BOE Budget Session 2 Business Meeting 2022-3-7

001Hello. I call this Budget Study Session #2 to order, and note that all board members are here except for Jessica Resnick-Ault. And we're also joined by Dr. Hagerman and his cabinet. So I will turn it over to... I'm not sure whom first, Thomas first. Okay, thank you. Thank you. So as is typical of this time of year, we do have Budget Study Sessions that precede our Business Meetings. And so we have both of those meetings lined up tonight. We are gonna kick off with the budget study session. This happens to be number two of a number of these. And we're certainly appreciative of folks who are attending either in person or virtually to participate in this work. This evening's presentation will be a continuation of the district's plan for the upcoming school year as it's

002related to the anticipated revenues and expenditures of the district. Tonight is gonna focus on curriculum, instruction, and assessment, special education, student services, and security, along with technology and facility. So it's pretty broad categorical areas are gonna be addressed tonight. There's gonna be a lot of information presented. As a reminder, these are available as livestream, but also are recorded so that folks can go back and watch these in a manner in which their schedule allows and can also go back for reference in terms of data points or discussion items that we've had. And we encourage folks to certainly partake of that opportunity. Next, I'd just like to say thank you again to my colleagues who are presenting with me tonight, as well as the myriad of other staff members, and administrators who work on the budgeting

003process really throughout the year. So thanks to everyone, as well as the board's ongoing work in this area. And again, we encourage the community stay informed in this process and to contribute your thoughts and insights as we work towards the development of a budget that will eventually be put to our community voters in May. And we appreciate again all the feedback we can get on this process. So with that, I will turn it over to Stuart. Thank you very much, Dr. Hagerman. As Dr. Hagerman mentioned, all of this is available if you go back and watch the videos, but also the presentations are available on our district with website under the Board of Education, Financial Budget Session, along with the most updated budget book. So tonight, to start off with an update on the budget,

004this is the same projected fund balance at this point, the same revenues and expenditures as we presented last time. I will say that these are extremely volatile times. So we are certainly being impacted by inflation, and fuel prices, and oil prices, and all of that. So I can guarantee you that neither our revenues and especially our expenditures will exactly match those numbers that you see on that screen. Hopefully, we'll be relatively close, but these are obviously subject to change. And as you recall, the fund balance of 23,577 to be allocated into those categories made up of the different reserves, whatever encumbrances we have at the end of the year, and then also fund balance assigned for next year. Any amount remaining of 5.3 million, which is just about 3.07 or 3.1% of the next year's

005budget at this point in time. So the draft budget, 173,291,393, that's where we left off at the end of Budget Session #1. So that was the updated number after we made those changes, which we presented at the end of that meeting. If we recall, we do not have any updates since that point. The budget to budget increase, 3.85%. Projected increase in levy, 3.45%. That levy limit if we recall is a 3.5% percent. So we are about $75,000 underneath that. When you translate those into actual tax rate increases, again, that's based on other factors than just the tax levy based on a total assessment. And the total fair market value or the equalization rate, the tax rate percent increases for Scarsdale just a bit under 2.5%. And Mamaroneck, 3.68%. And if we recall, we do have

006built into this budget a half a million for contingency funding. Previously branded as COVID contingency. And I'd like to suggest that we perhaps just change that to contingency funding at this point. Certainly, we could have some COVID contingency, but certainly we have contingency for things such as inflation and oil prices and gas prices whether we don't know if that's going to continue in next year if things change in Ukraine or across the world. But I would like to maybe perhaps rebrand that going into Budget Session #3. And I welcome your feedback at the end of the presentation on that. Go to the next slide. So the budget plan. This is our expenditure plan or offsetting revenues and the resulting levy. If you look that middle column, you can see our total expenditure budget, 173,291,393. That's

007that 3.85% increase. Offsetting revenues, state aid, county taxes, all the miscellaneous revenues, $11.12 million. Our transfer from reserves, 550,000. Assigned fund balance 1.925 million. You subtract those revenues out from the budget, and your result is the total tax levy of $159,697,444. That's a 3.45% increase compared to current year. So as Dr. Hagerman mentioned, we're gonna be looking at the different components at this meeting. And we're gonna start off with curriculum, instruction, and assessment. And I'll hand this over to Dr. McIntosh. Thanks. Thank you very much, Stuart. Thank you to the Board of Education, Thomas, and the entire cabinet, and all those in person or remotely who are joining us for this budget presentation. I appreciate the opportunity to highlight the essential areas of the curriculum, instruction, and assessment budget. I'll start with some of our

008guiding principles. Students are at the center. This may seem obvious, but it's important to check back to see that we are using our financial resources in ways that meaningfully and positively influence student development in all ways. It is important to connect the knowing and the doing. Knowing is what research in the field tells us and what our internal assessments tell us. The doing is the application of that knowledge to make the appropriate adjustments to our instruction, curriculum, and assessments. We know, for example, through ongoing research in the field of literacy that many beginning readers benefit from a wide access to simple decodable books. What we do is make certain that there are those abundant resources within each primary classroom library. These decodable books will come up later in the evening during a textbook approval portion.

009None of the educators in Scarsdale work in isolation. So the principle creation and cohesion require collaboration. We rely on a wide range of expertise and perspectives to create the best possible curriculum for our students and engage in the most effective instructional practices. This budget is also guided by the principle that multiple perspectives and authentic experiences enhance learning. Through critically examining different voices, ideas, and opinions, and having the resources, and training to do so, we come to a deeper understanding of history, current events, and social and societal trends that shape our world. This connects to the work in diversity, equity, and inclusion, and strategic plans related to global competencies and social entrepreneurship, and the concept of non-sibi. Authentic experiences are ones that are engaging and meaningful to students, ones that relate to their own felt needs

010and experiences, which connect to our goals on student-centered and project-based learning, and the exciting social entrepreneurship and science research that's fueling and motivating our students. Program improvement. The heart of program improvement is using internal expertise and harnessing experts in the field in designing and updating our methods and curriculum to better meet the needs of our students. This summer, we anticipate continued curriculum work. Hmm? Yeah, sorry. I was trying to settle down the signal. That's in the back. It's producing some thumping on the microphone. Oh, you know what? I'm used to talking through a mask. I just had to adjust. Just trying from there. Enunciate. Thank you. This summer, we anticipate continued curriculum work and alignment assessment, student wellness, and elementary mathematics, as well as areas that are subjects of upcoming educational reports. Namely a focus

011on response to recommendations from the tri-state committee on advanced topics, continued work on cohesive sustainability, and further work on our structures of multi-tiered systems of support or MTSS. And you remember those initials for our next educational report. Arts and aesthetic education. The arts continue to provide a healing and strengthening outlet for our students in the last few years. We look forward to expanding the in-person opportunities for visiting artists and visual and performing arts to continue to model and inspire creativity in our students. We look forward with excitement and optimism that our community can engage more and more in real life experiences. Special thank you to our music teachers who in preparing for upcoming spring performances have been creatively and flexibly working within the safe mitigations to provide opportunities for our young musicians to demonstrate their

012process and their learning. The Interdependence Institute fosters the development of intercultural skills that teachers and students need to deepen global understandings and broaden their international perspectives. Through partnerships and exchanges, students and faculty develop the skills needed to successfully navigate the complexities of an ever-increasingly interdependent world. The Interdependence Institute has also sponsored author and expert visits to enrich and inspire student experience. I'll have updates at the educational report, but this Thursday at 7:30 AM, Eastern Standard Time, a group of our high school students will be taking part in a global entrepreneurship challenge with peers from the Netherlands, India, China, Hong Kong, Turkey, England, Ghana, Italy, France, Canada, Morocco, and several U.S. states. The Scarsdale Teacher Institute provides continuing education to Scarsdale faculty. The STI is funded by the district in teacher tuition. The district funds the

013administrative salary of the STI director and provides an allocation for support of the STI program. The funding level of the STI is contractually negotiated with the Scarsdale Teacher Association. Here's a slide of teachers working this summer on project-based learning through an STI extension course, the learning that was underpinning the Spark Program. I'm happy to report this course is continuing through this year, and 50 elementary educators are enrolled, creating modules for authentic student-centered, non-sibi infused and project-based learning experiences. The next picture is actually the most important and underlines the true value of the STI district partnership. It shows students actually applying their learning in the classroom. The impact of the teacher learning on student outcomes is essential. Our STI is an important element of the work we do in Scarsdale. To highlight a few, the STI

014reflects the needs in interest of diverse educators. The courses are informed and generated by Scarsdale initiatives and values. Here's a picture of Joan Iorio. Iorio. Sorry, Joan, who is presenting to the policy board her innovative work on developing executive functioning in her students, work she has shared with educators and families. This coordination between the STI leadership and the district, this is very important. The STI Director Ann Marie Nee, Dr. Patrick and I meet regularly to coordinate our resources and work hand-in-hand to align and support district priorities. And the STI provides essential interdisciplinary collaboration across content and levels. New learning can result in course creation and structural change, and we've seen that happen. And also the stack classes are going strong and engage external and internal expertise. This continues to be a responsive and effective way

015to support our teachers. The Center for Innovation. The purpose for the Center of Innovation is to reimagine teaching and learning, develop new models of instruction, explore the role of technology in transforming instruction into foster widespread change beyond a single classroom or teacher. The allocation will fund teacher project proposals, consultants, speakers for faculty and community, conferences, and site visit expenses. We continue to expand our cohort of innovation ambassadors to include a wider and more diverse group of educators across the district. Grants this year help fund the middle school TV studio highlighted earlier this year and shown up on this screen. An examination of the high school science sequencing, an interdisciplinary elementary school project called Poetry, and Color, and Sound; and an exciting visiting speaker series in media literacy for high school students, which Jerry will be

016highlighting at the technology section of April's education report. Professional learning happens in a variety of ways. Teacher grants support, the professional learning needs of teachers, the District Professional Development Committee reviews and acts on teacher applications. As well, we work with various organizations and consultants. The budget supports the professional learning of elementary grade teachers to help support cohesion across the schools. This allocation will fund professional developers and consultants who are working with classroom teachers in all five schools on strategies for implementing the district's balance literacy, science and math programs in a consistent supported and coherent manner. Sustainability initiative, this money is used to fund the gardening and sustainability initiatives in all seven schools. Here's a screenshot of a guest speaker on composting. Not to put him on the spot. He might be here with us. Keeping

017the bods alive and sustainability. And then there's an update on Greenacres garden. It's being constructed, and it will be up, and it should be running later this spring with student input and involvement. Curriculum, research, and assessment. One of the district's strategic goals is to use data to improve instruction. This budget includes funds to bring in committees of college professors who work with teachers to develop, validate, and assess high school curricular offerings. This budget also provides funds to assess the district's strategic initiatives. As I mentioned earlier, this connection is important in an evolving district. I just snapped this picture of our third grade teachers involved in their ongoing training in Next Gen Standards in Science with Dr. Jen Kiley. We know the explicit spiraling of science concepts that build from year-to-year is important. And we dedicate

018time, resources, and energy to assure this. Multiple perspectives and authentic experiences enhance learning. To illustrate this, I've included a slide of a co-taught lesson between a seventh grade social studies teacher, Will, and our middle school librarian, Shana, in which they engage their students an analysis of the framework of Black reform leaders, a lens inspired by writing on anti-racism. Next to that is a stack of books recently introduced to our curriculum, illustrating the continued purposeful infusion of multiple perspectives. This slide is straightforward and shows administrative salaries across the district, principals, assistant principals, as well as their support and clerical needs. This is the professional development learning, instruction, staff, and curricular development in the areas, which I've just described. As a point of explanation, the increase from last year is largely due to an increase in the

