BOE Business Meeting 2022-1-10

001Okay, good evening to everyone joining us at tonight's annual. I'm going to do okay. I call this meeting to order. Good evening to everyone joining us for tonight's annual budget presentation on budget development and staffing recommendations. Thank you for taking the time to be here. I note that all members of the board are present with Jim Dugan participating virtually and that all members of cabinet are also present except for Rachel Mosley. I'd like to note that while there is no public comment period during this evening's budget presentation, there is opportunity to hear from those present during the two public comment periods that are part of the board business meeting that follows this one. So now we will turn to the presentation. Thank you. Okay, thank you all. I would like to first start off and

002say that, you know, a reminder that the budget process begins as early as really September in which we began to contemplate issues around staffing, what our expected projections might look like, what our other needs are going to be. It's obviously been a little more challenging the last couple of years as we've You know, been embarking our way through or working our way through issues related to COVID. Last year, we had a lot of unanticipated expenses that really affected the budget in adverse ways. We turned a little bit more towards normalcy in the budgeting process for this school year and continue to work towards that trend moving forward, of course. So if you open up onto the first slide here, you can see that tonight's presentation is a little bit on the longer side because it

003really is focusing on staffing, which is the most important aspect of our budget and certainly a considerable amount of it. So we're going to talk about general budget development and considerations. Stuart always spends a lot of time helping us to understand how the budget is put together and the factors that go into it. We'll also be talking about specific staffing recommendations. That's at the elementary school, the middle school, the high school, and of course for the district as a whole. We'll be looking at that sort of match up against projected enrollment for next year. And then as you can see, item number four, the staffing requests and recommendations. We also have building administrators who will be here to help present that, particularly Megan and Ken. And so shout out to both of you for being

004here and supporting this work here tonight. And then we're going to round out with both the projected staffing levels and projected enrollment, and finally the budget development timeline. And so we're going to jump right into the budget development process, and I'm going to ask Stuart to take over from here. Great. Thank you very much. Dr. Hagerman so we go to the next slide Jerry Should be yep in the audience here Stewart So this is a slide, you know, it may look familiar. We present it throughout the budget process, but really it's sort of a good grounding for all of us to remember, you know, what the school budget is when you get down to the pure sense. So the budget provides the necessary financial resources to operate the school district and to help achieve the

005goals and objectives of the district as set forth in the strategic plan. Very basic. this next slide you can see all of the 13 goals of the strategic plan you have all these goals there's many many sub goals that support each of these goals as well and they are varied and unfortunately we haven't gone through a lot of detail of these in public session since the covid but we are still working towards those and having all of our work really focused in this direction and budget initiatives only appear in the budget draft after thoughtful consideration deliberation and discussion as dr hagerman mentioned all these conversations they start in september of the current school year and again we're talking about the 22-23 school year and not only i would say some of these discussions start in

006september of 2021 in this case but they even go back to the previous school year as well you know sometimes things aren't quite ready we do things very organically here A lot of the ideas start in classrooms, work up to the building administration level, to the cabinet level before, you know, I would say like sort of ready for prime time where we're comfortable enough for it to get into a recommendation in the budget. So for instance, staffing requests, instructional budget drivers, very purposely vetted, planned meetings all the way through that fall season. Again, cabinet, principals, administrative council, so not only at an individual building level, but to the general administration as a whole. And we assess those requests for educational efficacy. impact on student education outcome and achievement, alignment with mandates and best practice, alignment

007with that strategic plan I was just talking about and education priorities, staffing efficiency. Is there a different way to sort of do it with the staff that we have? And we make sure that we want to explore all of those areas and also in consideration of any financial impact. And we're talking about staffing recommendations a lot of times from the instructional side and different budget drivers, but also happens on the non-instructional side as well. A lot of our budget goes into supporting our programs in different ways from a facilities perspective or athletics or transportation and all those other different areas. so when i meet and the business manager slash treasurer jeff martin meet with those departments we still want to make sure that we're consistent with the strategic plan we keep that in mind in

008our district goals consistent with operational standards and best practices not only within our district but also in comparison to other districts in the region and across the state state and across the country and let's take a look at our historical spending norms as well you know we do and jeff keeps you know goes back years or is something out of place here and that generates uh allows us to generate some questions some probing questions again to see if we're doing things the most efficiently and see what's really driving any ups or downs across the presented budget um some of the things that we look for and that we have in practice are many budget efficiencies so the one we're most familiar with is our self-funded health care plan which generates a lot of savings to

