BOE Audit Committee/Business Meeting 2022-12-19

001Call this audit committee meeting to order and note that all members of the audit committee, which are also all members of the board, are here this evening. First item of business is the appointment of a secretary pro tem. Could I get a motion to appoint Honore Adams as the secretary pro tem? Thank you, Jessica. Is there a second? Second. Thank you Bob. Any discussion? Okay. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, great. Thank you so much Honore. And Drew, I'm going to turn this over to you. Thank you. Unfortunately Mr. Mattie is unable to be here tonight due to illness and I will point out, hang on, it is only, that's muted. It is only the second board meeting. He's missed in his career as a business official, so he is sick,

002otherwise he wouldn't. So, I'm gonna step in and of course our treasurer Leases rescue is also here in case we need to shed any light on anything I'm unable to answer, but we do have two items tonight. The first item is the corrective action plan related to the external audit. It is the audit committee and then the board's determination to approve the corrective action plans. This particular corrective action plan responds to the two items laid out in the external audit fiscal year 2022. The first is pertaining to accounting software. We have discussed this at length and smarts. Our current accounting software and accounting software that's been in use for decades here is really not the current industry standard, at least for New York. It's used a lot in New Jersey, but not in New York.

003And we are seeking a completion date of October 31st, 2023 to get the migration started to the new system. And we do intend to build the '24, '25 budget in that accounting software. So, this this time next year, we will be building that budget, that future budget in that software. So, that's the first item. The second item pertained to the receivable, not billed in the athletic department billing and the athletic department doing its own billing for receivables. So, we have put processes in place to assure that any future billing is overseen by the business office and leases or rescues the responsible party for that. And that should be accomplished certainly by next month. Any questions on- Thank you so much, Drew. And we wish Stewart the best with his recovery. I'm sorry to miss him.

004I do have one question for you and maybe it's a question for Jeanie, but in terms of the target completion date for the new software it is for of October 31st. That seems pretty quick to me. So, it does, and we've been meeting and discussing on this. This is a little bit of an unusual opportunity. There is widespread internal stakeholder agreement that this change needs to be made. So, sometimes these change processes really require getting people oriented and thinking about it and then part of a decision making process, our folks are ready to go. Carol can tell you from the HR perspective, and Lisa certainly from the business office perspective. So, that's one hurdle that we're moving through much more quickly than a project like this typically would require. The second is there are really

005only two choices out there of product. So, our timeline for making the determination about which of the two products that are out there is really accelerated and we are very likely to go with one of the two given the experience of current employees with that system in other districts. So, that's really what allows for that acceleration. It's to be noted, we will live in two systems for a period of time. The idea would be like I said, build the subsequent years budget in the new system while we are closing out the current smart system. Okay, that does make sense. That explains a little bit more how you can sort of get up to speed so quickly. Okay, I don't know if any other board members have questions on this corrective action plan. Great. Ron, you

006didn't have anything? Okay, fantastic. Sorry, just didn't look at you when I was looking around. So, item 2.04, if you wouldn't mind, Drew. Thank you. So, item 2.04 reflects the report and corrective action plan associated with the office of the state controller audit that took place in this spring. Just as a reminder to the board, the office of the state controller does audit municipalities, school districts, fire districts, other types of political entities on a fairly regular basis about every five years. Just as a rep point of reference, our last audit was in the technology function in 2016, I believe. So, they came in in this past spring, they ended up focused deciding to focus on overtime and overtime controls. And I would note this time period that they examined was the time period of COVID

007where we did have higher than usual overtime costs. They also did point out a sort of error in our practice related to how overtime relates to meal periods and to adjusted work schedules such as summer hours and vacation hours. So, we appreciate the comptroller's look at that. I'll say a couple of things. First, the report had four recommendations in it. The report is available here for you and the public to see. We have a corrective action plan that responds to all four of those areas and associates, a person, an official and a completion date. So, the first area policies and procedures related to overtime controls that have written pre-approval or addressed the approval when that can't be given. And so we have that recommendation as slated to be completed by March 31st, 2023. And that's

008Stuart's responsibility. Number two is implementing procedures for supervisory review of ours worked. So, we will have those in place no later than March 31st, 2023 as well. The third one is ensure overtime is properly monitored. Again, we will have those in place by March 31st, 2023 still in Stewart's area of responsibility. And the fourth one we really have accomplished. So, we were in collective negotiations with custodians at the time that the audit took place and we were able to address the contract that specifies how overtime is to be paid in those time periods that are different, the vacation summer time period. So, we are confident that that particular recommendation has already been satisfied. I just will point out that there was a recent change that originally or in the past districts and municipalities were invited

009to submit their corrective action plans simultaneous to their response letter, the response letter saying thank you for coming and we understand the recommendations that have been made to the draft report and they perhaps that are pointing it out to them. They no longer allow that because sort of a conflict in the way the rules were written that the governing body must approve the corrective action plan, which is you, but the report couldn't be made public until they release it. So, it just so happened they released this report on Friday morning of last week. So, we had the corrective action plan ready to go, but they will be separate. Thank you for that, Drew. And before I turn it over to my fellow audit committee members for questions, I would just like to point out that

010board Vice President, Ron Schulhof and I, along with you and assistant superintendent Matt and district treasurer Lisa Zireski, all met with the state comptroller's office to review these findings in a meeting and to ask any questions before the report was published. So, I just wanna share that with the public now that we are able to. Does anybody have any questions on the corrective action plan? I have a clarifying question. I think we know the answer, but I will ask anyway just since the public may not. In terms of the implications of the overtime arrangements, does that mean that we will need to hire additional staff or what are the exact real world implications of this finding? So certainly one approach to trying to reduce overtime overall would be to increase staffing if it's cost effective

011to lessen the need for overtime. So, you will likely see in our staffing proposal in January the addition of a custodial FTE at the high school for just that reason. And we will come forward with a description of our best thinking about how that would impact overtime positively. In other words, offsetting the cost of that position by a reduction in overtime. So, thank you. Are there any other questions? Okay, great. Let's move on to action items then. Thank you, Drew, for filling in for Stewart. Item 3.01, the external audit corrective action plan and I believe that is Jim. Unfortunately I am not open. Sorry. Thank you, Jessica, would you mind? No, it's fine. So, we will be, it resolved that the audit committee recommends to the board of education that it accept... My mic was

012not working. Am I on now? Yes. Yes. Okay. Be it resolved that the audit committee recommends to the board of education that it accept the external audit corrective action plan for the 2022 fiscal year external audit. Thank you, Jessica. Is there a second? Thank you Jim. Any discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, great. Thank you. The motion carries. Item 3.02 and that is Susie. Thank you. I'd like to recommend the action that it be resolved that the audit committee recommends to the board of education that it accept the controller's audit corrective action plan for the audit entitled overtime. Thank you. Susie. Is there a second? Thank you Colleen. Any discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the motion carries. Thank you. Could I please get a

013motion to adjourn the audit committee meeting and move to the business committee meeting? Thank you. Jessica. Is there a second? Thank you Susie. Any discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Okay, great, the audit committee meeting is adjourned and we will now move to the business or the board education and business meeting and we'll start with roll call and my opening statement. Welcome and thank you to all those attending this evening's board meeting, whether in the audience via live streaming or watching later on demand. I call this meeting to order and note that all board members are present in addition to Dr. Patrick and his cabinet, with the exception of Stuart Mattie this evening, who's unable to join us due to illness. Earlier this evening, the audit committee consisting of all seven members of

014the Board of Education met to discuss the external audit corrective action plan completed in response to the report presented by the external auditor EFFPR on November 14th. The audit committee also discussed the audit report issued by the state comptroller's office, which focused on overtime and the corresponding corrective action plan. As noted during the audit committee meeting on November 8th, board Vice President Ron Schulhof and I, along with interim superintendent Dr. Patrick, assistant superintendent for business, Mr. Mattie and district treasurer, Ms. Zireski, met with members of the state comptroller's office to review their findings. The district's response to the audit was included when the report was published last Friday, December 16th. The audit committee took action this evening to recommend the board approved both corrective action plans, which includes specific steps and dates for completion of

015each action item. Since our last meeting on December 5th, the board has met an executive session six times to conduct work related to the superintendent search. Later this evening, board vice president Ron Schulhof will provide more details regarding our progress to date. Also, later this evening, the board will discuss advocacy efforts related to improving the safety for our students, faculty and staff by addressing telecommunications gaps around our buildings. Last week, interim superintendent Dr. Patrick board, Vice President Ron Schulhof and I met with our counterparts at the village to discuss these telecommunications gaps. We also discussed other areas of interest, including the proposed senior tax exemption and a possible joint future field study. Over the past few months, we have heard from a number of students at our board meetings advocating for inclusion of their holidays

016into the school calendar. These students have called attention to board policy 0105 on equity, inclusivity and diversity in education and have highlighted the feeling of belonging that could come from having their holidays recognized by the district. I have been and continue to be impressed by the caliber of our students who have so clearly articulated their positions. I want to recognize the work of Dr. Patrick, who took the time to meet with several of these students and develop various potential scenarios for the calendar, including adding additional holidays. In agenda item 10.03, Dr. Patrick will present these different scenarios to help answer questions about how additional holidays would impact the school calendar and provide a framework for the school community to provide input about the calendar. It is important to recognize that we are a diverse community

017in many ways. Young elementary students with preschool siblings, high school students with college-aged siblings, students and Scarsdale schools with siblings and private schools, students, faculty and staff who celebrate a variety of different holidays, those with family across the world and students with family right here in town, students with parents with inflexible work schedules and students with parents who have flexible schedules. This diversity is part of what makes Scarsdale a special community. While no one calendar will be able to accommodate every priority, we can try to find an appropriate balance in the school calendar. I appreciate Dr. Patrick's effort to develop multiple scenarios to provide the school community and board with the opportunity to reflect upon the multitude of trade-offs and constraints that must be considered when creating a school calendar. And finally, we look forward

018to tonight's education report, diving into our thriving students by reviewing assessments, DEI work, wellness updates, and multi-tiered systems of supports updates. And with that, I'll turn it over to you, Drew. Thank you very. And I add my good evening to everybody and welcome. Thank you for joining us for the second education report meeting of the school year. I'd like to start my comments this evening by reiterating portions of a message I sent out to the community yesterday afternoon. As all of us I think are aware, the past several weeks have seen a significant rise in respiratory illness, including the flu, RSV and COVID 19 across the region. As a result, we have had an increase in absences as these illnesses have impacted our students and our staff and our families. These illnesses have prompted an

019increasing number of students and staff to opt to wear masks during the school day, consistent with recommendations made by the CDC and the New York State Department of Health. We expect our students and staff to make the decision that makes the most sense to them and to respect each other's choices. Also, a reminder that COVID tests are available to students, families, and staff through our nurses. Students can drop by the health office and pick them up at SMS or or SHS here and at the elementary schools, a simple email to the school nurse will make sure she gets tests sent home with your child. So, if that's something you want, please take advantage of that. Presently COVID is not the most prevalent respiratory illness that we are seeing. We encourage everyone to make good choices

020and stay home and see a doctor if you're sick, especially as we approach the holiday and I know many people are looking forward to seeing family and seeing loved ones. Next is Amber noted, in addition to our education report tonight we'll be discussing the development of the 2023/'24 school calendar and looking beyond next year. I really appreciate your your remarks, Amber, noting the complexities of the interests with respect to the calendar that are out there among our stakeholders. There has already been a great deal of input from the community, which we appreciate. So, thank you. And please note we're attempting to make this year's process more transparent in order to help our community understand the pushes and pulls associated with the choices we have to make and to foster a dialogue around the values our

021school calendar does, should, or could reflect. I would like to point out right from the start that the scenarios presented tonight failed to note the timing of Passover in April of 2024. And I'll address that point further in the discussion item a little bit later. I'd also like to mention that the memo related to the IRS matter that was referenced at our last meeting is presented before the board tonight for acceptance in the consent agenda. Also last Thursday evening, I was able to attend a forum sponsored by the Lower Hudson Education Coalition, which is a legislative advocacy organization, which we belong to. The forum, featured a number of our current and newly elected state legislators and they answered questions from superintendents and from representatives from our area school boards associations. Among the most discussed topics

022were action to provide support for school safety efforts along with student mental health resources and support. The discussion was robust and happy to say these issues are clearly on the minds and on the agendas of our elected representatives. As always, a lot is happening around the district and as has become my habit, here are some of the highlights, not all, but some. Starting with the high school, the counseling department has started a practice of positive message Fridays wearing matching t-shirts with messages of kindness each week. Not only does it put a smile on student and staff faces, but it also has spread to staff in other departments and we appreciate that effort. And speaking of counseling, I do wanna once again reiterate my thanks to our counseling department at the high school for their presentation

023on December 5th about the college admissions landscape. Presentation is available on our on demand streaming TV station for those who may have missed it, and really a special thanks to Orrin Zapovich for the thorough, thoughtful, and helpful presentation that he led. Our high school students are also enjoying another residency with the Alvin Alley School of Dance. Students from our high school grades are learning the historical foundations of various dance moves as they collaboratively work with Alvin Alley professionals to choreograph presentations occurring over these weeks. We're so happy to have this program returned again. It's a really exciting collaboration. At Heath Code, our fourth graders presented their Ignite talks today about extreme weather. Students performed research, wrote their reports, created their presentations and auto advancing slides, and then they presented their work to parents and other

024teachers. They did a great job and we are of course very proud of them. At Edgewood fifth graders kept a unit on persuasion today by participating in small group debates about homework. Students perform research about all sides of the issue and then use their research to engage their classmates and also try to sway the opinions of their teachers for more homework, I'm sure. No, just kidding. So, the principal, Dr. Brown and visitors from central office, including Mr. Yang and Dr. McIntosh, were able to participate in that. At Fox Meadow, our students have been participating in the Creative Heart Project with an emphasis on the last three letters, A-R-T for White Plains Hospital, much like their friends at SMS did earlier this year. So, our Fox Meadow students created and donated nearly 200 unique art pieces

025for staff and volunteers at the hospital thanking them for their hard work and dedication to members of our community and the pictures that they received back from the hospital with those hearts in hand were priceless. Next is a quick plug for an event the Scarsdale, PTC, and CHILD are hosting in January called The Impact of Overscheduling. That event will take place on Tuesday, January 10th at seven 30 in the SMS auditorium and the presenter will be Dr. Lati McGinn, clinical psychologist and co-founder of the Cognitive and Behavioral Consultants. She specializes in cognitive behavioral treatment of anxiety, depression, and related disorders and will explore how after school activities, sports, tutors, therapy, and other demands can impact our children. And finally, as we close our calendar year, I want to express our deep gratitude to our parents,