019area of sustainability, which is providing programming for students at our school and increase in material costs. Budgeted maintenance upkeep for the gardening programs raised beds at our school. The majority of the sustainability program is contracted through BOCES and incurs a fee, but a percentage of the contract expense is returned to the district as BOCES aid the following year. Instruction - day school program. This slide represents the salaries of our educators' material needs as a pie chart. It's the next one. And not surprisingly, we represent a large portion of the budget. That's why you get the most slides, Edgar. Yeah, that's true. And I pass it back to Stuart. Oh, pass it on to Eric. Thank you. Happy to have the opportunity to talk a little bit tonight about three different portions of the budget; special

020education, student services, and then safety, security, and emergency management. We'll start out with special education. So as you can see, the number here represents the totality of the salaries, programmatic expenses, material expenses, and outside of district placement expenses for special education. This year represents a fairly significant increase from the budget, but a smaller increase from what our actual incurred expenditure were this year. I will go into kind of what drives that in a few minutes Before we do that, I think it's important to kind of take a look at really some of our philosophy and practices. These five bullet points kind of represent a good understanding of where we come from. All students deserve to have their strengths develop and achieve success. The vast majority of our students are and can be accommodated in regular

021classroom education with appropriate support. So the move towards being as inclusive as possible with our students. And making sure classified students are given their rights to receive those accommodation modifications on their IEPs and 504s. I think it's important to recognize that parents and our families are major parts of the decision makers that include our disabled students. And we're always looking to expand the curriculum of service and bring students back to district whenever we can. A couple of weeks ago, we had the opportunity to hear from some of our excellent special education educators, and they went through a number of our programs, and I went through some of the quantitative data. This is kind of a summary of that. We are at a classification rate that's CSE, IEPs at 12%. There's a similar rate for students

022with 504 identification. I think it's important to just recognize that students who are classified under the 504 are not considered special education students. They're students with disabilities, but they are not receiving specialized educational services. So they're not receiving instruction in a specially designed way. They often receive related services and accommodations and modifications within a classroom, but they're participating in the typical general education program and are not in specialized classes or specialized instruction within those classes. So the total students with disabilities are 24.2%. About 1,000 students are identified in one way or the other. Over the past 10 years, you can see the chart there. We've had a significant increase in students with autism. We've had a significant increase percentage-wise also with other health impaired. We've talked a lot about anxiety and some of the social

023emotional pieces. Many of those cases are located in that line of classification. Our emotional disturbance or emotional disabilities has stayed as a percentage relatively stable. However, given the increasing numbers of students who are classified, that has risen as an absolute number and has certainly has impacts on the budget. Next slide, Jerry. Just to review some of our current programs in the elementaries. All of our elementaries have learning resource centers staffed by two special education teachers. They provide services for MTSS, RTI, and for resource room on all of those schools. We have integrated co-teaching classes, as you can see there with the number of sections. And we have self-contained classes within two of our schools, Quaker Ridge and Edgewood. On the secondary level. Next slide, Jerry. We have our Learning Resource Center in the middle school,

024a full parallel program, which is a combination of integrated co-teaching and 12:1 special classes for students who are regularly assessed. And this year, we're proposing the start of the Scarsdale Support Program in the middle school, which is an extension of the Scarsdale Support Program in our high school. At the high school, we have a supported skills program, which includes some co-teaching with special education teachers, our Learning Resource Center, and then our Scarsdale Support Program, which started six years ago and has been quite successful. So that's really the scope of our named programs in the schools. Also, special education budget includes all of our related service providers with the exception of psychologists who fall our student services budget. This year's highlights really include the new positions that we've talked about over the past few weeks. The

025budget includes a new FTE on the elementary level for expanding the 8:1:2 class at Edgewood which would give us both a K2 and a 35 section of that. And adding of a middle school special education teacher to teach the academic portion of our Scarsdale Support Program or a proposed Scarsdale Support Program. Just as a note, the psychologist position for this program is not actually located in the special ed budget. That'll fall under the student services budget, and I'll mention that when we get there. And it also includes two school-based social workers, one assigned to the high school and one assigned to the middle school to address the need for direct mental health intervention. The major (audio cuts out) that we're seeing in the budget is obviously our increase in salaries and new positions. So that's

026an incremental increase, plus the four new positions that I just talked about. An increase in mandated services post-pandemic has really jumped with the focus on behavioral supports being one of the things that have jumped pretty significantly. We have one district using a number of consulting firms for that behavioral support. We don't believe that that behavioral support will be a long-term need, but it is something as students returned, especially students with disabilities from longer times outside of their regular structured schedules. They needed some extra support to get back into the flow of things. We also have a few particularly intensive needs students that have used a significant number of resources as appropriate, but still an impact on our budget. The other piece is although a relatively small number of students, we have had an increase of

027students post-pandemic and through the end of the pandemic, needing residential placements. Each one of those represents a significant cost. So even a handful of students can have an impact, a recognizable impact on the budget. So those are pieces that are driving our costs for this year. As we move on to student services, which really works hand-in-hand with our special education budget, you can see the increase there that is really almost solely due to salaries and the 2.4 positions that we're proposing to bring on which is the two psychologists and the.4 FTE of clerical support. This budget in addition to psychologists is the funding for all of our guidance counselors and their salaries and their office staff. And it also includes our contract for the use services project with Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling. That has a

028separate contract that is voted on separately. This year's contract includes all of the same services and number of social workers that were used this year, which is three in the middle school, two in the high school. We are expecting that contract to come in a little bit lower this year because there was time of last year when social workers were not actually in those positions, and there was hiring going on so we were receiving a credit from last year's contract. And finally, the health services are also included in our student services budget, which includes all of the district nurses, the nurse we provide to the Immaculate Heart of Mary. And it covers the maintenance of all of our AED machines and first aid supplies across all of the districts. That is in a nutshell our

029special education and student services budget. And then finally, I'm going to mention our safety, security, and emergency management budget. This is part of the plant operations budget. So we're calling it out separately. And in the narratorization in the budget book of plant operations, you can see these facts, but there is no place in our budget book to find safety, security, and emergency management as its own chart or graph. So this year, we're proposing a $1.23 million budget. This is $159,100 lower than last year's funding. And this is primarily because this year, we have about $150,000 expense for our integrated lockdown system and its installation. So once that is done, we don't see another cost taking that over for next year. The largest component of the SSEM budget is our safety monitors. As you can see,

030that's 873,000 of our 1.2 million. This funding also includes our consultation with Al Terrace and our chief of security and emergency management. Safety and security related supplies and equipment are about $183,000 of the budget. I think it's important to kinda look at how we conceptualize safety, security, and emergency management. We really have three main pillars. The first being a layer of actual physical safety, security, and emergency management. So safety monitors window mitigation, integrated lockdown system. Our budget this year maintains all of that and funds limited gate and Ballard installation. And also, we've started to discuss the possibility of doing some digital mapping of all of our buildings and grounds to help with first responder response. So those are pieces of the budget that we're looking at for kind of the external layer of safety and

031security. The second piece is our mental health and social emotional support. This year's budget really focuses on this pillar of safety, security, and emergency management, looking to expand our Scarsdale Support Program, and put additional mental health clinicians for general intervention in both the middle school and the high school. And the last part of our focus, which is the least impactful on the budget, but just as important is our policies, practices, and procedures. Next year, the focus will really be on integrating our new integrated lockdown system into our actual practice and making sure that students, teachers, faculty, and staff all know how to react with the new system and the new procedures there. So all in all... Next slide. All in all, student services and special education represent... What is that? 14.5% of our budget, which

032has risen from about eight and follows what our population numbers are as we move forward. So thank you. I think our next, Jerry and Rachel. Thank you again for the opportunity to present the technology budget to you tonight. Rachel and I will be talking about our three different domains of technology. Even though we talk about each of these areas separately, the truth is that they all work together to form the cohesive technology program. To set the context, I just wanna talk about two items that we discuss and putting together the technology budget. The first is that the interesting thing about the timing of this presentation is that our actual technology presentation always happens in the spring and will be the same this year, April 25th. But tonight, we're talking about the budget first, which is

033kind of an interesting order. We're talking about the total cost of ownership of our technology. But in April, you're gonna see the value of investment with the technology provides to our students and teachers. The second thing is that there's a term in IT called MOOSE. It stands for maintain and operate the organization, systems and equipment. And that's significant because when Rachel and I get together to do the budget every year, we go line by line to go over to make sure that we have everything needed to make sure the technology program functions on a day-to-day. And beyond that, we look at other things we need to add to the program in order to bring enhancements and also request that are part of the program as well. To further set the context, we do wanna talk

034about the fact that we're dealing with a lot of uncertainty, not just within schools, but of course also in budget planning. And I say this every year because this budget comes out at a fairly early date here in March, the devices that we're gonna be purchasing in the spring in July are not available yet. So we're doing our prices based on estimates and what existing devices are that we're using. The other thing is that increasingly over the years, technology companies are no longer willing to disclose their long-term plans. We used to be able to sit down with Apple and Google, sign a nondisclosure agreement, and they would give us information about a quarterly roadmap. They don't do that anymore because of social media and because, of course, the way investments depend on use. The other

035thing is that, we are moving from and have been moving from purchasing relatively smaller numbers of large devices, like desktop computers, to an increasing number of devices that are smaller, less expensive, but the catch is that if there's an increase in price or a change based on what we've budgeted for, that small increase is multiplied out by hundreds. So for example, if we do an estimate on the cost of an iPad or a Chromebook, and we're off by $20, that $20 increase is multiplied times the number of devices that we order every year, which could present a potential issue. And of course, we all know about the global supply chain and the disruptions that we've been facing. And just an example, we ordered color printers in September, and we were told that they are not

036gonna ship this year until May. So fortunately, for most of the devices that we've ordered, they did come in in time, they did come in in the fall, but there are gonna be examples of things that will be delayed because of the supply chain issues. Another thing regarding volatility that there have been different things that are happening around the world. There was recently an incident where Western Digital who is a huge supplier of devices called SSD drive, solid state drives. These are the little hard drives that are in your laptops or iPads or other devices, that a significant number of them were deemed to be unusable. And as a result, that supply chain on those items, which are really in many different devices is gonna be constrained. So of course, I saw this article immediately,

037went out and bought a backup drive because they're predicting that drives, the cost of these devices are gonna go up over the next couple of months. Increasingly with the context of our program, we have to be concerned about data privacy and security. And that's something that we need to consider for every one of our technology purchases involving online services, software, and things of that nature. And then last year, I also told the board that the pandemic itself hasn't changed our technology plans per se, but it has really accelerated some of the things that we wanted to do. Taking the one-to-one devices home. We had to do that all at once across the board for every student. That was something we were planning to do, but we weren't certainly planning to do it all at once.