009our to the district and taxpayers optimizing that staff so staffing efficiency which i just spoke of maximizing state aid so bocce services transportation expenditure based aids are we spending money in a way that might allow us to generate revenues that would offset tax increases and or maybe allow us to add program at a more in a more efficient manner and you'll see this and hopefully you have seen the last couple years with that BOCES aid actually increasing as we you know drive when it makes sense to do so some expenditures through through BOCES timing considerations. We talk a lot about this during the budget process, especially for facilities and technology or staffing decisions. do we really want to jump in with both feet right now maybe it makes sense to you know put one foot

010in first year see how it goes and then add the next foot in the next year after that and therefore you sort of level it off a little bit and you don't have these big peaks and valleys in your tax base and it allows you to evaluate things as we go as well Cooperative agreements we have quite a few of them with the village. We also work with other school districts I'd say not as much but there have been one or two. We're always sort of exploring that cooperative purchasing competitive bidding Linda Bozzano and the business office does a great job of exploring all sorts of different purchasing arrangements and make sure we're purchasing effectively, efficiently, and getting a good cost savings when we can. technology advancements Rachel's department and mr. Basso Mike Basso and

011her department are great at you know are we in Jerry of course are we staying on top of things you know there could be new technologies that will be more efficient that will do things more cost effectively and provide a better program for our students and staff. And making sure that when we do that, while not keeping on old technologies and we're just sort of carrying the expense, but really not utilizing it. So it's a really important process. And one of the many things that we talk about when we go through their budgets and sort of that deliberation period of the budget development process. And energy consumption. I just put down LED lighting and new boilers. We've been doing the LED lighting over the last number of years in the budget, making sure that we

012replace as we go any new bulbs and getting projects into the budget. And then for the 2018 bond project, replacing all of the boilers that were about 30 years old. So even as we see some of those expenses increase this year for... Gas and oil that the new boilers are running much more efficiently offsetting some of those increases So that's been a great a great savings there And a sequence of the budget process. Again, budget deliberation and development is a huge part of it and really probably the most time consuming as we have all those conversations and diving into the numbers, not only from the business side of things, but you'll hear from Ken and Megan and their end from all the different building budgets, they're doing the same thing and it sort of works

013its way up. So there's a lot of time spent. on that aspect of it budget discussions we had our budget forum of course back in november with the community those discussions now start to continue with the board table and all throughout the spring as we develop the the budget community gets involved all of working out all all of these things working up to that final budget vote on the 17th of may this year that third third tuesday and it's just sort of a different way of looking at it you can see those three aspects of input and discussions all sort of leading into that budget calendar all of those different discussions throughout the spring And again, all these different influences, you've heard me talk about them, it's a sort of different way of looking at

014it and some other things that have a part in it. Certainly, Dr. Hagerman talked about staffing. It's a huge part of our budget. All of the requirements of our labor agreements, staffing. Salaries and benefits, 80% of our budget, right? We don't produce widgets, we don't have machines, we have human capital, human resources that go into affecting student life on a day-to-day basis. We have mandated programs and costs, different changes that we don't have control in, local assessment values, equalization rates. CPI changes different special education requirements IEP provisions so all these different things that influence all these different variables that influence the budget every not only every day but sort of culminating until we get to that that budget presentation and final budget number another way of looking at the budget and Sort of a mandated

015way to do it. We don't really present this way too often. It's called a three-part budget so educational program capital and administration. Educational program, again, it's just everything you think about from an instructional side of things. That actually also includes transportation and athletics. Capital is mostly facilities and debt service and administration are all those administrative costs, not only from a central office perspective, but also administratively in all the buildings. attorney fees, insurance costs, and all those types of things are the administration part of the budget. By far and away, the largest piece of the pie there is the educational program. um so what are some of the considerations if what we haven't seen wasn't enough just so these all have a a part in the budget as we prepare it and drive the budget to

016one extent or another uh projected staffing needs which we'll talk about tonight before you know you'll see the recommendations behind all that was all that enrollment data program changes uh retirements all of that play a piece and what the final staffing staffing budget will be for the the upcoming school year all the contractual obligations for district personnel self-funded health insurance is a big driver that we always talk about it's a it's a big number that can sway up or down in any given year based on experience historical spending patterns state aid we get about four percent of our revenues from state so it's not a big number but as that goes up or down that allows tax levy to be offset or considerations of whether we have to maybe look at decreasing the budget a

017little bit to try to get below the tax cap or whatever that number is that we're looking to go out to taxpayers with. So that's always a driver to one extent or another. Fund balance and reserves projected to remain at the current year end. I will point out here, typically at this meeting, we do do that projection for the year end. We are behind in the business office. We've had absences, and we're still trying to catch up. So we do hope to have that to you for that first budget session in February. At that point, we'll have a budget drafted as well. But that's obviously a big number, or plays a very important part of the budget plan. What are the property tax levy limit calculations? That's also known as the tax cap. So what