026our family members, community members and staff who volunteer their time and share their knowledge, skills, customs and traditions with and for our students benefit. We are truly lucky to have such an engaged, caring community willing to add to the richness of the educational experience here in Scarsdale. On behalf of our school family, we want all of our student wish, all of our students and their families a restful break, a joyous holiday season and a peaceful start to 2023. Thank you so much for your opening remarks too. Those were lovely. Are there any board member reports? I have a quick report. I attended a NSBA webinar, the 2023 Legislative and State budget preview just for the community, as a reminder, NSBA or the New York State School Board Association provides many functions and benefits to school

027boards and districts, one of which is informational webinars such as this one. This one talked about the upcoming legislative session and state budget and aspects that might relate to school districts. Some examples include where state aid could be legislation that's being considered by the state that would impact public schools, things like potential mandates, whether they're funded or unfunded. So, it was very helpful just to get that preview and thanks to NBO for putting it on. And I will also mention that I have to step outta the meeting now for a short period, but I will be back soon. Thank you so much, Ron. I'm glad you were able to get your update in. Drew, I'm gonna turn it back to you for cabinet updates. Thank you very much. We have one and it's over to

028Carol. Sure. Thank you. So, I'm pleased to announce that the district has received gold certification from the New York State Local Retirement System. Over the past eight months, the data service department, payroll and business department and human resource department have collaborated to transition to an enhanced reporting system for all civil service employees. Rachel Mosley initially led this multifaceted project working with Sarah DeMartino, Christine Tanner, Tara Kim, Antoinette van Dom, Valerie Lloyd, and Carolyn Rosetti. This dedicated group of employees spent a great deal of time and effort making certain the district seamlessly and successfully transitioned to this new reporting system. So, congratulations to that team. I also have two retirements to announce this evening. Lore Lamonica, kindergarten teacher at Quaker Ridge Elementary School is retiring after 24 years of teaching service in Scarsdale. Before teaching in

029Scarsdale, Lore taught in the New York City public school system and has a total of 36 years of teaching service. Greg Leon, computer teacher at Scarsdale High School is retiring after 34 years of teaching service. Greg began teaching at Scarsdale High School in 1995 and taught in the New York City public school system prior to joining the high school faculty. I know you joined me in thanking both of these teachers for their dedicated service to the Scarsdale community. They will be missed by students, parents, and colleagues. Thank you so much, Carol, and congratulations to that team for their hard work and that certification. That's great news and thank you for sharing the news about the retirees as well. We wish them luck. Okay, if there's no further cabinet updates, we will move on to hearing

030from those present and I will 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 will not engage in dialogue. The board reserves the right

031to 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 our first public comment period to members of the audience. If anybody would like to speak, please come to the podium. Anyone can come up if they would like. Good evening. Good evening. My name is Samina Mallek and I live on 77 Tamsa Road. I'm just gonna keep it short tonight by saying thank you on behalf of the Scarsdale Muslim community for everything that you have done. It's really nice to hear that the board has taken our thoughts and considerations into account as it reminds us of how we're valued in our

032community. Thank you, Samina. Would anyone else like to speak? Hi, my name is Hum Septor. I'm 11 years old and I live on 66 Lockwood Road. It should be a day off, not only because it's a religious holiday because, but if we don't have it as a holiday, I will always have a difficult decision to make. Should I spend time celebrating my holiday with my family and friends or should I go to school so I do not miss work, a test or to make sure I'm not behind? I can either miss work on a school day or I can celebrate the this holiday with my family. It isn't fair that I have to make this decision while other students get their holidays off to spend with their family. But why can't I? Islam is the

033second largest religion in the world and I know you've may me thinking that there aren't many Muslims here in Des, but there are actually over 150 families that we know of and there may even be more. How many kids do you have to miss school to make or make this difficult decision before it matters enough to make a change. Thank you so much for your comments. Hello, I'm Iman Daisy. I'm a 10th grader and I live at seven Sylvan Lane. Thank you for listening to me for a few minutes while I explain why including the important holidays of religion outside of Judaism and Christianity are important. Firstly, it is unfair that students have to observe holidays they do not follow and none of their own. It goes against what is taught in school, in society

034and at home, which is that each religion deserves respect. It adds to the stereotype that there are certain religions superior to others when that is the farthest thing from the truth. In my case, Ess has fallen on a school day for the past several years. At some point in middle school I stopped skipping school on E because I had too much work to do. A test in one class, a project due in another, it adds an intense amount of stress to the student from both sides of the story. Are we supposed to stay in school and miss out on our culture traditions and ceremonies or are we supposed to fall behind and stress about our work while engaging in those festivities? There is no right answer besides allowing these holidays become a day of observation

035in the school calendar. Additionally, many children who observe these holidays are away from their home country where these holidays are properly acknowledged. They have to find and acclimate into their own communities here trying to replicate what their parents or they themselves might have lost when moving to America. It is a beautiful thing to be able to acclimate into a new country smoothly, balancing yourself out culturally and western early, not allowing students to take the day off to observe these holidays represses the cultural side of themselves, ultimately causing them to hold other things as more important than their own religion. To add on, it is heartbreaking to tell your elderly grandparents why you won't be at the Eid or the Diwali or the Chinese New Year celebrations that are happening during the weekdays. We never know

036how much time is left with our relatives and spending these holy days with them are treasured memories that matter more than attest to a project. It should not even be a choice for students to pick school over religion, but unfortunately in our case it is the reality. To conclude, I deeply appreciate that Scarsdale is open to including more religions into their religious holidays in their calendar for the upcoming school years. I'm hoping that future generations will not have to experience the same divide that we did. Thank you, Iman. Hello, everyone. My name is Arru Naika and I live at 39, Weaver Street. I'm a freshman here at Scarsdale High School and I'm thrilled to have the opportunity to speak here tonight. I just wanted to express my thoughts and opinions on two key issues that

037affect not only Scottsdale's youth but the entire community as a whole. The first problem is the proper observance of cultural holidays. And so basically for years my family and other families of separate communities have noticed that the state of New York as a whole hasn't recognized the diversity of its population and the fact that schools wouldn't be closed on holidays. Various religious holidays made it seem as though the diversity of cultures that made up the percent that doesn't follow Judaism or Christianity wouldn't ever be acknowledged. And it was clear that holidays like the Volley and Eid and Lunar New Year didn't weigh in against the more mainstream celebrations like Christmas and Hanukkah and that these holidays weren't seen in the same light. And this underrepresentation of cultures that are already swept under the rug is

038not only unfair, but also casts a negative light on our efforts to respect all cultures equally, it seemed appropriate to finally put some light on this crucial problem of equal representation of cultures as the holiday season draws near. I've been taking initiative in this matter for the past week, along with a few other classmates and in just two days we were able to assemble about 150 campaign supporters in general in favor of enabling families to properly observe their holidays by closing schools on these religious holidays. However, the only conflict that must be sorted out is what to do with the existing breaks in the calendar. I request that the board take into account the fact that eliminating from the current breaks that we have and snow days that we currently enjoy as students and takes

039a mental health break from all our schoolwork would be completely unfair. And for the record, this request isn't only being made to simply have more time off from school or have less time in class, but rather to overall increase in ensure equal representation of all cultures within our community. And I ask that the board proceed with the necessary changes to the calendar so that these holidays are included. The absence of student input in administrative decisions is the second issue I'd like to talk about. So, the Board of Education in my opinion, should consider student feedback when making administrative decisions since it offers a very distinct viewpoint on matters that directly affect us, the students, and I believe administrators can better serve the interests and concerns of their students by incorporating feedback from students into policies

040and decisions. The formation of a student council can also give students a sense of ownership, empowerment and confidence that is often lacking in many other extracurricular activities. And students having the ability to actively participate in their education and in directing ideas to better help the school environment is very much crucial. My proposition is that a group of high school students get together with the superintendent and or various board members at least biweekly or weekly to debate important issues affecting the youth population as well as potential solutions. I ask that the board also consider this idea. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Arun. Is there anybody else in the audience? Hi, everyone, my name's a Tia Mallek and I live at 77 Tusk Road. I just wanted to take a few brief seconds.

041First of all, like my daughter said, to thank you guys for all the work and effort that you have put in into the calendars. I am the daughter of an immigrant. I am also Muslim. One of my first memories of celebrating a holiday is Christmas. My parents were the only Muslims in their town and they were invited to a Christmas celebration and because they didn't have family nearby, that is what they celebrated. So, I don't have any memories of Eid, don't have any memories of Hanukkah because there were no Jewish community members in our town. As I grew older and we moved to New York after I got married, my children were introduced to Hanukkah. Again, no Muslim students, they were the only ones. We created Eid traditions in our home, but they cannot replicate

042what you find in a community. The fact that Eid is even being considered means more than you can even imagine. Little kids will know that they matter. Children will be able to go and say, when a teacher asks what holiday do you celebrate? They will say Eid with pride and know that their teachers know what they are talking about. Again, this is not saying that one holiday is more than another or something should be given preference, but as a minority, as somebody who never had the opportunity to celebrate these growing up again, it means more than you can even imagine. And now I'm getting emotional, so I'm gonna step back. Thank you so much again. Thank you for your comments Ms. Mellik. Is there anyone else in the audience that would like to speak? Hi,

043good evening. My name is Jane Dishi and I live on five Gilmore Court. My daughter actually spoke here I think at two meetings before. So, first of all, I'd like to thank the administration and the board for proposing the new calendars. It's the first time we actually see the possibility of having those holidays added to the calendar. I am an immigrant from China. My husband is also an immigrant. So, back in China when I was little, celebrating Chinese New Year is the happiest day in my whole life. We would be counting down, it's a very long celebration. So, since my kids were born, we always tell them about the holidays, the traditions, what we would do and then every time I would be like, but you cannot do that because you know you have school.

044And I think my daughter also talked about how one year I decided to be the good mom and put them out of school and all she could think about is the test that might happen the next day, the homework that she has missed. So, she can never really enjoy those holidays. We moved here, let me see, we moved here about seven or eight years ago and honestly the first few months has been had been challenging for my daughter and she told me she didn't feel the community was very inclusive. She says she felt different as the time goes by, I think she finally found her own friend group and everything and things are getting better. But by adding the Luna New Year and Eid and Diwali into the holidays calendar, I think really shows that

045we are an inclusive community and as a minority, we feel that our holidays are appreciated and celebrated as well. So, again, I wanna thank you for all your effort and I really hope this is the time that we can make this a reality. Thank you so much. Thank you for your comments, Dishi. Is there anybody else in the audience that would like to speak? Dear, Dr. Patrick, members of the district and the Board of Education, my name is Shitra Maheta. I live at 74 Drek Road in Scarsdale and I'm not speaking on behalf of any organization. I am a Hindu, but my first point here is a big thank you to all of you for including days off for Eid in one of the options presented for the school calendar for 2023, '24. For my

046Muslim friends who celebrate Eid, there's nothing more special than being able to celebrate the holiday with their kids before they go off to college. When Diwali and lunar New Year fall on weekdays in the coming years, it's my earnest hope that the school calendar will include days off for those as well. Additionally, I also want to thank you for the option of two weeks of holiday recess in December. Many families like mine who like to travel overseas in December find it very hard to do so if there's just one week off, which is not enough time to make an overseas trip. Also, December is an ideal time to visit family in parts of the world that are way too hot to visit during the summer. Two weeks off during winter break allows enough time to

047travel internationally to see family when the weather is not unbearably hot there. The diversity of the community is one of the strengths of Scarsdale and I thank you all in recognizing, respecting and enabling the residents in celebrating their respective identities, cultures, and needs. Thank you Ms. Netta. Is there anybody else in the audience that would like to speak? Okay, let's move to the Zoom. I understand there may be some problems for people watching live trying to log into the Zoom. Do we have any updates on that? Not at the moment. Give me one second. Okay, so we'll just for those that are watching remotely that may wish to comment, we understand there are some issues with the Zoom. We hope you'll give us a moment. Perhaps I will be able to help you. Is anyone,

048there are four participants. There are? So people are able to get into the Zoom. Are they raising their hands? I see one hand being raised. Okay, so I'm not sure what the problems are if some people are getting into the Zoom. I just tried like from here to click the link and it is asking for a passcode. So, but maybe. Susie, perhaps you can ask those people how if they put in a passcode. Okay, we have it. We have the passcode. So, the passcode is, and maybe Michelle can send it out. The passcode is 806110. Again, that's if you are watching remotely. The passcode is 806110. And Susie, why don't we start with the first person who has their hand raise. Thank you. Our first participant is is Mayra. Mayra, do you hear me? Okay,

049I'm promoting you now to speak. Hi Susie, are you able to hear me hear me. Yes, I am able to hear you. Okay, I think- Hi, Susie or someone, are you all able to hear me? Okay, hold on. Myra, give us a minute. Okay, thank you Susie. And I'm sorry my camera for some reason I'm not being allowed to turn it on, but thank you very much for having this meeting and especially to discuss the calendars. My family and I interpret this really as a great sign of open-mindedness on the part of the administration to include the many cultures and religions that we're lucky to have in Scarsdale. My family and I are very aware how challenging it is to put together the calendar with all of the different state mandates and federal holidays and

050union contracts and all that. So, we really appreciate how time consuming this is. So, we thank you Dr. Patrick and everybody else who's been involved in this. We fully support including Eid, Diwali and Lunar New Year. It's high time that these members of our community are really included and made to feel welcome here. I've had the pleasure of working with many of these different communities in various multicultural and diversity projects and they're really a fantastic group of people and I really hope they get their holiday. I also hope that we find a way to get at least one or two days for Pesach. That's obviously a very important holiday here, not only in Scarsdale but in a lot of the United States and the world. So, I hope we can find a way to include

051Pesach. Perhaps this is a good time to ask whether we can start shortening the February vacation. I know that a lot of people ski during that time. Perhaps that is a religion for some, maybe we need to shorten the march April break and not get a whole week and maybe just get from Good Friday to Easter Monday. So, I encourage all of you to think of all of these different ways to include everybody. And certainly a two week holiday in December, January would be fantastic. I know it's not always possible, but it is a great time for mental and emotional health break and to give us time to travel and frankly to learn about different cultures when we are able to leave outside of Scarsdale. Thank you everybody for the efforts on the calendar. Merry

052Christmas and happy holidays to everybody. Thank you Myra. Susie, is anybody else on the. Yes, Lauren Grossberg, you are being promoted to speak. Can you hear me? Yes, we can hear you. Okay, thank you. Me calling. Hello? Can you hear me? My stream is muted so I hope that feedback isn't coming from me and I also can't turn on my camera so I apologize. But my name is Lauren Grossberg, I am calling in on behalf of the Scarsdale PT Council Executive Committee and our PTC DEI co-chairs. This statement is in regards to adding the holidays to the school calendar. So, the Scarsdale PT Council has been working closely with the district over the course of the last few years to make diversity, equity and inclusion a priority within our schools, both at the curriculum level

