in our elementary schools, middle school, and I believe one at the high school. So this would be, again, moving forward with that process of having entitle work with the correct position. So the civil service has their job responsibilities and duties listed for every position. And currently the aide doing this work is out of title work. And we would like to just shift it in title work of a clerk. And to explain the cost

074difference. The secretarial unit is the unit that has the clerk title and the clerk work. This person would come into that unit instead of being part-time, be full-time for 10 months and be eligible for benefits including health. Any questions on that? Okay, and then as I spoke about a little bit earlier, the three contingency positions, again, these are contingents, so we don't exactly know, we would not fill them if they're not needed. I wanna make that point clear. But in our thinking, we're thinking the possible need for middle school special education as students transition from elementary schools into the middle school, on our continuum of services, similar rationale, possibly high school special education need, and a TBD of a possibly for a potential section break. And we estimate 110,000 per position, just keeping that in

075mind, that's where those would come from. At the tier two level, we have a carryover from '21-22 that middle school cleaner, Stuart just kind of showed the square footage layout and breakout. We're moving that to tier three, Stuart or that's, yeah. We are for now. And actually there should be a tier two request that I didn't put up here related to the facilities department. So I could take this slide over if you'd like. Yes, please. So carry over. So middle school cleaner, we did move that to a tier three of some other priorities have come up. I mean, keep in mind that we did see the square footage there, but I think priority wise from a facilities department new for '23-24 would be a groundskeeper. And I think we saw that last year as well.

076And that's sort of on the docket as we think about facility use on all of our fields across the district. As we think about a district slide, field usage plan, master plan with a village, that's something that the board's gonna have to think about in next year's or the '23-24 budget, '24-25 budget. Wow, yes. Okay, thank you. Yep. Okay. So now we're gonna revisit the three of the slides that Carol shared before, but projecting out if these proposals that we made tonight were to be incorporated, what would that look like? Great, thank you. So at the elementary level, you can see the certified staffing requests would result in a 0.7 increase. So we budgeted this school year 205.3 FTEs and recommend we remain at 206 FTEs in this next budget based on the actual staffing

077of this year. Okay. At the middle school, you can see that we budgeted 113 FTEs and would recommend 113.6 FTEs for an increase of 0.6. You'll notice we had spoken earlier about our actual, which is at 114.6. What accounts for that is again the teacher on special assignment that will not be necessary next year. Okay. If we look to the high school, we budget 161.4 FTEs and recommend we remain at that number for the 2023-24 budget. Again, we spoke earlier, we have a teacher who was unexpectedly out for medical reasons that will not be necessary for next year. Okay. The subtotal for our certified staffing include 479.7 in the '22-23 budget and 481 for the '23-24 budget, which results in a 1.3 increase in certified staffing. If we look to the district wide staffing, we

078budgeted 21 FTEs in the school year's budget with actual staffing at 21.9. And again, I'll just remind you that that 0.9 was as a result of the shift from a classified position into a certified position. Okay. And we had a slight reduction at IHM, so we added a 0.9. The recommendation for the budget is for 22.4, which results in 1.4 increase. We would maintain the actual staffing for this school year at 21.9 and add that 0.5 CPSE chair. Okay. Our civil service staffing was budgeted at 161 FTEs. We reduced the actual count to 160.22 FTEs given the request for a full-time custodian and a 10-month clerk at the high school. This would result in a 1.8 FTE request. Also to clarify, the 1.0 is for the custodian, their 12-month employee, but as a 10-month clerk,

079it's a 0.8 position. Okay. So the impact on the budget would result in a 1.02 increase in civil service FTEs. The total budget to budget difference reflects an increase of 3.72 FTEs for the 2023-24 budget and a total of 665.42 FTEs. Okay, and we're just gonna take another look at this graph that you're familiar with from our earlier slides, this reflects our certified staffing. Again, looking over a 10-year period, we are projecting for the 2023-24 school year. So that is the bar in red, a total of 481 FTEs, and an increase in enrollment. And that increase is based on our projections of 4,730 students. Whoops. All right, and our total staffing, again, very similar graph, looking at total staffing as it relates to student enrollment as well. If we look to that red bar, the

080right hand side, you will see that we have 665.4 FTEs that's district wide with an enrollment of 4,730 students. Great. And budget discussion timeline. So here we are on January 9th. Our next formal budget meeting will be on the 13th with our budget session number one, we'll have a draft budget plan for next school year. We'll look at our projections, of course, and we'll start to look at the different areas of the budget, so transportation, employee benefits, athletics, and then we will ask for the affirmation of the staffing or recommendations that you see this evening or follow up with any questions or answers that you may have at that point. Bit of a break due to the February break, March 6th, we'll come back with budget session two where we'll talk about the remaining areas

081of the budget. Budget session three, we'll take a look with a full update, any changes that we've made up to that point, certainly revenues and a full budget presentation and review, followed up by the budget form. And that'll get us to April, just like that. Just turned January. I know, just moving us right along. And that wraps up the staffing presentation. Thank you very much. I guess I'll open it up to board member questions, although we have the opportunity to ask questions along the way, but does anybody have anything they wanna ask? One of the metrics that I often see when I read about public school systems are ratios of students to teachers. And I'm not certain that is necessarily a helpful ratio, but it is a ratio that one does see. So I'm just

082curious, is that a benchmark number that people that are in the planning realm, like your team use as a reference point? So, if I take out the total population, I divide it by number of teachers, I'm not quite sure what the right number is. 9.83. Okay, so 9.83. So I'm like thinking, oh, is that high, is that low? Just so people understand how we fall in the pecking water. I don't have that data at my fingertips as far as how I would compare it to other districts, but I can certainly work on that, and provide that to you in a future conversation if you'd like. Yeah, I'm just curious. Great. Sure we can look at neighboring districts. We do report that stat in the budget book. There's a couple of statistics that the state used

083to produce on a regular basis that they no longer do. And I believe that's one of them that they've stopped, I'm just trying to find the page in last year's budget book where we. I know that we provided for the high school. Yeah, yeah. But not any of other buildings. I think it's also important to recognize that's typically, the math is done with that certified number, it's a little bit of a blunt instrument because each district, our district, perfect example, our department chairs are certified teachers that are in the teaching bargaining unit. Depending on how districts break up, where some of their supervisory positions are, it's just a division problem to get that number and sometimes there's a little bit more nuance to that. Can I just add, if we are gonna look at that

084number, which I'm not saying is not a good number to look at, I think at least at the high school level, we've talked about the number, I forget exactly the number, the number of students that get their first choice basically of their class. And I think that's something that Scarsdale prides itself on and I think that's just another, to Eric's point to try to sort of give a bigger picture of then just necessarily student ratio, one of our drivers at the high school's choice. So just throw that out there, yep. Absolutely. Just to comment on the slide that there's reference was made to a number of times and I respected answer really. Right here, maybe you have one ready. So the 2023-24 district-wide total staffing, what seems really noteworthy to me is the pronounced drop

085in the student population correlated with an increase in staffing that is sort of curious. It seems to correspond, at least the drop in student population seems to correspond with COVID and possibly, I don't know, people leaving the district temporarily, the numbers are coming back. But what I was wondering is what the drivers were for the increase in staffing, to the extent people have a sense of it, which has been pretty consistent, going from 2020-21 through 2022-23. I wouldn't know if it's significant, but it's definitely a pronounced increase in staffing whilst at least for part of that time the number of students was declining. So I was just sort of wondering if people have a sense of what the really the drivers were for that. Yeah, so the jump from 2021 to 20, sorry, 2021-22 to

0862022-23, the current year is big. It's a like a 17 FTE jump. So that was driven by two main things. It was driven by the, well, combination of things, the middle school and high school increase in staffing associated with mental health support and the initiation of the SSP program at the middle school. So all told that was one, two, three, four, five FTE certified. We also made this change that Carol talked about from part-time teacher aides, right or wrong, we don't count in the FTE count because they're all part-time similar with our bus drivers. You see a little caveat at the top of this that says that number doesn't include part-time civil service staff. So for example, we have 250 teacher aides, we budget for an account for that in a very different manner because

087of that, we actually count hours at each building. We added six positions while budgetarily, they didn't cost the equivalent of six positions, they came in as six positions because they were aides that became clerks, 10-month full-time clerks. So that's why you see that big jump, partially, it's an accounting question. So we did substantially grow our programs and we had this transition and yeah, and that was, the five cleaners was from 2019-20 to 2020-21. So that jump you see from 627 to 646 included, actually at that time, 10 cleaners during COVID, some of which we scaled back from, we laid off. I think it's probably also important to note that we have over the past seven to eight years focused on expanding our continuum of services within special education. And our ICT classes alone since 2013-14

088have jumped from six to 21, which is a full 15 FTEs over that period of time, along with the SSP accounting at the high school for additional and our start of the eight to one to two and the bridge program, which would be another three FTEs. Thank you. Although it could make you a little dizzy, the green boxes, the dark green boxes here show that they're positioned to show a trend, not just the numbers. So you see those green boxes go from six special education co-taught sections in 2013-14 up to '21, which is inclusive of our eight to one to two self-contained classes as well. Yep. Anyone else have any questions? Oh. I just had a quick question. Can you just remind me that three contingent positions we don't show as FTEs, but will be

089in the proposed budget. Is that correct? Yes. Okay, yeah. Got it, thanks. And they are in included in that 206 number. Sorry, they are included. In that top row, they're actually included in the elementary count. It's just how we account for them. It's a byproduct, like a decision made 20 years ago. We account for those contingent positions in that section of the count. So when we look at this projected number on the graph, those three are in there? They are. Oh, okay. Got it, thanks. Okay, I think that's it for questions. So thank you very much for that thorough and detailed presentation all of you. We appreciate all the information you provided us with this evening and answering all of our questions. So thank you. And with that, do we need a motion to adjourn

090into the business meeting, Honore, or can we just go into the business meeting? Okay. All right. Great. So good evening and welcome to all of those attending this evening's board meeting or watching later on demand. Happy New Year. I call this meeting to order and note that all board members are present along with Dr. Patrick and members of his cabinet. At our last meeting on December 19th, the board approved the letter to be sent to three telecommunications carriers, urging them to prioritize and address telecommunication gaps that impact service in and around the schools to improve the safety for our students, faculty and staff and broader school community. Since that meeting, letters have been sent to AT&T, Verizon and T-Mobile and can be found on the board of education's advocacy webpage. Earlier this evening, the board

091held a public hearing on the proposed senior tax exemption. The draft resolution considered by the board raises the income limits for qualifying property owners from 29,000 up to maximum of 50,000 for a 50% exemption. The board expects to take action on the exemption at the January 30th meeting. The January 30th business meeting was not originally on the board meeting calendar. Originally, the next meeting after tonight was to be held on February 13th, five weeks from today. The board officers and Dr. Patrick felt it was appropriate to add a meeting on the 30th in order to conduct district business in a timely and efficient manner. The full schedule of meetings for the upcoming months ahead will be presented later tonight in the agenda item 14.01. Also this evening was the first budget presentation for the 2023-2024

092school year, focused on staffing recommendations and budget assumptions. The board appreciates the work of Dr. Patrick and his cabinet to gather input from the various stakeholders and coalesce that information into tonight's presentation. Since budget season has started, a letter to our community partners was sent out today to encourage their participation in the budget process. We encourage the entire community's participation in the budget process and hope that you will attend our upcoming budget study sessions, public forum and board business meetings where you may speak during public comment periods. You may also write to us via email. The board continues to meet an executive session to conduct business related to the superintendent's search. Later tonight in agenda item 10.03, the board will provide an update on our search as part of our commitment to keeping the community