018does that look like from year to year? Enrollment projections also play a considerable part in the budget plan. Building specific budgets have a little big piece of the pie. The non-instructional budgets, employee benefits. Debt service budget based on what we know and projected schedules. It's a little easier when all of our debt is pretty much settled and we don't have anything that has not been bid out yet. And projected revenues. A couple of things that do play an important part that we have a range on at this point are employer pension contribution rates for teachers' retirement system and employees' retirement system. TRS, very colleagues and myself were surprised that that number was going up for 21, 22, between 10 and 10.5%. And the reason was that the increase in the number of retirees, so they're

019getting more and more retirees, they're retiring at a younger age, and they also dropped their assumed rate of return. that is all driving that number up. So that number will be finalized with, I think within a month or so, we'll have a final number on that. And when we have that first draft of the budget to you, you know, we'll have a recommendation on how to handle that. If you're, as you recall, we do have the TRS reserve now. So we probably would be looking to use that to sort of smooth out that small increase. um from year to year but again we'll have that final recommendation for you when we get into the actual draft the ers number between 15 and 16 same reasons for the increase there if they did not drop their

020assumed rate of return it's primarily based on the number of retires and retirees and the age again And then I just put a little reminder down there what 1% means. You're always looking at percent of budget and all of that. So percent of budget increase is 1.67 million and percent of tax levy a little bit less at a 1.4 million, 1.54 million. And I'd like to turn it over to Dr. Patrick. Thank you. So I'm going to look at... our current staffing look at some historical trends in staffing and enrollment as a prelude to the proposals the recommendations and requests that will follow that up so there are some familiar graphs this is the first one we look at historical district-wide staffing we usually take a 10-year look at that to see where we are

021so we have in the current year overall 648.7 full-time equivalent employees that's both certified and classified civil service positions that does not include our part-time teacher aides and bus drivers and our current enrollment these enrollments all are based on the first wednesday in october each year obviously our enrollment fluctuates a little bit all the time but we're at 4609 students k-12 next slide This is a slide we introduced a couple of years ago kind of to look at where those staffing those individuals are located just in terms of our educational program so starting along the bottom the blue bar is our high school senior high school staffing these are Exclusively in that case our certified staff teachers administrators the red reflects our middle school staffing The green bar reflects our elementary school staffing with an

022inset in there in purple that shows the total number of elementary classroom sections. And you can see that fluctuates from year to year. And that is driven primarily by our class size guidelines. So we start the year each year with the intent of having a maximum class size of 22 students in grades K1, 2, and 3 and a maximum class size of 24 students in grades 4 and 5 and our sections we make changes even after the budget is adopted, if a section, an enrollment breaks, we will add a section up till August 15th. That's really the latest time that we make such a change. above that the bar in orange reflects district-wide staffing so that's mostly central office administration we do have a couple of non-administrative positions in there that are just folks who

023work district-wide and then the I guess light blue bar above that is our total civil service personnel. So these are all of our clerical support. These are business office folks. These are technology, both data services and technical services, our custodians, grounds, people. And then the black number at the top is just the total staffing. So it just gives us a sense of a 10-year look. And I'll talk a little bit about the difference between the budget and the actual for the current year on a subsequent slide. So then the next slide is our total certified staffing. So this is a subset of that first graph that we looked at that just counts our certified teachers, you know, counselors, psychologists, administrators, and so forth, those who hold license from the New York State Education Department. So

024the next slide really breaks this into a table format. and I'm going to just spend a second kind of looking at our budget versus actual for the current year. I presented most of this at our first meeting in September when we do an annual update, but we are one position over budget this year in the elementary school level, and that really reflects some increased art, physical education, and music. that was necessary to accommodate our schedule once we built our schedule. That is something we're looking hard at this year to be as efficient as we can. The middle school, we have an increase from budget in the current year, really driven by enrollment. more students who are English is a new language for them and that's a we needed more staffing it actually restores a point

025four position that we eliminated a couple of years ago we also added over the course of the summer an additional special education teacher as a result of caseloads they they grew sort of beyond our current staffing and we this is a little unfair to the middle school but we did increase music a full-time music position at the middle school what was there was a part-time it's attributed as a half of fte to the middle school but really some of that was in the elementary levels just how it was budgeted in the book so middle school has a an increase there then our high school staffing came in at budget District-wide, we saw an increase of 0.6 FTE. That is the addition of a special education teacher over the summer for IHM. We have students that