053and throughout our many PTC and PTA offerings. We are fortunate to live in a diverse community with people of all different backgrounds who celebrate many different holidays, festivals, and cultural events. The PT council thinks it is of the utmost importance for all community members to feel included and for our students of all backgrounds to have an equitable experience. That equity would be vastly improved by adding the proposed holidays, Diwali, lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr and Ed alATA to our district calendar for days off of school. We applaud and support any efforts by the district and faculty to limit the amount of work and tests and or allow extensions for students who celebrate and observe these or other holidays. However, these options, as we've repeatedly heard from our students, can add other stress to their and

054their families' lives as they feel pressure to keep up with their classmates who are in school making it difficult for them to fully enjoy their holidays. As Dr. Patrick shared in his thorough calendar look backwards and forwards, it is possible to add these holidays as days off with limited disruption to the calendar overall. Other school districts from New York City to New Jersey are making these changes and we would love to lead the way for Westchester Schools to do the same. For these reasons, the PT Council executive committee and our PTC DEI co-chairs are in full support of making this change going forward. Thank you for your consideration and personally I was happy to hear the additional note of taking another look at Passover, but thank you very much for all the time and effort

055put into this. We think it'll make a huge difference. Thank you. Yes. Chelsea, you're afraid to speak? Hi, can you hear me? Yes. Hi Derek. Good evening everyone. My name is Chelsea Wang. I live at 34 Graduate Road. I'm here to request the Scarsdale reduced number of early dismissal in half days in elementary school. I have young children at the elementary school level and I'm very disappointed when I look at the proposed calendar and see the large number of early dismissal days in the school district. I think there are 12 or 13 of them in New York City where my children previously attended school. There were only four half days and they also took into consideration the Luna New Year and Diwali. But I also noticed that other peer schools in the district such as

056Chautauqua, Brownsville, they only have five or six half days. Now, this 13 half days is extremely disruptive to young children and it's a huge burden to my family and to families that are dual career and single parent families. So, I'm here to strongly urge that the board of education revise the school calendar to reduce number of early dismissal days so that we can be on par with our neighbors schools. Thank you very much. Thank you. Okay, we have, sorry, we have another one more panel. Diana, you're allowed to talk. Thank you. Hi, can you hear me? I don't think you can see me. Sorry. Yes, hello? Oh great. Thank you. I'm Dinna Cohen and I live in Heath Coat. Thank you for the opportunity to speak today. I'm here to speak about the elementary school

057half days as well. Scarsdale has 13 elementary school, half days for K through two and 10 for grade three through five place randomly throughout the week. This is problematic for a few reasons. Young children thrive on consistency on schedules. OHS, the Office of Headstart program for the United States says that schedules help children feel secure and comfortable. It says a predictable routine is important for young children to self-regulate. Half days are disruptive and bad for young children's learning and behavior. Children are our true north in Scarsdale. It's why we all moved here. If something is bad for our kids, why are we doing it? Half days are disruptive to parents' schedule, especially for working mothers who make up 50% of the community. Who can take off 13 days from work to pick up their kid.

058On top of that, the hourly rate for a caregiver has doubled post COVID, making them unaffordable for most families and leaving many in the lurch. I'm confident that we can make changes to our school schedule and the reason that I'm so confident is that all of our peers have significantly fewer half days placed adjacent to weekends and holidays. There are schools that have half days for conferences. There's schools that have half days for holidays. There are schools that have half days at the end of the year and there's schools that close for Eid, Diwali and Lunar New Year. There's no school except for Scarsdale that wants to do it all. I sympathize with the administration. It's very challenging to develop the calendar and I appreciate the transparency. That said, every school contends with state requirements,

059mandated holidays and teachers unions and the median number of half dates in our surrounding neighborhoods is six, half of what we have. New York City closes for the four considered holidays and they have four half days. That's one third of what we have. As long as you're maintaining the instructional hours for the students, we're not asking teachers to work more hours. We're only asking you to rearrange the schedule to minimize disruption. What I have yet to hear is what is the argument for the half days? Our teachers are professionals. They pride themselves on their ability to educate our children. I have seen the passion and the love for our children, for my children's teachers. If the disruptive schedule is bad for our kids learning, it's hard for me to believe that our teachers actually want

060them. There is a significant community support for this change. We have over 150 signatures on a petition that is launched less than 24 hours ago, and it's during a time when many people are focused on the holidays and illnesses with their young children. Because of this, I urge you to consider the change to reduce the half days and place them in a way that would be less disruptive for the students. Thanks. Thank you. There are some other participants, but none of them with their hands raised, so may wanna give it a minute. Why don't we give them another second or two. Nobody's facing the camera. Yeah, I'm gonna just watch. Okay, let's go ahead and close this public comment period and we will move on to item 7.01. Follow up to public comment. I believe

061almost all of our comments directly related to the calendar, so we have an agenda item 10.03 later where we will be discussing the scenarios. So, I think we'll defer most of those. We did have one comment on a proposal to consider a student council to the board and I think that is something that the board can consider. I don't know if you have anything to add, Drew? No, I really appreciate all of the public comment and it's always a pleasure to see our students come to the microphone. I would definitely like to follow up with the room and see if we can have a conversation about that and report back. I will share a little bit during the calendar item in the future. Yeah, the calendar item 10.03 that just a little bit about what

062the board's responsibility is versus what the administration's responsibility is and we'll make all of the materials related to the calendar item and the video of that presentation available on our district calendar page, the district level page as opposed to school level. If you go to the district website, you will see under calendars you'll see a link that says District calendar, one page summary. That is the link that we will use to like have all these materials so people can go and kind of follow what's going on. Thank you so much, Drew. And just a reminder to anyone who spoke, if you'd like to email your comments to the board of Ed, you're welcome to do so. All right, let's move on to item eight, the consent agenda and 8.01. I'll read the preamble. The board

063may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda and 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 in consultation with the president and or the 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 material 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.

064The 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 business of the school district. Would anybody like to remove anything from the consent agenda? Hearing nothing, we will move on to item nine, which is the consent agenda and that's Jessica. The consent, my voice broke. Just the wrong moment. Sorry. The consent agenda has 12 items. One item 9.01, the minutes from the business meeting of December 5th, 2022, 9.02, the minutes from special meetings, 9.03, personnel certified, 9.04, personnel non-certified, 9.05, the external audit, 9.06, the office of the State Comptroller Audit- Corrective Action plan, 9.07, the claims audit report from November, 2022, 9.08, the revised policy and exhibit 2340- on notice of

065meetings. Item 9.09, the IRS matters memo revised, 9.10, the stipulation of settlement, 9.11, contracts over $20,000- Research for Better Teaching Inc, and finally, 9.12, accepting the consent agenda. I move the board, accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you. Jessica. Is there a second? Thank you, Bob. Well, no discussion, consent, agenda. All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Great, thank you. The consent agenda passes and we will move on to item 10.01, the education report. Okay. Thank you very much. Before I turn it over to Edgar to present tonight, I just wanna remind the board and the community that we have organized our education reports this year a little bit differently. We've organized them around themes that we believe can meaningfully articulate our priorities for teaching and learning, and illustrate how our approaches

066to the work are visible across programs, disciplines, and levels of education. Tonight's presentation is titled, thriving Students, the Structures and Methods that support Student wellbeing, inclusion, empathy, and Joy. Dr. McIntosh and some distinguished guests will illustrate some of the ways that we connect our wide community and help our students to be both good at learning and at life. Take it away. Thank you, Drew. And thank you. A warm welcome to the members of the community in person and online. It is my pleasure to present an educational report focused on how we support nurture and empower thriving students in Scarsdale. We discussed many standardized measures in our last education report. Measures in which students as a whole in Scarsdale do very well at the secondary level and across all the elementary schools. Many educators follow the

067research of Dr. Young Zhao, a university professor and author of many noted books on education, including "Counting What Counts", "Reframing Education Evaluation". SAL Studies indicate that an over-reliance and over focus on standardized measures can actually do harm and take away from precious time and energy on developing and assessing essential skills like the ability to work with people of other cultures, communicate with those with different perspectives, and think complexly about global challenges. Not surprisingly, his and others' research point to key indicators of success that include self-confidence, hopefulness, social capital, teamwork, conscientiousness, openness to new experiences, empathy, curiosity, and passion. These skills and dispositions are rarely formally tested, but highly valued by educational researchers, our community and future employers. And yes, as Oren and his team will attest, even college admissions officers. There's a movement in fact

068to have these formally designated soft skills renamed power skills to more clearly articulate their importance today and a post ChatGPT world. If you don't know what that is, Google it if you dare. In this educational report, I will highlight some ways we both support and nurture these power skills through our teaching methods, structures and the environment we create and the joyful opportunities we provide, as noted up there from a shot from AMAE to ensure all our students thrive. I'll start by describing our strategic multi-leveled focus on WIDE, wellbeing, inclusion, diversity, and equity with a lens on last year, this year and next. Afterwards I'll talk about some of the visioning we've been doing, specifically what we hope our high school graduates will be prepared for in the ever shifting landscape ahead. I'll then discuss the

069structures we value in our elementary learning environments, structures that promote students at all levels to engage and grow. Next, I'll invite two colleagues, Shauna Fraezin, Middle School Librarian, and Brooke Busey, middle school health teacher to talk about how they're working together, building empathy through guided reading research with students on the power of reading fiction. We'll then take a look at some of the opportunities we provide for our students to have choices and social connections. Bravo to assistant principal, Chris Kauflin, who is dressed up as a Turkey for a joy filled community building activity the Wednesday before Thanksgiving. It will be my pleasure to welcome up Heather Waters, global coordinator and a student ambassador, Carson Cohen, to help describe our exciting evolutions to student-centered global partnerships. And then quickly thank and Excuse Carson because it is

070a Monday night the week before break. Finally, I will be joined by Eric Rauchadolf to talk about the ways we create access and opportunity for all our students to thrive through support structures, resources, programs, and skilled practitioners. So, we'll start with a chart. Here's a chart that outlines our growth in the last three years in wellbeing and DEI or WIDE. A letter not included here, but truly important is B for belonging, which is the outcome of a celebration of diversity, the respect that is demonstrated by equity and authentic inclusion. Social scientists are in full agreement in order to best thrive, one must feel a sense of belonging. At the top, you'll see the focus of the district level compact committee. Following the chart from left to right and yellow, you'll see the focus on DEI,

071and then wellness this year and then next year we anticipate a focus on the intersection of both. You'll also see in green the targeted work we have done with our consultant, Dr. Derek Gay. Last year assured training with our leadership group and this year with parents, educators and support personnel across the district. He will also be helping us in the development of a climate assessment tool in the form of a survey. Next year, he will guide us through the analysis in planning a response to the survey. It is essential that our long-term plan is responsive to our community's expressed needs rather than reactive to assumptions. Concurrently, you will see that adaptations, additions and revisions to our resources, professional learning and practices are ongoing, as is our engagement with content and level specific consultants. For example,

072at the most recent DEI PTA committee meeting, I was able to share some of the evidence of those changes by highlighting the expansion of classroom and school libraries and demonstrating shifts in the high school curriculum through the addition of over 50 common texts or textbooks in the last five years that reflect a culturally responsive and sustaining framework through multiple perspectives, examining structures of bias and widening representation. In other words, while while we developed a survey, we continue a pathway forward that responds to already identified needs. Parent family engagement is key and part of the latest work with Derek Gay. He met last week in this room with all the chairs of the building level, DEI committees to provide some important framing of the work and get feedback from this connected group on the areas in

073which the work is going well in addition to areas where there are opportunities for growth. A major goal of the meeting was to inform the upcoming spring parent workshop that Dr. Gay will be leading. In keeping with the theme of a responsive approach to the work, we have a steering committee made up of representative educators from across the school to guide Dr. Gay's time and focus during his four day onsite consultancies. To our upcoming in February, one of them has been scheduled to coincide with the March Superintendent's Conference day and the day following. And while we are planning these important learning times, other work in diversity, equity, inclusion and belonging continues throughout the district. Beyond what I mentioned earlier, we are continuing partnerships with diverse group of artists, including, as Drew mentioned, and new interactive

074historical learning sites. There are also several STI learning opportunities and site specific consultancies including most recently Colleen Cruz who has been working closely with the middle school. This important work is to create a sense of true belonging for our students so they can thrive. I wanted to give you a peak at a draft for what the high school is working on. The profile of an SHS graduate. This vision is still being developed and needs reviewed by important stakeholders, the compact committee, the PTA, and the school government. I show it to you now to highlight some key areas. We want our students to be knowledgeable and skillful practitioners, but also compassionate leaders, critical thinkers, empathetic, curious, resilient, engaged citizens, and possess the ability to recognize and appreciate multiple perspectives. An entire section is de dedicated to

075non-SIBI, not for oneself. I show it to you now to draw the clear line between the efforts to authentically engage in DEI and our vision for our students to develop power skills right along hard skills. The exercise and backward design, starting with a vision of an ideal outcome is a good way to check our priorities and guide our decisions. This is a good segue to talk about some of the structures that build these skills for all of our students. The elementary workshop model, for example, in English language arts, is designed to provide explicit support as needed, but also allows students to make choices about reading and writing topics, build stamina and passion, follow curiosity and experience joy. Drew mentioned Eric William and I had a chance to sit in on a group of fifth graders,

076debating the pros and cons of homework with in enthusiasm and also research citations. Likewise, as we've presented to the board and the community, our math lessons are designed to include all students the low floor, high ceiling, and invite exploration, risk taking and perseverance. And yes, because hard skills or math facts are important, those practices are built in. In addition, we value students having opportunities to learn through hands-on experiments and science, collaborative projects using technology to communicate to an authentic audience and student chose an inquiry. Students also gain skills through Spanish language classes, physical education and music and the arts, opportunities for students to learn from and with each other across a range of abilities. This is also a foundational time in which students are engaging in the perspectives of others. I am happy to pause

077my talking for a moment and now invite my colleagues, Brooke and Shauna to share an innovative way they are working together to teach empathy. And thank William for moving the slides forward and then passing the wand onto Shauna. All right, so we have a practice at the middle school beginning with gratitude. So, I wanna thank all of you for your service, your time, and the opportunity present to present. I'm Shauna, I'm the librarian at the middle school. And I'm Brooke, the health sixth teacher at the middle school. So, in our sixth grade curriculum, we participate in bullying prevention. So, we're here today to share a collaboration between the library and health meant to support students in empathy, wellbeing, inclusion, and joy. Thanks for that coaching. Okay, so, the lesson that we collaborated on was an

078inquiry lesson, and we posed this question to the students. Can reading help stomp out bullying? So, we bookended the lesson with a pre-assessment and a post assessment, and we asked students to respond to that inquiry question, can reading help stomp out bullying. We had some yeses, some maybes, some nos in response to this question. So, take a look. Our favorite part of the lesson is studying the student work. Then next, we had curated a Padlet, which had 15 or 16 different articles about the relationship between reading and empathy from 15 or 16 different news organizations. We folded in a little media literacy, asking the kids to read across all the headlines first to compare and contrast those headlines, and then to choose an article that they were interested in reading. This part was followed up

079with discussion where the students talked about what they noticed and what they learned first in small groups, and then as a whole group. And as the librarian, whenever I have students in the library, I seize the opportunity to make book recommendations. And this time I shared these three titles through the lens of the ways that my empathy grew by reading each of them. We then shared this quote with the students. In short, if we want better people, then we want more empathy. And if reading fiction can help some of us get there, then why wouldn't we encourage everyone to pick up a book a little more often? And on that note, we curated a padlet of over 50 different high interest titles that we felt would really lend themselves to building kids empathy through reading.