093informed of our progress. And finally, an agenda item 10.01. The board will continue the preliminary calendar discussion for the 2023-2024 school year, including the addition of two scenarios, which take into consideration the Passover holiday. The board appreciates all those who have taken the time to share their perspective with the board via public comment, email or through the district's feedback form. We encourage everyone to share their thoughts if they have not done so already. Drew. Thank you very much, Amber. Good evening, I'd like to add my welcome to the first board business meeting of the calendar year and wish everybody in our community a happy New Year. I'd like to note two important observances this month, starting with Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. Day on January 16th. It's a state and federal holiday and our schools

094will be closed in observance on Monday. The second is Lunar New Year, which will be observed on Sunday, January 22nd. Lunar New Year is of course one of the holidays we've been discussing as a potential school holiday when it falls on a regularly scheduled school day in the future. As Amber noted, we have an information item dedicated to providing a calendar update a little bit later tonight. January also marks, as we saw with our staffing presentation, a lot of planning for 2023-24, including online kindergarten registration. Our online registration for kindergarten begins January 17th and children whose fifth birthday falls on or before December 31st, 2023 may be registered. If you're unsure about any of this or which school your child is geographically scheduled to attend, please reach out to our registrar, Nunzia Mauro. She can

095be reached at 721-2444 or email registrar, R-E-G-I-S-T-R-A-R @scarsdaleschools.org. And while it's hard to believe, we're excited to begin planning to welcome our new kindergartners before we know it. As always, there is a lot happening in our schools and I enjoy updating and providing just a sampling of some of those activities. And we'll start right here in SHS, Scarsdale High School. Once again be organizing activities related to Martin Luther King Jr. Day. Kathleen McGreal and Elizabeth Colleary play a key role in helping to organize that along with other faculty and students. There's a museum display of public service taking place outside the library all week for students to peruse. On Wednesday, a speaker from Sleepy Hollow Coffee, Too. T-O-O, will share a presentation focusing on part of their business model, which includes being staffed largely by

096individuals with developmental disabilities. On Friday, on the first floor of Commons, there'll be a student coffee house for a cause where student performers will share songs, stories, and poetry. Also, on Wednesday, SHS will host the gap year fair at 7:00 PM in the little theater, following a short presentation called Gap Year 101, a group of counselors, program representatives and alumni will be available to speak with students and families and answer questions. And it's a great opportunity. We thank our counseling department for hosting that for our community. At Scarsdale Middle School, the New Year began on a high note as the first keystone of the year focused on student goals, goal setting and how our habits can help achieve these goals. Many students shared their habit of staying up too late and their desires to adjust

097towards healthier bedtimes. Good time for New Year's resolutions. Last we week, the middle school also hosted the high school information session for eighth grade parents and parents had an opportunity to meet Mr. Bonamo, who's in the audience, the principal of Scarsdale High School and the director of counseling, Oren Iosepovici. Parents also heard a presentation by the house counselors who explained the ins and outs of the high school program to families. And we thank them. They put a tremendous amount of time to work on the presentation, including meeting with our high school department chairs to make sure they are able to explain the programmings and convey a clear understanding of the options and opportunities. So thank you to those folks. The elementary level, couple of things, Quaker Ridge, our third grade students and their kindergarten buddies

098teamed up to set healthy goals for school and for home. Quaker Ridge also hosted its annual global learning potluck dinner last week. So we thank the PTA for the hard work entailed in organizing that great event. The Edgewood News has relaunched as a video podcast written, filmed, and produced by students. That's exciting. We love watching their unique take on the events of the day and taking place at school and listening to the thoughtful questions they ask each other. As you may know, media literacy is an important focus at all of our schools. And at Greenacres, Ms. Deppert's class took it a step further and created their own class magazine featuring articles about the engineering design process, learning about rounding numbers and writing. We're looking forward to the next edition there. And Fox Meadow first graders

099have started studying cave art, including why it was created. This is a funny little anecdote when asked, when a particular piece of ancient art may have been created. One student very helpfully shared that it dates all the way back to 1997. And also our fourth and fifth grade winner chorus concert will be held next week at Fox Meadow. So again, just some of the highlights, impossible to capture everything that's going on, but we appreciate that. Thank you, Drew. And I think those highlights are some of my favorite part of the board meeting, so thank you for sharing those and collecting those every week. Board member updates. I was able to attend today a meeting for a group called Safe Coalition, which is headed by Natalie Ramos, who is with the Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling. She

100is our team leader. And there were essentially two topics that were discussed that the community should be aware of and be tracking. The first was getting some feedback on a program called A Call to Men, that was in December. A number of people on the committee were able to attend, unfortunately we had a board conflict that night, so I was not, but apparently it was just incredibly well done. Anna O'Gorman from the high school in particular said, which I found kind of an impactful comment. She said, this is a topic that you know she's been involved with for years and years and she was still wowed by the content. She said, "I left with new information and my head was spinning with new ideas." So it wasn't usually attended unfortunately, but the feedback was really

101excellent and we are considering trying to repeat it again next year, perhaps in a different way, which gets complicated with hybrid versus in person, all those different kind of considerations. But people should keep an ear open for A Call To Men, apparently, it's a really an outstanding program. And the other topic that we talked about was the mission of Safe Coalition is really to really to support the community regarding domestic abuse and topics of violence. So people may recall last year there was a book, community book read with Anita Hill and she was brought in via Zoom to participate in the program. We're looking to repeat a similar format of a book and an author, ideally either in person or through Zoom to be determined depending on the author's availability. We really took a lot

102of time to talk about the books and the pros and cons and what we learned. And I'll give you a teaser, but there is a great book out there that people were absolutely kind of raving about in terms of the topic, in terms of its ability to communicate really sensitively on the topic. So keep an eye open for that particular event. I hope as many people that can attend it will. That's my report. Thank you, Bob. I don't believe there are any other board member updates. Can I make a quick. Oh, sure. As the liaison to the PT Council, I want to make a quick PSA, a little announcement. The PT Council and CHILD will be hosting a joint program tomorrow evening, Tuesday, January 10th at 7:30 PM in the Scarsdale Middle School auditorium. The

103program will discuss the impact of overscheduling on our children with Dr. Lata McGinn, who will share her expertise on this subject. She specializes in cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety, depression, and related disorders. And the PT Council and CHILD invites everyone to this informative presentation and discussion. Thank you, Suzie. Anybody else? Okay, Drew, I'll turn it back to you. Okay, thanks. Some quick updates from our cabinet members. I'm gonna ask Edgar to say a few words about computer-based testing. Yes. So the state is moving to fully computer-based testing for grade three through eighth for the both the ELA and the math test by spring 2026. So all New York State schools will be required to administer both the ELA and math computer based tests for grades five and eight in 2024. So we are opting some

104of the computer based testing this year to help anticipate our needs for mandated computer-based testing next year, we are choosing fourth grade. And 2023, we're providing a practice year before the test is mandated for those students in fifth grade. Sixth through eighth graders, we'll take the computer-based ELA test and all other grades will take the ELA test on paper. All grades will take the math test on paper and eighth grade will take the science test on paper. There's no fourth grade science test this year to transition to a fifth grade science test next year. Okay, next I'm gonna ask Carol to talk about the tenure process and our retirees. Retirees, yes. So tonight you'll find six staff members who are listed as retiring at the end of this school year. So we have Christine Boyer,

105who's served at Heathcote for the past 26 years. Jennifer Gilbert, who's been at Scarsdale Middle School for 36 years. She's science teacher and department chair. Radmilla Knezevich, who has served at Fox Meadow School for 26 years. Mitchell Thompson will be retiring as a guidance counselor at Scarsdale High School after 20 years of service. Steve Weiss has served Scarsdale Middle School as a math teacher and will be retiring after 21 years. And finally, Lisa Yokana will be retiring from Scarsdale High School after 15 years of service. So we congratulate them and wish them well and we'll have plenty of time to celebrate their contribution to the district. So many familiar names and past teachers. It's a great loss for our district but thank you, Carol. In the coming weeks, the administrative team will be meeting to

106review the performance of probationary teachers who were eligible for tenure at the end of this school year. Awarding of tenure is one of the most critical decisions we make as a district. Central office administrators joined by building level administrators and department chairs will examine closely each educator's progress in meeting the teaching standards that include planning and preparation, classroom environment, instruction, and professional responsibilities. We have a thorough process that involves multiple classroom observations and review of a professional portfolio that allows for the elements of teaching practice that are less visible to administrators to become more apparent. Parent feedback also plays an important role in this important process. Several years ago the district initiated a parent feedback survey, which provides parents the opportunity to comment on the performance of their children's teachers prior to tenure. The survey

107questions are grounded in the standards that we use to assess teacher quality and growth known as the Danielson framework for teacher. The parent survey was sent to families this Friday or this past Friday, I'm sorry. And I would encourage parents to provide feedback to us. The deadline for submission is Monday, January 23rd. Thank you very much, Carol. And last but not least, Eric will give a quick update on our lockdown automation. I am happy to report that our long lost card readers have been shipped and that is the final piece of technology that allows us to plan the ultimate work timeline for the installation of our new hardware for the lockdown integration system. I will be meeting with Day Automation this Thursday and look forward to giving you a more specific update on the 30th.

108Thank you for those updates. All right, we'll move on to hearing from those present and I'll read the public comment preamble. Members of the public are cordially invited to speak on district related items or other non-personnel related matters during two separate public comment periods. When it is your turn to speak, please state your name, address, and if you are speaking on behalf of an organization. For those commenting remotely, please mute the livestream voice, turn on your camera, and then unmute yourself. Speakers will be asked to conclude their remarks after four minutes and will be given a verbal cue at the three-minute mark. If at this point a speaker has additional comments, they may send them in writing to the board via email at [email protected]. The public comment period is reserved for comments only. The board

109will not engage in dialogue. The board reserves the right to respond to comments and questions at its discretion, either during response to public comment or at a later time in place. Response to public comment will take place after the first and second public comment periods. And with that, I'd like to open up public comment to those that are here in person. Hi, my name is Helene Gray. I live at 88 Secor Road, Scarsdale. I've been a parent of children in the Scarsdale School district continuously since 2002. I mentioned this longevity only because I think it gives me somewhat of a unique perspective on things that are going on in the community. And I think that we have an opportunity to do something for our students and their families that will be very much appreciated and

110will demonstrate how that this process is indeed responsive. And I'm talking specifically about the calendar process, responsive and fluid and organic, and one that really responds to the needs of our families and our students and their families. So in all of those scenarios that are presented for 2024, all the graduation date has shown up as Tuesday, June 25th, 2024. And this is later than graduation is traditionally held. And also deviates from Scottsdale's tradition of hosting graduations when my other kids were in their Fridays, but now I know we have Thursdays as well. Thursday or Friday. I think one is a rain date sometimes. I know that the graduation date is tied to ratings day and regions, I understand that. But we have some evidence from neighboring districts and their schedule, and I'll present those to

111you, this year, that there's some flexibility in selecting a graduation date. So there are a few reasons why Tuesday, June 25th, I believe presents challenges and some burdens for our families. First of all, many, many summer programs, summer camps, summer internships, summer jobs begin earlier than June 25th. Specifically families of our graduates who have younger siblings who might go away to summer camp, those camps are all generally begin that weekend before graduation. So, it presents an issue, here we wanna celebrate graduation, but many families have younger siblings who then need to either miss the first few days of camp or parents especially, it's burdensome for working parents, have to figure out how to get them there in the middle of the next week. For the graduates themselves, many teenagers work at summer camps as their

112job and unless you work at the Scarsdale Rec camp, you're missing the beginning of your work as well as your orientation. Scarsdale's graduation has always been late the week of the 21st, 22nd around then. But moving it to that next week then really changes the whole picture for a lot of our students. As I said, the graduates themselves who are looking for work and internships, summer travel programs, any of those things. (alarm ringing) Thank you. I just wanna also add that the traditional Thursday, Friday is a lot easier also for people who are having families come in from out of town. Grandparents for example. So let's look at some of our neighboring communities. Byron Hills, for example, this year has graduation on Tuesday, June 20th. Chappaqua has it on Saturday, June 17th, Bronxville, Saturday, June

11317th. Rye, Friday, June 16th and Edgemont is like us Thursday the 22nd. So I understand that the calendar is challenging, especially in 2024. But I think we might have an opportunity here to make some changes that will really be helpful and responsive to our families and will make the celebration that much more joyful without adding this additional burden of some of the things that I've just outlined. Thank you for your comments. Good evening, my name is Chelsea Wagon, I live at 34 Edgewood Road. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to come here, speak on a topic that's really impacted my family and so many other families. I'm a working parent of two young girls. That alarm that you heard before, I apologize for that, that was my 7:30 putting my kids to bed alarm.