038And that requires a funding commitment, and we're gonna continue to examine that in the future. And then the other thing is that during the pandemic, we learned a couple of things and saw a couple of services that we really like to keep on. The biggest example being Zoom. We now know that having this video conferencing technology allows us to do things very easily and very quickly, and perhaps can save us in doing some meetings. So it's something that we have to now fund. We did receive Zoom for free during the pandemic, but now that the pandemic is over, we have to fund that. So that's part of this budget. And in addition, we have state mandates that also dictate things. So for example, the remote public comment that you're gonna be doing tonight runs over

039Zoom. So we have to have Zoom webinars available to support that. Those are also included in the budget. The budget, of course, supports the district strategic plan. And you're gonna hear more about that when we talk about the technology plan that we're gonna be submitting to New York State later on the spring. The other thing that's very important to understand about our technology budget is that we plan things in packages. So for example, if we're going to be purchasing iPads, it's not just the iPad, it's the cover for the iPad. It's the virus protection in the iPads case virus software, but internet filtering software. It's the apps that go on that iPad. So there's a lot of things that go into a device beyond the cost of the device itself. And then our computer teachers

040do study the latest trends. We also consult with other districts in the region. We have something called the New York Technology Educators Network, NYTEN, other tech directors. We all meet once a month to discuss our purchasing procedures and other things so we can norm ourselves that way. And then, of course, the Lower Hudson Regional Information Center has been a very good partner in helping us to predict some of the things that we need to do in the future. We do have, over the course of the years, a very good record, I think, of making sound purchases partially due to, I think, good forecasting, partially sometimes maybe due to luck. But we've had, I think, a good track record regarding that. And finally, in terms of the budget itself, we do not like to have... While

041the technology may be volatile, we don't like a budget that goes up and down every year. So for example, you're gonna hear me talking a little bit about the technology lease purchase program that has been flat 0% increase for the past five years. So a flat budget. This year, we are asking for an increase in that, and I'll talk a little bit about that. But generally speaking, we like to keep our technology costs pretty steady growth or flat. So Rachel's gonna talk about two critical important areas that support the instructional program and are very big part of the budget. Thank you, Jerry. I will first be talking about the administrative technology budget. Thank you. I said thank you, Jerry. (Rachel laughs) And if you could go to the next slide. I will be talking about

042the administrative technology budget, which includes the support of services and applications provided by the data services team. This includes Infinite Campus, our Student Information System, as well as systems for finance, human resources, food services, transportation, and facilities. It also incorporates staffing for state and federal reporting of both student and staff data. Lastly, it comprises support of desktop hardware on computer software for administrators on all other administrative users. The administrative technology budget is being increased to cover anticipated software license increases driven by the HIVE Inflation, as well as the cost for new software to streamline operational processes. The increases also cover the addition of mobile hotspots for all administrators for emergency management, as well as the cost of some wireless access points and network switches. This is part of our planned initiative to improve our wireless

043coverage, which I will be addressing in the next section. The technical services budget. In this section, I will be discussing the funds necessary to build and maintain a technology infrastructure that on one hand, supports the instructional program and on the other hand, allows the district to improve its operational efficiency. Mike Basso who manages the Technical Services Team is in the audience. And I would like to thank him for joining us this evening. Mike and his team manage the implementation support of everything we talk about here, and he provides integral support when Jerry and I developed this technology budget. This budget includes funds to support the district's network and server infrastructure, cyber security, phone system, computer hardware, and audio visual equipment. It also covers sound systems and installation and maintenance of classroom display technology, as well

044as cable TV productions and audio visual support. The increase in this budget is for the purpose of enhancing wireless internet access in our buildings and immediate surrounding areas. We have been receiving feedback from the community about lack of internet access in some parts of our buildings and surrounding areas. Before I get into details, it is important that I point out the difference between two types of different internet access, cellular and wifi access. The first type, cellular internet access requires a cell phone signal, which is transmitted from a cellular radio tower. Certain areas of Scarsdale, especially the Fox Meadow neighborhood have very poor cellular service. The village is in talks with cellular companies and the studying options to improve coverage. The second type, wifi internet access happens via network routers. While the district installed its wifi

045network many years ago, we continue to use of the art technology and regularly upgrade our wifi access points. This is why the district does not have any issues with wifi performance. However, when the wifi was installed, the objective was to provide wireless internet access in classrooms and other learning spaces. This was a successful strategy as recently as two years ago. Now, however, we find that for emergency management and overall convenience, staff, students, and building visitors expect wireless internet in every spot of our buildings, including hallways, stairwells, and even in bathrooms. In addition, during the pandemic, many non-instructional spaces were converted into offices to allow for staff and students to spread out. These spaces did not previously have wifi connectivity. The money that we have earmarked in this budget for the wifi expansion will allow us

046to complete a comprehensive wireless site survey in every building. These servers will produce heat maps which inform us of dead spots. The budget will also provide the funds to purchase access points, network switches, and add the necessary wiring. Jerry, back to you. Thank you, Rachel. So now onto the program that's supported by a lot of the work that Rachel and her team do instructional technology. This budget includes funds for software and online services. And in New York state, we do receive a reimbursement from the state in terms of state aid of approximately $75,000 to help offset the cost of software and online services. The budget also pays for all of the mandated and essential services that we have including our website and everything associated with the website, including software to help us with ADA compliance,

047streaming, filtering all the one-to-one device management systems and things of that nature, as well as all the library technology. And technical support contracts are technically under Rachel's department, but they do live in this budget because they do support the instructional program. That includes support contracts for a wireless network, all of our backup systems, cyber security initiatives more recently, and all those other services that are part of this budget. The instructional technology budget also supports the four-year hardware lease and replacement cycle that we've had in Scarsdale for probably over a decade and the hardware lease purchase program budget that'll be outlined in the three-year technology plan that you're going to see on April 25th. This year for the first time in five years, we are going to request an increase of $50,000 in that budget. Now

048in the technology plan that is currently in place, we did request an increase for this current year, but going into the pandemic and looking at our technology pricing, we thought that it did not warrant an increase. However, next year, due to some of the issues that I talked about earlier in terms of projected price increases and actually price increases that we're seeing now when we order hardware, we do think that it's time to take advantage of that projection that we had put into the technology plan. The budget also continues the 1:1 program at all levels this year up through ninth grade. Next year, expanding it to 10th grade. I do want to point out that if there's a student in 11th or also a senior, they do have the ability to do a long-term loan

049and borrow a Chromebook for the school year. So even though it's not part of the 1:1 program, we do provide that access to our students. Technology upgrades are also part of the technology plan in addition to our devices. And the increase is the budget really come down to three different areas. One is that we had a request from Mike Basso and his team to increase or to add some services to our Microsoft licensing. That enhances our security. Now, when we talk about Microsoft licensing, we're not just talking about the desktop applications that we use, but actually our home network which is a Microsoft-based network. So that's why that security piece is really important. The second one I mentioned, that's the purchase of Zoom licenses, Zoom webinar licenses. And the third piece is that there is

050an increasing need to use more and more online services and instructional software. Every year, we go through our usage and we find services that we're not using as much and get rid of them. But of course, there's also a need increasingly to add those services. And finally, our subscription databases that we use in our libraries are also supplemented by the state NOVEL database program that provides equalization funding to all public schools, private schools, and also public libraries to help provide digital resources to students across the domain. And as we say every year, technology still after all these years remains 2% of the budget, but technology touches 100% of the district. Thank you very much. The next section of the budget, we'll be discussing or presenting tonight will be facilities, plant operations and maintenance. You can

051see plant operations. Really all the utilities are major part of this section of the budget including staffing. This budget is projected to go up about 4% from year to year, really driven largely by utility. So just like in our homes, we are seeing this current year, our pricing for heating and electric really going up. On the electrical point, certainly our COVID mitigation strategies are impacting what we're paying at the end of each month, including the use of window air conditioners, probably more often than not in those warmer months. And then, I sort of forgot about this, but then it's sort of dawned to me in the aha moment. Yes, we've actually installed the mechanical ventilation systems at Edgewood and Fox Meadow, requiring more electricity. And of course, we increase the square footage at Greenacres and

052some other new spaces. And of course, the rates have increased. So we are seeing those electrical bills go up for a current year and also projected to carry through next year even if some of our use starts to stabilize a little bit. Our heating and fuel pricing, it's been great that we installed or replaced all of our aging boilers as part of that 2018 bond. However, prices have been going up and we've been running our systems a bit harder as we've had windows open this past year as well. So we are projected to increase that budget, or we are increasing that budget by $100,000 for next year. Safety, security, emergency management is also part of this budget which Eric mentioned in his presentation decreasing 159,000. And of course, we have our staffing of our custodial

053and cleaner positions and the four and a half positions in the facilities office itself. And then just a reminder, over one million square feet of building space in the district that's being maintained by this budget. Next slide. Plant maintenance. So these are really our maintenance workers, grounds workers, electricians, plumbers, and all of that. Small increase or relatively small increase of $84,000 driven by our equipment budget, a slight increase there year-to-year. we are in need of replacing a one person lift to get us into those hard to reach places for an existing one that can no longer be repaired and replacing a large mower. And then this budget, just a reminder, takes care of water testing filtration, all of our testing programs, our painting and carpeting programs, all our inspections and repairs across the district. And

054of course, the 118 acres of grounds in addition to that building space. Plant improvements and capital projects lined up for next school year. Keeping that flat year-to-year, $630,000. Here's a list of items, nothing too exciting, but nevertheless important in the operations of those buildings. Focus on replacing some aging condensate pumps and hot water heaters across the district. And some ADA improvements at A-school and some security cameras at the bus compound. We have some couple pictures anyways, LED replacement at Fox Meadow replacing these older incandescent lighting fixtures in the library. And there's just a picture of the ramp at the ADA building that clearly needs to be dealt with. And the transfer to capital fund, $485,000 for next year. The Heathcote office, which has been on our internal list for a number of years, it'll be

055the last elementary office that will have been renovated at least since I've been here. So the next couple pictures will show sort of an outdated cramped-type office that Maria Stile and her team have been working out of. Also, be replacing the carpeting, painting, furniture, and some of the case work. Also, there's some minor asbestos abatement that will also occur next summer. And I wanna give you an update on the high school auditorium project that we've been talking about for quite some time now, but let you know that that work is still continuing. You recall this slide I presented to you last year, sort of a history of where we have come from. If you recall, 2014 was included as part of that bond. Unfortunately, those bids came in much, much over what the original estimates

056were and what the bonds provided for that project was pulled out. Since then, we've been trying to include pieces in the budget as we have gone. The only part not completed as part of original bond work at this point was the seating. So that's good news. However, as we've continued this work, we have also identified some additional work as we've sort of changed consultants and internal people working on the project. So we can go to the next slide. Here's just recent history in the 2021 budget $700,000 of work was included. Took care of a lot of that safety and security, not security, safety items are in that setting. So the stage rigging was the big one and some sound system improvements. Now, that work has just been completed within the last few weeks, and they're

057just waiting on doing the training. So that's exciting as we've just finished that phase one work. I do wanna draw your attention to water infiltration was also identified when we went back and looked at this project. So we've been able to mitigate some of this, but it still exists, and it's gonna take a more concentrated focus and more dollars to fix the issue where it's really coming from the courtyard. And we're gonna have to dig down into all of that. So there's a bigger price tag associated with that work. Phase 2A, it was included as part of this budget. So that was updating a lot of the lighting systems, some of the mechanical stage lighting, and updated dimmer module, not sure exactly what that is, but that was important to be replaced, and some of

058the theatrical cabling and power wiring. We actually opened bids on that this past week. Bids came in a little bit under budget, so that was great news. And we'll have those ready for board approval at the next board meeting. And that work is scheduled to take place this upcoming summer. So what have we been doing since then? Well, we expanded our committee and we've added a new member. So David Graybill is the new theater director. David has been amazing. He brings in a wealth of experience, a lot of background. He worked in California in theaters for a number of years, has really brought a keen eye to sort of what our theater has and doesn't have. And we also added Laura Gelbum to our committee. She's the FMA president. She's here tonight. So what have