080And the students had time to browse the Padlet and to bookshop and to check out books. We then closed with our post assessment. So, we asked students to respond to that original inquiry question, can reading help stomp out bullying? And here is a sampling of their brilliance. Thank you for your time. Thank you so much, Shauna and Brooke. So, a few years ago I had a chance to see Dr. Young speak. He said something that stuck with me. He said, while choosing schools for his own children, he didn't look at standardized testing scores at all. Rather, he looked at a number of the number of student clubs the school had. Students, clubs, especially as run by students themselves, encourage students to develop interest, engage and negotiate socially work for change, and build skills in creative

081and critical thinking that can lead to entrepreneurship, fulfillment and self-determination and life and career. We are proud to say that the high school has a truly impressive number of clubs, currently 80 active student organizations that are vetted by committee and are all student-run. As well as building power skills, these clubs by design serve as spaces of belonging. The vast majority of our students are involved in at least one of these clubs. The middle school also has clubs based on student interests. Everything from a Lego club to a knitting club to robust modified sports for our seventh and eighth graders. The modified program started 19 years ago and has grown immensely with the addition of multiple teams in sports. This fall season, for example, 255 students participated after school, an untapped market was discovered. And this

082year we started their first boys volleyball club with over 53 boys participating. According to Ray, the high school fall season for the high school was the strongest and recent memory. We had 583 students participate as members of 27 teams allowing 40% of our student body to participate in interscholastic athletics. In the theater world, our SMS play anticipates the middle school in place anticipates 60 to 70 in the cast and about 20 on stage crew. So, Drew, is there any way you can hit the little music cue there? Yeah, right over there. Just hit that button right there. How's the volume. ♪ Everywhere up expectation hanging in here ♪ The drama production, mama Mia at the high school involved approximately 90 students, actors, musicians, tech crew, and production staff. I bumped into a rehearsal in the

083hallway the week before the show, and it was pure joy. I was contemplating actually for tonight, arranging a flash mob with students jumping up from the audience at this point. But it is a Monday night, so Carson's the only one who's and okay, it's right. But, so wait, I got a sound clip from the show to give you a sense. Thanks to Mike Babs and Ben for passing it on. Thank you so much. We know that all every single one of these connections to schools outside of the traditional schedule involvement are powerful and contribute to wellbeing and connection. I now wanna expand from discussing local connections, interpersonal connections to global connections. And for that, I'd like to invite Heather Waters to talk about the current offerings and opportunities for authentic global connection, virtual and in

084person and high school senior Carson Cohen to talk about his personal experience. Before Heather starts, I'll start with some background on some important collaboration and benchmarking. You might have heard about the Scarsdale Public School entered a partnership with a research team at Teachers College Columbia University more than a decade ago, together with exemplary international schools in Helsinki and Singapore to form the Global Learning Alliance or the GLA. The GLA focused on bringing together school leaders from high performing innovative schools worldwide, as well as scholars from top educational universities to examine exemplary practices in teaching and learning collaboratively. As the GLA moved forward with successful conferences, there was increasing interest in expanding from a school leadership participation to one that was more student-centered, and that specifically involved more and more students. After a conference in Singapore

085in 2016 and one in Helsinki in 2018, Scarsdale was set to be the international host in the spring of 2020. And as we know some great innovations grow from disruptions. Heather has been a leader in the evolutions that came out of our experiences. So, I'll let her talk you through some of the exciting iterations and our commitment to assured global experiences. And we'll hear from Carson about what he learned through the journey. So, we've really looked at our existing programs and gotten feedback from the participants, looked at some of the data and the goals or standards that we built them on and sometimes and evaluated our partners. And we've we're growing pretty rapidly in this area. And there's a real thirst as as seen from the public speaking tonight. That's a lot of what our

086discussions are. We did a Moroccan exchange and we talked about Eid and the kids taught each other. And so we've really grown to making it more student-centered. We were lucky enough four years ago, and thank you to the board, to join the GBG, the Global Education Benchmark Group, which is really for adults, looking at global directors, looking at global programs. We're the only public school in it, I believe it's big prep schools, many local, the rest across the nation and the world. And we all have that same goal of looking at the global competencies and we connected to our curricula. And then also how do we develop active global citizens. Right now we have a series of programs. We have the Envoys program, which is a Saturday program. We were lucky enough, we had kids

087so inspired by it that they actually came to me and asked like, "Couldn't we do our own program with this?" We actually had Mr. Shulk and Mr. Sterling as our local, Mr. Disnyake, who's a Sri Lankan, does work in Sri Lanka on Giving Back, and then Mr. Dosel, who is a local resident, and his son graduated from here, he's also working with us right now on, if you look at the third slide on the Global Entrepreneurship Challenge, which we have schools in Jakarta, in Italy, in Argentina, I'm sure the Argentinians are very happy right now. But really taking, looking at issues in the community and talking about what that looks like in their various communities around the world and connecting it through the UNSDGs to their coursework, both science, social studies, English, and kids are

088really engaging with each other and talking about these issues and designing real things as entrepreneurs, Parson, that can help their communities. And we've had this each year and we thought, well, couldn't we take this global? And it's the sort of an example of how we're growing. We also have a series of exchanges where now the travels back and yay that we are in the middle of an Italian exchange. They were here in September. There we are in Grand Central and Carson's house. And really rich experiences that allow our kids to step out of Scarsdale and really look at things in through new eyes and have new understandings. We're happy to have travel back, but when it was gone, we were able to reinvent and being part of that network of sort of like, okay, guys,

089what do we do now? We can't go anywhere. And really creating this very rich virtual opportunities. And now we have both. And that's been a goal from our very beginning with Mr. Banomo and Ms. O. Gorman and Dr. McIntosh of sort of how do we offer these global experiences to more students? And now that travels back, that's wonderful, there's a real power in place, but we are keeping the virtual, which is still, I think, untapped the potential of that. So, we're in a growth moment and we're looking to engage in other networks. And again, before we design something, we really look at how does this fit Scarsdale? And looking at sometimes data from the Piza reports on global competencies, the Asia Society, and their sort of standards for global competency. And we're really in an

090exciting moment. Speaking of which. Hi, my name is Carson Cohen and I'm a senior at Scarsdale. I'm honored to be speaking in front of you guys tonight. I was fortunate enough to be provided the opportunity to participate in the Talent Exchange Program. While I was initially reluctant to sign up for the program, unsure of the commitment it would require, how it can potentially conflict with my senior in school extracurriculars and outside of school work. I was wrong. Needless to say, the two weeks in my September were one of the most insightful and inspirational and transformative experiences of my high school career. Hosting Emiliano, my exchange counterpart, gave me new in insight into Italian traditions, allowed me to practice greater cross-cultural communication and provided me with a more nuanced understanding of the world. After learning about

091Emiliano's love and affinity for soccer I took him to his first soccer again. And even after the wrong team had scored, he was still smiling and his smile was contagious. And I beamed back, right back at him. I'm happy to share that my peers shared similar experiences that I did. Similarly in at entrepreneurship, the class participated in a similar global entrepreneurship challenge in which we focus on local problems on a more global scale. We worked with individuals, learned from them, garnered their perspectives, and festered our own ideas and created our own solutions. I wanna express my sincere gratitude and appreciation for all of you guys in facilitating me and my peers for taking this initiative and for having this as an opportunity at Scarsdale School. Thank you both. We know that social emotional wellbeing is

092essential. Looking at the wide work ahead, we know that we have areas of growth to focus on. We are, for example, exploring resources related to more insured experiences for our students in the social and emotional learning realm, providing students with important tools of resilience, self-regulation, and confidence, to name a few. As we look at our pathways, we are dedicated to an integrated approach rather than simply an add-on program. Here's a graphic of the well studied castle framework, one in which the best approaches are built, approaches that serve and benefit all students. I do want to shift our attention at this point to student support. As we've described at past meetings, the district resources has been given to structures, programs and support. We provide for students whose needs require special and responsive attention. Eric and I

093will spend a few slides providing really updates to some of these important supports that you've heard about. So, we'll start with an update on the elementary MTSS or the multi-tiered system of support structure. And we have some good news to share. The students and the administrators who are using the new updated common form have found it valuable. It's easier now to share resources, especially a lot of resources are being shared around executive functioning across the schools. There's Titan communication through some common processes that we put in place between teacher and committee. And this picture was an exciting one that I took as I came to drop in on an MTSS meeting. Teacher had videotaped a student discussing his mathematical thinking. And while it's traditional to brings student work to these meetings, this illuminates the process.

094This technology illuminates the process the student used, which provided the committee better insights and more targeted strategies for support. We continue to refine our process to provide optimal support in the area of a social-emotional learning, which has been identified by the teachers as a priority and for something for us to focus on. I think it's really important to recognize, we talk about a common form, but really what it is a building of a common set of principles and a common set of information that we look at across students, across schools, across professionals, which really helps to assure the same outcomes as far as support goes for students in various classes, various grades and various schools. So, it's really been an an opportunity for us to pull together the best practices that are happening in each

095school and help drive those into the processes at other schools, while at the same time allowing people to share information, share best approaches, share best practices, and have a little bit more streamlined ability to collect that information and not reinvent the wheel for different students as we've moved down the road. So, it's been fruitful work for our clinicians, our teachers, and our administrators. So, first I would like to thank the board again for providing us with the additional resources in this year's budget. As a quick review, we expanded our so Scarsdale support program from the high school to the middle school. And we've added a social worker in both the middle school and high school, and a school psychologist at the high school as well. It's important to recognize that we are in the first

096three to four months of this implementation. And I have early results all, which are really wonderful to hear. So, in the next slide, I'll start with the Scarsdale support program. Currently we have 10 students to sixth graders to seventh and sixth, eighth graders, which is the spread we've kind of expected for this first year. We're looking to maintain that number moving into next year with certain students moving in this year and fifth graders who would make good sixth grade candidates for it. So, it's developing its pathway and fifth grade teachers and schools are understanding it and kind of working it into their thinking as far as what the most appropriate supports for students are. First and foremost students, and we asked the teachers of the Scarsdale support program to talk with students in the weeks

097coming to this presentation, asking them about how their experience this year versus last year. And we heard an emerging theme of less social angst and more feelings of comfort within the buildings because they are provided with a home base that allows them to find consistent support in the moments where they need it most. Whereas previous to this, often it was finding your trusted adult, but that trusted adult might be anywhere in what anybody has walked around the middle school in a very large place. And the second is, we've looked at the data and early first quarter results, we're seeing a market improvement in academic instruction for the students in those classes year over year. And again, early returns, but this is a really promising sign. I wanted to take a second to also focus on

098what we're doing within the counseling within this program. And it's really a look, it's within a CBT model, but focusing on DBT, which really focuses on mindfulness, managing emotions, enhancing relationships, and increasing distress tolerance. Those are the key principles of DBT. And our students are reporting with their feet. They're not missing counseling sessions, they're there, they're engaged, they're participating in the group. So, that's a wonderful sign. I've been into the room many times and you can tell the comfort that some of the kids have in there because they are engaging in a way that is both productive and emotionally warm with everybody there. So, we've had really great success. The middle school program has mirrored many of the best aspects of the SSP at the high school, but it's been adapted really to a different

099schedule and a different developmental age. In addition to the feedback we've received from the students themselves and the parents about the student experience, I think it's important to also recognize, we've heard from many of our counselors and clinicians that the program has allowed for more focus on proactive measures, which was originally the goal, mainly because the outreach and including outreach because the students who needed more intensive support have that provided outside of the regular structure of social-emotional support, which has really freed up both our psychologists, our house counselors, and obviously the new social worker to look outward at students who might not be having the intense needs, but engage in a way that keeps small problems small rather than not engaging until the small problems become medium sized problems and sometimes large problems. Next slide.

100And then focusing on our additional counseling staff. Really it's allowed our YSP, our youth services project, to kind of return to the original project's goal. The YSP has been able to restart leadership programs. They've been able to become, be more present in classes, doing outreach, hitting all of our health classes in the middle and high school to let students know where they are, how to get in touch and do some of that, what I'll call transient counseling that students need for emerging things going on in their lives. They've started non formalized, mandated DBT groups, executive functioning and anxiety groups, but for students who need assistance that may not fall into classified. And that's happened both at the middle and the high school. A streamlined process has been engaged at the high school, particularly for referring

101and engaging new students and there's an increased focus on direct and referral-based family support. So, our social workers are really taking on the ability to look at outside agencies and when families are in distress, provide them with referrals that can really be helpful and sometimes need an expert to navigate. Because if you've ever tried to go out there and find support in this atmosphere, a call from a school clinician really helps to open doors and understand what's out there. At the middle school, the social worker has been able to push into all the sixth grade classes and co-taught with Brooke Busey a growth mindset class. She's also been able to get into all of the Fountain eight English classes to do a Socratic seminar in grief and loss after reading a book with Megan Malloy.