114So I'm here to support the petition that's been signed by nearly 450 parents across Scarsdale, asking the school district to please reduce the number of early dismissal days for the upcoming school year in the elementary schools. They're presently 13, early dismissal days, more than double on neighboring school districts such as Rye. When I first moved here and I first heard that entire last week of school were early dismissal days and the last day of school was just one hour. I honestly thought that that was a typo and I had to call the school to confirm. I thought who could possibly think that it would benefit students to go to school for just one hour and it must be a joke and for the rest of that week to be half days, like why even bother

115having the kids go to school? New York state mandates 180 days of school. So by making those 13 days, half days, it really feels like the district is cheating the system and robbing my children and our children of quality education and instructional time that they so desperately need. We talk about COVID in the last two years, we've seen many children fall behind, so these early dismissal days are not helping that. As a working parent in dual career household, I'm constantly forced to choose between my career and my children. And studies show, time and time again that women like myself are forced out of the workforce do the challenges with raising a family and childcare. And let's be honest, it's frequently the mom like me that has to deal with childcare issues. So having to take

116these 13 days off work that it's in the best interest of my children definitely impacts my career. So if we truly care about diversity, equity, and inclusion, then we need to support our working mothers and show our children that my two little girls, that women can have careers outside of the home. So working moms, we don't have time to find a one off babysitter to watch children on these 13 random days. Even the after school program, the kids face little school that many of our kids go to after school, they do not support early dismissal. And my children, they don't want to have strangers watch them because mom and dad have to be in the office. So I did a survey of second grade families at Edgewood and nearly 60% of students come from dual

117career families. And I believe this is a fair representation of families at Edgewood. So I'm here to plea with the school district, with the board of education to please give our children their full days of quality instruction and support working families by showing our children that both men and women can have careers outside the home. Thank you very much for your consideration. Thank you. Hi, good evening. I'm Shea Shay, I live on White Road, I'm here to support the petition for decreasing the number of half days. I'm a single parent and my kids go to Edgewood and Quaker Ridge Elementary schools. My days go by very fast. Being a full-time parent with a full-time job as most of you can relate, it's a cumbersome and tedious, not tedious but lot of hours go by that

118way, right? So scheduling becomes difficult, especially since we do not have a full-time nanny. My children attend Scarsdale schools because it provides quality education but also provides the safety and the care I need for them. Decreasing the number of half days will immensely help me maintain our busy schedules and will no doubt provide the much needed support as a single working parent. Thank you, have a nice evening. Thank you. Hi, my name is (speaks indistinctly) I live at 35 Brite Ave and I'm a senior at Scarsdale High School. I want to comment on the initiative to add Eid, Diwali, and the Lunar New Year to the school calendar next year. I won't actually be able to see this resolution take effect if it passes, but I'm very grateful to the board that they're considering this.

119As I've passed through high school and classes have become more difficult, I've found it harder and harder to actually participate in celebration and religious observance on Eid. I've often had to pray in the morning and skip morning classes than rush back to school so that I can attend my afternoon classes and catch up on any information that I've missed. A resolution like this will let students like me take their time and celebrate with their families. Thank you for sharing your thoughts. Is there anyone else in the audience? Dear board of education, my name is Tan Dong. I'm a fifth grader at Greenacres Elementary School and I live on 5 Gilmore Court. I would like to thank you for considering adding Lunar Year to the school calendar. We recently celebrated Christmas and Hanukkah, which are very

120special holidays for many students. For people in Asian cultures, Lunar New Year is similarly important, however, at this time, Lunar New Year is not included as a holiday for a school system. As a child of Chinese immigrant parents, I always wish to celebrate this special holiday the way my parents do when they're young. No school, no homework, tons of good food and presence and getting together with our loved ones. I'm excited that it might become a reality soon. I support the fifth scenario of the proposed calendar, which would include Lunar New Year as well as Diwali, Eid and Passover. I hope every child in Scarsdale can celebrate holidays that are important to them. Thank you for your consideration. Thank you for that wonderful public comment. Is there anybody else who would like to come up

121to the microphone? Good evening. My name's Reid Miller. I live on Graham Road in Heathcote and I'm here also in support of reducing the number of half days. I'm a full-time stay-at-home dad and I'm also a part-time lawyer so I juggle a lot of balls as a lot of parents do. I might not have as compelling a story as a lot of the other parents who are here speaking on behalf of this petition. But certainly the hardest part really is that last week, having an entire week of half days I think impacts all different kinds of parents, working parents, even parents like me who arguably have the most flexible of schedules compared to a lot of the parents in our community. I have a first grader in Heathcote and I also have a younger child

122who's still in pre-K. Now, my pre-K child doesn't get the half days, so invariably what ends up happening is I'm picking up my first grader and then I'm trying to drag him along with over to pre-K pickup and he's wondering why he's out of school and I don't really have the bandwidth or the hours in the schedule to do something productive with him. And I understand there's a lot of moving parts that go into the schedule. There's the needs of the teachers, there's the needs of all kinds of things. I could understand a day or two of consecutive half days, but when it's four consecutive half days and I believe the proposal for the next school year is actually for five consecutive half days at the end of the year, it really becomes disruptive to

123a lot of the different families. Whether there's working families, stay-at-home parent families, I think it's hard on a lot of people so I just wanted to be here in support of that. Thank you. Is there anybody else in the audience? Hi, I'm Diana Cohen, I live at Duck Pond Road. Thank you for having us and for considering the conversation on the calendar. Today, we've spoken extensively about the social emotional needs of our elementary school students, including asking for additional budget for those students for their needs. Another way we can support those children is by making the calendar more consistent and having schedules to support their needs. That is why it's no surprise to me that a petition to reduce the number of half days is on its way to almost 500 signatures. And this is

124all happened over the holiday season. So when we review this scenario is presented, scenario four and five, reduce the elementary half days to 10 instead of 13. I thank the administration for presenting this option. It's progress in the right direction and I hope you continue to move in that area. What must be considered is that we are still the only school with 13 half days that is also considering the four holiday closures. All of the New Jersey schools that have the holidays, including highly regarded schools with excellent exhibits such as Edison, New Jersey, have no February break and fewer than 10 half days. I'm concerned that we haven't had a robust enough conversation about what it means for learning if we add the four holidays and more or less keep to our existing schedule. In

125the scenarios that I've talked about, four and five, the last two school weeks are almost shut. What happens right now, the last week is shut, but now we're adding like another one. What happens when all of the holidays fall on weekdays? What does this mean for our kids learning, Edgar, what does it mean to the kids' curriculum? Will they be losing out on something? And I would love to hear you comment on that. Another topic to discuss is the placement of the elementary school conference days. It hasn't been contemplated in the calendars yet. I encourage the administration to put them days in a row or next to weekends or next to holidays to reduce the disruption for the children. In particular, the first set of conference days I felt were very disruptive this year because

126they came right after Thanksgiving break. On top of that, they felt too late to be helpful to parents to get the information that they need about their children. In scenario four and five, I suggest putting the fall conference days, the week of Thanksgiving or the week of Veterans Day. If we do the week of Thanksgiving, teachers could work from home on the 22nd, which would be very convenient to them. And working from home is a benefit that many of us in other jobs are afforded. The spring conference days could be placed near spring break and we could consider shortening this break. The spring conference days have many different pros and cons and they're challenging to place and I'm sure that you're grappling with that now. My question for Drew is when will the placement of

127the conference days be released? I encourage you to release them as soon as possible so we have sufficient time to comment and make adjustments if necessary. Thank you. Is there anyone else in the audience that would like to comment? Okay, let's turn to Zoom. We do have a couple hand raised on Zoom. I'm gonna promote some people. One sec. Hi, can you hear me? Yes, can you please show your video as well? Hmm, I don't have that option, let's see. I don't have that option, I don't know why. You should see a popup to be promoted to panelist. Okay, I see that pop. Accept that then you should be able to turn your video on. Okay. Okay, please go ahead. My name's Marianne Lee. I am a parent of a daughter at Edgewood and I

128wanted to also contribute to the public comment regarding the half days. I think there are several options. One rooted around with a foundation rooted in equity and I think in addition to equity and diversity and the acknowledgement of the many different celebrations of students and families in Scarsdale, there's also I think a foundation in equity around the different lifestyle circumstances and needs of families within the Scarsdale community. And adding the number of half days, which are disruptive to family schedules for many of the reasons already named, would be an additional burden for several families, working families including my own. So I'd love for that to be taken into consideration by the board in finalizing the calendar and find a solution that can acknowledge and include many of the additions proposed while limiting the number of

129half days, which are incredibly difficult for families to navigate depending on their circumstances. Thank you very much. Hi everyone. Hopefully I am clear and loud. Yes, we can hear you. Hi, hi everyone. My name is Pao and we live on Quentin Road. My son goes to kindergarten in Heathcote school and I'm here to support the half day issue that we're having with the schools in Scarsdale. I'm very appreciative of everything that we've seen with the community, the school, the teachers, and all the effort. We only moved to this neighborhood two months ago and have been very, very thankful for the education. So we just to give a little bit color, I wanted to take a few moments to share my own experience. We are both working parents, me and my husband, we have full-time jobs

130and our schedules are often filled with back-to-back meetings throughout the days. When the school shut at half days, especially that week around Thanksgiving. It was highly disruptive to our schedules. I was under because we were new to the area as well. I faced a lot of anxiety and stress in trying to figure out how do I find someone to do the pickup and make sure that my child is safely back home and can be looked after school. To add to that, finding childcare for that time period, especially during the known you barely just dropped your child off and then it seems like it's just time to pick up again. Finding someone for that time period in the afternoon was very hard and then finding someone who can do that on an ad hoc basis was

131very challenging for me. So I would appreciate if we did consider clumping multiple half days to potentially maybe convert them to a full day and so we can manage our schedules a little bit better. My goal really today is to find a solution that would make it easier for working parents and in no way I'm suggesting extra work for our teachers or school staff. You all heard about some of the data points that my friend Diana spoke about and I really hope that we can find an inclusive solution that can help working parents. Thank you. Nobody else has their hand raised. We do have a couple other attendees if we wanna give them a second. Sure, let's keep on. We do have a hand raised, one second. Hello, can you see me? Yes, but please

132turn off your live stream. Keep your Zoom but turn off your live stream. Okay, great, thank you. Hi everyone, this is Molly Tu from 3 Putnam Road. Sorry. Keep your Zoom but turn off your live stream. You're getting feedback because you have the Zoom and the video open so if you turn off the video you shouldn't have more feedback. Is this better? Yes, thanks. Yeah, sorry about that. I thought I turned it off. This is Molly Tu from 3 Putnam Road, I have two kids in Greenacres Elementary School. Today I'm speaking in support of two initiatives. One is adding the Eid, Lunar New Year and Diwali to the school calendar. And the other one is reducing the number of half days in the school calendar. As an Asian working mom, I think it is really