026are Scarsdale residents that attend, and we provide special education services. Sorry, they're not they're not necessarily residents a few of them are relatives residents But as a district of location we need to provide services for students with what are called IESPs Which are service plans we had been doing that contractually Or through our own buildings having kids bus to our buildings the number of kids in IHM who have those plans has increased dramatically We do build back for that those services to the districts where the kids live so that cost is aggregated and then broken up across the districts for however many kids they have at that district thank you eric appreciate that and then an increase of 1.3 over our budget on the civil service side that reflects an increase in the we do

027provide a nurse similar we provide a nurse to ihm it was a half a half time nurse for a long time. Last year we increased that to 1.0. We didn't know where we were going into the in the budget process last year what it would look like this year in terms of COVID but it seemed to make sense to keep that nurse at a full-time status and then we had a number we've had some staff turnover. One of the areas we've had that turnover are in part-time 10-month clerks where we piece together multiple part-time people to be the second person in the office. You're going to hear a little bit more about that as part of our proposal. This year we did go ahead and hire someone into a sort of a full-time but 10-month

028position not summer at Edgewood to replace the individuals who had resigned so we took two positions and turned that into one they were part-time positions that weren't part of the head count the FTE count and that is what that 0.8 clerk ad is there so we ended up 4.8 positions above budget um in the current year okay so that is a prelude to our staffing requests and recommendations those requests and recommendations jerry if you'll advance the slide are really driven by several guiding principles so our decisions are justified by aligning to these particular things. First is educational efficacy. We think about any decision through the lens of a positive impact on the educational lives of our students. Second area is our student educational outcomes and achievement. We have these core principles, classical education taught in

029the progressive tradition. We have a commitment to teaching and learning that advances. our Scarsdale Education for Tomorrow 2.0 and also resources that further the strategic plan goals as all related to educational outcomes and achievement. We also think through the lens of mandates and best practices. So we, of course, observe those mandates as thoughtfully and contextually as possible, both the external and internal mandates. And, of course, we try to promote best practices. So I gave the example earlier of elementary class size guidelines. We don't have to do that, but that has been a long-time practice here of keeping... class sizes at 20 you know no more than 22 or 24 as i explained earlier and of course we've seen you know a growth in our special education programming as more students who might have gone out

030for support or services out of district more of those students are staying in we believe that's a best practice And of course the strategic planning and educational priorities and of course we think about staffing efficiencies and ultimately the financial impact. What is the overall impact and what is the community's comfort with what we propose? Next slide. So when we make a proposal for a program or a staffing proposal, for the last number of years we've used a request process that is sort of standardized a little bit. So we try to provide each recommendation with the same kinds of information. Some background and rationale for the proposal. How does it connect to the strategic plan? What are we currently doing in that particular area or program? What do we think the impacts are going to be

031and how will we monitor that for impact? So we try to provide the board and the community with common slate of background information to help explain our thinking when coming forward with a proposal. And I'm going to hand it back to Stuart. All right, thank you very much, Drew. So what is the next step in our process? Well, after getting through sort of the gauntlet and rising up organically, you know, through the building administration, up through administrative council and cabinet, I would say cabinet goes through a pretty extensive process over the course of... a few weeks of evaluating each of the requests on those guiding principles that Dr. Patrick just spoke about. And we come to a sort of a tiering to see how To what point do we want to feel comfortable recommending it

032to the Board of Education for inclusion in the initial draft? So a Tier 1 staffing request is recommended to the board and those are the ones that you'll see tonight for presentation. They'll be included in the initial draft of the budget or they are included in the initial draft of the budget and they really strongly meet with our guiding principles. Tier two staffing request is not recommended at this time. It may have merit based on the rationale provided and it wasn't totally rejected, but really needs some more time to be developed to study studied for inclusion in the future budget. Staffing efficiency, the cabinet may have had some additional questions about that. uh building administration may have had some concerns about that as well they really needed to go back uh to develop uh that

033further uh and give a little bit more time to do that and the tier tier three staffing request is also not recommended they might need extensive additional study or just sort of a really initial thought giving cabinet or administrative council a heads up you know this might be coming down the road we just wanted to let you know that this is out there that we're looking at it So having said all that, the staff and recommendations that were categorized as tier one for inclusion in our initial draft of the 22-23 budget are on this chart. So you can see, sort of divided these up into three categories. Instructional, you can see elementary math teacher, a life skills teacher, computer science teacher at the middle school, and a middle school special educational teacher. This year or

034for next year you'll see an emphasis on student support as we heard about for the last couple of years and through many of sort of our listening sessions. Middle school psychologists, middle school social worker, high school psychologists, high school social worker, clerical support for that psychologist and a CPSC chairperson. And then on the operational side an additional grounds person, high school cleaner. and then just a sort of a recategorized categorization and different way thinking about our clerks district-wide so we're going to go through and look at all these tier one recommendations megan and ken will come up when it's their turn to speak about their request and we'll start off this evening actually with edgar talking about the elementary math support person thank you stuart So given the math needs we anticipate at the elementary