102Human Rights Day has had an addition to social media awareness with the school counselors. And Lauren and Danielle who are our two social workers, are finishing up the newly created and about to be released student services website, which will really be a wealth of information resources for parents about the issues of the day, whether it's anxiety, social media, outside referral agencies, those types of all in one place. So, it's been really wonderful and both of our social workers have jumped both feet first into our wellness committees in both schools and becoming thought partners for that work. So, it's really been a wonderful start to the additional resources and can't thank the board enough for providing those. I do want to thank Heather and Shauna and Brooke again. Thank you so much. And I think Carson

103is. He's studying for a test. Great. Okay. As he should be. And I'm happy to answer any questions with Eric. I'll just start by thanking you, Edgar and everyone who participated in creating that presentation. It was really, really fabulous and nice to see so many of the things that are going on in our schools. I'm gonna start with, where is that flash mob, because you got me so excited that they were all gonna stand up and dance that. No, but he did mention a flash mob earlier. I actually wanted to dive a little into the SSP program, Eric. So, right now there's 10 students in there and you mentioned that you think it'll continue to stay at that level, but sixth of those are eighth graders, so I would assume they would move on. Are

104you thinking that the incoming class will be large? Or how are you seeing that staying missing? What we found before we started this was sixth into seventh grade, and then seventh into eighth grade are places where many students start to exhibit some of these needs. And there is a number of students currently being considered for the program additionally as they're moving through the seventh grade year and through the sixth grade year. So, I think what we'll have moving forward is certainly some incoming sixth graders identified early, but our experience has been over the years that the time in middle school is when kids start to need more interventions. So, we do experience, I have a feeling when you ask me in June, we'll probably be more in the 14 or 15 and it's not gonna

105be additional eighth graders. And then I think that will continue just given what our experience has been over the last few years. Okay, great. Thank you. And I just wanna say, I'm so glad to hear that the social workers have been able to help with student anxiety and creating some of those opportunities for students to get help. I think that's really cool. It's reset us really to a place where we can engage students who need it for a little bit of time. Just to get over a hump or get over a challenge that might be in their outside lives, might be a social issue within schools and then be released back to kind of their normal classes rather than letting some of those things fester until there were major problems. Thank you. I do have

106more questions, but I'm gonna let the board have an opportunity to ask anything that they would like to. I have a follow up to your question far. So, what is the capacity of this program? 15. Ish. And is it the idea that the eighth graders that are moving on to the high school, is it that they're are no longer gonna need such a program or that they're going to move into the high school version. Depending on the student? I think there's no, I would expect given this is the first year of our program, that most of those students will move on to the high school SSP. With that being said, as we establish the program and kids spend a little bit more time and maybe start as a sixth grader, the hope is that there

107will be some students who can kind of peel out of the program and some students that may need to come in. There's no set exit ramp. It's not, you can have two years in it and then you have to leave. It's really on a student by student basis. Also in a transition from eight to nine year, if a student is in and sixth and seventh, we might think about fading it out between seventh and eighth. That transition year is in and of itself kind of a little bit more of a stressful transition. So, unless there's a compelling reason, there may not be many exits from eighth to ninth, but getting into ninth grade with the understanding that if there weren't a transition, we may say we'll start here and move to something else, whether it's

108mid-year, at the end of ninth grade. So, that's really the thinking. Just one more follow up to that. So, the middle school is quite large, so 15 doesn't sound like a big number in relation to all the students that you have. So, I'm just curious like, do you feel like 15 is enough spots for these students or does the program need to be bigger? I would've expected a larger number, just. So, I think it's important to recognize... So, yes, right now I do believe 15 is appropriate for the middle school. We have a full program in the high school and it's also capped at 15-ish. I think we're at 16 or 17 right now. There's no mandated cap. We can schedule obviously the RCS in that group kind of, and stay under the five to

109one ratio. The thing we want to maintain is to make sure that these are a group of students with kind of intensive needs. So, the staff has to have the time to engage students in ways that might take longer than your typical 30 minute counseling session or students that may need more, what I'll call on the moment intervention regularly through the school day. So, that's really what we gauge it on. And it isn't the magic number of 10 or 15, it's also about the cohort. What are the needs of the students. A student who's been in the program for three years might be have much less active engagement on that on the moment than a student who's just moved into that program. So, right now the answer is yes. I won't make a promise that

110the answer will always be yes. My hope is that as, and this is really the thinking and the strategy, these are social emotional supports for students that are experiencing need. The hope is that all of the things you've heard and that we continue to build around social emotional learning will also inoculate our school population in a way that keeps that number of kids who need that expanded support manageable. But that's obviously a little bit longer term. Thank you. I think it's wonderful that the middle school has this program and that we're thinking about the whole child and giving children a safe space to go. When children are going to utilize that support, if they're missing direct educational content, how is that provided? Yeah, so there is a special education teacher that works in the SSP.

111Obviously, we want students in class as much as humanly possible. It is a situation where that program works with the teams who have students that are part of that program to understand the flexibility of the program. So, there are times where a student may not be able to attend class for a day or two, or even just a period here or a period there. There's arrangements made for whatever work can be done. So, they don't need to catch up as much when they go back. It depends on the kid is the answer, right? It depends on the student. You have students that really need a time to decompress, divorce themselves from what the work of the day is. There may need to be flexibility in what assignments are due and when, or if it's a

112situation where a student is experiencing some emotional trauma, there may need to be a assignment excused for that student depending on, but obviously you balance that with wanting to give kids the distress tolerance and the ability to meet all the requirements in those classes. And that's where the staff and the program start to make those professional decisions on how do we move kids and scaffold kids towards independence. It might start out very structured with a lot of different modifications and changes to curriculum and assignments. The goal is six months after that point, are we doing less exceptions, less modifications, less accommodations because we've given the student the skills to engage in a way that allows them not to hit their distress tolerant threshold where they've started. So, it's a moving scale but there's plenty of

113resources and communication between the teams to be able to move that work into the SSP room as kids can take it on. Eric, I just wanted to clarify. The SSP is really essentially a special education program focused on kids with pretty significant mental health support needs, right? This is not, I just wanna make sure that we're differentiating between this and some of the others- No, it's a great point. That are being offered because obviously we've been here for a lot of these discussions, but maybe people are watching, So, it's important that we have a continuum of services. There are many students in the middle school that get counseling that may see a counselor, whether it's the house counselor, the psychologist, or now the social worker on a regular basis. Not all of those students need

114the SSP. The SSP is our most intensive social-emotional program that really focuses on students whose either mental health, social emotional challenges regularly impact their ability to function during the normal school day and need direct instruction on coping mechanisms, strategies for executive functioning, strategies for relationship management that allow them to access the general education, to allow them to access the general education curriculum. Thank you. I was asking that sort of as a natural followed everyone else's questions, but I have a separate question for Ms. Waters, I think. I really appreciated everyone's presentations and it was great. Everyone was great. But I was wondering, you spoke about the board approving the partnership, the consortium that you operate in right now or that we're a member of right now. What is on your wishlist, like for next year?

115What would you like us to be thinking about? Actually, cause people are watching. Sorry, sorry. We've had such a positive experience with the network and the GBG, Global Education Benchmark , that we've now been in it for four years, the whole time I've been here. And most of those schools are in a program, another network that's really designed for student programming called Round Square. And so we're looking into joining Round Square. We've had preliminary meetings and the networks, it would be 250 schools in 50 countries and it includes experiential learning, includes service opportunities, it includes some summer programs, which is sort of an area we haven't really tapped yet, which also eases our having to miss academic time. We're always very conscious of that. And these type of things having met with, I zoomed with

116the director for the Americas and it seems to really match our non-SIBI goals, our educational goals. I'm a socialized teacher, so this is right. I'm like, this matches this and this and this. And again, it looks at the UNSTGs and it really, that sort of portrait of a SHS graduate, it's a piece that'll help us get there, even even more so. Thank you. You're welcome. Actually, since Ms. Waters brought it up, you can sit down, but you did bring up the picture of the graduate and that was something that I wanted to, could we pull that back up again? Is that possible? I thought it was a really interesting graphic and I just think I wanted a little more time to absorb it. Your idea of power skills really resonated with me, Edgar, and I

117don't even know if there's more for you to add, but I just thought this was a really, really interesting way of thinking about things for our students. Yeah, it is interesting and it in many ways, it mirrored this exercise that Derek Gay did with the DEI PTA committee where he actually had people work in groups and he asked them, what do you want for your children? What do you truly value? And then just started listing all these different things. And of course parents wanted their students, their kids to be knowledgeable and have what they needed. But all of these, these dispositions, all of these things as they relate to empathy and critical and creative thinking and a global awareness and a flexibility, they all just kind of rose to the top. And so a committee

118at the high school has been working on this and it is still in draft form, so it's still needs other eyes on it, other ideas. But when it was presented to the admin council during an admin learning time by Chris Walsh, it was really powerful to look at and really affirming about all the structures and all the things that we value as an educational community. Absolutely. I agree. I think it's a very interesting way of thinking about education and what we would like our students to go out into the world and be able to achieve. I think Heather's comment about that program or other programs matching some of these things is really the compelling next area of work, right, is to say, okay, if these are things we value, what are the types of learning

119experiences that match that? How do we assess for it? How do we make sure kids are getting a balanced comprehensive range of experiences that kind of match that? And that's super exciting and I definitely expressed my thanks to Heather and Carson for presenting and sharing some of that tonight. And of course also to Brooke and Shauna for painting that picture too. Yes, Bob. I'm just curious, piggybacking on that thought, is there a way to embed in the rubric of evaluation of students some of these attributes or qualities? Because I think it's human nature to focus on the numbers and the grades. Parents, it's easy to look at and say, I want you to do better improve here. But as we start to shift the value of these power skills to the definition of success, is

120there a way to start to migrate towards including that as part of our way of when you sit down with a parent to talk about some of these, I don't wanna say softer skills, but you know what I mean, like it's hard, maybe to document it, but how well is my son or daughter doing as a critical thinker and ways to communicate that to pair up some of these other opportunities to say, well, I think if your child had exposure to that, it would help them under be more compassionate or have more empathy because they haven't had exposure. How do we be innovative, I guess, in the way we talk about our children? I'm really glad you asked that question because it, when I was talking about, I was saying that there is a big

121emphasis on these standardized measures, but and there are ways that we are in Scarsdale doing performance based assessments where we look at measuring these attributes. A lot of what we're doing though is thinking about how we set up structures and authentic learning experiences for them where you cannot get from point A to point B just through memorizing a set of facts. You actually have to work with other people. You have to think critically. You have to demonstrate your understanding in multiple ways and communicate in ways that can be understood. And those are the two sides of it. So, designing assessments that actually measure it and also creating those structures and environments that support it and build it. I would argue the student responses that Brooke and Shauna showed are evidence of a sixth grade version

122of that in one way. One measure. So, you see before you see after and matching those up and seeing what the students were able to demonstrate in terms of their own critical thinking with respect to an inquiry question, that's a big question. Can fiction help reduce bullying or stop bullying? That's a really compelling worthy problem. I mean, I'll admit I haven't, my kids graduated quite a while ago, so I haven't really seen a recent report card. I assume we still have report cards, but what I'm thinking is there a way to kind of come up with a new kind of report card? Do you know what I mean? That starts to embed these themes because I think as we all experience when the scores came out this obsession with and in very natural as a

123parent, you want your child to be in a particular quadrant. I get all that. But it's distracting to perhaps the bigger picture of these power skills or it's kind of a cool way to umbrella to talk about it because when we get our metric of a report card, it doesn't really deal with that, unless it's changed since I was a paranoia, you know what I mean? So, Bob, I feel like I planted you in the audience and I didn't, but it's really interesting because currently we're actually part of a tri-state study group that's looking very closely at what grading looks like. And it's through exactly that lens. Like what are we trying to measure? How are grades and grading being used and how can we think of it that gets us closer, closer to that,

124right? So, it is something that has us looking very critically at that and posing some questions to the educators and to the community about how we can shift this. It's a huge endeavor to change the way we view the outputs of school, but it's important to recognize a lot of these things are being built into the A, the B from social studies that was 20 years ago is not the same A and B from social studies now. It probably deserves a different type of product, but a lot of those skills are also being built into how students are assessed in the traditional grades and how they're coming out. And that gets analatized by teachers and parent-teacher conferences. But you're right, it doesn't come out. Today's report card looks almost not explicit. It's not very explicit,

125and I think if we look at the migration of the college acceptance process and the shifting away from certain numbers that were such, so key at certain points in college acceptance days, certainly in my day where you had to get a certain number to be considered for points z it sounds like these power skills, in some ways there are a more persuasive argument about the value of your child. But if you don't have this, if you don't have the documentation or the clues to help the parents say, well, look, all right, my kid didn't get whatever, &50 on this exam, but they've done some projects that show incredible skillful practitioner and compassionate leader or whatever, you know what I mean? They're an A plus in those categories In some ways those are even more important

126than getting that 750 on your well SAT or whatever. So, I think there's an education for parents because we just given the tools we're given to evaluate our kids and I think teachers, as you say it, it's of course the A and A builds in some of that knowledge that a teacher has. But I don't know if a parent knows that. Just a thought. Expanding on what Eric said. One thing I found very valuable from the parent-teacher conferences that we had recently was that feedback from the teachers. And it reflects the values of our community and of our teachers that these are skills, power skills that we value in our students and wanna encourage and promote more than hearing the average of my child in a certain subject, hearing the story of where he demonstrated

127empathy or leadership or collaborative skills made more of an impression on me. And I appreciated the fact that the teachers in the brief four minute speed dating kind of parent teacher conference would spend those valuable minutes talking about those things. So, I think that is reflected very much in our schools. It's also really important, our guidance counselor or the deans at the high school are doing the work to get out to universities, both to learn about them, but also to have them learn about us and what we're doing within classrooms and what the transcript from our school means, as a standalone by itself. So, that admissions officers and colleges do know that it's all part, but you have to be really careful about changing the systems when you're working in the traditional systems that our

128kids need to succeed in moving to post-second. Can I just add, like we heard from Carson tonight, who in just a minute really shared, at least reported to us that the experience was transformative and what you're not hearing is the building blocks and what the transformation was. But if we had had the privilege of 30 minutes with Carson, I think he would've been able to describe aspects of this himself better than a teacher. Any of our students out there have in a year, five, six, seven teachers the optimal reporter of this is the student. That's really, I think what we would aspire to in the end. Tilting on that, Drew, I was actually just gonna say that some of our most innovative teachers have done really impressive things with the report card feedback, including having

129students set their own goals in class and talk about whether they're meeting those goals at the secondary level. And I think that's great. And often those goals aren't just like, get an A next semester, they're what to learn, dissect whatever do a thing and it's interesting, learn more deeply about blah, blah blah or stay calm when taking a math test. And I think that that's great and I do think that we see that more and more just from my vantage point. I just want to emphasize there's a lot of conversation to happen including beyond faculty, staff and students. I mean to include the community on this. So, I don't want people to see this and think, oh, I haven't seen that before. When did that become the. But I think it shows how excited we

130are about this. Given sort of the initial discussions, I think, Colleen, did you have something you wanted to add? I was just gonna say, I'm reading this and Jim Rod and I toured the high school and we sat in maybe 10 minutes in the at entrepreneurship class, but I'm reading all of these attributes and I feel like we saw so many of them in that short time. So, while it might not be on a report card, I do feel like having classes like that naturally build these attributes into the students. And so I don't know why, it was exciting. So, thanks. Did anybody have anything else on the report? Thank you of you. Yes, thank you. There was a great report. Lots of interesting things to think about in conversations. We appreciate that. Yeah, just