133important for the school to consider both proposals, which all makes sense. I hope it is not in either or situation. It's cause both petitions have gained broad support across the school district, right? I'm hearing similar numbers for 450, 500. I think that really demonstrates the backing, right, and the rationale behind each petition. I was very happy to see in the last iteration of the school calendar has provided options that are inclusive of the first proposal, right? And I'm happy to see that the school district is responsive and open-minded to the needs from the community. I will love to see the school district continue to evolve our school calendar, which is really important, it dictates how we spend the school year. Thank you very much. Thank you. There are currently no other hands raised. Give it

134like five seconds, just a case. Nobody. Still no hands raised. Okay. Then we will go ahead and close public comment and I wanna thank everyone who spoke tonight. We had a lot of comments on the calendar. As I mentioned earlier in my opening comment, we do have an agenda item later on this evening. Item 10.01 where we'll discuss the calendar. Drew, I don't know if you wanna add anything before we get into that discussion later. It probably makes sense just to share a few things so people don't have to stay for the rest of the night if they don't want to. One, I would encourage anyone who didn't see the presentation from December 19th about all of the factors that go into the calendar development process. Please take a look at that video. It is

135on our website. Short of that, there is a document on our district one page calendar webpage. So if you go to the district homepage and you hover over calendars, the second link down I think is district one page summaries on that pages linked to the feedback survey, the scenarios that we've painted, but also a background document about what the major factors are that influence the calendar. It's definitely important. I see the size of the population of people engaging on this topic growing, which is fantastic. I also think it's important that everyone who engages has as deep an understanding as possible within reason of the factors. There's a lot of push and pull and we really are doing our best to listen. One point in particular, I do wanna bring up is the graduation. I agree

136with the commenter, I'm sorry I missed her name. The commenter. I think it was Helene Gray. Thank you, thank you. That other schools do hold their high school graduations at different times. It has just been a tradition here. I've started to dig in with the high school administration and we've followed a pattern over time of when graduation is, there was a time in 2018-19 with the same sort of calendar where the Wednesday, the last day of the Regents Exams period was a Wednesday and the graduation was that day. That's not to say we can't change it and we're looking at it and as long as all things line up where we can staff it and there are no significant conflicts with testing, exams, I don't think there's a reason why we would object to moving

137it to a more favorable date. So thank you for that comment. Thank you, Drew. It's been over two hours since we started our meeting and we try to take a break every two hours. So we're going to have a five minute recess. We'll be back at 8:27. Thank you. Okay, we're back and we are on item seven, written communications so I'm gonna turn it over to Ron. Thanks Amber. There were 29, oh, sorry. Preamble. Please note that the board of education email is also viewed by the superintendent and district clerk. Open meetings law requires all board deliberations, which may lead to action or policy changes to occur in public. Therefore, your written communications and emails will be reported at an upcoming public board meeting. A board member will respond at the earliest convenience. Since our

138last update on written communications, the board has received 29 emails regarding district matters and seven emails regarding board invitations, publications, board meetings, or highlights. Thank you, Ron. And now we'll move on to item eight, the consent agenda and I will read the preamble. The board may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda in an effort to achieve greater efficiency at board meetings. A consent agenda condenses some of the routine business of the board of education into a single motion. The consent agenda is prepared by the superintendent of schools and consultation with the president and/or vice president of the board. Items are selected for the consent agenda when the officers of the board and the superintendent believe there is no controversy regarding them. The items on the consent agenda will have the same background

139material as ordinary items on the board agenda. If any member of the board feels that any item on the consent agenda requires discussion prior to action, that board member may remove that item from the consent agenda merely by requesting same at the meeting. The exempted item then moves to the regular agenda, however, all non-exempt items would be moved, seconded, and voted upon without discussion in order to provide greater efficiency to conducting the routine items of the business of the school district. Is there anyone who would like to remove anything from the consent agenda? Okay, seeing none, we'll move to item nine, which is the consent agenda. And that's Jim. Thank you, Amber. The consent agenda this evening has five items, minutes of the business meeting of December 19th, 2022, minutes of special meetings executive session

140January 3rd, 2023. Personnel, certified. Personnel, non-certified. Claims audit report, December, 2022. I move that the board accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you, Jim. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Jessica. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the consent agenda passes and we will move on to item 10.01, the preliminary calendar discussion. And Drew, I'm gonna turn that back over to you. Okay, thank you, Amber. So tonight I'll summarize the feedback that's been received to date about the 2023-24 school calendar and provide an update on the calendar process moving forward. Notwithstanding the feedback we heard tonight, I didn't incorporate that into this particular set of comments, but we do take it to heart and to mind. But as of 4:10 this afternoon, we'd received 215 comments via the online survey.

141We've received a petition related to reducing the number of half days, we heard from some of those petitioners tonight, signed by 433 individuals at the time of receipt and dozens of emails to me and/or to the board, regarding various aspects of this discussion. There are a number of commonly expressed themes evident in the feedback, and I thought it might be useful to recap some of those themes. And by theme I mean something that's recurring, not a single comment made once by one contributor, but comments that recur by multiple contributors throughout the survey. So this is in no particular order. The themes include, reduced half days, often citing childcare as an issue or a concern. A two-week December break. Especially international families prefer the two-week break for the ability to travel. No two-week December break. Many

142families are opposed to it having to take so much time off from work so close together. And especially having a week in January with no school for some families is challenging. Closed schools for Passover, and some of our scenarios do include that. The comment was June 28th or late June end to the school year seems very late. We don't really have a choice over that. That's connected to Regents Exams and Regents Week. Start school after Labor Day, schedule graduation later in the week on a Thursday or Friday, in the previous week to the last week of school. Spring break in March is too early. Some recommendations for a four-day weekend for Easter and another four-day weekend for Passover and two days off in June. So close to the end of the school year that's referring

143to Juneteenth and Eid is very disruptive. Just over half of those who responded to the survey also indicated a preference for one or more than one of the calendar scenarios that were presented. I want to emphasize this is not a scientific survey, it was not intended to be, it's just input, but I thought it might be useful to kind of note that the preferences varied. Also note that that wasn't a vote and the calendar won't be determined by a vote. So interestingly of the a hundred plus people who voluntarily gave a preference, 1/5 or 20% of those indicated a preference, identifying scenario one, many people identified more than one scenario, so I included them in each one that they indicated. So about 1/5 or 20% scenario one, about 1/5 or 20% preferred scenario three. About

1441/5 preferred scenario four and about 2/5 or 40% expressed preference for scenario five. So just to remind you what those scenarios were. Scenario one starts school on the Tuesday after Labor Day. These are just some of the highlights on the Tuesday after Labor Day includes a two-week break in December and January with no school on the Friday before Memorial Day. Scenario two starts school on the Thursday after Labor Day, shortens the December, January break and no school on the Friday before Memorial Day. Scenario three starts school on the Tuesday after Labor Day includes a two-week break in December, January, and observes Eid al-Fitr as a superintendent's conference day, no school for students and observes Eid al-Adha in June. Scenario four starts school on the Tuesday after Labor Day includes a shortened break in December, January,

145observes the Eid holidays the first two days of Passover. And scenario five starts school on August 31st, includes a two-week break at December, January. Observes Eid al-Fitr as a superintendent's conference day, the first two days of Passover in Eid al-Adha as a holiday in June. So that's just a reminder of what we put out there as a range of different scenarios that could theoretically occur. Noting, of course, it does not include the parent-teacher conference date yet. So next steps, we will continue our dialogue with the STA as their partners in developing the calendar with us and with our civil service unions as well. As a reminder, it's the responsibility of the administration after consulting with the STA to bring a calendar forward to the board. And it is the board's responsibility to act, to approve

146or reject the calendar as presented. And I just share that you all know that, but as I said in response to public comment, I do know as more people become engaged in the process, which is great, I think it's important just to review what the process is. So the board really has no authority to propose a calendar. The board is responding to the administration's proposal and that's your governance role there. So we expect to bring a calendar draft to you at the added board meeting. So January 30th does give us an extra opportunity for an information item. We'll bring to you at the end of this month, what we ultimately determine is the best proposed calendar weighing everything, and there'll be a period of time between that meeting and the February 13th business meeting for

147people to give additional input and consider any potential changes that might be warranted at at that point, we will, in the proposed January 30th version, we hope to have the proposed parent-teacher conference date in that, so that too is part of the knowledge. You're acting with the knowledge of what those dates are. In the meantime, the survey that's linked, it's just an open-ended question on the website. It will remain there through January 27th for people to continue to comment. And that's the update. I'm happy to take questions. Hi, okay, thank you, Drew, for all of your hard work on this and to everyone who has taken time through various channels to engage and to Joe and the STA who are going to obviously continue to work with Drew on this. I wanted to understand, first

148of all, Drew, what is the rationale for the positioning of April break? Obviously I've looked at the one pager, but I just wasn't sure, is it Good Friday? What are the factors that historically have? Yep, so the position typically, it's been the week leading up to Easter, ending with Easter Sunday. And while students are in here, often Good Friday has been a civil service holiday. There's a number of our civil service units, those classified staff that Carol clarified before, they have in their contracts 17 paid holidays. Some of them are clearly prescribed in contract, the remaining ones are not and those are discussed with them so often they've coincided with brakes. That's not written in stone. And we have in various conversations commented on the close proximity in those drafts between the February and the

149spring, so-called spring break. And we're certainly continuing to think about options there. Yes, as I was looking at it, one thing that occurred to me was that if we gave Good Friday as a holiday and then for students and all the staff who historically have gotten it and then put the spring break during Passover, it would save one school day I think. I just didn't know the history behind that. So I was curious. That's a possibility. We don't know the dates of AP testing, but we do know some of our students take AP and they typically start around May 1st. It's just a consideration. It's not a deal breaker necessarily about, but that could be an impact of making that week of Passover. Also the spring break week, that's one of the many. That's good

150to understand. I just was thinking through some of that and then I guess I just wanted to say, look, I'm listening to what everyone has said about half days, particularly working parents and stay-at-home parents. And I'm thinking about my own personal experience as a full-time single working parent and prior to that, my husband's experience as a part-time working stay-at-home parent. It's interesting because I think we always really valued those half days because we liked parent-teacher conferences and because we liked how flexible our teachers were, we really appreciated that many of them came in early to do our parent-teacher conferences before school. And I think it would be in some ways very punitive to teachers to take away those half-day conferences if parents still needed those before school conference times. That seems like that could present

151a burden potentially. And I think it would be a shame to lose some of that flexibility. I just wanna respond though, as a matter of fact, the half day parent-teacher conferences for K-5 in the fall and grades K through two in the spring are contractual. Great. They are not. Okay. The dates on when they occur we discuss, but that day occur is presently not up for discussion. Perfect, okay. And then the other thought I had as I was thinking about this was one of the advantages that half days provides to students, provide to students is it gives children, particularly at the elementary level who might have after school programming or other reasons that they can't socialize after school, an opportunity to socialize. It gives them a chance to widen their social circles. And I think

152from a social emotional perspective, that is valuable. And I do wonder, I don't necessarily see filling that time as the school's responsibility or something we should take on, but I do wonder about opportunities, sort of innovative opportunities to foster group activity that might take some of the burden off of working parents and provide activities for students. Whether it's done collaboratively with the PTC or whether it's done independently as a school district or collaboratively with kids base, there may be a way to look at solving the problem that would alleviate some of the burden that parents shared with us tonight and also address some of those social emotional needs. Thank you. Does anyone else? I don't really have a comment per se. I just wanted to thank you for the new drafts. So we're getting a