035level, we are recommending that we include a math-focused teacher on special assignment and the 2022-23 school budget. We anticipate at this point this position would recur for an additional year into 2023-24. As some of you may remember, Nancy Pavia, our elementary math curriculum coordinator, presented at the May 24, 2021 Board of Ed meeting a description and rationale for a multi-year process of program review of our current elementary math program. This rationale is connected to our strategic plan, particularly as it relates to the goals of next-gen standards alignment and student-centered learning. Through material analysis, outside math consultation, and next-gen standards alignment, the committee determined to move from the current vendor, which is primary math, and examined several alternative programs. After several presentations of vendor materials, exploration of digital and hands-on materials, our committee made the determination

036to move forward with three math pilots, Bridges in Mathematics, Illustrative Mathematics, and Investigations 3. The pilots are now underway in 42 classrooms. Investigations and illustrative have been completed and Bridges Mathematics was launched through a Zoom presentation with all the pilot teachers on Friday night into Saturday. A special shout out to our dedicated pilot teachers who spent their entire school day and night on Friday teaching and learning virtually. Currently, we have one designated math coordinator, Nancy, and one part time math consultant. Launching a new research based next gen standards aligned math program to elementary teachers will require a deeper level of on site support and coaching than is currently part of our professional development structure. The last math program adoption of primary math was more than a decade ago. And at that time it was successfully

037supported by three math designated teachers on special assignment. At the time they were referred to as helping teachers. This teacher on special assignment would work both alongside and independently from Nancy Pavia and our consultants to engage in coaching and modeling lessons, coordinate resources materials, communicate consistent expectations district-wide for K-5 educators and assured learning expectations for students, provide one-on-one and targeted small group planning and support, participate in the communication, written and live presentations of rationales, goals, and structures to teachers, teacher aides, and families, perform needs assessments based on ongoing communication with teachers and administrators, and offer anything else needed to create the most cohesive transition possible. I do want to proactively address a question I've been asked. Why not hire a designated math person from outside rather than create a teacher on special assignment position? Well,

038first of all, we appreciate the outside consultants and anticipate working closely with the staff developers who accompany all three of these programs. By inviting a member of our existing elementary community into this position, there are some key benefits. The district creates a leadership opportunity for one of our own teacher leaders. This person already knows and appreciates Scarsdale. We have much known in-house talent to choose from. And I think most importantly, filling this role with the district teacher enables us to take advantage of established relationships, trust, and histories. I'm happy to answer any questions the board may have about the position and our process at the end of the presentation. Thank you. I do want to add before Eric jumps in with the next slide is the rationales that we spoke of earlier in the presentation,

039they are all available in the appendix of the presentation for perhaps a little bit more detail. Good evening and thank you. I'm going to present on a special education teacher for life skills in a second. I just want to point out as you hear many of these staffing requests, you will hear the theme of student mental health as the main driver for many, if not most of these requests. So keep that in mind as we move forward. This, however, is the request for 1.0 special education teacher. This comes from our current bridge program, which is in Quaker Ridge. Originally had four students in it. We had one move away. But we had two new students come into the program this year. One was a move in from out of district, and the other was able

040to be brought back from an outside program. So that's a wonderful thing now that we have. That being said, these two students are a year younger than the existing cohort that was there. The original plan was to move the Bridge Program out of Quaker Ridge and make a connection to the middle school with a new program there that combined aspects of our parallel program along with some more differentiated education and adaptive life skills curriculum. Because these two new students are of a different age, we are reevaluating whether to move the entire cohort to the middle school next year or to split it between the two schools. In either case, there will be a a need for a differentiation of the program across those two cohorts which will require an additional special education teacher we are

041not sure whether that will be assigned to the middle school or stay in the elementary school for one more year we're working that through in the next few weeks so we wanted to put it out there that this is going to be a need to accommodate these students you'll see the estimated cost is 110 000 That is the cost of a staff member. We do have a savings on that due to the fact that we did bring a student back from an out of district placement, which was approximately about $75,000. The next staffing request that I'm going to talk about is really the request to start a new mental health program at the middle school. This actually encompasses the full-time equivalent psychologist ask at the middle school, the full-time equivalent special education teacher, and an