059we been doing? Well, we reviewed the remaining original scope of work, which included that replacement of seating, carpeting, additional lighting improvements beyond what we've done and also some new state flooring behind the proscenium. However, Mr. Graybill, who brings all this wealth of experience, when you change people out, they bring a new lens. So we've had him sort of complete that an internal audit of the theater for form and function. So not only what does it look like, but what is the experience in that space. So what does it look like now? What will it look like after the proposed work and then identifying sort of what those additional needs were? What of the glaring things that stood out to David was the sound was really poor in that space. So we went ahead and had

060an acoustical study done about three months or so ago. We've reviewed that study and we're still waiting, like, sort of, okay, architecturally, what would that mean? And we're still waiting on that information, but we expect to see that. One of the glaring finds of that study was that the acoustical center of that space was like stage right for the whole theater. So it just tells you something is off. So we do have some suggestions for improvements, but of course, that will have price tag associated with it. So our next steps is really to continue with our outreach for other stakeholders because that final scope that we identified previously is not really the final scope. There's more work to be done. We wanna reach out to more teachers, more students, all the different arts using that

061space to make sure that we do have a comprehensive scope and really have a holistic perspective to make sure that when we do come forth with what our final recommendation will be, it will be, "This is what will make the auditorium sort of complete and not sort of half of what should be done. We're only gonna be coming back to you five years from now because XYZ wasn't complete." So thinking, if you recall, the last price tag or last all-in price was like $1.9 million. We've done some of that work, but now we're gonna be adding additional work. My guess is it will be 1.5 million, 1.7 million, something like that. Don't hold me to it, but somewhere in that area. It will narrow that down and have a recommendation. Best thinking is that we

062need to continue putting that together for that all inclusive scope, continue to meet with people, and keep the Board of Education community abreast of where we are with that. And my best thinking is to make it part of the '23-'24 budget at this point in time. My thinking is we'll also have dollars left over. The 2018 will be complete at that point. All of that work will be completed this coming summer. All the projects will be bid out. As you recall, we do that transfer from debt service when there's money available, and that could help offset if not fully cover any proposed work at that point in time. Now, we can't promise, of course. We don't know what it will be, but if those two things equal or the money left over from the bond

063is greater, we could possibly, as a recommendation, propose to do that, all other things being equal. And then as for the famous pie chart, showing it's about 8% of operations maintenance and those capital projects in comparison to the rest of the categories. So where are we in the budget discussion timeline? So that is our last formal presentation of our expenditure components. March 21st, two weeks from now, we'll do a full plan update with any changes. I will present the revenues, which we have not done to this point. So we'll go into a little bit more detail on state aid and some of those other miscellaneous revenue sources offsetting the expenditure budget and go through sort of a full budget presentation. We will have the Budget Forum on March 28th. And the board scheduled to adopt

064on April 4th, leading up to the vote on May 17th. And we welcome any questions. Yes. Thanks, Stuart. I'll start working backwards. So with the auditorium, you mentioned that there were some water issues there. Are we planning to do any of that work this year, or are we putting that off as well? Yeah, I'm envisioning that to be part of whatever full auditorium. Okay, so that would be the following- Be part of that, correct. Yes. It will be included in the BCS. And I think the initial price tag was about $300,000. Okay. And then you mentioned the bus compound. Was there some work that we took off the budget last year and is that the same work that you're proposing for this year? No, actually some of that work were actually... So the work that

065was part of this year's budget, we did get completed last summer. We've been able to pick up some of that other work out of the regular facilities budget. So that will be addressed. And the $10,000 is really just to finish it off with some security cameras. Not a typical plant improvement project, but we wanted to show that we were still doing some work there. Oh, we did manage to get that bus We did. compound working. Okay, great. And Eric, my last question is for you. The two full-time psychologists that we're looking at adding, you said one would be for the support program at SMS, and one would be sort of general and in the high school. And I'm just wondering with all the talk about mental health needs, is that one at the Middle School?

066Ms. Choi thinks that's sufficient just to have that one person. Correct. Combined with the new social worker, yes. Okay, great. Thank you. That's it for me. I'm gonna work backwards too. Okay. Stuart, on the very last slide when we look at capital investment, the last three years have been significantly lower around 0.6 to 0.9% versus the previous seven of one in a quarter to two. Are we expecting that to go back to that level? I know we have a new building condition survey that will come out soon. Did we get a lot of work done? And now, we expect this to be the new level and just be helpful as we think about things like fund balance and all the other stuff. It is. And I think I mentioned at the last meeting, it's always

067that competition for dollars. I think if we're really in need and recommending all the staffing increases, we could have seen a little bit shift and maybe picked up some additional items. But having said that, we really wanted to focus the dollars on those staffing needs. In a perfect world, we would increase those dollar amounts. We will have a BCS with a new list of items that will start want to pick up And certainly, it would be influenced by... If the high school auditorium carries into next year, that would certainly drive that percentage up as well. But we're gonna see an influx of BCS items, I think over the next three or four years that we'll be wanting to do. And again, they're not gonna be very exciting things, but they'll be necessary things all the

068same. But they're important. I mean, the community knows this board takes building tours to the facilities. And you can see the difference. In an area that's been redone, it just looks amazing. And an area that might be a little bit older, you can see our buildings are old. It is what it is. Have to keep a lot of upkeep. That will lead to my next question, which is just specific about the LED lighting. Again, when we saw our tours, the hallways, the classrooms that had new lighting, you really feel difference. Much brighter, much clearer. Given the fact that we are also seen rising utility costs, are there hallways in classrooms we could add this year, maybe even trying to outsource? 'Cause I know we have only so much labor to do the install and just

069try to get both the payback and the better lighting. Absolutely, it's a conversation I have around this time every year. If we have a better way to spend some dollars, if we're under budget and some categories, so we'll be having those conversations. We're not under budget as much as we maybe normally are this year, unfortunately, but that is always a conversation I have, how best can we spend dollars that will save us dollars. So we will definitely be having those. And I just wanna add onto the plant improvement projects. One item that you don't see there that we have seen in the last probably 10 years is roofing expenses. It's gone because we've replaced all of our roofs as part of the bond project in 2018. So we're in great shape. All roofs are either

070newer, in great shape, or covered by warranty. So that's some wonderful news. We're able to sort of reallocate those dollars to other areas. Thank you. I have a question for Jerry and Rachel. I'm not actually sure if it's a fully budget-related question, but it might be. For our classroom and book resources along with our new DEI policy, Edgar's done a great job of bringing in different resources. You talked about a lot of our digital resources and our digital content. Do we have a similar review for that to see that we're getting different perspectives for our digital resources? I could answer that. That's a good point. The way things typically work is that, for example, our research resources are recommended by our librarians. And if you take a look at our library websites, you could actually

071see a list of all the different resources that show varied, not just resources, but also varied perspectives. So those are included within that piece. That doesn't go to the board, typically, but I think I'll highlight some of those during the presentation in April. Regarding other types of sources that we use, typically the technology pieces that we have support the existing curriculum. So for example, when we choose our new math program, undoubtedly, there'll be a technology component that'll be required to support that program. And that'll be part of that package. So the technology will really reflect or the content, we reflect the content of the program itself. So it's part of kind of the larger piece. But in terms of having the board review those things, we typically don't do that, Thank you. Thanks. And just

072a quick question for Rachel on the wifi study. Will that include some outdoor spaces, the heat maps, like I'm just thinking Butler Field, Fox Meadow field, et cetera? Yes, I didn't address that. I was nervous that I was getting too long for the wifi, but yes, we will. When we do the surveys, we will also include immediate surrounding areas. And while we can't cover all the space all around the buildings, we will definitely have areas which are critical covered. We also are actually working right now on splitting out our guest wifi, allowing us to have guest wifi outside in the future. Again, only within a certain parameter, peripheral. Thank you. (Rachel chuckles) And in regards to the fields, not sure when we can cover that, but be definitely looking at Butler and Dean Field to

073make sure that we're trying to make sure that by the bleachers, we have at least wifi. Great, thank you. No problem. I have a question for Eric. Is the glass mitigation and the Ballards that are back, is that now complete what was cut from two years ago? So the listing of the glass mitigation was already done. That was phase one. We are not contemplating phase two for this year. We'll re-look at it again next year. Most of the priority areas that we saw in need were done in phase one. So there are many secondary areas that could be mitigated, but when we look at it from a priority standpoint, from the integrated lockdown drill, from the traffic safety standpoint, and then ultimately, we're starting to look into this digital mapping piece. All of those have,

074I think, more present need and priority than that second phase of glass mitigation. Okay, thank you. And in terms of safety monitors, we haven't really talked about that for a few years. Is that something that gets evaluated yearly? I know there was an increase in safety monitors. There was a floating monitor. I didn't know how is that evaluated. Yeah, that's a great question. So really, when we first initiated the safety monitors, there was not that floating monitor in each building. And what we found was there were gaps in coverage because human beings have to use the bathroom, have lunch, have a break, those types of things. And with the way we've integrated a floating monitor, our major areas are consistently covered throughout the day. It gives us flexibility to expand into those after school hours

075more easily 'cause we can split the schedules. So at this point, we feel that's very well covered. We do check in on a yearly basis with our principles. And when there are major changes to extracurriculars sports type activities, we do evaluate that as part of those changes to scheduling, and do there need to be changes in the safety monitor hours and coverage. But at this point, I think we feel pretty good about the coverage we have. So there's no expected changes for next year. That's great. And I wanted to thank you, Rachel, for addressing the dead spots. I know that has been a conversation safety-wise too for years so that's terrific. I was glad to hear that. I have a couple auditorium questions. So we've been waiting a long time for the seats and the

076carpets. So I just was trying to understand now in this consultation that this is not being separated. All of this is gonna go together or kind of be separated. I know we discussed safety concerns in terms of the carpet in places. I didn't know if it can be unbundled or it's best practice to keep it all bundled at this point. Yeah, so that's sort of the frustrating thing. So as we identified other areas, most notably acoustical issues, we're gonna have to get to the ceiling to replace the acoustics. And in order to get the ceiling, the seats have to be out. You don't want to put new seats in, and then go up and do the acoustics all over the new seats. So I'm talking to the architects and the consultants. The best way to

077do it is to do it really as one package, and then time it out within that package. Makes sense, So it's sort of unfortunate. Part of the discussion was, well, what can we do this year just to keep it moving? But there's really nothing we could pull out that made sense to sort of keep it moving without having to undo it again in your future, or possibly ruin it, or spend a lot of money trying to cover it up and make sure it's okay. Right. And so if I recall right, there was like a two year lead time on ordering all of that. I don't know if that's still the case. We haven't touched on that, but it would definitely be a summer project. Okay. I was just trying to understand the completion date if

078it's rolling into next year's budget for completion in '24-'25, then is that realistic then? I'm just trying to understand. We really talked about that, but I would think so. I would think if it was part of the '23-'24 budget, it would probably be summer of '24. Okay. Okay, thank you. I think that's it for me. Anyone else? Carl or Jim, any of you have any? I just have another question for special ed. I imagine for certain services such as speech, the numbers stay the same, but the kids are different. Kids are getting their speech and then they maybe don't need it anymore. Anecdotally, it seems like with the pandemic with mask, we might have kids in certain services that now need them longer. So should we be expecting sort of a certain period budget bump

079in the coming years for that? Do you see that? Yeah, I think you'll see it in our difference between budget and actual expenditures this year. A behaviorist services are probably the majority of that. They're not the totality of that cost. So we're seeing incremental rises in some of those. And our usage of consultant, speech and language consultant, OTs that we use normally, but are using a little bit more because we've seen this uptick. I agree with you that we're gonna see a certain point of that, and I think then we will have some type of return to baseline whether that's going to happen in September, December, or May of next year. I can't really predict that. But we have that. We're budgeted towards kind of level of services we're using now 'cause I've seen the