153lot of responses about the calendar, both written, verbal, everyone has multiple factors playing into their own lives and making these drafts is a lot of work. And to go from three and now to five is a lot of work and each draft takes into account all of the information and requests we're getting, so I just wanted to take a moment and thank you for putting these together for our community. I think it's very valuable, so thanks. Thank you. And I in turn should thank Honore Adams and Antigoni Manzi from my office for helping put those together as well, so thank you. Just have a two quick questions or one clarification. 'Cause I think you a good point is more people are watching, making sure they have all the information, sort of how to give the

154administration feedback. We have five scenarios now. Presumably someone wants to give you feedback taking some from one scenario. It's these aren't five, like pick one of these five. No, these are just information for people to consider. I just wanna make sure that's accurate. It's an important clarification. There could be 25 scenarios that we put out that we stopped at five because of the work. No, I think it makes a lot of sense. But some of 'em have different levers pulled as long as everybody understands we have to meet certain number of days and there are certain contractual aspects that there can be a mixture if people wanna give that feedback. Yes. And then just one question about the process. Once you and the administration get to a place where you're ready to present, we've looked

155at all of the stuff, this is what we're bringing back, these are the decisions we've made. As part of this analysis, you did a look forward, to say, if we added these holidays, what does that start to look like? Is there value in taking what you decide and sort of doing a little bit of an update to say, okay, if we then carry these assumptions and decisions forward, this is what the future would look like. Yeah. Is that feasible? Yeah, I think it's required in a way. I think because we're in new territory in considering adding elements to the school calendar that have not been there before. I think it's incumbent upon us to carry that logic to imagine what that logic, those values, we talked about it in December as we're gonna meet all

156of our mandates and requirements first, that's our responsibility. And anything left over is really an expression of what we value, I think it would be helpful to communicate how those values look in subsequent years to some extent. However, there are still unknowns in those subsequent years and those values may push and pull against each other because maybe they're really close together, they're not ones not so much more valued than the other. So there could still yet be decisions about the duration of a particular break as being more or less valuable than a start date, things like that. So we'll try, but knowing there's still variables. No, that's really helpful and just thank you that I think this has been an incredibly inclusive, transparent and really forward thinking process and so thanks for all the work

157and everybody's work on this. Where this goes is the idea to present a recommendation on calendar to us. Yes. Okay. Here's five choose one 'cause that sounds like a recipe for chaos. I don't see that as meeting our responsibility. I think to meet our responsibility as an administration or me as interim superintendent is to present you with something you vote for or don't vote for. Okay, all right, I just wanted to make sure that, okay, that makes sense to me. Anyone else have any questions? I have one question, Drew. So when you talked about potentially moving the graduation date earlier, just to clarify, the rest of the students would go still to school through ratings day? Yeah. If you look at the school calendar, graduation is an event that is a wonderful, incredible pinnacle celebration,

158but is not necessarily the end of the school year for anyone, including perhaps even some seniors. So yeah, so that would be a separate thing. Okay. And I just wanna echo my fellow board members. We heard from the community earlier this year about including some of the holidays. And I appreciate that you took that feedback and created an opportunity for the community to provide input. You created options. I think we've really seen great engagement from our community. I appreciate members of the community coming forward and sharing their thoughts. I especially appreciate that you're going to include the half days in this scenario because I think those aren't typically included when the calendar's presented to us, so we look forward to hearing how your discussions with STA and the other union leaders go. Great, thank you.

159Thank you. All right, let's move to the high school auditorium renovation. Drew, Stuart. Well, here we are again. We promised we'd come back to you in January with a variety of information, some answers to excellent questions that were asked to continue to further the conversation. I would just point out that in the board material that you have, there are a couple of attachments, one recent, but it's a cost estimate of the original proposal that you heard from, was that in December? November. And then more recently we talked about an acoustic modeling study and we have our expert from that organization here. The results of that study are also in the agenda for the public to see, and I'll turn it over to Stuart. Well, and I'll turn it over to Ken Schupner from BBS, who

160has been doing some homework since our last meeting and he'll share that with you. Thank you. Thanks for having us again. Happy New Year. Good to see everybody again. Just wanna kind of give a brief overview of the renovation project we talked about back in November. And then I'll give Arthur, who's from Acoustic Distinctions, an opportunity to present to you the modeling of the acoustics of the existing conditions and the proposed conditions. So following the initial presentation, I believe there's been some clarification to one of the items that was discussed in regards to this area of the building was originally designed and constructed as an auditorium. So I think there was some concern about whether or not there was appropriateness in renovating a space that may not have been original. So just as confirmation and

161clarification that space was designed, it's not original to the building, it was an addition and constructed as an auditorium. There were renovations in the late 1970s to the auditorium from its original construction. That renovation removed the existing balcony seating area, fur out the interior walls with a flat gypsum board and wood paneling, and also installed the circular discs below the original plaster concealed spline ceiling system. During that same renovation, there was also an addition of a new band room adjacent to the auditorium, which removed some of the exterior windows that originally existed. These conditions remain present today, so there's been no further physical changes to the auditorium. The proposed renovation is intended to approve acoustic qualities of the auditorium. And in addition, functional improvements. Some of those improvements include for functionally modifying the catwalk. In

162order to properly traverse the catwalk, add a side ramp and permanent stairs to the stage, replace stage flooring, relocate the front of house theatrical lighting and replace the deteriorated seats. Some of the acoustical improvements include maximizing volume that would be accomplished by removing the circular discs and the ceiling above. Improve liveness of the room by installing tuning curtains, reduce flutter echo by installing an architectural shelf and diffusive wall treatments below. Improve sound transmission with proscenium shaping, cheek walls and a brow reflector above the proscenium. And also to reduce intrusive noise from the exterior sound seals on doors and modifying the existing electrical and HVAC systems. So that's in addition to some of the other recent infrastructure improvements associated with theatrical lighting, assisted listening systems and safety and rigging improvements that have already been accomplished or

163currently ongoing. So with that, I'd like Arthur to come up and review his report that they've prepared based upon an acoustic model that they've developed. Hi all, my name's Arthur van der Harten, I'm with Acoustic Distinctions. I understand you all wanted to see some more corroborating information about what the improvements to the auditorium were going to do more than just changing the appearance, but also functionally acoustically. And so that's kind of what we did here. Do you all have access to the report in front of you? Good. So looking at the first page, we go over at the beginning of our process, the first thing is to build a model of the existing room. And from that we can calibrate materials using the measurements that we took back in December of 2021. Now if we

164can run a model and get a similar refrigeration time to what we received in our measurement, then we know that our model is at least very close, if not exactly a good duplicate or replica of the room that you guys have. And from there we can start putting in the changes that were proposed and assessing the improvement to the room based on that. So if we move on to page three, you see the room with the various changes. Indeed, we have removed the ceiling, both the floating discs and the absorptive gypsum board ceiling that was mounted just above that to expose a little bit of extra height and also a much harder concrete or deck. And from there also wrote some of the wall finishes, added the diffusion down low to help address some of

165that flutter echo, actually added an eyebrow reflector above the proscenium, which delivers some early reflections to improve clarity. There's a shelf on the side walls as well where the diffusive materials terminate and that shelf actually delivers more early reflections, especially to the rear of the room, which also improves clarity and speech intelligibility. And then we have our variable treatments, the curtains that run along the side walls. And did I miss anything? Is that everything? Side walls and rear walls. Yep, side walls and the right. So from there you see the next page, we have our results both from the measurements, the green is sort of the measurement/calibrated model, reverberation time room average over the entire audience. And then you have our proposal, our proposed room with the curtains retracted. That's the red line in the

166reverberation time that's solid. So you see that we've actually increased the reverberation time of the entire room at its max by about half a second from what you currently have, which makes it it a much better room, for say, musical ensemble. It's a much better room, but it still isn't say, the Musikverein in Austria. It simply isn't, it never will be and it shouldn't be, but it is certainly going to be a much more live room, a much better experience for music. And then when you pull the curtains, draw the curtains on the side walls in the rear, you can drop the room back down to just a little shy of where it was initially. So you have a reverberation time that is kind of similar to what you have now, but hopefully without the

167fluter echo, if the treatments work correctly. And so you'll have an improved experience in terms of speech intelligibility, less distracting for the speakers and much better for any kind of presentation that you might want to actually execute in there. I also included a graph for strength. You can actually have a much more powerful sound in this room now. Any room with a bit of a dryness will be somewhat quiet. But in its most state you actually have a louder room in some regards but not overpoweringly so. About six or seven decibels is something, you'll find is actually very comfortable in the room, but it'll allow you a greater dynamic range. Quiet passages will be more audible in the room and louder ones will actually be much more exciting. The next page is a bunch of

168graphs of the clarity. And from here you see the existing condition you have right now, pretty typical room, frankly, you have pretty good clarity closer to the audience because you're actually really close to the stage so you can hear articulation all right, but further back, it degrades very quickly. If we move on to the next graph, this is the condition with the curtains all stored. And it is a much more reverberant room and actually you don't want it to be too clear, a little bit of extra clarity in room like this does lead to a better quality and in terms of music, but it simply can't be too clear when you have a lot of reverberation anyway. So this is actually a decent condition for music. And if we roll down to the last one,

169that's where we draw the curtains out again. It actually looks kind of similar to the initial graph, but it's actually a little more green here, which means that we've actually improved the clarity and that is because of the eyebrow reflector and the shelves along the side walls. So in conclusion, we hope we've shown the things we've proposed to do this room will improve it a great deal and allow you a multifunctional space that's decent for music and improved her speech. Any questions? Thank you very much for that presentation. I actually do have a couple questions for you regarding your presentation. I know other board members have some, so could you just clarify for me, so the reverberation is what you consider when you're in instrumental or music, is that right? And then clarity is for

170speech. You threw a lot of things out there and I'm trying to understand what measures for what. I understand. So I actually consider all of them for all of these things. So more reverberation is appreciated for music, especially large ensembles, orchestral, anything like that. Smaller ensembles sometimes prefer a little bit less reverberation. What's nice about curtains is you can draw them out any amount until it is about the sound is how you like it. So you'll have the variability in the control of the room. But that said, I mean, when you have a large ensemble, if it's not too loud, then having a lot of variation will probably be a good thing. That said, when you have a speech, you're going to want a lower reverberations, if you have a lecture going on, you want

171it to be down below about a second and a half. And when you have an audience in here, it's going to fall even more. So you probably will get pretty close to that and you'll find that speech intelligibility will improve a great deal when you dry it out, when you take away the reverberation, when you draw out those curtains. Okay, yeah, you use that terminology, dry it out. I wasn't sure what that was either. And you mentioned flutter at one point in time Could you explain on that? Sure, yeah. So if you go into that room right now and you just clap, (claps) you'll hear sound that goes, (blowing) that is effectively what we call flutter. It's a repetitive echo that lasts a while and currently it's actually artificially drawing out the reverberation, making it

172much longer. But it's not real reverberation, it's really an anomaly. It's destructive to intelligibility and it's not really a good condition for anything. Okay. So the curtains are associated with reverberation, diffusive panels are associated with flutter. Yes. Exactly. So the flutter actually occurs between parallel walls that happen to be sort of in the plane of a speaker or a listener. And by having the flutter echo, sorry, the diffusive treatments in that plane of a listener or in that plane of the speaker, you're disrupting sort of those very clear reflections and instead diffusing the sound so that any reflections you get off those side walls are less stark, softer, more diffused. The energy's still there. You still have the strength of the room, but it's not going to create that very salient echo, if you will.