131thanks again. And just quickly, can I preview the next two which are March 27th, the focus will be on inquiry and innovation and then the May 22nd report will be optimizing learning, including the AT study report. So, just to remind folks, and we're certainly open to feedback on how the new process is working, presenting these around thematic ideas rather than like a single content area. Thank you very much. Appreciate that. We look forward to the next one in March. It has been two hours, however, we have the treasurer's report and I wonder if Lisa would like to go ahead and give her report and then we'll take a short recess before we jump into the calendar. Okay. So, as you can see, the reports for this month are for fiscal year through October 31st. As

132of the end of the month, we had approximately 52.5 million in the bank. Of that, about 66% is invested in the higher rates, which in October we're hovering close to 3%. So, they're moving up, as I'm sure you've heard, they keep ticking up the interest rates. So, currently we're hovering at about 4%. So, revenue wise we have started getting tax money in. I know there were some questions on the scheduling. So, the village of Scarsdale and the town of Magallanes collect our taxes and they remit to us periodically. We have a schedule set up. They typically transfer the funds to us about once per month. I am working with the village, that's the substantial amount of our tax money to get a better understanding of how they're remitting the money to us to make sure

133that we are optimizing our money on hand and earning the interest on it. On the expense side, you'll start to see over the next few months, we're starting to consolidate some codes and you'll see there's some negatives. So, we'll be putting some budget transfers forward. It's really just a matter of shuffling where the money is expended. For example, legal, you'll see in October there's some negative amounts. It's a matter of redistributing how we're recording those expenses. So, right now it's just a matter of getting the money where it belongs. So, it's kind of a work in progress. So, again, over the next few months you'll see those transfers presented for approval. Any questions? Okay. Thank you so much Lisa, we appreciate your reporting. Okay, well we've been two hours, so let's take a five minute

134break. We'll return at 8:46. It's 8:46. So, let's go ahead and get started. I'm gonna save every minute that we can. So, now we are on item 10.03 school calendar development. And Drew, I'd like to turn it over to you. Okay, thank you very much, Amber. I appreciate it. So, as I had indicated earlier in my opening comments, the purpose of tonight's presentation is to help our community understand the pushes and pulls associated with the choices we have to make with respect to the school calendar, but also to foster our dialogue around the values our school calendar does, should or could reflect. So, with discussion and planning for the 2023/'24 school calendar underway, we should recognize the call from our community, including those who spoke tonight to consider new school holidays to accommodate important cultural

135observances, including Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, and Eid al-Adha. And it's our hope that by presenting possible scenarios, now that we are able to create an opportunity for the community input prior to submitting a formal proposal to the board for adoption. And I'm gonna use that last line to just comment a little bit. I think for the public to observe a meeting like this and like how the board works, it can be confusing to not quite exactly know. And I'm thinking about Alun's comment earlier he sort of interchanged the board and administration and there really are distinct roles, as you all know, but maybe the community doesn't know. And in a very broad brush stroke, the policies of the board and the board decisions kind of empower the administration to run the district and

136make those sorts of decisions. And many times the role the board plays is to respond to or even vote yes or no on that, which is presented to them. And that's true about the school calendar. We as an administration engage in conversations with our employee groups, the STA, Scarsdale Teachers Association, with ourselves, with each other, and we come forward to the board with the proposal. And it's really your responsibility to decide whether that proposal reflects what we think we've heard and what the administration has done to respond. So, for the public, the discussion that the board engages in about the calendar, it all happens right here at this table. It doesn't happen, for example, in executive session. It can't, that's not a topic that can occur there. And so what the public is seeing is,

137is exactly what you have had before you to consider. So, I'm also hopeful by talking about this in December and in January before our February, typical February adoption, that there is time to have a little bit of discussion and we would value your thoughts and input along the way. And so hopefully that was helpful just to explain a little bit about that. So, we're gonna talk about a few different things tonight as reflected on this slide, including going forward and looking at some scenarios that could come to pass or some ideas in there that we can think more about. So, First, the factors that influence the development of our school calendar broadly fall into three categories. One is state laws, requirements, and minimums. We are compelled to follow the regulations and rules of the Board

138of Regents, and we want to get our state, the state aid that we're eligible for. So, we're gonna make sure, we're always gonna make sure we meet those requirements. So, the key ones there are 180 days a session. So, a day of session is any day a student comes to school and up to four superintendents conference days, all of those categories fall into what's called a day of session. And then for students and grades kindergarten through six, our students have to have 900 hours of instruction at a minimum throughout the course of those 180 plus days. There is a spreadsheet on the state aid website that districts complete once we've adopted a calendar, they'll post the model calendar will fill in our start time or end time, how much lunchtime we have, how much passing

139time we have that's deducted from instructional time. And then we see if we've met our hours and if even if we have 180 days in a given year, but we've had, I don't know, some other circumstances where we've had lots of early dismissals due to snow or something like that, we may have to look in some years at reclaiming a scheduled vacation day or extending half days at the end of the year to full days to meet our minimum instructional requirements. So, that's all kind of part of that. There are certain holidays that we're required to observe under the state law, and it oddly falls under what's called the general construction law. I'm not exactly sure the history of that, but that's where those observances come in. One example is Columbus Day/Indigenous People's Day. That

140is in the state requirements for us. And then another state impacted consideration is the timing of assessments. We don't get to choose precisely when the grades three through eight ELA and math assessments are given. There's a time window that they're given and that's prescribed by the state, as are the regions exam dates. And then also for students who take AP exams, we don't control that calendar that's controlled by the college board. So, for example, and this could be a real example, we typically wouldn't want to hold a spring break and then kids return on that Monday to an AP exam. That just wouldn't be a great educational practice. But that's an example of how APS could impact that. The second broad category or our collective bargaining agreements, there're two specific impacts here. One is our

141contract with the Scarsdale Teachers Association explicitly includes collaboration with them to determine the school calendar. And then we also have certain holidays that are recognized in other, although the teachers association doesn't have any holidays in their calendar, other unions or custodians or secretaries or middle management unit have specific school holidays in there. And we really don't run school without our custodians, our secretaries and our technology staff and stuff like that. That wouldn't be a safe practice, I would say. And then the third, everything else is really a function of things like tradition, past practice and values, the thing, expression of what we think the community values. So, that's really the big three, the big broad three categories. So, next I thought it would make sense to kind of, to share some thinking about what makes

142for a "good school calendar". And I think first and foremost, there are a variety of influences that impact the school calendar. And good might mean different things to different people. And I think Amber, you did a nice job of kind of laying that out a little bit. And that's just reality. I think that's okay. But that's reality. And we're trying to find the right mix, the right balance. There are some longstanding norms that serve as guideposts for us and we think about in our minds in terms of a good school calendar. So, for example, we think the calendar should be crafted where possible to maximize instructional continuity, where as much as possible days are consecutive for student learning and minimize the disruption of instructional time. We try, we strive for that. Another guidepost would be

143the calendar should conform to federal, state, and local requirements, including board policy and including the requirements for receiving our share of state aid. So, I think we've covered that amply. And the calendar must honor our collective bargaining agreements, including some past practices. And there's an order of operations to those priorities, I would say. So, following the laws and regulations that govern of work as a school is paramount. I think it's also essential we observe the commitments that are reflected in our collective bargaining agreements. And when these obligations are met, the rest of the decisions are expressions of those values that we believe we have consensus on. We're approaching the second anniversary of the board's adoption of policy 0105, equity, inclusivity, and diversity and education. And all of us having listened to the public comment and

144reading emails and letters we've received from students and families about observance is important to a significant segment of our community, through the lens of that policy. And I think our PTC president's comments tonight also kind of reiterated that. What I hear, I'm just speaking for me now, what I hear, while we all have to make difficult choices in life, some of our students feel like they're being asked to make a choice to attend school or to attend to an extremely important religious tradition that others in our community might not have to make because our schools are already closed on some of those observances. So, that's one thing I've been reflecting on. So, we've taken the step of exploring the possibility of adding new days of school closure to our calendar that haven't traditionally been observed.

145As I've kind of commented, we did expand the timeframe this year in order to present this information, get feedback, iterate, and then come forward with a proposal. So, this slide sort of shows a little bit of kind of framing of a traditional versus how to think about the new observances. So, this is not set in stone, but kind of traditionally we have experienced the faculty starting before Labor Day with conference days, two conference days to prepare for school. Recent couple years back before the COVID Pandemic, I think we had a period of time where we had one conference day. There was consensus that that wasn't adequate. So, we kind of went back to a two conference day model. We typically following that model, we would start students next year after Labor Day on that Tuesday,

1469/5. It turns out that Rosh Hashanah, which is a holiday that we observe as reflected in our Labor union contracts, it's prescribed civil service holiday there. And Anne reflects values of the community. It happens to fall on a weekend this coming year, we could imagine, and we've heard some comment on the desire to have a 10 day, some members of a community, some of our staff really prefer a when we can, maximizing that break these days that I'm referring to would refer to school days, not the weekend days. So, if possible, accomplishing a 10 day break. We've traditionally had a full week at February break and a full week at the April or March, what we call spring break. The President's Day in February is one of another one of our civil service holidays. So,

147we typically have tried to orient that week around President's Day. Makes a lot of sense. And then in often, not always, one of the non-prescribed but required to discuss with our civil service unions, Good Friday has sometimes been a common holiday. So, we've scheduled spring break around that and then ending with Easter. So, that's just kind of some ideas that that guide how we start with a draft. We've had sometimes had Friday before Memorial Day off to have a longer weekend if we have the requisite number of days. And that is doable. People seem to like that long weekend. And then of course, we're bound by the last day being the rating day. Rating day is cons is the official last day of Regents Exam Week. It is prescribed by the state of New York.

148We can we are allowed to schedule school days up to and through June 30th. That's typically not been done here. People are pretty much out and out and about to camps and so on by the time that rating day comes along. So, that's not been something we've done. On the other side of the ledger here, adding new observances. These are some things to consider. So, the new observances that I mentioned, Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha. For next year, if we were to add that most of the traditional calendar could remain the same. It turns out that in '23/'24 Diwali and Lunar New Year, both fall on weekends, Eid al-Fitr and Eid al-Adha fall during the week. We have a new piece of information from the state of New York, a new

149decision that they've made. So, in there, right now it's a draft regions exam schedule for 2024, for June of 2024. They have purposefully not scheduled regions exams on Eid al-Adha. That's the first time we've seen that behavior on the part of the state. They've explicitly carved it out as a non-testing day. And if it were a day of school, there's actually some question as to whether that would count as a day of session or not. What I think that's an open question 'cause it's a new move by the state, a new decision by the state. Technically those regions exam days are if our day's exams are given. So, open question. But if that were a school day, we could always schedule an activity that day if we needed to. And then 2024 is a rare

150year when Passover and Easter are really far apart. And that is the piece that's not reflected in these scenarios. But we'll talk tonight about what could be done there. So, in the agenda, there are a couple of different examples. Here's one scenario. We tried to present these in a form that might be familiar to the public. It's that what we call the grid view that kind of lays out the school year using coding gray as school closures on holidays that, I don't know, it's a salmon color for like superintendent's conference days, a yellow color for early dismissal days and blue for parent-teacher conference days. I'll start with that. We have not, and we traditionally don't identify the parent teacher conference days until after we've got the base calendar in place. I know we heard some

151public comment tonight about that and the commenters are right. Let me just pause and identify grades in the teacher's contract. There are two contractual periods of parent teacher conference half days. One is described as in the fall, three half days for students in grades K five so that the teachers have time dedicated to meet with parents. And three in the spring for grades K two, not three five, again for the same reason, dedicated time for teachers to meet with parents where students are released home. So, those are facts. We do need to schedule those six half days on the calendar when you know they are, that's still an open discussion. So, this more traditional model that looks like maybe what it would look like in the past would have those conference days in August for

152teachers, students starting on the 5th of September, observing all the holidays were required to observe by state requirement and then also by contract. We would have a two week December break, we would have a week in February, coinciding with President's Day, a fourth superintendent's conference day, keeping the election day conference day as the third, a fourth superintendent's conference day in early part of March, like we have this year, the spring recess is leading up to Easter Sunday. Doesn't have to be there, but that's just in this particular example. There's enough space in this version to have Friday before Memorial Day as a day off, a four day weekend. And obviously observe Juneteenth, which is a state holiday, and then reach our 185 days of session, which is 181 student days and four superintendents conference days.

153So, that's a scenario that could play out. Now that scenario does not include Passover. That was an oversight. Passover is observed April 22nd and 23rd of 2024. So, that's a Monday and a Tuesday. And in a minute I'll talk a little bit more about, so how we would accomplish having those days as school closures, if that was what we determined to do. I'll talk about the list of choices that we would have that we could consider. Some of them will be obvious to people and maybe some a little bit less so. So, going back, just following this scenario, looking at what that same calendar would look like as close as possible, but including the new observances of Eid, we would still sort of the left half, if you will, of the calendar would look the

154same. And one way to accomplish those new observances along the right half would be to claim one of those days back as that Friday before Memorial Day, not have that as a day off and use that to observe one of the two Eid celebrations. And then another idea that is an idea that provides, it's a trade off. It provides some possibility and flexibility, but also carries with it some a message that Edgar and I might not love for faculty staff would be to schedule that spring superintendent's conference day on the other Eid holiday. So, Eid al-Fitr is the 10th of April. We could reasonably schedule that as a superintendent's conference day. Students have it off. Presently, our staff members who observe that holiday or other holidays that our workdays do have paid time off that

155they're entitled to, and do, some of our employees do take those holidays as paid time off using personal time to observe a religious observance. Now the thing that Edgar and I struggle with there is does that communicate a message to our staff about the lack of importance of the learning that takes place on superintendent's conference day? Well, that's a trade off. We hope it wouldn't communicate a lower priority on that learning. We hope it would communicate, these things are tough and we sometimes have to make some trade offs to get kind of a balance of what we value and what we hold dear and all of that. So, those are two scenarios. The third scenario that we presented in the agenda, which I won't go over but just looks at what if we started staff

156after Labor Day, which has sometimes happened and that trade off would come in a shortened December break, most likely. So, in years where we've done that in the past, if you look at December break, the 1st of January, which is the last required day off that's a holiday, is on a Monday. We could return to school certainly by Thursday, Wednesday, Thursday or Friday of that week, have days of session and start the school year a little bit later for students. So, those are just some examples of flexibilities associated with this building of a 185 day calendar. So if we go back to the slides, and this will be where we can think about Passover and think about future years and so forth. Essentially, the bottom line is if we were to introduce new holidays, it

157makes the machination more difficult, makes some years harder than other years to observe everything we wanna observe and still get the 185 days within the window that we're used to. That's where tension comes in, pushes and pulls about how would we do it in some of the more challenging years. So, we've tried to look back in time, we tried to look forward in time and in the agenda there's a spreadsheet that models out five future years of actual school days and also 10 years of when these various holidays happen to fall. And what we can learn is there's one year within the next five that has all four of these previously unobserved holidays on potential school days. So, in other words, it doesn't happen every year. There are gonna be harder years and easier years

158to make that happen with the assumption that once we add these holidays, it becomes a norm and not, oh, some years we have it, some years we don't. I would be making that assumption. Some years Rosh Hashanah or Yo Kippur fall on weekends and some years Juneteenth Falls on a Saturday. Any of those combinations create greater flexibility within the calendar. The reason Juneteenth falling on a Saturday matters is that if it does under state law, it does not have to be observed on a school day. If Juneteenth falls on a Sunday, it does have to be observed on a school day on that Monday. That's just how the state law was written. That's a recent one, a recent addition. But that's how that's framed out. So, what are the sort of universe of alternatives that

159we can consider? So, as I mentioned, one of the ideas is we could hold one or more superintendent's conference days on an observance day and it would have that same consequence that I talked about. We would likely have staff members opting to take a personal day on that day. I will say just as they would, if that were an instructional day. We could hold a student day on election day, which we have not done recently, freeing up that superintendent's conference day to also be one of those ones that's actually scheduled on an observance. And we can look at an example of that. Our past practice, kind of as far back as I've looked, has been to observe two days for Rosh Hashanah, the high holy days. We could observe one of those two days. That's

160a trade off that we could consider making. We could start students before Labor Day. And you ask, well is that something that happens? Well actually the last time Passover and Easter were as far apart as they will be next year, we did that in 2015, '16. I'm holding the calendar here. We had staff in their superintendent's conference days on Monday and Tuesday August 31st and September 1st. Students came to school on Wednesday the second, the third and half a day on the fourth. And then we were closed Labor day and then they resumed after that. So, that is something that has happened before. And then the way the break looked is that year, there was a four day weekend, March 25th through 28th that included Good Friday and Easter and Easter Monday as a closure.