080referrals start to kind of plateau and cap off. So I'm hoping that that will mean those services are doing that as well. So we have kind of inflationary rises on the pieces that we're working on now. We've gotten also some help from bringing some students back in from out of district, which adds a little bit more cushion in there. Okay, thank you. This is an incredibly detailed question that you may be too detailed really for you to respond to Edgar. But I'm kind of curious about as we're entering into a new COVID phase, travel in particular with respect to the music program was something that didn't happen last year or actually the last two years. I don't really know. I mean, it's probably an infinitesimally small number compared to other things in the budget, but

081in terms of instructional significance, it's actually, I think, highly important. Other thoughts about it. Like, whether that's gonna happen, whether the budget around it? Yeah, this is where our world's overlap. We have the resources to make it happen. I mean, make it happen, allow it to happen, but. Yeah, I think you'll hear in the back to school report that the one place that the COVID restriction still is problematic is in flight-based travel because we have the possibility of a student possibly getting ill and needing to isolate wherever they happen to be. That would cause real difficulty in a return trip, obviously. So travel is not being restricted at this point because of COVID per se, but because of isolation requirements from a flight-based standpoint. A driving trip, an overnight trip that drives somewhere, we're confident

082that a parent could come and pick up a student or isolate with them or do whatever it need be. But if that's a flight, especially an international flight, that becomes a bit more problematic. So yes is we are hoping that that all gets reinstated. That's a piece that we have to see how things kind of move along. Thanks. Any other questions? Thank you all so much for that very comprehensive presentation. It's so great to see such a rich curriculum, so many opportunities for professional development opportunities for our children. To talk about travel again is just really terrific. So appreciate everyone's hard work. Do you have anything else to add? Just to echo all the thanks again. We're still in the throws of a lot of COVID and other educational stuff. And again, just everybody taking

083the time to really dedicate to not only doing the work of the budget, but being so thoughtful about the presentations. It's very appreciated. Thank you so much. Okay so may I have a motion to adjourn this Budget Study Session and move into our Business Meeting? So moved. Second? Second. Okay, all in favor? Opposed? Okay, motion passes. So we will now move into our Business Meeting. We don't wanna take a break, right? No? I think we're okay. Okay. All right, I called this Business Meeting to order and I note that all board members are present except for Jessica Resnick-Ault. Dr. Hagerman and his cabinet are also present. I want to say good evening to all those who are attending in the audience and those watching via remote means. I hope that everyone had a relaxing and

084restorative winter break. Just before this meeting, we had our Budget Study Session #2, during which we looked at and discussed needs related to curriculum, instruction, and assessment, special education, and student services, including safety, security, and management, technology and information technology, and facilities. If you miss this presentation and discussion, please know that you may view it on the Board of Education meeting videos library. I'd like to to start my comments tonight, calling attention to Dr. Hagerman's message in the February edition of the 'Dale Dispatch. He refers to the New York Times bestselling author and spiritual leader, Eckhart Tolle's reflection on the Latin saying, "Per aspera ad astra." I hope I said that right, which is to translated, through adversity to the stars. Essentially, it is the obstacles and difficulties in life that encourage us to generate

085more strength, more energy and/or more consciousness. COVID has challenged us all in so many ways and ours our return to greater normalcy strengthens. We face important opportunities to reset, rebuild, and grow. While united in the common purpose of providing the best education for our students, we do hold a diversity of views most recently evidenced by various comforts levels towards optional masking. And therefore kindness, respect, inclusivity remain as important as ever as we work to heal, support each other, and move forward together, generating more strength, more energy, and more consciousness. For the board, our true north is to act in the best interest of our students. We recognize the critical work currently before us, identifying an interim superintendent and developing a responsible budget that is responsive to the needs of our students, staff, and schools. We

086are committed to doing this work well, understanding how significant both budget decisions and a change of leadership are to the school community and broader Scarsdale community. In closing, I'd like to thank those who have provided feedback so far on the budget process and the criteria and priorities for an intern superintendent. We are truly appreciative of the community's engagement and support. Thank you so much. Dr. Hagerman. Thank you, Karen. And thank you for reminding folks about 'Dale Dispatch. It's nice to get back. It's always a pretty comprehensive look at what's going on in different cabinet member's areas of responsibilities. And I hope an interesting read for folks who want to follow more discretely along with what's going on here. So I would also like to say good evening and welcome. We appreciate you joining us virtually

087and in person at tonight's business meeting to become more informed about our most significant work as a district. I also hope that everybody had a restful and restorative February break. Of course, everyone knows just prior to our return, we received word from the governor that she was planning to lift the mask mandate from New York public schools. As most of you know, the district followed that guidance immediately by providing family and individuals the choice to decide whether or not to wear masks. And that was effective Wednesday, March 2nd. Fast forward, a few days from there, and we're nearly back to pre-pandemic functioning. Having said that, there are a few mitigation efforts that currently remain in place. And Eric's gonna review those couple of exceptions a little bit later tonight in our back to school update.

088In addition to these couple of exceptions, I want to acknowledge the social emotional toll on our children and educators. It has certainly been significant. And it will take a long time to fully recover from the hardships that we've all faced over the past two years. With that in mind, to prioritize the wellbeing and mental health of our entire school community as we continue you to move forward. In other news this evening, I'd like to extend congratulations to all of our student athletes who participated in the Winter Sports Season. Once again, all of our varsity teams have met the criteria for the New York State Public High School Athletic Association Scholar-Athlete team award with 211 student athletes receiving an academic average of 90 or above. Athletically, our team sports also fared very well. Our cheerleader performed

089well at the UCA National Championship with our JV team placing third. Our girls' bowling team earned a league championship. and we had a quarter final appearance by the boys' basketball and a semi-final appearance by the boys' ice hockey. Our merged girls' ice hockey team won the sectional championship and ended up their season as regional finalists. Members of our gymnastics, boys, swimming, and diving, and girls' track and field teams also competed this weekend in state championships. Notably, Scarsdale placed third in all the high schools that participated in the swimming and diving state championships while all individual award information has not yet been reported. Our student athletes have garnered 30 all-league, one all-county, two all-conference, five all-section, and one all-state awards. I try to do that in one breath, but I did quite get there, sorry. I'd

090also like to just acknowledge and thank Ray and his cadre of coaches and other support staff who really create a whole season for our students. No small feat. And Ray actually does a nice job of summarizing that. So if you miss some of those numbers, you can look forward to a fuller report of that coming out a little bit later. But the last, our student athletes were not the only students who had a lot going on. I'd also like to acknowledge the Scarsdale High School Business Club, consisting of, I'm just gonna use first names, Max, Aveniche, Veron, Colin, Dohan, and Mike. They made it to the semifinals of the Wharton Investment Competition. It's important to know that only 50 teams out of 1,300 made it to semifinals this year. For a little background on that,

091The Wharton Investment Competition consists of a number of teams who are tasked with a case study featuring a potential client. The teams work collaboratively over the course of 10 weeks to meet the client's short and long term investment goals. They're equipped with an approved stock list and the Wharton investment simulator to develop an investment strategy to analyze industries and companies and build a portfolio using $100,000 in virtual cash. Winners are selected on the strength and articulation of their team strategy, not necessarily on portfolio growth, which is important. Final reports are reviewed by the team of judges who select 50 semifinalist teams. Those teams are invited to present their strategies to a panel of expert judges at the virtual semifinals. The top 10 teams for the semifinals then get to move on to the global finals

092at Wharton in Philadelphia. So we wish our business club participants the best of luck in the semifinals. And I would say wish them a win, but we wish them a good experience is what we wish them. And then finally, as many of you know, I could spend the next several hours speaking about other student successes across all domains across all seven schools, but we have a Business Meeting ahead of us tonight. So I will actually leave it there. Thanking again all of our coaches, club advisors, mentors, and other individuals who help to enrich the student experience through these and many other co and extracurricular opportunities. And with that, I will turn it back to Karen. Okay. Do any board members have reports? I just have a very brief report from the Drug and Alcohol Task

093Force, which met just prior to break and discussed a number of upcoming programs and initiatives, including marijuana education campaign, social media guide, and the No to Prevent Speaker Series, which has a number of speaker series over the coming months. And there was also just a brief follow-up discussion about the pride survey. And just as a reminder, there's a great presentation by the DATF and Chris Griffin about the pride surveys. If anyone would like to see that data, you can find it on the DATF website. Thank you, Ron. Jim. Yes. So I'd like to give a brief report on the Scarsdale Friends of Music and the Arts for which I am the liaison on the board. I'll call them the FMA for short, had an executive team meeting on March 3rd. And they're very busy. As

094you know, they are a nonprofit parent group that supports visual and performing arts in Scarsdale schools. Obviously, we're very proud of our arts and music programs here in Scarsdale. And they do what they can to support that through their efforts in volunteerism. So their activities, and they've been very busy, include among other things a September Membership Drive, an Encore Dress Program that they run a program that provides reduced cost concert dresses for high school band, orchestra, encore students. Practice Partners Program. It's a program launched last year. It's a student-to-student music mentorship program connecting Scarsdale three to eighth grade musicians with high school instrumentalists. And they provide a one-to-one mentoring support over Zoom. They're looking into sustaining that program to the future. Hospitality, FMA provides staff freshman tables at concerts and performances this year and plan

095to do so for the Spring Concert Season. Performances, FMA has helped students arrange performances in the village tent in December. They plan to continuing to do that. Advocacy, they are active in budget season advocating various renovation-related projects that enhance the music and performing arts experience. And Arts Committee. The FMA has historically attracted parents whose children are in the music programs, but they've recently made efforts to branch out into others in the community, including other parents. And they had their first ever art committee work sessions on March 2nd, which attracted a dozen parents and produced some very interesting new ideas. Anyone interested in this organization should visit www.scarsdalearts.org for opportunities to volunteer. Great. Thank you so much. Rob. Sure. On February 17th, I was joined by Jessica and Carl on a walking tour of the middle

096school by Principal Meghan Troy. For those that at don't recall, we do a walk through all of the schools throughout the year. The goal of the tour is to view the physical condition of the school and to identify areas potentially of improvement if that's necessary. Some of the themes that we experienced were improving some of the storage throughout the facility, which is not an uncommon challenge in buildings like this, potential improvements to some of the specialty rooms in terms of, for example, the dining room at Cooper now that the food service has evolved over time, and the potential and the future revisioning the library. We all agreed that the level of energy and atmosphere was very, very positive. Meghan Troy in particular gave a shout out to her faculty and staff that are in her

097opinion, always stepping up above and beyond with required. And she's just very positive about this year's experience for the kids. Thank you. Terrific. Thanks so much. Okay, so now, we will move on to item three; information items led by the superintendent and our back to school update. Okay, as you suggest. As you suggested, we are pleased to announce that we have come to the end of a journey with respect to one aspect of board meetings, which is the back to school updates. This will be our last one from Eric. Everyone, knock on wood, product is close to you, but we hope that this will be the end of that in any communications that need to happen will come out as we have been doing through written communications or directly from school administration. And with that