173Thank you. And before I turn it over to my board members for questions, I'm just curious, what is your background? Are you a sound engineer or what does one study when one goes into this line of work? Yeah, so I actually have two master's degrees, one in architecture and one in acoustics. Oh. I'm sort of like an applied scientist in building acoustics, so. Great, thank you. I'll open it up, Bob. Yeah, thank you. The report I found educational, I'm an architect, so I found your breakdown clear, but I did have some questions and my questions are really gonna fall into two silos. I'm gonna start with the acoustics, but then I did have some questions about cost and that's another, I know. Let's start with the acoustics. Okay. So one of the things that caught

174my eye, and I just wanna hear your reaction, it's on page four. It says, results indicate that the interventions will result in a significant increase in maximum reverberation. You used the word significant. Around two seconds at the mid frequencies. At the same time, a condition that is more than dry than existing room can be achieved by deploying the curtains. So if I'm hearing this correctly, when you increase reverberation, you decrease clarity. That's right. So the intervention is gonna decrease clarity. Only for the very reverberant case. But I mean, the room you have right now is really more clear than you would like it to be for say, musical ensemble or orchestral. So here's where I'm trying to imagine this. We talk about, curtains open, curtains close, but for example, recently I went to see a

175musical play. Okay. And it has music and verbal, speaking and music. And personally I had trouble hearing the speaking, and I was sort of sitting in the middle. So that's a matter of, say, balance of loudness between the actors on stage and the musicians in the pit, that can be room acoustics issue but you can also address it with audio systems. Right. And that was gonna be one of my questions is we don't really talk about audio. Creating different delay systems that might affect the acoustics. So I just wanna be clear, if we were going to go and see a production, like a musical theater. Yeah. Which has speaking and orchestra, so it has both the music and the speech because you kept kind of saying, if we have it this way, it'll create a

176nicer musical experience. if we have it that way, it'll increase the speech. But of course, in many cases we have both. So I wanna understand what I will experience compared to what I'm experiencing now. Will I come away and say, wow, they nailed that. I can now hear those people or not. It seems like there are two questions there kind of. Okay. The first one, seems to be about applicability, for say, musical theater. Okay. Or something like that. And so I'll bring in the third category here, which is opera. Opera is sort of that much, much older ancestor of musical theory you might say. And it came from a time before we had audio systems. And so it was really designed around having vocal music that performed well really, really nicely in more reverent spaces,

177right? Okay. And musical theater by comparison wants a dryer environment with a lot of audio, with a lot of microphones and loud speakers and so on and so forth, left center, right array, fills, et cetera, et cetera. And so that would be in the ideal case, of course. In a school you'll have some speakers, certainly there might be an LCR, but you'll do what's practical, right? In terms of whether you'll think that we nailed it or not, that's subjective. But I'd like to think so. Does that sort of answer your question. Not really, not really. Okay. I don't think it is subjective actually, I'm sorry. I think, there are standards about what you hear when you go to a play and a musical theater. And I'm asking you as a professional when these changes are

178done and people are sitting at various, first of all, it seems to me because of the reverberation today, it really varies where you sit. If you sit closer, you might hear a lot better than if you sit in the back. Yeah. But it is what it is. The size is the size. Will the majority of people find it a more positive musical experience in your opinion? In my opinion, yes, it will be much improved. It will be much improved, okay. In your opinion, are there other things that can be done to increase that likelihood, meaning, in terms of introducing some sort of delay speaker systems where people in the back are hearing things, to eliminate some of those reverberations and why perhaps haven't those been considered? Hmm. I'm not sure about the discussion when it

179comes to audio systems. I can tell you that, I mean, there are already systems in the room already, right? Can I just jump in for two seconds. Go ahead, yep. Yeah, there is going to be in addition to the physical changes to address the acoustic issues, we are doing some additional audio improvements to the room. There's been some equipment upgrades in the past. But part of the overall design solution will include new speakers in the house that I'm sure can be utilized to compliment the physical changes along with audio changes. So the facility will have that ability to do both. Okay. To that point I do see new sound system speakers. So I think I get a sense of where you're coming from in terms of the different qualities and I won't lie, I'm sitting

180here hoping for a very confident level that this is gonna be a lot better. And I say that and I'll cut to the chase. For 4.7 million, I would expect it to be improved, okay? I'm just saying that. And going to the cost estimate, a couple of observations. So we have a $4.734 million, and you've broken it down into 24-line items. So couple of questions, I was curious when you look at it, more than half of the 24 are not estimates or allowances. And I'm curious why, because it seems to me if you have a wall and you're adding panels to it, you should be able to know today, you don't put a date on, the cost. You don't say 2022 or 2023, but I'm assuming it was done in year end. So the baseline

181would be at the time that you did it, I'm just curious why there's so many allowances versus estimates. Yeah, there's a variation of quantified unit prices and then some lump sum dollar figures. Right. At this point in a schematic design development process. Right. Not all of our engineering is fully understood. So in some cases there needs to be allowances for those scopes of work. We've identified it as an item, but it has not been engineered. Like I said, it's a format for this phase of the project. And that makes perfect sense, by the way. I understand that. And the reason I was asking is to be honest, I think for me personally, Bob Klein as an architect, I would like to see it to go beyond the schematic. When I see, for example, acoustic wood

182treatment of interior perimeter doors, not doors, walls, sorry, allowance $735,000. This is an existing building. We know what the walls are, we know the height, we know the width, we know those walls, they're the existing walls. So to me, it's very feasible to know what it's gonna cost for that wood paneling. Yes. Because it's a given. That one, we did obtain manufacturer's pricing for that. Yes. So some of these unit prices or lump sum numbers have been quantified through either vendors or through manufacturers. In that case, we reached out to RPG, who was the acoustic material manufacturer, and they had provided us with material costs specifically for this project and this design. Then they assisted us with determining the labor costs for that. So you picked one that happened to be, although it's defined as

183a lump sum, has been accurately calculated. Okay. Through the manufacturer. Okay, so in my opinion, it's not an allowance, it's an estimate. Okay, I mean you might say. The whole thing is an estimate. Well, okay. Let's look at it this way. You've got $4.7 million for 6,750 square feet. That's over $700 a square foot, okay. This is an existing building, we're not changing the structure. we are keeping the existing stage, rigging, stage drapery, we're keeping the existing HVAC, we're keeping the existing LED housing, we're keeping the existing theatrical stage lighting to remain. And we're keeping the existing light sound booth to remain. We're keeping a lot of this. Yeah, this isn't the type. And this is over $700 a square foot. This isn't the type of project that I would allocate a unit price of

184per square foot in a construction estimate. I understand, that's what the math is telling us. Yeah. But this is a unique type of space. It's not like I'm building a classroom. I would equate this to building a cafeteria and a kitchen. The special components and features of these rooms have a higher cost as a result of that. Yes, but in all due respect, we live where we live. We know what things cost. Roughly speaking, I'm not minimizing inflation today. Over $700 a square foot is a lot of money. And I've asked other architects their opinion on this. So my personal recommendation is the allowances have to migrate to estimates. Meaning, if we don't know enough what it's gonna cost and we need to do a little more work to find out what it's gonna cost.

185If we're gonna say wood Wayne's Scott, chair rail horizontal allowance, a hundred thousand dollars, again, this could be calculated. So my intuition is the 700 is high. I'm just telling you. And yes, you can keep saying it's a theater and it's a specialty building. All true. But it's still a lot of money and I think there's excess in here. That's my gut feeling. Yeah, I mean, one of the things and I know you're looking at the numbers, so obviously there's a construction cost that's derived by that estimate. And then there's a project cost that's arrived by that estimate. So there's a significant amount of dollars kind of below the line that are attributing to not necessarily a per cost per square foot, but more of a project cost per square foot. And that's fair, fair

186point. Yeah, so some of that, there's a line item for contingencies in soft costs. And I'll just summarize, just so you're aware of some of those dollars. So in that 25%, there's typically a 5% design contingency that we carry through the project development. Okay. There's a 5% construction contingency, which is for under construction if there's discovered conditions or change orders or things like that, that there's costs that are carried in the project to support any of that if they occur. And then there's soft costs and escalation into that 25% also. Right. It would be a little clear if there were dates because there are no dates on what was escalated to when at least on this sheet. But I think, from my perspective, contingencies are appropriate and fine. But if you think about, if you

187go through this list here, it's pretty straightforward, honestly. Yeah, I mean there. I mean the building is there, we know it's all there. This is not, oh, we're gonna excavate and we're gonna see something that we didn't find. We know what the conditions are and yet there are a lot of contingencies. You know what? You could argue and maybe this is a defensible argument, you know what Bob, yes it's a little high, but that's better than, it's a little low, there is that argument. But I see my own responsibility as a board member with some level of expertise here to say $712 a square foot for a renovation. That is by the way, keeping a lot of existing stuff. You know, a lot of it is gonna be the same. Which is fine by the

188way, I mean, it's appropriate. It just feels like a lot of money to me. I get it, I get it. And we're gonna have to approve it, right? So I'm just saying, I think, I would like to have someone sharpen their pencil and I never really asked who did the estimate. I dunno if you guys did it or you had. Well, I would argue, there are lots of cost estimators out there that will take your drawings and your specification, be it as it may, and do a cost estimate to kind of verify It's not an uncommon exercise. And I think to start out, this is excellent and lists it all. But no question for me that bottom line. We can take a further look at it in comparison, obviously we've been working with the district

189for a few years now. We just completed or disclosed to finishing the $64 million bond referendum very successfully. I did some quick calculations, I think Stuart said there's about $3 1/2 million left over from that $64 million project, which is about 4 1/2% of the total of that project. So in estimating the 500 line items that were part of that in Greenacres, addition being the bulk of that project, we have a lot of history in preparing these estimates. Okay. So I just wanted you to be aware of our history with the district and any capital projects or improvement projects that we do, we typically do the estimate in-house and provide those figures to the district. And there's been savings through other projects also. It's not 25%, it could be 4 1/2%, it could be 8%.

190So I'm pretty comfortable with the numbers, just explaining our process to you and hopefully maybe providing some additional support to some of your questions. Yeah, I mean I think just. So you understand how we do it. Yeah. And I think experience with the district is comforting to know, right? That your numbers have proven to be good. I guess I would like to see some of these allowances drilled down more. 'Cause I think to be frank, based on what I'm looking at, no disrespect, we can keep saying, it's an auditorium, it's an auditorium but this is pretty straightforward, honestly, from a renovation point of view in. This is not a complicated. Yes. This is complicated. It's complicated, but a lot of these things, they're pretty straightforward. Right. And we were able to develop that defined list

191through our process with the committee and their acoustic initial evaluation of some of the deficiencies. So we knew the scope of work that has to be done. So I don't think there's any issues with how we've delineated the scope of work. You're just looking for some refinement. I mean, tell me, I could be totally off base. You think over $700, when you just gotta do the math. Sounds good to you. It's a big number, I don't doubt it. I would say for a space that is not an auditorium or a space that's not a cafeteria or some other specialty type of space, we would probably be in the $550 a square foot loaded renovation. For a renovation. Yes. We're over a thousand dollars for new construction. How would that differ from a municipality to private

192construction? Do those numbers go up when we're talking about a school district? School districts are required to apply prevailing wage. Right. Which is established by the Department of Labor. Doesn't have to be union. Union wages are close to that. but everything is prevailing wage, which is higher cost than a private contractor would do. So those wages are available on the Department of Labor and you'll see you're paying an electrician $145 an hour. I'm making up a number, but something. And I guess that's where my point, Bob, is that sometimes when we just look at things apples to apples, but then unfortunately you go to a school district or any sort of municipality, we get escalated even though that we're dealing with public dollars, we're handcuffed a little bit that we have to follow certain rules