161And then the spring break was scheduled during, we closed at noon actually on Friday, which was the first day of Passover, the 22nd of April that year. And the Saturday the 23rd would've been the second day of Passover that year. And then the spring, whoops, spring break followed that week. And we can look ahead at that. So, that's start students before Labor Day. That's an option. Shorten a break, that's an option. So, we just gave the example of in even a full traditional calendar that didn't have the new observances. If we started faculty on the Tuesday after Labor Day for two days and then students on the Thursday after Labor Day, we would shorten December break by two days. We've, to my knowledge, not really ever shortened April or February break but we could certainly

162do that. And then we could also schedule fewer than 185 days. So, that has the obvious trade off of less instruction. It also has the potential of fewer snow days available in that calendar. In some years we don't need snow days and some years we have five. I mean it just, that's the luck of nature. I will say, just to be clear, the consequence of not having 180 days as per of the state definition is we then would potentially lose state aid on a proportional basis. So, 179 days, one day of state aid. However, the laws and regulations have been updated to give districts more flexibility in those years where you really have a catastrophic weather situations. So, you can now, which you didn't used to be able to do, apply to the state for

163a waiver from the 180 day requirement, if you experience something, I'll say something like Hurricane Sandy, something of that magnitude. So, just, I know we're holding a lot of information and balance, but I want to try to give as clear a picture as possible. So, actually what what I want to do is kind of just share briefly that multi-year calendar and just give a little quick tutorial for the public for anyone who might wanna play around with this. So, first of all, there are some instructions that have provided. This is available to anyone in the community and you can certainly make a copy of it and play around with it yourself. These are not official school calendars. Please understand that they reflect a planning tool way to think about scenarios. We try to plan for

164185 days and you'll see in some of these scenarios that's not done yet because something from that list of trade-offs would have to occur and they're probably four or five or six different ways to do that. So, I didn't want it to reflect like we had thought about those tradeoffs already and we decided which tradeoffs are of more value or less value. I just want to be clear that we haven't made those judgements yet. This is really an open inquiry. So, when we look at next year, I know this is probably painful on some people's eyes, it takes a little, yeah it takes a little while, but the months are in columns and the idea is to try to look across the year we change color when we switch the calendar from December to January.

165We have our total number of student contact days in next to the month and then it kind of lays out certain scenarios. So, playing around with '23/'24. What you see in here is the sort of traditional model that's reflected in the first scenario sample I shared, this one. I'm sorry. No, this one. So, what we're looking at basically is that one. well the trade trade-offs that we could make would be to think about taking time from the December/January break. We could play around with those superintendent's conference days, like we talked about. This particular scenario as it's coded right now does not take advantage of that trade-off. It does include the memorial break Friday. Those are all things that that could move around. If we were to think about those options and think about including Passover

166on the 22nd and 23rd, I'm kind of toggling back and forth between those right now among our choices could be to shorten that December break to start students earlier, start the superintendent's conference days earlier. 'Cause if you look at the month of September, labor Day falls on Monday the fourth. Friday is September 1st and August 31st is a Thursday. School on those two days is possible. We could look to play with that other superintendent's conference day in November. We could look at having shorter April break and spreading that April break on a long weekend around Easter and a long weekend around Passover. Those are all different things that we could think about. So, in terms of those, I think that's really the important thing to think about is that this is really the key list

167of things I think that we've thought about that could be trade offs. So, I think I can push through the last two slides pretty quickly and then we can come to questions and considerations. We did look out 10 years, and this also is probably difficult on the eyes, but let me explain this. So, we looked at those, some of the things I mentioned. So, we included like two days of Rosh Hashanah versus one is a possible tradeoff. So, I included the dates here of when Rosh Hashanah are, and in fact one of our students helped kind of put this together and get the ball rolling on this. When Yom Kipur falls, when Diwali falls, Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al-Adha, Juneteenth and green indicates when those particular holidays fall on a weekend. So, they

168don't play a role in the number of school days of session. A couple of those are highlighted in yellow because they could coincide with existing breaks. In other words, Tuesday, February 17th, 2026 is Lunar New Year. That is the day after President's Day that year, which is very likely the week we would be closed for February break if we followed tradition. Monday, January 3rd could be an extended day of break. On the December holiday and also happens to be Eid al-Fitr. So, those are just examples. So, as we look at when in 10 years looking out 10 academic years when, or how frequently these various holidays occur on weekends, it's quite often. The minimum number of those list of holidays that would fall on school days is three and the maximum is seven. So, that's

169the universe of play that we have to be thinking about that. And then I'll just quickly kind of lay out next steps and then we'll open it to discussion. We are again, I wanna reiterate, we're purposefully building in time for input, stakeholder input. We will have another space in this at this meeting, at the board meeting on January 9th to kind of share any updated thinking. We'll continue our dialogue with the STA that is part of our obligation contractually to design a calendar. We still have to determine when we would schedule parent teacher conferences. We have heard the feedback about interruptions to instruction and so on. And that's something we can consider. Ultimately we're looking out toward February 13th to put a recommendation in front of the board. So, let me stop there. Actually, I'm

170not, I'm gonna say one other thing. Forgive me. I just want to illustrate where we will put this information along with a link. We are getting a lot of emails. I'll also put a link to just a survey where you can, where it'll help us aggregate the feedback a little better. So, here is just the district homepage. If you come up to all the way on the right, there's a link called calendar and there's district calendar one page summary. We will create a '23/'24 planning link by tomorrow or a section by tomorrow. And we will add these resources right there. So, they're on the webpage in addition to being in board docs. All right, I will pause there and open the floor to questions. Drew, that was an incredibly impressive analysis and thorough and I'm

171trying to think of all kinds of adjectives I can share because they really, really appreciate the thought that you put into thinking about this and drilling into the different scenarios, explaining the constraints. I know I personally feel like I understand very well some of the trade offs that we have to make or that we would be considering that as a community what could happen. So, I just wanna say be the first to say thank you for that. I will open up to my fellow board members for questions. Yeah, I don't really have a question because that's really too much information for me to absorb and have meaningful questions. Appreciate that. I wanna ask about September 23rd, 2027. (members laughing) No, that's not really true. I did want to thank you for that very, I didn't

172wanna ask you about that very thorough presentation because it really, as Amber said, I wanna repeat everything she said it did lay out the trade offs that are necessary. I think as a board my view, it's incumbent on us to give direction on the values that should be embraced by the calendar. I view a calendar like a budget. It's a expression of values as much as it is the job of scheduling and obviously diversity, equity and inclusion are important values for this community and for this board. So, I think it's the tough job of getting it done that falls to you guys and district. But in terms of the overarching policy directive, certainly from my view, the schedule that embraces those values is to be sought after. Thank you. I thank you Drew for all

173of the work that went into this and I know how exhaustive it is. It's really a lot. You could fall down a big rabbit hole very quickly. So, thank you. Thank you to drew to the students and parents who spoke and have spoken for more than a year on this in very moving ways. It's been great. And to the STA who's gonna weigh in and work with you on this 'cause there are a lot of voices that need to be integrated and processed and we know that it's not just about the work that has gone into this, but also about the work that goes ahead. This is a super intense process where people have deeply personal feelings, which I think we all as board members have heard, whether through emails to the group or as

174individuals in the past few days. And so it actually is a really compelling argument for our schools that no one wants to miss a day. That's the good news from all of this, right? Everyone wants their kids to be in school and I know there's an amazing amount of work that has gotten us here. I just had a few really, like Jim, it leaves me in a tails stand. It's a lot of information. So, I just have a few very simple questions. One, as you consider the messages to staff and the questions that you and Edgar were weighing around that, would it be possible to have a recognition that for teachers who did need to miss because of, or sorry, faculty and staff who did need to miss because of previously arranged religious observances that

175they would not have to use a vacation day, but that it would be treated as if they had that holiday the way students did. So, that's question one. I have like three and I'll package them off and then I'll stop talking. Question two is, someone asked me and I have no idea why does the December break go into January rather than starting earlier? Is that something we had considered? I don't know if there's a school reason for that. And then the only other thing is that Passover is a many day event and I do appreciate your efforts to take the first two days off, but I know there are some families who will still have to take time off even if we do that. But I think that that would be a great step. One

176of the other topics that you haven't talked about, at least unless my brain didn't hear it, but there is a group that is very concerned about the half days and I'm trying to, in my own mind 'cause you haven't kind of woven that in too much to this discussion about how the district views those half days. Then the issue of custom versus policy in terms of when teachers get their classrooms ready to leave. I think that's sort of another nuance to some of the decision making that if I were to sit down and try and take the challenge to do this, which maybe some of us will, I don't know, that would be something else I'm kind of thinking about so I just maybe one or two minutes on the- Sure. Thank you. The half

177day. I was trying to balance the overwhelming. I know, but. So, a way to think about the half days or shortened days that we've traditionally taken a away, not the only way is to think about them in three categories. So, one category are the six days that affect K2. They are currently contractual. They're part of how we support teachers to have release time from teaching to be able to meet with parents. So, right now those are not days that we can change but what is open for discussion and we're in discussion about is where they fall in the week, we're in the weeks right, that they occur. So, I'm gonna reflect my lack of knowledge on this, but I've shared this already, like when I came the pattern has been to have those days fall

178typically midweek one day and one week the next two days in the following week. I don't know why those particular midweek days are important. I do know a couple of, and I've asked the question, we're gonna get feedback and kind of learn more about that. I do know there are some important factors there. In the elementary school we have a six day cycle where kids meet different special area teachers. If we were to have all three of those days, let's say on A day, kids would miss the same special for three weeks or whatever, three times. And that, like, we'd wanna avoid that, that wouldn't be fair to the students. Could they be on Monday's, Fridays to have more of a continuous week, possibly. So, that's one bucket. Second bucket is the last week of

179school or some number of days in the final stretch of school. And you talked about those days, something like three or four of those days have been student half days. So, that staff can close out the year. One of the things we observe is that there's a different treatment, elementary and middle school to high school. So, elementary, there are no like final exams per se. Whereas at, in high school, students stop coming regularly in like second week in June because it's a stretch of exams where it's not regular school teachers have time there to finish up grading grade exams, administer proctor exams and then close up for the year, often moving materials and equipment so that the staff custodial team can do their cleaning and all of that. So, it's been the tradition to allow

180those days. Those days never used to appear on our calendars half days. It was just sort of known about five or six years ago. We made it more explicit on the calendar that they're half days and it is fairly common around the region that those days, so for example, sometimes or Chautauqua and Rye have been looked to as well, they don't have them, actually they do. So, in those days in June they take early dismissal days for students. The third bucket are days adjacent to holidays or long weekends. So, Wednesday before Thanksgiving this Friday. So, when I looked back, there is a tradition here of when December 23rd is the last day before the December break. It has been a half day. The Friday before Memorial Day, if not a day off has has often

181been a half day. So, when you've heard the number 13 half days, let's count them. So, starting with that last example first, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, so this year, the Wednesday before Thanksgiving, the Wednesday before December break, the Friday before Memorial day is three. We have the six conference days for parents. So, that's nine. And then we have the June days of which is four. So, that's 13. That's how we get to 13. So, again, if you said this I apologize, but if a child comes to school let's say those last four or five days and they leave at 10 o'clock or at noon or whenever they leave, that counts as a full day. It's a day of session. So, it's a day where kids came to school. So, it's one of the 185. One

182of the 185, 180 required. But we would count far fewer hours of instruction on that day. Okay. So, it counts as one of the days. So clearly, am I correct in saying that any of the scenarios we've seen obviously have enough instruction? In other words, they meet the required. They meet exceed the requirements. And we can't say no, well the kids aren't getting. We would never build that calendar, right? We're not building a calendar that doesn't meet. No. So, that's kind of okay. Thank you for this very extensive report. I know how much time and so I really appreciate it. It's been I'm thinking about all the students that spoke to us. So, articulate, I'm thinking now, we were just listening to Edgar's and Eric's report where they talk about students thrive with this sense

183of belonging. We're looking at the student profile where they talk about how we want our students to be deeply invested in the community, willing to stand up for what's right and embrace being the change agent. So, I do think that trying to create a calendar where we embrace those qualities, where we include the holidays that our community is asking not only sends a message, but it really is encouraging us to put our students at the focus and let them thrive because they realize that they belong in this community, that we accept them in this community. And I think it's an opportunity for other students who don't know about these holidays to also be exposed to them. I mean, I did not know as much as I know now purely from listening to these students. So,

184I just, as you work with all the stakeholders, I do appreciate this draft, including the holidays and I hope that that is the direction that we move in to. Thank you. I just wanted to add to everybody's very eloquent words, thanking you drew for all the work that you put into this calendar. You are leading our school community and embodying kind of what we are saying about DEI and wide and belonging and actually through your actions and leadership and taking the time to put this calendar, these different scenarios together and getting stakeholder feedback from everybody is just so gratifying for me to see because I was one of those kids who I never celebrated the Lunar Year with my family. So, like it's emotional to me. And I thank you for trying. Thank you. I