042aide. So six years ago, we started at Scarsdale High School the SSP program, the Scarsdale Support Program. That has run successfully for the past six years. It has been... at or near full capacity for the entire time. And it has reduced our reliance significantly on outside therapeutic day placements for students attending the high school. At the time we started this, we knew there would be a need to look at the middle school to understand what the needs for a special education emotional disabilities program there would be. COVID has increased some of the need in the middle school, but it has only kind of magnified an increasing trend that we had seen in the years prior to COVID. So we are seeing more students in the middle school dealing with depression, anxiety, or some combination thereof,

043along with... other mental health issues having to do both with students at home lives or dealing with substances or dealing with peer relationships. Students ultimately benefit from staying in district and being able to work through those issues with support here with the families and the neighbors that they've grown up with. So our hope is to start a similar program to the high school, which would be a program that allows students to attend the appropriate classes in the middle school, but provide them with a safe and stable place to receive counseling on the moment interventions. and their learning support in in a separate place from a regular lrc much like the high school has set up the ssp room in in the high school the therapeutic component will involve group and individual counseling it will use

044a combination of dbt cbt and traditional talk therapy the psychologist can do home visits when necessary can provide what i would call ad hoc therapeutic intervention where students who have acute crisis on the moment because the case load would be about 15 for this program that would allow the psychologist and the special ed teacher to spend. dedicated intervention time if that student needs to be out of class for a few days and just be in the SSP room if a student needs particular support to join them in a class for a little while those are things that are doable in this program that are not doable for a student who is having these issues but is being intervened through either one of our youth outreach workers or our psychologists due to the caseload size So

045approximately $235,000 plus the aid and some minor classroom renovations would be the price tag on this program. That being said, we are hoping to bring a couple of kids back from outside placements and prevent the use of outside placements further in the middle school. So that would provide an offsetting cost. At this point, I can't give you a solid estimate of who would be able to be brought back. We have had some students leave both this year and last year. So until those students are settled in their new programs, we can't really evaluate until a little later in this year whether there would be an opportunity to bring any back. Megan's going to speak about the computer science teacher at the middle school with a little help from Jerry, perhaps. Thank you. As Eric has

046shared, we've seen an increase in the number of students seeking support in the area of mental health. This upward trend, as Eric shared, began before the pandemic and has really only accelerated during it. And these issues look really different with every student. For some, it may present itself as anxiety and they struggle to come to school on a daily basis. For others, they may withdraw and isolate themselves. However it presents, our mental health providers, our psychologists, our house counselors and social workers are on the front line, actively working with families, students and teachers to move them to a better place where they can find success. To give a sense of the increase, our building currently has 100 students receiving mandated counseling. This is up from 78 students in the 2019-2020 school year. Our special education

047students have grown from 100 students to over 100 students. 101 in 2018-19 to 130 in the current school year. And for us, these are November numbers, which typically grow during the upcoming school year. These numbers do not include our non-mandated counseling, which is approximately an additional 150 students across the house counselors and social workers. All of the positions, including the ones Eric just shared with you, provide greater support for our students' mental health. We believe it is important to address these challenges in this moment, and this includes the first position I'd like to share more about, which is the middle school computer science position. Not obviously supporting mental health. Currently, our sixth grade students experience a computer tech program for one of their four quarterly classes. Prior to the 2021 school year, the computer tech

048class ran on an every other day cycle opposite a seminar class run by our house counselors. Each of these classes met for 22 to 24 days. Computer tech focuses on coding, digital citizenship, and related topics. The seminar class focused on transitional skills for our sixth grade students and anti-bullying programs. And it is our expectation without any changes we would return to that model next year. However, this year we made the decision to have the computer tech meet four days a week and seminar meet only one. This decision was based on the rising and expected mental health concerns of our students and the need to have our counselors available on a more regular basis. In addition, we've incorporated many of the seminar goals into our Keystone Advisory Program. This has helped our counselors have that time

049with students. However, there have been other consequences. In the past, the computer tech teacher also acted as a computer teacher or what we would call an instructional technology specialist and supported the integration of technology into the classrooms. With an increase in their teaching responsibilities, they're unable to fulfill that role to the same degree. Our one-to-one iPad program requires a tremendous need for support. The current model we have in place has one computer teacher supporting 1,200 students and 120 faculty. This person is able to maintain the baseline of support, but not fully support the teachers and students in a way that leads to innovative practice in the classrooms. When we introduced the one-to-one iPad program a number of years ago, we were leading the way and we'd like to continue to lead in innovative practices. Programming

050and coding should be a common experience for our middle school students. The quarterly class creates that opportunity. We see the K-5 coding experience for our youngest learners and the opportunities for our high school students as rich and rewarding. And we believe it's really important to fill that gap at the middle school and build that passion in our middle learners. This is an age where we can expose them to many different things and let them choose what they'd like to pursue as they get older. In closing, we're asking for that full-time computer science teacher to meet every day for an entire quarter with our students. This would bring their meeting time to 44 to 48 consecutive days. In addition to providing a rich experience for our sixth grade students, this change would allow our house counselors