193that sometimes drive up the cost. (speaker speaking indistinctly) I think that's very defensible. I didn't go through the exercise myself of how much per square foot to do some other renovations because, remember, Greenacres was primarily a new construction. It was a mix. Can I ask, can you estimate off the Greenacres all that renovation existing space. The total addition and renovation costs separate from BCS items I think was about 35 million for Greenacres. I don't know separation of. The entire existing school was renovated. Was renovated, yes. All of it. Can I jump in with a few questions. I'm sorry my head is spinning right now. 'Cause I feel like I might be in "Alice in Wonderland" a little bit. BBS Architect, you're from BBS Architects, correct? Correct. Okay. How long have you worked on projects for

194the district, BBS Architects? We were hired for the 2018 bond. Okay, and in connection with that, you did a fair amount of construction for the district? We oversaw all of the construction. And how much was the value of the construction? The cost of the construction you oversaw in that regard? It was the full 64 million. Okay. And in connection with that, did you have an opportunity to work and be supervised by district personnel, work with and be supervised. Work, yes. Yes, you did, who? Primarily the facilities department and the assistant superintendent for business. Okay, and did you find them to be capable and sophisticated in their dealings with you? Yeah. Did you find them to be accepting without question of costs that you proposed to them? Generally, yes. Accepting without question, they did not question

195ever any costs that you presented to them? I don't wanna say ever. I came into the bond process after the development. So I'm sure there were discussions in determining the scope of the work and the value of some of those items. So I'm sure there was a quantification of some of the costs. I don't know if they changed as a result of those discussions. Well, here's the point I'm getting at, which is I don't think we as a board should be having to drill down on cost items for the first time ever in a project that's been in under discussion and under consideration for years, which this has. I'm just scratching my head 'cause I'm hearing Bob over here ask all these questions as if like they have been never asked before and I personally

196can't believe that that's the case. Am I wrong? That there haven't been questions budget. Those questions about costs, questions about estimates, questions about whether the overall cost of the project is high or is not high. That's never been discussed before with you guys by anybody? I think I can hop in here. I think it would be helpful. I mean, so we defer to the experts that we work with, right? So certainly there's always a concern about costs and all of that. But we aren't architects and engineers. BBS was hired primarily because they've been doing school districts. Have you done billions of dollars worth of school districts across. Over $4 Billion of school districts across New York state. So we rely on them for their expertise. I'm not gonna get into square foot cost and everything

197'cause that's not where our expertise lies. We talk about scope. Does the work reflect the types of things that we discussed along the way? Will it improve acoustics won't make a difference? If not then why? Why are we doing that? A lot of those questions you were asking is certainly part of our process. Does this make sense moving forward. When we see cost for some things, well, is that value added? That's where we would get into cost. And certainly, for this particular project as that number was getting higher. That's getting higher or does this make sense to move forward with, or should we build a new auditorium or something like that? And I think we got to a point through our committee work, then this does make sense, it does do justice. Let's do it

198right. So we're not coming back three years from now, scratching our heads, why didn't we do more? So I think, all of those things are sort of wrapped up as part of that discussion but certainly deferring to the experts in the room that do this for a living is a traditional way of looking at the estimates. And certainly if something looks out of line, we would push back. Stuart, didn't we? This is really a phase, what is it a version two of the original auditorium, correct? It's probably version 12. Okay, version 12. Yeah. Correct me if I'm wrong. It's doubled or tripled since the last time we've discussed this, correct? I would say it quadrupled. Okay. From the original. And that doesn't cause you to think, wow, it's quadrupled. No, because the scope is completely

199enhanced. The scope, this scope is quadruple, what we were gonna do before. This is pretty modest. If you look at the all in all scope from the 2014 bond project, which by the way was grossly underestimated. Okay. With a number. Which is why it didn't happen. Oh, it was underestimated. The scope compared to then did not touch the acoustics. It didn't touch the walls, it didn't touch the curtains, didn't touch the back room, it didn't touch the stage. So the original auditorium renovation was just more of an aesthetics upgrade. Seats, some sound, some lights, and that was pretty much it. And again, if you look and read the recommendation report that we provided, you'll see that we were able to pick up some of those things along the way through budgets. Yes, some of those

200have been done, right? But that committee continued, and as the committee developed and still study that we realized that the experience in that auditorium, you could do seats and that's wonderful, but it's not gonna change the experience for the people in the auditorium trying to enjoy our performance or the student experience up on the catwalk trying to learn how to do the lighting and all that, or the performer. So we really took sort of a step back, took a lot of time, did a 360. We had some change in personnel with Dr. David Graybill, who you met and spent some time with, who was able to add a lot to the conversation and this is where we ended up. So Jim, you don't think as an architect I should be commenting on the price? No,

201I just wanna make sure that there are people involved in this process who are overseeing it appropriately. So it's not like we're coming in and no one's asked a single question about why anything's being done 'cause the kinds of questions you're asking, Bob, to my mind, almost make it sound as though we've caught people with their pants down. I don't think that's your intent, but that's kind of how it sounded to me. And I wanna make sure that's not the situation 'cause if that was the situation, I would be pretty upset as a board member. And it doesn't sound like it's that situation, it sounds like you're just drilling down in a way, with some assumptions that may not be right in terms of what the starting point was. We just heard the starting point

202was very modest and not close to what is actually now being envisioned. Okay. If that's the case, that might explain some of the disconnect, but as a person who's also got oversight responsibilities, hearing your questions and where they're coming from. I just had concerns about what exactly has been happening here. I think they've been somewhat addressed by your answers, Stuart, but I just wanted to explain where I'm coming from in this. Well, I rely on Stuart because obviously I haven't participated in the facilities design process. But in all due respect, I think the people and facilities should ask these questions. You have a big construction budget, you gotta learn something along the way about what things roughly cost. These are kind of rough boiler over macro numbers and that's what experience shows you, so I'm

203hoping that these questions were asked. I would disagree, Bob. I don't have an architectural degree. I do not have an engineering degree. Our facility directors do not do that. We ask the questions, but we're not out there in the field in 50 other school districts. We have an idea, and again, we rely on the architects and engineers and when we comes down, at the end of the day, where do the bids come in for other projects then, obviously if BBS has been off for years, then we probably wouldn't be having Ken here in front of us making this presentation. I think we've had some issues with other architects in the past that if you've been here through all that process, they're not here with us anymore. So you can see we do pay attention to

204this. Okay. We take it seriously. I think what you're talking about is getting to the next level and we can do this. Sometimes we did this a little bit more for the 2018 bond project, especially at Greenacres. We went past the schematic. Now that costs money, I don't think we would expect BBS to go into design mode for free, right? So that comes with a dollar amount and of course that would drill down and get you the most accurate numbers because some of the allowances and things like that would really come fruit to bear. You're really asking them to do the specifications for the project that will go out to bid, right? So you're way down the road. And the risk for that is, of course, if we don't end up with a project, then

205you've spent good money after bad because you have specs without a project. And that's of course that's up to the board to decide what you wanna do with that. And I just wanna say thank you because I believe that our history as a firm, our history with the district has proven. Our process and estimating projects, I have no problem having dialogue in discussing it. I'm comfortable with the number. Okay. We've looked at alternative manufacturers to RPG, maybe I could save a hundred thousand dollars in working with Acoustic Distinctions. I'm sure they may have some other design options that could offer some additional savings, but for the project we've designed, I feel comfortable with the estimate that we've provided. It also sounds like you have a track record and that track record is positive and I'm

206not suggesting it isn't. And I apologize if I suggest it otherwise, but I'm not. Again, I'm repeating myself. There was some sticker shock, okay? That was really where I'm coming from and I'm trying to make sure that everyone's on the same page and we're good. And if you're good and you're good and you're putting your professional expertise out there. I'm good with it too. I appreciate it. Yeah, I would just reiterate, I think the process was really good too. Jessica was part of that process and bringing along the questions and the design, scope of work and there was plenty of opportunity for questioning what do we need, what don't we need. Not speaking about the cost estimates, but the discussion about the scope. And I think the work the high school has done and the

207team there, Ken Bonomo's in the audience. I think it was a really good process and we got to this place through a hard slog, quite frankly. But I think it's landed in a really robust and fruitful place, if and when it's supported, we're gonna be, I think, thrilled with the outcome. Yeah, I'd like to add too, and I think, the important thing to remember with an estimate is an estimate of the project, it's an estimate of our budget. Are we gonna spend every penny in our budget? Gosh, I hope not, right? We hope to come underneath that, and the worst thing to do in a project is to come back and we experience this if you go back to the 2014 bond project. Suzie, you were attending the board meetings back then. We had to

208come back and ask for money because we didn't have enough money in the 2014 bond project because we were short. So I'd much rather come back as we have for the 2018 bond project and say, great news, we came in under budget, we didn't need all those contingencies that we had planned on. We have some extra money we can give back to the taxpayers. We can do another capital project or make other decisions but it's a much healthier conversation rather than asking for money or having to cut things that were once approved by the voters. Well, I appreciate your questions, Bob, in terms of drilling down so that you feel comfortable with the numbers, I just wanna give my other fellow board members an opportunity to ask any questions if they would like to. Yeah,

209I have a couple quick questions. I think, Ken, actually, you just started to touch on this. I think, if I remember correctly, we talked about coming back with an option acoustically that was cheaper. I'm not saying I want to do that to be clear. It sounds like you did some of that work. Simply. We didn't redesign the project. Yeah. We looked at an alternative manufacturer that provides similar products to what we base the initial design on as manufactured products. That was a material savings of approximately a hundred thousand dollars. There may be other field applied products that could offer some additional savings but as we developed the process and an aesthetic and a quantifiable acoustical product, we wanted to make sure that the results were appropriate for addressing the acoustic concerns of the space. But

210just to confirm, the acoustic study was done with the high end product. This is the best we can do with. I don't know if it's the most expensive, I don't know. But it's an expensive component of the project. The original idea, okay, thanks. What other question I had on, wasn't in the original, I just don't know if we've updated or what the process is to decide if we're updating. There was that 20% of the floor that was not gonna be redone. I don't know that you ever wanted or asked us to come to consensus. Or do you need feedback on should we update this? Does that not have to happen now? I just wanna understand that part of the process. You're referring to the front stage flooring. The front, I don't remember if you were

211at the meeting. I know we discussed. I think Stuart had asked me to look at those numbers. Yeah. And we did. And it's not a significant amount of area. I think I budgeted it at about $38,000. But honestly with that I would use my 5% design contingency to apply that. I wouldn't increase the project cost for that. We have contingency money for some of those things that may come along. So I actually wrote that as one of my notes as a design contingency consideration. Okay, appreciate it. And just last question regarding the acoustical study. There's a note that says this was all done model that says an unoccupied space. How do I ask this? Does an occupied space affect the different lines differently? Yeah, so let me first say why we do that. First off,

212it's very, very difficult to get an audience while we're taking an acoustical measurement. (members giggling) It is possible, it's a lot of planning and the main difference actually is just that your audience is going to be a lot more absorptive when you have people in it, especially in winter when people are wearing, say Wallie sweaters like this or something like that. I predicted in an unoccupied room, something like 1.5 seconds that might go down, to say, 1.2 with all the curtains deployed or something like that. Or possibly a little bit lower than that, so that's kind of what happens when you have an audience. And I guess the last thing I'll say about it is, predicting the exact absorption of an audience is kind of a difficult thing anyway because it goes differ from season

213to season and so on and so forth. It's in the number of audience. Yeah, I mean stationary seats that don't change, that's a much easier thing to control for. But it doesn't change the takeaway of your analysis at all. Certainly not. Okay, thanks. No, I was just gonna ask for other questions. So if you have a question. No, I guess I just have a comment 'cause Drew mentioned that I was the person who was in the room with the subcommittee, which was really amazing in terms of its dedication to this project and brought together obviously, Ken's team and Stuart's team as well as faculty, parent representatives, administrative representatives, Mr. Bonomo. But I was just gonna say, I think that that project, that group, that subcommittee was probably more dedicated, at least from my observation to