098introduction, Eric, here we go. Happily my first and last unmasked back to school update. So just quick review of the metrics. Currently, the county is at 11.1 per 100,000 cases, 0.89 infection rate, and a 2.2 positivity rate. Again, those are commensurate with kind of the lowest points of the pandemic, which is good. We have had 20 district cases since we've been back from break. They are almost wholly concentrated student-wise in the high school, which I think those are students who probably did the most traveling and the most interacting on their own, but still a very low number comparative to what we were seeing the weeks prior to that. So good news on that end. As Dr. Hagerman talked about, school is back and functioning on a very close to normal situation. There are a few

099COVID restrictions, not really COVID restrictions, but COVID protocols still in place. The first being students who do test positive do need to isolate for up to five or for at least five days, and then can return to school once they meet the symptom requirements. During days six through 10, they must wear a mask in school and maintain six feet of social distancing when eating or drinking. So the schools have put in procedures to make sure that's possible. Obviously, families and students themselves, that's all reviewed with them as it happens. So students also who become symptomatic in school or out because of symptoms do need a negative test to return. That can be done with antigen tests, and we supply those to the family. So there really isn't a turnaround time. The test can be given

100the night before, add the morning of, that would give the two negative tests required to return for antigens. If you're vaccinated and get students back to school, assuming they're feeling well enough to do that. And then as I mentioned before, the only piece of travel that is still not restricted fully, but requires a student parent 1:1 ratio is flight-based travel just to guard against the need for a student to isolate wherever they are without having appropriate coverage there and needing to send students home, depending on how many adults are going with the group. That is something that I think we'll need to continue to look at. And I'm not sure how long isolation requirements will last or what will change in order to make that an easier prospect. But other than that, all of the

101other travel that we usually do, whether it's overnight or day trips are open and ready to be engaged in. I do wanna talk a little bit about testing. We are really going to move away after this week from the PCR-based saliva testing. We have found, especially since we have received a very good supply of antigen tests that the vast majority of the few positives we're getting now, we already know about because the kids had antigen test between the time that they gave the saliva and the results of those. So we are going to move to a test if you're symptomatic. Test if you believe you are exposed through the antigen testing. Families can either get antigen tests from the school nurse's office, or at this point, they are covered by health insurance. It can be

102gotten for free from a pharmacy anywhere in town. Stocks are also back, and they don't seem to be any shortages on the retail market at this point. We will continue according to the governor's standing executive order to test all non-vaccinated staff on a weekly basis, but we will move to an antigen testing system for that as well. And we are going to move away from athletic testing altogether. And happily, that is the end of our back to school update and back to school updates for hopefully the duration of my career, so. Thank you, Eric. Any questions? Could we hear a little bit about the ventilation plan? I think it's still in place. Was that something that we- Yes. So, yes, I'm sorry that's a good point. So the ventilation plan that we have had is

103to use all areas that have adequate ventilation and filtration. Mechanical fresh air is part of the regulations from the state. We have augmented our mechanical fresh air by running it as the highest settings as we can during the school day. Also, for the systems that don't have filtration already built in, or aren't 100% fresh air exchange. In other words, there's no recycling of air. We have added HEPA filters to the places that don't have filtration in those systems or MERV 13 filtration. So that will all continue to be done. At this point, we have looked at spaces that don't have mechanical air exchange, like the gym at Heathcote. And at this point, we are going to move to reopen that for single classes of students for PE because at this point, the contagion risk is

104low enough that we're not going to be using it at full capacity, but we will allow for indoor PE and limited recess use on inclement weather days, so. Great, thank you. And I have one more question. It was also about lunchroom protocols. Are they all back to normal? Yeah, we're back. So at this point, we won't be... So the elementary class or the element schools had to change their schedule and split up lunches. At this point, changing the actual elementary schedule to get back to one lunch will cause more disruption than it's worth. So we will continue to use the same time schedule, but we are condensing some areas. And all of the restrictions for that kids can sit at the same table and they can be unasked while eating. So all of that is

105back to normal. Next year, we will start with a normal schedule that has just the one, the one lunch period. Great. And I'm sorry, I have one more question too. Visitors to the classroom, parents during the day has- Moving back to normal with that. Just to give everybody a heads up on big events that have already been planned that have been done virtually, those are not gonna be rescheduled on the last minute. But as we move forward, we'll be doing our events as usual. I think we should all expect as a community, we've learned a number of things from using Zoom and using electronic means to have gatherings. I think we will find there are some places that we wanna keep those things in place. I think it's super important to understand that everyone across

106the district believes we need to get back to face-to-face interactions and live events, but there are some events that may be better accessible for parents, be better accessible for families if done in a virtual setting. And as we move through the end of this year and into the summer, those are discussions we'll have to have kind of with PTAs with, with teachers, with administrators to kind of figure out what gets kept, what gets changed, what goes back to the way it was. Thank you. I just had a couple questions. First, it's great to hear about Heathcote gym. I think that students will very much appreciate. Do you know if Principal Stile will be sending out a note? Obviously, we've all heard without- We will have communication next day or so. Okay, great. Just regarding lunch.

107So we are not back to hot lunch, correct? And that's sort of COVID, sort of not COVID, but could you just give us an update? 'Cause we've heard about that as well. Well, that was going to be my lunch update section, but I'll talk- Nevermind. No, I can talk about it now. That's fine. So it is sort of COVID-related because we don't unfortunately have the staffing to hire people to get them into the elementary cafeteria. So we're gonna remain on the cold lunch only at the elementary buildings. If you could think about all those spaces in the elementary buildings times two, we've tried to get staff and it's very challenging. So we're gonna gear up, get ready to go for our next school year. And we've already had those conversations. And the rest of the

108school year will just remain as is. And just in terms of virtual, any change on parent-teacher conferences? Will they remain virtual for the rest of the year? Yeah. Okay, thank you. Anything else? I don't think so. All right. Thank you, Eric. So now, we'll turn to item 4, hearing from those present. At this time, members of the public are cordially invited to speak on district items or other non-personnel related matters. When it is your turn to speak, please state your name, your address, and if you are speaking on behalf of an organization. For those who comment remotely, please mute your livestream voice. Turn on your camera, and then unmute yourself. Speakers are asked to conclude their remarks within four minutes and will be given a cue at the three-minute mark. If at this point, the

109speaker does have additional comments, we ask that you send them to the board via email. 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 at its discretion either during response to public comment or at a later time in place. And there will be a response to public comment after this first and our second comment periods. So hello, Laura and Diane. Laura and Diane. I'm Laura Gelbum, 45 Brewster Rd. And I'm here representing Friends of Music in the Arts in Scarsdale Schools. Jim, thank you for the introduction. And thank you all the administration and the board for the comprehensive Budget Study Session at six o'clock tonight, especially Stuart for your dedication and working with us. Thank you so

110much. As a nonprofit parent booster group supporting visual and performing arts in Scarsdale Schools, FMA believes arts education provides opportunities for students to connect, find self-expression, and cultivate wellbeing. Commitment to an investment in arts education has been is and should always be central to any Scarsdale educational program, especially one focused on the whole child. FMA hopes that the board administration will reconsider the current budget recommendation to delay auditorium improvements and approve a remaining scope of work with a heightened sense of process and urgency. We strongly prefer funds for next phase improvements in the '22-'23 school budget. The auditorium work was originally approved by a town wide referendum for a million dollars, a community mandate to prioritize the work, but has been delayed for nearly a decade. While the auditorium project has waited millions of dollars

111of district capital improvements for other projects have been prioritized, funded, and completed. Last year, the board considered funding the remaining auditorium work, but ultimately approved a second phase of work phase 2A, leaving the remainder to be scoped out this year. The acoustic study this year was a helpful step, but the process still has not included input from key faculty and other stakeholders. And importantly, there's been no timeline for developing and pricing the scope of remaining work. Dr. Graybill, the new theater tech director has been a terrific addition to the team and has brought some exciting ideas to the table, including potentially looking into ways to improve sight lines to performers in the back of the orchestra and band ensembles, and ways to address student requests for maintenance, updated video monitors. Sorry, and updated video monitors

112in the orchestra pit. I'm Diane Greenwald, 2 Oak Lane, also representing, vice president of Friends of Music and the Arts. We'd like to see these ideas explored and rough priced now to determine if they can be included in the next scope of work covered by the performing arts department budget, or if FMA can help fundraise for these upgrades. Additionally, since the most recent work came in approximately $100,000 under budget, we hope that savings are being returned to performing arts students' needs. Our concerns about delaying the renovation include no guarantee that funds for the 2023-'24 budget will be approved for the remaining work. Slating auditorium renovations to the 2023-'24 budget would delay actual work to 2025, which is 11 years after the 2014 bond. And finally, the auditorium renovation delay also delays improvements needed for other

113performing arts facilities, like the Scarsdale High School Little Theater. During the committee review leading up to the 2014 bond, the auditorium was prioritized over the Little Theater, which also needs renovations to address and create a multipurpose space for smaller performances and to expand programming for students. I served on that, and I remembered a lot of conversation about the value of redoing the Little Theater. FMA is grateful to have been included in auditorium committee discussions. Nonetheless, FMA does not feel the budget recommendation aligns with community values or sufficiently serves students. We request the reconsideration for creative solutions that might move the work into the 2022-'23 budget. Again, thank you for your time here tonight. And it's really great to see your faces. I feel sort of strange without my mask on, but it's really nice. And

114thank you for sharing our love of the arts education, which in many ways is actually mental healthcare, which is, of course, a district priority. The arts is the place where possibility lives, and we are very excited about our future. Thank you. Great. Thank you so much. So now, we will turn to our remote participants. We have one person's hand raised. Okay. Now, we will turn to... We have one person's hand raised. Hi, good evening. I'm Mayra Kirkendall-Rodríguez. And together with Laura Liu, we are the PTC Budget Study co-chairs. We'd like to inform the Scarsdale community that we've created a PTC Budget Study page, which includes several frequently asked question, documents, a budget glossary, and a school budget documents archive. Please go to the Scarsdale school district website, go to the parent section. And there, you'll

115find the PT council, and you'll find the budget study page. Also, you may go to the Sunday PTA newsletters, where we have been having a PTC Budget Study section. So many thanks to the PTA newsletter writers and contributors for including the PTC Budget information and links for the last several weeks. Starting in October, we, the PTC budget co-chairs have been working with presidents and budget liaisons of all our seven schools and the PTC executive. Thank you very much to all those individuals for their hard work and participation. Together, we have submitted over 60 questions to the administration about the budget. And we thank Mr. Maddy, especially, and everybody else in the administration for sending us responses. Those questions which we have posed and the responses may also be found in the PTC Budget Study page.