051to focus on the students' mental health issues. It's a time, it's time that's very important to their work with students. Jerry, if you want to jump in or before they go into the next one. I just want to say Megan gave a very nice rationale for the position, but just so the board knows and the community knows, this is a position that really has been in the making for about three years. It was initially at that level three position that I think Stuart described, and it's worked its way up to the point now where we have the one-to-one program at the middle school that really demands much more support. And also, you know, we have a constant desire by our middle school parents to have students have additional coding opportunities. We also find our students

052are coming into the middle school with more and more sophistication to the point where this year we actually had to allow some independent study for those students who are more advanced at coding, who have really done it on their own. So we believe this position is really important, not just for Scarza, but specifically at that grade level. We know it's so important to have an emphasis on helping students with understanding problem solving through coding. And the other benefit is that we also know this is an age range where we oftentimes lose our girls. And by having that position in place, I really think we can provide that continuity and also address that gender issue that we face every year. The next position I'd like to speak about is a middle school social worker. So as

053I shared and as we've heard, there's been a rise in students struggling with mental health issues including anxiety, depression, and other issues. We've seen a rise in mandated counseling and regular counseling for our students. Adding a school-based social worker would help our current staff provide the necessary help our students need both now and in the future. One of the important roles our social workers have is getting to know the families and communities in Scarsdale. By having a school-based social worker, they would provide the consistency and continuity for families. This social worker would be able to play a much larger role in preventative programming for our students. With the rise in mandated counseling and other counseling needs, our social workers have been pulled from the groups that they typically run and being able to push into

054the classrooms the same way that they could years ago. This new hire would be able to reach more students and help address some of the issues before they turn into chronic mental health struggles. A school-based counselor would expand our capacity to support students and their families through challenging times. We believe we've hit a threshold and need that additional help in supporting our students. We've also heard from many families who struggle to find support for their children outside of the school. There are just not enough mental health providers to meet the needs of our young people today. This makes our school-based mental health providers even more valuable and important. Thank you for your consideration of these different roles. I'd just like to take a quick second to delineate between what we are asking for with some

055middle school social worker that would be a district employee and our longstanding a longstanding program of the youth services project with Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling. So Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling provides three social workers for the middle school and two for the high school. This was started in the 1980s as a prevention program for suicide and has grown into a prevention program for all mental health needs. Our social worker's job has first and foremost been to be a reaching out to the general education population to try and. catch budding mental health issues and acute student problems kind of before they become chronic. Over the past four to five years, more and more of these youth outreach workers have taken on the role of consistent counselors for students who are having more intense mental health needs. And

056that has brought them out of the classroom, as Megan said. So we are hoping. to bring in a district person to take on both some of the mandated and non-acute counseling that some of the youth outreach workers have had to pick up given the need that we're seeing in the building. So that's why there's a differentiation between this social worker, which would be a district employee, versus our youth outreach workers, which are a joint program between the village and the school district. great and ken bonamo will come up and talk about the high school staffing recommendations thank you stuart and thank you to the board for allowing me to present the themes that i will touch on here are very similar to what megan said the request for an additional school psychologist the high school

057is in response to the demonstrated need in the number of students who need mental health support The request is rooted in two separate but related issues. First is that at the high school, the number of students with IEPs has increased by 21% over the past five years. And over the past four years, we have seen a concomitant increase, 30% increase in mandated counseling, 42% increase in tri-annual evaluations. And even though it's a small number, 133% increase in the number of hospitalizations. It is this last data point that is the springboard to the second issue, which is that before the pandemic, we were seeing an increase in the number of students who needed help and an increase in the severity of the different crises they were experiencing. And this phenomenon has only been exacerbated by the

058pandemic. with its attendance, social isolation and general uncertainty. Throughout the pandemic and especially the school year, our existing two school psychologists for the general population have been stretched far beyond their capacity in dealing with their already existing caseload and handling crises as they have come up. I should note that the 133% increase in hospitalizations was only through this November. That is to say, we don't know what the rest of the year will hold. And we are double where we normally are for the whole year, just half the year through. The request for the secretary for the high school psychologist is related to the request for the additional psychologist, which will bring the total number of psychologists in the high school to four. One for SSP and three for the general population. There is significant work