214determining the appropriate scope of the process. And I think Stuart has really taken the lead on the costing. I didn't see that group as being such a costing group particularly. So I felt like you guys had run this project through its paces from a costing perspective. But that wasn't what that committee was doing, just to clarify. The committee would had the discussion about scope and identifying the scope and then, Ken would come back with the estimates and we would take a look at that to see where we were, which we would have discussion about. But again, is really relying on our experts to come back with that. Anybody else? Thank you very much for your presentations tonight. Awesome, thank you for having us. And so in terms of next steps for the high school auditorium,

215it's included in the budget. How do we move forward? (members giggle) How do we go forward? What are our next steps? And it's really looking for guidance from the board of education to give some different options, right? It could be for funding, if the board feels strongly, you would like to move forward sooner rather than later. It could be included as a transfer to capital project similar to what we have done in the past. It'd be offset on the revenue side, it'd be the full expenditure amount offset by the transfer from debt service would be the leftover money from the 2018 bond project. The difference would be, I think, it was a $1.1 million or 1.4, something like that. Different, that would be the impact on tax levy. It would be excluded from the tax

216cap calculation, it wouldn't be excluded from the taxes, right? It would be your whatever the regular budget would have as the tax increase plus that amount related to the auditorium. Or you could move to a bond vote, a separate proposition. You could do a vote in October if you wanna keep it separate from the budget. (speaker speaking faintly) So perhaps I can or were you going to. And I was just gonna remind you that the recommendation from the committee and administration would be to fund it through the budget. Okay. That was what we had presented to you back in November. Just a reminder. Thank you for that. So looking at my fellow board members, I think I'd like to take the pulse of the board in terms of moving forward with this project in the

217immediate term. Is the board comfortable with that? And then we can talk about the mechanism for moving forward. We could use the recommendation of the district. All right. Start? Okay. I'd like to move forward with it. I'd like it to be in the budget and when we get to budget time, we'll see what the budget looks like at that point and we'll see what the general view of the community is on these things and we can discuss it. But I think we wanna give ourselves the option to discuss it. So I would like to see us use the transfer of capital from the remaining debt service 'cause this was a bond project that was approved by voters almost 10 years ago or part of it was a bond project, understanding not the full scope. I

218would like to see the rest in the budget so that way we can have a discussion as part of budget. I think that gives us the most options. Thank you, Ron. Suzie. I agree. I'd like to move forward with the district recommendation on this proposal and to incorporate it in the budget conversation. Thank you. Yeah, I support what Ron's suggesting. I think it would be helpful to see the numbers in the budget with the offset of the cap with the remaining capital funds being used to phrase some of the costs so I'd like to see that. I think it's a project we should move forward with. Thank you for your comments, Jim. I agree. Great, thank you, Jessica. I agree as well, I'd like to move forward on this project. All right, thank you, Colleen.

219Bob? I think we should put it in the budget and see where it goes, why not? Okay, great. And I also think that's the right path forward. I think the district's done their homework here and I feel comfortable with moving forward with the auditorium project at this time. I'd like to go ahead and put it in the budget and then do the transfer. We can discuss it as Ron noted. So great, I think we have consensus on that. So exciting news. Yay. Thank you very much. Have a great evening. Thank you both. Okay, let's move on to item 10.03, which is the superintendent search update. And Ron, I'd like to ask you to take that one please. Thank you, Amber. Tonight's search update will be similar to the update from our last board meeting that

220was held just before the holidays. As Amber mentioned earlier this evening, we are continuing to meet an executive session to conduct work related to the superintendent search. As we continue to progress through this work, the board anticipates maintaining our expected timeline, including conducting reference checks and performing other due diligence, entering into contract negotiations and setting up a selected group of stakeholders to meet with a finalist before a contract assigned. A formal announcement and introduction will be made to the community thereafter. We will continue to provide updates to the community at board meetings, as well as through direct communications. All communications, documents, videos and other information related to the search are available on the superintendent's search page. A link to this page can be found on the homepage of the district website. Thank you for that

221update, Ron. Does anyone have any additional comments? Okay, great. Let's move on to item 10.04 STI courses. Hi, Amber. (members giggling) Nice to see you, Edgar. Good to see you too. What are you pointing at? (Drew speaking indistinctly) Oh, okay. (Edgar giggles) I am joined in invisibly now, but I am joined by Ann Marie Nee who is available on Zoom to answer any questions that you might have. But I am very briefly gonna just go through the new courses being proposed for the STI for the spring and the summer. The first one is building community through music. It's a course that's being led by a music educators and directly reflects some of the power skills we spoke about last time. Through an experiential learning opportunities, teachers with varying experiences in chorus will be taken from

222rehearsal to performance, will learn the fundamentals of vocal technique, program selection and methods of integrating music into their learning environments. This is to bolster learning connections built community and foster wellbeing. The next one is Canva, high quality cloud-based graphic design. It's a course being proposed that will expand educators technology skills in creating powerful graphics, anchor charts, assignment templates, event posters and infographics. And essentially bringing these skills to their students to empower their communication through the powerful resources and to further develop those skills. The next one is A Day in the Life of the Hudson, it's an immersive course and experience. Teachers will research and discuss resources and materials from A Day in the Life of the Hudson program developed by elementary educators and discuss the connections to science standards and local curriculum. The workshop will

223take place onsite at Croton Point Park and participants will carry out a series of experiments and create lesson plans, plan a site visit and reflect on the ways the Hudson connects and can enrich their curriculum. That said, this model of a truly integrated and experiential learning program is a model that can be replicated across wide content. The next one is ancient wisdom and the smartphone dilemma as being proposed by a high school teacher, and the focus is on the impact of smartphone, social media and new technology and examines potential solutions through the written works of Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, as well as Chinese and Greek philosophies. A creative erudite and thoughtful way to use past thinking to impact the methods to help our students thrive with the complexity technology provides. The next one is becoming an

224Apple certified teacher, a practical and hands-on course which will give teachers fluidity and iMovie, GarageBand, numbers, pages, keynote and all the core Apple products in both Mac and iPad versions. Then we have five pillars of financial literacy. We'll explore these pillars, earnings, saving, protecting, spending, and borrowing. And the ways we can use tools to wisely use our money for greater life satisfaction. Again, something to be transferred to our students. And then we have three elementary math courses that really reflect our commitment to responsive professional learning opportunities. These topics directly arose from express needs of our educators in the classrooms. One is leveraging and addressing language skills in reveal math, K to 2. The other is unpacking the reveal math experience K to 5. And another one is examining K-5 math progressions, documents to enhance student

225learning. The next one is a study of censorship and I'm excited to be facilitating this one. Participants will look at the history of book censorship in the US and take a critical look at the determinations we make in our learning environments to include or exclude texts from our libraries, classroom collections and curriculum. We'll examine the relationships that exist between text access and developmental appropriateness. We'll be working with playwright Kenneth Jones whose play Alabama Story, centers on the landmark 1959 case involving the efforts of politicians to ban the children's book, "The Rabbit's Wedding" from the Alabama State Library and the librarian Emily Reed Wheelock, who is at the center of it. The new courses to be offered this summer are foundations in education for sustainability at Shelburne Farms, Vermont on site to gain familiarity with the

226practice and the skills to apply education for sustainability as a unifying framework for educators that helps students contribute, creating a healthy future for their communities, economically, socially, and environmentally. And then a summer symposium on media literacy. Teachers will engage in a variety of collaborative and independent activities through the week that scaffold their understanding towards integrating and implementing media literacy with their units of study. The next one is responsive classroom advanced workshop, which represents an SEL approach that we spoke about earlier. And then finally, design and structure of a K-5 math classroom to enhance student learning and really asking the essential question, what specific classroom, organization, structures and resources are necessary to enhance student learning specifically in mathematics. Thank you, Edgar. Does anybody have any comments or questions for Edgar or Annmarie? I just have a

227really quick question. I just wanna make sure I reading this right, the responsive classroom advanced, that's a new one. You need to take the intro course that's still offered, right? Because it's in the chart at the end. Yes, yes. So the new one is the advanced course and we have a large cohort who have already taken the beginning one and there's a lot of interest in continuing to the advanced course. And for somebody that who hasn't taken the intro, that remains a course. Yes, that is also going to be offered as well. Thanks so much. Anybody else? I just wanna say thank you for this impressive list of courses. I'm actually most excited about the five pillars of financial literacy. I was speaking with the board intern earlier this evening and we were talking about

228Scarsdale, has some amazing classes for its students. But I do think financial literacy is an area that everyone could benefit from and the idea that they're going to take what they learn there and could transfer those ideas to students is really wonderful. So I thank Annemarie and the entire STI for putting this, and you Edgar for putting this list together. So thank you so much. And Annamarie is on Zoom just so you know, she heard your thanks. Oh, good, good, I'm glad. All right, so with that, we move on to our second public comment period. And I'll just give the highlights of the public comment. Members of public comment are cordially invited to speak on district related items or other non-personnel related matters during two separate public comment periods. When it is your turn to

229speak, please state your name, address, and if you're speaking on behalf of an organization. For those commenting remotely, please mute the livestream voice, turn on your camera, and then unmute yourself. Speakers will be asked to conclude their remarks after four minutes and we'll be given a verbal cue at the three minute mark. They're welcome to send their comments and writing to the board of education by email and public comment period is reserved for comments only. The board will not engage in dialogue. Response to public comment will take place after the first and second public comment periods. Is there anyone in the audience that would like to come forward for public comment? Seeing no one. We'll turn to Zoom. We'll give it a second. I know it takes a minute. There are no hands raised, but

230I did just put a note to the attendees if they'd like to make a comment. There are still no hands raised. Okay, let's go ahead and close public comment then and follow up to public comment. I think we can move forward with that. So wrap up items. Were there any wrap up items, questions? I don't think so. Okay, let's move on to meeting dates. Ron. I needed some water, this is a long list. We actually have meeting dates through March 27th and what's nice about this is that the community can see all the meeting dates related to the budget, including the budget study sessions in the budget forum. Beginning Wednesday, January 11th, 2023, special meeting or executive session 6:00 PM at the high school room, 171-72. In the same location, a special meeting or executive

231session at 7:00 PM on Wednesday, January 18th. On Monday, January 23rd, a special meeting or executive session at 6:00 PM at the high school room, 171-72. On Monday, January 30th, 2023, a special meeting executive session at 5:30 PM, room 171-72 at the high school. Followed by a business meeting at 6:30 PM in the same room. On Monday, February 13th, 2023, budget study session number one, which Stuart mentioned before, at 6:30 PM at the high school room, 171-172. Followed immediately by a business meeting in the same location and followed by an executive session if needed. Monday, March 6th, 2023, meeting with a designated group at 5:00 PM in the Learning Commons, at the high school. Followed by a special meeting executive session if needed at 6:00 PM at the high school room 171-72. Followed by budget

232study session number two at 6:30 PM in the same room. Followed by a business meeting immediately following the budget study session in the same room. Monday, March 20th, 2023, budget study session number three, 6:30 PM, high school room 171-72. And lastly, Monday, March 27th, a special meeting executive session at 5:30 PM at the high school room 171-72, followed by the budget forum and an education report and a business meeting at 6:30 PM in the same room. That was quite a list, thank you. Okay, we'll move on to our next item. Would a board member like to make a motion to move to executive session to discuss matters that might lead to the appointment of a particular person? Thank you, Suzie. Is there a second? Second. Thank you, Jessica. Any discussion? Okay, please note that there

233will be no further action take. I'll let us vote first actually. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, everyone please note that there will be no further action taken after the board returns from executive session. The board will adjourn the meeting after it returns. Okay, thank you. We'll go to executive session now, thank you.