116We encourage Scarsdale parents to please reach out to your PTA presidents and budget liaisons with questions and comments about the budget. And of course, you may reach Laura Liu and me at [email protected]. Thank you all very much for your hard work and dedication to our schools and have a good evening. Thank you very much, Mayra. Okay. So we will close public comment and turn to follow up to public comment. Do we have anything to add to that? We appreciate hearing from FMA. You're sharing your viewpoint. Thank you for your statement. Could you email that to us as well? Thank you. And also for the work of the PT council budget chairs. So, all right. With that, we will move to written communications, item six. Amber. Thank you. Please note that the Board of Education email

117is also viewed by the superintendent and district clerk. Open meetings law requires all board deliberations, which may lead to action or policy changes to occur in public. Therefore, your written communications and emails will be reported on at an upcoming public board meeting. A board member will respond at their earliest convenience. This report is for emails received by the board from February 10th through March 5th. There were 36 emails received from 31 individuals. 24 were on district matters, 12 on board matters. Within district matters, 12 were on COVID protocol-related emails; two were request to remove masking requirements; one was a request for a return to normalcy; four were a request to resend the no visitor policy for special events in the elementary schools; one was a question about masking on buses; one was a question about

118lunch plans at the middle school; and two were requests to abandon the ventilation plan and reopen the Heathcote gym; and one was a question about continuing the ventilation plan. There were 12 non-COVID-related district matter emails. One about with concerns about conflicts with spring sports playoffs and the prom; three about misconduct at sporting events; three with thoughts and information about the superintendent search; one with concerns about adding social workers to the Scarsdale Middle School and Scarsdale High School staff; one with questions about the at ET/AP evaluation; one with gratitude for the board and administration supported the cheerleading teams; one for a requested the reinstatement of hot lunch at elementary schools; and one with the request from the teacher's aids and assistants. There were 12 emails related to board invitations, publications, or meeting highlights. There were five

119copies of public statements made at board meetings or in support of public statements made at board meetings. There was one article. There was one email with gratitude for Karen Ceske service to the district. There was one email with gratitude for communication around masking plans. There was one email with gratitude to the district for implementing mask optional plans. There were three emails with gratitude for mask optional plans with the request to remove all other COVID risk mitigation protocols. That's it. Okay. Thank you so much. Now, we'll move to item seven, the personnel report. Drew. Thank you. I just wanna point out, we do have one additional retirement on tonight's consent agenda. Mr. Adam Weisler will be retiring effective in January. He gave us ample notification, which I'll say more about in a second. But Mr. Weisler

120served in the district for a total of 21 years. He has been out on an unpaid leave of absence for these past two school years, but we appreciate Adam's service to the district. And that does add essentially another retiree to our list of people we'll celebrate. You will see it a subsequent board meeting, an MOA between the district and the Scarsdale Teachers Association related to this, which extends his right to an unpaid leave to get him to the January 15th date, where he is age eligible for retirement. I talk more about that when that comes back to you, but just wanna acknowledge Mr. Weisler. Thanks so much, Drew. Now, we will move to our consent agenda, item eight. The board may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda in an effort to achieve

121greater efficiency at board meetings. The consent agenda condenses some routine business of the board into a single motion. Items are selected when the board officers and the superintendent believe there's no controversy regarding them. Any member of the board who feels an item on the consent agenda requires discussion prior to action may remove that item from the consent agenda. Would anyone like to do that? We're good? Okay. Otherwise, Ron will take us through the consent agenda. Thanks, Karen. There are nine items on tonight's Consent Agenda. 9.01, minutes from the Board Budget Study Session and Business Meeting on February 14th, 2022. 9.02, minutes from the Board Special Meeting/Executive Session, March 5th, 2022. 9.03, personnel certified. 9.04, personnel non-certified. 9.05, the Claims Audit Report for February 2022. 9.06, printing of ballots for the May 17th, 2022 annual vote.

1229.07, the Southern Westchester BOCES contract for 2022-2023. 9.08, the Quarterly Treasurer's Report and schedule of investments for quarter ended December 31st, 2021. Item 9.09, accepting the consent agenda. I move that the consent agenda be accepted as presented. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, the motion passes. Item 10 is before us next. We have been sitting almost two hours. I think maybe we'll take our wellness break now, and then come back to our information items. Thank you. Return to item 10, information items. 10.01, proposed new textbooks. Edgar. Thank you. Yeah. So I have two things to talk about. One, textbook; or one, trade book and the other are actually libraries or sections of libraries. One of the things that we've talked about a lot in the last few years is

123doing a close audit of the books that we have and the libraries that we have to make sure that we have multiple perspectives. But we also look across our libraries. In this case, the kindergarten and first grade library to make sure that we have books that are meeting the needs of our students. And so through the careful audit and conversations with the ELA Committee, it was determined that we needed more books for kindergarten and first grade that were easily decodable, that helped supported the readers as they're learning to read and use those skills. So you'll see through benchmark education, it's a bundles of decodable books that we're going to use to put in the libraries to make sure that we're meeting all the needs of our kindergartners and our first graders. Going all the way

124up to 11th grade. This is a book that's going to be piloted in a classroom. Am I too close again? Subconscious. We're good. Is this okay? Yeah, that's good. And it's a book by Jenny Offill from 2021, a novel called "Weather". Are you smiling 'cause I mispronounced it? No, I'm sorry. I'm just joyful about it. Okay. And I talked to Amanda Philly about it, and she's the instructor in the class. And she chose this book for two reasons. She chose it because it's stylistically really interesting and inspiring. It's a bestseller. It's also won awards. We're always looking for new classics, but it's also a book in which the main character struggles with the feelings around global warming and the anxiety that's being produced in her life. And so when I was talking to Amanda about

125it, she really wanted to choose a book that both had artistic merit, but at the same time also connected to something that was really on the minds of the students. And so very, very happy and enthusiastic to recommend "Weather" by Jenny Offill. Thank you, Edgar. Any questions? Okay. So take step back as we move into information items. Typically, these are led by the superintendent, but the first two are 10.01 and 10.02 are textbooks and food services, respectively. And then the rest of them really are board items. So the board will pick up at that point and do 10.03, which is the board draft calendar. The next is succession planning, followed by committee report update. And finally, we'll finish out with the policy series 1000. So with that, I'm gonna ask Stuart to do the food

126service update, which we talked about a little bit earlier, but. Just a couple folks in this state. Yeah, yep. So the first thing I mentioned was related to the rest of the current year. In the elementary buildings, we will be doing the cold only. So not hot lunches at this point in time due to staffing shortages where we just don't have the staff to get out into the elementary buildings. Although we've explored the hot order to-go, maintaining the food quality while preparing it here at the high school and getting it out to the buildings, it just doesn't work. So we'll hold off on that until next year, but we're excited to get going full steam once again. And then the emergency contract. So the state, if you recall, allowed emergency one year contracts, each of

127the last two years due to COVID. We are due to do a new full competitive bid. Two years ago, we had all of our committee meetings. All of that, the specs ready to go, and then COVID hit. We did the one year emergency contract. We did the same thing this school year. And they've allowed it once again for next year. It's gonna be my recommendation to go ahead and do that one year emergency contract once again. Quite frankly, Chartwells who we've been with forever, but I would say in most recent memory, they've been fantastic in working with us. Not only have they helped us roll out the elementary program, which is brand new for our district, but also have provided us some top quality individuals, most namely Chef Glenn Garew, who provided the meals here

128this evening, but does a tremendous job with logistics, and food prep, and all of that. So if we can guarantee that one more year, why wouldn't we? And we'll plan on doing those specs and getting out to bid this time next year. Any questions on that? Great. That's it. Thank you. That's great. On the next item... And actually, I don't know if you wanna do this or do you want me to do this. 10.03 is the draft meeting of the board meeting calendar for next year. Were you prepared to do that? No, I hadn't prepared. Okay. I'm happy to cover that. So I'm gonna look at the list version. There are two versions that are attached to the agenda. The one is the more traditional calendar. The other is simply the list version. If you

129look at it, what you will notice is it follows the similar patterns as the last couple of years. I would say over the eight years I've been in the district, we experimented the first few years with variety of different scheduling formats, but we seem to have landed on this over the last, I would say probably three or four years now, in which there's about two meetings per month, starting in October. Of course, that ramps up a little bit more starting in February, March, where there are multiple meetings because of the budget planning process. Of course, this starts as a skeleton of a budget. We know that board work is dynamic and school work is dynamic, and it requires often additional meetings to be added in real time according to whatever the needs happen to be

130at this time. Also, following our sort of traditional pattern, we will see that our business meetings are proceeded by meetings with a designated group. Those groups have ranged from students, to village trustees, to STA or other faculty and staff meeting groups, as well as high school students. And so I think the board has fallen into kind of a predictable pattern that seems to be working well for all intents and purposes. And again, another feature of this calendar is that the board meetings alternate a business meeting every other month with an education report meeting in which we try to minimize the business aspects so that we can really focus in on the teaching and learning pieces as a way of both dedicating specific time to that. And also, that is the heart of why we're here

131are students and their learning. And so it serves as an important reminder that allows us to get deep into a couple of topics that are shared interest from between the board and the community. And those are often very engaging presentations that Edgar and company put together for the board and the community. The timelines are also the same. We've kind of started the meetings a little bit earlier this year, which has helped us to have manageable meetings and be able to leave before midnight in most cases this year. So unless there's any objections to that. We've essentially sort of replicated the skeleton of the last two years and are using that as a spring board for the 2020-'23 planning of the board calendar. With that, I'll stop and see if there's any questions. I don't know

132if this is a question, but I think it's maybe a comment. Maybe it's a discussion point for the board and the cabinet. This year, we had the change in the law where we have to publish the agenda at least 24 hours in advance, and we're doing that now on Fridays. And we sort of said we'd see how that was working with the Monday meetings. And I mean, I'm fine with the Monday meetings, but I just was wondering if we wanted to discuss how that was working for us at all, if that was an issue or if we're all comfortable with the Friday getting the agenda out then. The pros are that it's a predictable pattern that it's been in place for years and years. And I think the full Scarsdale community has come to understand

133that. The pros from a community standpoint is that you get the agenda a lot earlier than you did, and you have an opportunity to sort of live through that. It also pushes us as in a cabinet administrative team to sort of get stuff done earlier, but that also starts our cons column, which is we're always working on and have often used the weekends to put together presentations for a Monday night board meeting. And so it really condenses the timeline. We've not yet spoken as a cabinet group so I'm just sort of speaking about the way I see on the pros and cons there. I think, personally, I thought it was gonna be a much harder slog than it seems to have been. That's not to say that there are certainly times on the calendar that

134are more busy than others. And so I would suggest maybe coming back to that question in another month or so to give us a chance as a cabinet group to discuss it and to have a little more time kind of evaluating. This just went into place. Honore, when did this go into place? Like a month ago? So we haven't had a whole lot of time to yet understand the stress of it over time, and kind of how that might impact our work. I think having another month or two will give us a better sense of our ability to sustain this long term. Okay. That's a good question. I just have one comment/discussion item. It seems like this year, last year, some due to COVID, but some due to just taking on a lot of board

135work, we've had some meetings that are just heavily packed with items, information items, action items, presentations. And I think just speaking for myself, that means they can be challenging to get through them all or to have a significant discussion about all those items. So my question about that is once we publish this, what flexibility do we have to add working sessions or other meetings throughout the year? Complete flexibility. I'm working at as many meetings as... And I think we've demonstrated that repeatedly over the last couple of years. I think this is a relatively young board. If we went back four or five years ago, if we had a bond going on, if we had some big projects, the meetings would go late, and there'd be some amount of public comment and long discussions about things.

136But it was also just as common to have a two and a half hour meeting as it was to have a six hour meeting. Maybe more common to have a two and a half hour meeting. So I think once we've moved through the vicissitudes of COVID life, and there's not a complicated, controversial bond or something like that coming up, I hope that that creates the natural space. If you think about how much time we've dedicated to COVID conversations, for example, that's been hours on end sometimes before we really get into it. And right now, we're in the budget throws. This is natural, but if we took that out of it, I mean, this would be a perfectly reasonable meeting tonight, for example, even though it's a very busy time of the school year for us.

137But to answer your question very directly, the board can have as many meetings as it wants. Thanks. I think just the practice here has... At least this has been the conversation. If you put it on the calendar, you tend to have the meeting. And so it's better to add it rather than just have it on the calendar. And I think this board so far has been comfortable with that approach, but that could change as well. I look at this as sort of your minimum. It's a skeleton, absolutely. Minimum number of meetings you're gonna have to make sure you get all of the required business done. That having been said, it's quite apparent to me sitting here that there are going to be plenty more meetings that are gonna be added on next year. Of course.