185have some questions. Is rating stay for 2024 out or is that an assumption? So, there is a draft from the state that has listed the 26th, if that's right, yeah, that Wednesday. I can't recall is it often a Wednesday? No, the last time. So, that's infrequent. This year, the 23rd is the last day. And in recent years, when that happens, the next year it flips like to a Wednesday. So, it's not that common. And I can go back and tell you the last time that happened was 2018/'19. Okay. Okay. But as we're looking at this, I know cause at this time of year we're always waiting for Ratings day. It sounds like we're confident that's. Earlier draft. That's how I know Eid al-Adha is not a Regents exam day. It has the three through eight

186testing dates. And is that something, do you think that would be helpful to add to the community those testing dates? Because some, I'm actually, let me ask in a question. Are there any decisions that were made in these scenario analysis that might not be obvious, but if you knew that there were certain tests there that would say, oh, that's why we don't have a day here, or we chose this week for a holiday. I'm not sure there are. I'm just curious. The one that potentially, so there is a testing window we don't know for 2024, and that's the AP exam window. AP exams traditionally run for two weeks. They traditionally start at the very, very beginning of May. When you look at the 2023/'24 calendar, they may starts on a Wednesday. So, that week is

187the 29th of April, 30th of April, 1st of May. That very well could be the AP start week. Passover's the week before one thing, if we were to mirror the 2015 16 approach, we could make that week spring break. Kids would be home for the week. They would come back to high school kids, come back to school into an AP exam. I think we frown on that educationally. So, that's one example. The state we're in a period of transition with the state test. I hope I'm not letting anything out of the bag, but we are starting slowly with computer-based testing. The state has had computer-based testing for a number of years. They recommend we start some of that this year. Next year certain grades are mandated to be on the computer. You get much greater

188flexibility if you take the computer-based testing option. You basically get a a month long window with much more flexibility of when you choose to do it versus the paper-based tests. There are three days of which you have to select two. So, in a paper-based test world, we would have to avoid that week and probably the week before for April break and the ELA is always in April. Got it. Okay. And the reason I mentioned this, we've gotten some really great feedback from the community. I think one thing that's challenging, and I speak from experience that if you don't have a high school kid, there's certain aspects you're just, you're not necessarily thinking about. Whether it's APs, different types a lot of high school students come back earlier for sports orientation. If there is a way

189to get some of that information out there that might be helpful to people as they're considering how to give you feedback. And my hope was this is one of the ways to get that information out there, I hope. But so I will tell, so it's Wednesday, April 10th through Friday, April 12th, 2024 is the scheduled ELA paper-based test. We may not be in paper then. We have not made that decision yet for 2024. But if it is paper-based, that's when it is. Gotcha. Okay. That's really helpful. Thank you. I think one thing that would also be helpful if we could add is looking back, Bob sort of alluded to this before of, what are our instructional hours? And obviously we always plan, I know we plan for more than the minimum, and I know that

190there's also variance. An obvious example is snow days. If we have a lot of snow days, we will have less instructional hours that year. But it might be helpful for people as they're looking at it to understand what that variance is. I'm personally not sure what that is. It may not tell the whole story, I understand, but I think there's value is, to your point, there's so many moving parts. So, whatever we can give data wise to kind of say, this is that band that we live in. So, even though you see a lot of moving parts in the calendar, we always end up in this band, which is an assumption I have, but actually am not 100% sure. And then I just, I have a comment and a comment and a suggestion. So, my

191comment is, I mean the one piece I, first of all, I think this is excellent. We're having this discussion. This is how we should do work. I so thank you for spending the time to allow us to have this conversation. There is a real tension as you look at these examples between that value of the community, which I believe in, of instructional continuity and adding holidays, especially when holidays, many of them move days of the week or periods of time. And that is includes holidays we already celebrate. I want to acknowledge that that is not something that only these four holidays, but I think we just have to recognize you look at some examples the end of next year potentially you could have one full day of school in the last two weeks. That's just

192a value the community's gonna have to think about. So, when you're thinking about sharing feedback, I think that's important. And then my one quest question comment is, I guess the whole thing was excellent. The one piece I feel like we didn't talk about is what the underlying processes to have determined which holidays. I'm not sure that matters today. I think we kind of know what is, we've heard from the community, we know. It could matter in the future. And it's just something that we may want to think about articulating. That might be the hardest thing of all of all this. How do we know what that value is? And I think it's the voices that we've heard, which necessarily does not include the voices we haven't heard. And I think that's really what you're saying

193and what the future might look like for different groups that come in different holidays that are observed and that we're not even thinking about right now. Exactly, we just don't, and I think, I'm not saying that should stop us from doing this work. So, I'm unknown in the future. I just think that we just have to be cognizant of that and we have a finite number of days and hours. Is what it is. I don't think any of us want to go into the summer, but it's just something to think about. So, thank you for this. It was really helpful. Is there any debate, Drew, among say the faculty and administration? We do traditionally have the two full weeks of vacation in like the February and March or April. And it seems to me one

194could potentially say that's great if you can do it, but now we're trying to, I'm looking at things like Passover and those are two days. So, maybe instead of having a full week, we have a long weekend. I don't know. I mean there's a certain amount of custom involved with what people expect in terms of their school breaks. But I'm, in my own mind, debating, well we have the two weeks for Christmas and we have this large contingency of people that put a huge value on family time during the holidays and that's frequently international travel involved and there are all these tensions because in order to do that, we may have to short change something else. So, I mean, the pecking order starts to become a little bit gray in terms of the volume of

195the impact. Yes, in a perfect world you would meet all of those, but it, as we can see, it's almost virtually impossible to check every box. Let me give like a little bit of an absurd example, but I think it illustrates your point. So, one of the things we think and worry about would be, so let's say we needed next year, we needed to trade off one day. We could easily bring people back Friday, I think it's the 5th of January, 2024. I think we would look pretty foolish asking everybody for one day, maybe I'm wrong about this, but for one day. So, to come back for one day only to have a weekend again after having been off traveling, whatever, perhaps for 13 days or 12 days. I'm not doing the math well in

196my head right now. 13 days, right? That's an extreme example. But that's the kind of thing. So, what we think about is, what would attendance look like on that day? People not show up. Are we really essentially spiting ourselves and really we won't have a great attendance rate 'cause families will make a judgment that well, yeah, one day we'll stay away, we'll extend our trip. I don't know, I'm just being practical there. That's the thing. And so you could extend that, okay, two long weekends. So, let's say it's we have Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday off, you have now you're extending that same problem to a Thursday and a Friday. Will people take. So, those are things we just think about and worry about it. And if I could just add, I mean I would view it,

197from the board's perspective, it's my view, I don't think we're in the weeds problem solving on which Thursday, which Tuesday. I mean I don't think that's our role really. I mean I think our role and others can disagree is to give guidance as a policy matter. What values do we want to enshrine in this calendar versus like how do we wanna problem solve for if you do fit Eid in 2027, what has to get cut in 2027? Because I mean that's just something that if that were our job, we would clearly be here many, many days and weeks. So, totally great. I mean I just shared that in an to do the transparency of this is what we are wrestling with in our heads. Absolutely - I was lucky to have a preview of a

198lot of this so I don't have too many questions. I did have one comment which was not at all related to the calendar, but the fact that we're considering computer-based testing for state tests, I actually thought was really interesting given sort of what's happening with the SAT moving to computer-based next year. And I had sort of wondered how for students that are older that haven't had the opportunity to take as many computer-based tests, how they will fare. I think that's something that a lot of parents are wondering. So, I think it's interesting that we're moving or that there's an option to move in that direction but that's an aside from the calendar. We'll give a cabinet update on that in January 'cause there's a big information window in January that we're gonna learn more from.

199Sometime in January we'll give a cabinet update to kind of share more about that. Great, I'm looking forward to that. And I'll just reiterate some of my comments from earlier. And Drew, you mentioned that, we're coming up on two years of our anniversary of our DEI policy. And I think it is really a testament to you as to how much we have moved forward with that policy and to have heard from our students, to hear from our community, to be given the opportunity to look at these scenarios and consider the trade-offs and comment on them, and then let you take that feedback back and work with the teachers and the rest of the school community, I appreciate that opportunity. I will also say that I appreciate that we're looking for ways to be an inclusive

200community for all of our students. So, thank you for doing that. Great, thank you. Appreciate that. Okay, well that was a healthy discussion. Let's move on to the superintendent search update. And as I stated earlier that we would have an update this evening. I will turn it over to Ron, to give our update. Thank you, Amber. Tonight I just have a few brief updates and reminders regarding the expected timeline of the search process. As Amber mentioned earlier this evening, since our last board meeting, we have met an executive session six times to conduct work related to the superintendent search. The board anticipates maintaining our expected timeline and that the process will continue into the new year. We will be meeting an executive session after the holiday break to continue the process, including activities such as

201conducting 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 is signed. 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 the page can be found on the homepage of the district website. Thank you, Ron. And does anybody have any other comments or we'll move on? Okay, let's move on to the next, which is the telecommunications letter to cellular carriers. And as I mentioned last time and as we discussed, it was suggested to us from the mayor

202that we consider writing letters directly to the telecommunications carriers and this board voiced their support for that and would like to include their name. And Ron has graciously agreed to write a draft of that letter, which is attached. I don't know if you'd like to share any comments about that, Ron. So, for those watching, a draft of the letter is attached to board docs. Since it went out I think on Friday based on some good feedback I received, I just want to make a couple suggestions to this board to make sure they're okay with this. And of course, any other suggestions people may wish to voice. There were two or three suggestions. One is there's a couple places where we use the term near term to discuss addressing solutions now at the schools. And so

203we would like to add the word immediate right before that in two places. So, it would be immediate near term to just really emphasize we're not talking near term six months, we're talking about near term right now. Along the same lines in the second paragraph where it right now says, for the reasons stated in this letter, including safety and security, the board believes it would be immediate near term solutions are essential to address telecom gaps around school buildings and exterior grounds. We would suggest, or I would suggest adding the following sentence, implementation of such near term solutions could begin concurrently while longer term solutions continue to be planned. And the idea here is that there are longer term community-wide solutions. The schools is not the only thing the village is looking at. So, while that

204work is being done, we hope concurrently we can do some implementation for near term things at the schools. And then the last piece is just in the first paragraph, there's a sentence about the work of the village and the carriers and we might tweak this slightly, just depending on where the village is with each carrier. There are three main carriers. They might be at slightly different places, so you might see a slight tweak in that sentence. And so I just put that out there, see if anybody has any comments, if you're okay with that, or other comments before we finalize. Ron, I think you missed one immediate in the last paragraph that you added. Oh yeah, thanks, Amber. In the last paragraph, there's, in the second line where it says near term, it would also

205say immediate near term in our conclusion. Does anybody have any feedback or are we generally all comfortable with moving forward? And everybody would still like to have their name on this letter? Thank you for drafting it, Rob. Great. Looks like there's consensus from the board. I echo Jessica's thanks, thank you for drafting that. We will create versions of this letter for each of the carriers, Verizon, AT&T and T-Mobile, and get those out as soon as possible with everyone's signatures. Thank you. Okay, what is next on our agenda? Oh, public comment. Okay, I will just give the preamble to public comment. 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,

206address, 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, a [email protected]. The public comment period is reserved for comments only. The board will not engage in dialogue. The board reserves the right to respond to comments and questions and 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 our

207second public comment period to members of the audience. If you would like to speak, please come to the podium. Hi, my name is Laura Lou and I live at two Wheelock Road. I'm here to speak as an individual and not on behalf of any groups. Same as the students and families who spoke previously, I would like to thank Dr. Patrick, the district and the board for considering adding Diwali, Lunar New Year, Eid al-Fitr, Eid al Adha, in the development of the school calendar. I'm grateful for your commitment to diversity and inclusion in the district, your responsiveness to community needs and the tremendous thoughtful work that you put into this. You have heard from many, and I'm sure you understand. My family and many other families who celebrate these holidays are extremely heartened by this possibility

208and we can't wait for it to be adopted by the board and become a reality. I'm extremely moved by Ms. Hong's comments about missing Luna New Year growing up. For me, I immigrated here as an adult, so I do have that part solid, personally. Immigration carried its own challenges, but I was able to draw strengths from my culture and heritage. For my children and my friends' children, I understand that it's a true deficit for them not having their heritages recognized equitably. Now with this potential development with their heritage affirmed and have their holidays recognized, it will be an incredible and long overdue boost to students sense of belonging and wellbeing. This will be a transformative change in hundreds and thousands of students' lives now and going forward. I also wanna say all these articulate and

209thoughtful young people who've spoken here so eloquently advocating for themselves and their classmates are products of the Scarsdale education as much as their products of their heritage cultures. You should all take great pride in the wonderful work you do for the community. I just have one small suggestion for the draft calendar because in the '23 to '24 school year, many holidays, roshana, Diwali and Luna New Year, all fall on weekends. I hope the board will consider like adding a lineup of text on top of the calendar just to recognize that fact to avoid any confusion. Just in closing, I just wanna say, as we often say in the DEI community, in the district, it's a key 21st century skill to understand diverse cultures, perspectives and to be able to collaborate as global citizens. We are

210fortunate to have this wonderful diversity among us here to enrich us. Adding these holidays to the school calendar will advance our work tremendously, and I can't thank you enough for considering adopting this calendar. And I just wanna wish you all wonderful holiday. Thank you, Ms. Lou. Is there anyone else in the audience? Okay, seeing now one, let's move to the Zoom. And I'm not sure if it's Ron or Susie who's managing you. There are a few attendees, but nobody has an array hands raised. I have put a comment a couple times in the chat, but why don't we just give it a. Sure. Minute. The code. The oh, the right, the code, I wrote it down. The password for the Zoom, if you are watching through the livestream is 806110. Again, it's 806110. We'll give

211you a minute to log into the Zoom in case you would like to comment. Nobody has joined and none of the current attendees have their hands up. Okay, let's go ahead and close public comment and we will move on to follow up to public comment, which we only had one comment. So I think we're in good shape. Wrap up items. I think the only thing I can think of is, Drew, so we would like people to offer feedback on the district webpage where you'll have the calendar and all the documents linked. So, we'll encourage the community members to offer their feedback that way, rather than emailing the Board of Ed directly. And then we'll move on to meeting dates for the next month, Ron. There are two meeting dates for the coming month, Monday, January

2129th, 2023, a budget and staffing recommendation, 6:00 PM at the high school room, 170-172. In the same room, a business meeting at 7:00 PM. I have followed by an executive session if needed. On Monday, February 13th, 2023, budget study session number one. 6:00 PM at the high school room, 170-172. Followed in the same room by a business meeting and followed by an executive session if needed. Thank you, Ron. Can I get a motion to adjourn the meeting? Thank you, Jessica. Is there a second? Thank you, Susie. Any discussion? All in favor, please say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Thank you everyone. Have a wonderful holiday break and we'll see you in 2023.