138But it's also apparent, I wouldn't be able to say when the right time is right now for adding those meetings on because it's gonna depend a lot on what happens in the next few months, in the next six months, in September. So I think this is fine. I think it gives the baseline and we can go from there. Thank you. So we'll proceed with kind of moving forward. If anyone, of course, has any feedback, feel free to provide that to Honore or myself. And we're happy to make sure that that gets in front of the board at a next read of this. So now, we have succession planning, which is truly a board topics. I'm gonna turn back over to Karen for 10.04. Okay. So at our last meeting, the board agreed on the next

139steps. Our next steps would be to one, appoint an intern superintendent for the 2022-2023 school year, and also begin the process of identifying a professional search firm to conduct a national search for a permanent superintendent. We set forth the following criteria and priorities for an interim candidate. Again, they are to provide stability and to lead the Scarsdale Schools schools through a transitional period; the ability to maintain positive momentum over the next year to provide the best educational experiences and outcomes for our students; the commitment to continuing the work currently being done in support of the strategic plan, DEI, mental health; and the overall mission and culture of the Scarsdale Schools; someone who is a proven educational leader; has exceptional interpersonal and communication skills; is creative and a flexible problem solver; has a willingness to collaborate

140with and be responsive to the board; faculty, and students, parents, sorry, faculty and staff, students, parents, and community members and someone who's the appropriate New York state certification. We then reached out to the school community and the broader community to ask for feedback on the criteria and the priorities we set forth. We received 108 responses over two weeks, 82 parents, 12 residents, 13 staff, and two other. Thank you to all those who responded. The feedback we received affirmed the board's criteria and priorities in addition to offering the following, which I present here as summary. A leader who can provide a seamless transition; who is aware of the challenges of the past two years and will help restore normalcy; unite and recharge, but who can also deal with any potential pandemic-related challenges if they were to

141reoccur; an individual who understands the systems and culture of the schools; is already well-versed in or familiar with its current work; and has experience with a high expectations district; a professional who is passionate about education and focused on academics and educational excellence for the 21st century; who is proactive and has a strong work ethic and experience as both a teacher and administrator; a leader who is focused on students and who is supportive of faculty and staff; an individual who is transparent and a clear communicator, fair-minded, and positive; seeks and is open to feedback; listens to and addresses concerns, and treats others with respect; a person who engenders trust is kind thoughtful, inclusive, empathetic, and compassionate. As a reminder for the community, the board will not discuss the consideration and vetting of specific candidates or search

142firms at the board table. Due to their confidential nature, these conversations are reserved for executive session. We will, however, provide continued updates and process-related discussions. We are taking next steps to identify potential interim candidates. We are also taking next steps to identify potential search firms to conduct the search for a permanent superintendent and begin work on RFPs. And I'm going to turn it over to Ron and Bob to give us an overview of the RFP process and what we can expect. Ron. Thanks, Karen. I'll kick it off. And then Bob, please just jump in. So Jessica, Bob and I are working on the RFP process and just wanted to try both the board and the community with a quick update on that, as well as expected timing. Once the RFP which we will draft, this

143board has the discretion to draft because there's professional services, RFP, we can expect a multi-week timeframe. Could be up to eight weeks where firms have a chance to report back to us, ask any clarifying questions, allow us to clarify any of those questions. Next, to vet those responses and ultimately to engage with the search firm. Again, because it's a professional services RFP that allows us to have more discretion than some of the RFPs you hear about, Stuart talked about, which are competitive bids. So I just wanted to give that brief update. I don't know if Bob, you wanna add anything? No, I think that's good. Yeah. So it's a couple of months, people should be thinking in terms of hearing who that search firm might be. Okay. I wanted to just give a shout out

144to my fellow board members because they are incredibly committed to this work and putting forward the additional time to make all the work and to make sure it's done well. So I just wanted to give you all a shout out and thank you for all the work being done. So now, we will turn to 10.05, the board's subcommittee on community engagement, follow-up discussion from our last meeting. Amber. Thanks, Karen. As a reminder, the board established a subcommittee for community engagement, which consists of myself, Jessica Resnick-Ault, Ron Schulhof And at our last meeting on the 14th, we discussed among other things having board coffees. Since then, we have put out a Doodle poll within the board to see everyone's availability. And we are looking at hosting coffees in late April, early May with a 330 coffee

145to be held outdoors at the Scarsdale High School picnic table. And a different coffee on a different day at 5:30 held indoors in this room, 171-172. Again, both of those right now, we've picked out dates in late April, early May, and we'll confirm which bird board members will be at those coffees. However, as we were discuss the timeline for announcing the RFP, we may need to think about that as we set those dates. I don't know if anybody wants to add anything on the coffees. There is one other topic for the subcommittee. It was also suggested that the subcommittee review are written communications reporting. And so I'm going to bring that up to our subcommittee to see if there's anything we'd like to do differently when we report on our emails. Okay, great. Thank you

146so much. Can you explain that what you just said again? It was suggested that perhaps we may want to provide additional information when we do email reporting beyond what I'm currently doing. Oh, okay. And so we thought that that might be a good topic for the subcommittee on community engagement, discuss the pros and cons of what level of information we might provide to the public. So just throw out to that for your discussion, whether we put in more or less. We had a discussion a few years ago, and I think it was just Ron, and I, and Karen were on the board at that point, but I could be wrong, about whether emails that come in should be just posted on the website and available for people to see. So I think that's a conversation

147I wouldn't mind revisiting in context of that as well. I think that's what the subcommittee will probably discuss and then bring to the board as a whole, a recommendation. Okay. Thank you. Okay, thank you so much. Okay, 10.06, the 1000 series. Second reading. I think you're leading this too. Okay. I'll just read once here. The board was presented with the first reading of policies 1000 to 1925 during our February 14th board meeting. No further recommendations were made from board members. Attached is a description of past and current policy subcommittee members. The meeting dates, what policies were reviewed, and notes on suggested revision into recommendations for resending a policy. This is the second reading of the following policies that will be presented to the board for adoption leader in this meeting. The current policy may be

148viewed by clicking on the policy number below. Additionally, and there's a list of policies, including a new policy 1925, interpreters for hearing impaired parents. And there's also a list of policies that the board is recommending to be rescinded either based on recommendations from this by the New York State School Boards Association or from our attorneys. Any additional comments on the policies? No. Okay, so then we will move to item 11, action items. Carl. So it's my pleasure to move that the policies 1000 to 1900 be approved. As I do so, I wanna thank the prior board members who worked on it and made a significant amount of headway prior to our most recent involvement and to Dr. Hagerman for his words and work with us on it. And for those who may be watching and

149unaware, these are the policies that guide a whole bunch of different things from community relations at the policy 1000 which we were just talking about, to public complaints, not that we have any of those, and parental involvement. So all kinds of things. And I would move that the policies be accepted as submitted in the agenda. Okay. Is there second? second, Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. Item 11.02. Jim So as part of this policy review process, there were a number of policies that were identified as being, for various reasons, no longer appropriate or necessary and are therefore posed to be rescinded. And those policies range from 1100 to 1900, covering a number of different matters, but most of them are duplicative of existing policies and other areas, or not really

150necessary given that they cover items that are covered already in the education law or in other regulations that are applicable. So with that, we recommend that these policies be rescinded by the board. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. At this time, we will turn to hearing from those present. Is there anyone in the audience who wishes to speak? Okay. Please state your name and your address. And if you are speaking on behalf of an organization, we ask that you speak on district-related items or other non-personnel related matter. Thank you. Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Speakers are also asked to conclude their remarks within four minutes and will be given a cue at a three-minute mark. Come on, give me an extra minute. My name is Robert Harrison, 40-year resident

151of Scarsdale. I've been before school boards for about 38 years. And I'm chairman of the Scarsdale Taxpayer Alert that I started in 1989. Our purpose is to provide information to our residents on tax issues, both the village and the school to see that we get good use of our funds, of our tax dollars. We are one of the highest tax communities, quite frankly, in the nation. And not everybody's rich in Scarsdale. Far from it, quite frankly. So anyway, I was watching on TV. I tried to get on when you had a public comment period. Maybe I don't know how to do it. I know the one person did get on, but anyway. So I think, I don't know if there was some problem. My good friend, Jerry, over here. If I had your cell number,

152I would've called you. Anyway, so you should make it easy for people to get on. And you don't seem to have this meeting being shown on the channels of the cable channels. I'm an optimum customer. Channel 77 is the school channel. So I guess you're not for some reason putting that on. I wish you would. The more we communicate with the community, the better make it easier for them. The opportunity to speak here, I strongly disagree with four minutes. It should be five minutes like the village. In the village, the current mayor has been very nice to people who speak, and lets them finish their point. If they have to go to five and a half minutes, no problem. After all, you wanna hear from us. We're the taxpayers. You're supposed to serve the taxpayers.

153So right now, it looks like you're looking at if I understand the numbers and maybe I don't. I have your hand out for the meeting. Oh, by the way, school enrollment since 2019-'20. You're down 6.99, excuse me, 6.3%. The number of students in Scarsdale Schools are down 6.3%. It looks like you're adding to the headcount. Why? Same message for the village. They try to get 18 new F... Excuse me, eight new FTEs. We've got it down to four and hopefully we'll get it down to two. You should only be adding to your head count if it's absolutely necessary. Once you add head count, it's hard to get rid of head count. So we're going into a potential recession. We have a war in Europe. Doesn't look like it's gonna end shortly. It's very debilitating. I

154have some good friends who are Ukrainian. So I wish that you take another look at this budget. It looks like you're somewhere in the 3.5% percent tax increase. I think last year, you were under three, two point some thing. Please get it down into the twos. Let's help our residents. They have problems besides COVID. Thank you very much, Mr. Harrison. Are there any remote participants? No, okay. At this point, response to public comment. We appreciate your coming here. Mr. Harrison. Apologies, you weren't able to get on remotely. Thank you for coming here to give us your comment. Any follow up? Okay. So now, we will turn to wrap up items. Any? Nope? Okay. And now, to item 15, meeting dates for the coming month. Amber. Okay, I've got a long list. This Wednesday, March 9th,

155the board will hold a Special Meeting/Executive Session at 6:00 PM in room 170-172 at the High School. On Wednesday, March 16th in 2022, the board will hold a Special Meeting/Executive Session in this room at 6:00 PM. On Monday, March 21st, the board will hold a Special Meeting or Executive Session at 5:30 in this room. Then Budget Study Session 3 at 6:30 in this room, and an Education Report immediately following in this room. On Wednesday, March 23rd, the board will hold a Special Meeting/Executive Session at 6:00 PM in this room. On Monday, March 28th, the board will hold a Budget Forum at 6:00 PM in this room. On Monday, April 4th, the board will hold a meeting with the designated group in the High School Learning Commons at 5:00 PM. The board will adopt the budget

156at 6:30 PM. There will be a business meeting immediately following in this room and an Executive Session if needed. On Tuesday, April 19th, there will be a special meeting. The Southwest BOCES vote at 9:00 AM in this room, 170-172. And on Monday, April 25th, there will be a Special Meeting or an Executive Session at 5:30 in this room followed by an Education Report and a Business Meeting immediately following. That's it? Okay, so the only change is the Executive Session for this Wednesday will take place via Zoom, and we will send out an announcement. Yes, okay. Thank you. So at this time, would someone like to make a motion to adjourn the meeting? So moved. Second? Second. Okay, all in favor? Aye. Okay, motion is adjourned. Thank you all very much. Have a nice evening.