059in scheduling sessions with students and keeping track of attendance at these sessions, as well as with all the paperwork related to mandated counseling and students who are experiencing crises. There's extensive contact with families and outreach to service providers who are outside of the school, and providing our psychologists with dedicated clerical support will free up even more time in their schedules to devote to direct student service during the day. And finally, the request for a high school social worker is also related to the overall increase in mental health needs in the community among students, families, and indeed staff. Because of the increase in mandated counseling that I mentioned earlier, sometimes our youth outreach workers, who are social workers, perform the counseling that is required for students who have this written into their IEPs. However, this takes

060the youth outreach workers away from their core mission during preventative work around substance use and abuse that they are meant to do with students and families and parent groups. Having a school-based full-time social worker will allow us to continue to take advantage of having counseling by a social worker when it is appropriate as determined by the CSC without taking professional time away from the Youth Services Project of Scarsdale Family Counseling Services. Additional staffing is needed to accommodate the increase for collaboration within the school community, provide necessary counseling, crisis intervention, risk assessments, and important school-based programming. And it's probably worth noting that the social work model promotes the overall academic mission by providing services that strengthen homeschooling community partnerships and alleviate barriers to learning. ScarScale has always valued these partnerships and parental involvement and the school

061having a school-based social worker can more directly control how we assess what to be appropriate for different students. The social worker model significantly contributes to the development of a healthy safe and caring environment and is accomplished by understanding the emotional and social development of students. and the influences of family and community, as well as cultural differences on student success and implementing effective intervention strategies. It's important that we're able to respond to the increased need in mental health services with both a psychologist and a social worker, as well as clerical support, since the focus of their practices are different and our students and families have different needs when they present in crisis and in general. In short, the demand for these services has increased in recent years and I would like your assistance in helping us

062respond in kind with increase in staff. Thank you. The next position that I'm going to talk about is a half-time position within the Special Education Office at the district level. The special education office at the district level is responsible for making sure the committee on special education process is done effectively and efficiently that keeps us. in line with law but also allows for families to feel they have someone who is directing the services and intervention for their children in an effective and caring manner. Currently that responsibility is split. So the Special Education Office also handles CPSC, which is the Committee on Preschool Special Education, which is a committee, which is a program that is by the school district, but implemented by the county. So we do not provide services for students who are three and

063four years old, but we do administrate and make the determinations on what services they should get for the county. So currently, those responsibilities are held by three chairpeople who are in my office. It's really 2.7 full-time equivalents because one of our district level psychologists takes on a 0.3 counseling role in the high school, which can partially be helped by the psychologist that was just requested at the high school. So we have a CPSC and primary CSE chair. That person is responsible for all the initials, program review, preschool transitions, and all K through five students who need any type of program change and or services in the elementary schools. We have a CSE secondary chair who does the sit-gistute. all the CSE functions for grades 6 through 12, middle school and high school transitions, elementary to

064middle school transitions, finalizing of all of the annual reviews. And she has supervisory responsibility for CSE testing and out of district students placed by the secondary level in other schools. And then we have an out of district chairperson in our district psychologist who is responsible for all parentally placed students out, has a caseload of CSE students, K through five who are placed out, and does a .3 FTE counseling job at the high school. She also supervises all of the district of location services that are done at Immaculate Heart of Mary. At this point, We have had an increase of 151 students in the last three years in special education across the district. We have moved from a just shy of 8% classification rate to an 11% classification rate. So, and I've talked about that in

065the past where the average rate of classification in Westchester hovers between 12 and 14%. So our numbers were quite a bit low. for for the area i feel more comfortable with where our classification rate is now i think we're servicing the students that we are supposed to service that being said it has become difficult for the chairs to provide the needed time for all of the families in their caseload adding to this the job of assistant superintendent of special ed and student services has also expanded to in include safety, security, and emergency management, and certainly in the last two years, COVID. So at this point, that has left our chair people to be more responsible for some of our high need students and the coordination of those complex meetings that I would have been part

066of just a couple of years ago. So at this point, we are asking to carve out the CPSC function from the primary CSE chair position and use a half time person to focus on our three and four year olds, which will allow a re. a redesignation of caseloads across the other three chair people and allow for them to have a little bit more time to focus on their kids who need the most intervention. great thank you eric uh the next uh recommendation uh falls uh to me for district-wide operational this is uh the request for a 1.0 fte grounds person currently the staffing levels for the grounds department which falls under facilities stands at 6.0 fte that's five workers and a supervisor all of them are hands-on on a daily basis we also do hire

067some seasonal workers That 6.0 individuals is down from the original 8.0 back in 2008, and that's been dropped down to the 6.0 closer to the 2008 school year. I think by 2012 or 13, it was down to the 6.0 we see now. Having said that, during that time, even though we've dropped the number of FTEs, the work responsibilities and demand have increased. The added plantings and all of the outdoor landscaping at all of our buildings has taken up more of the individual's time across the district. And as we've moved, certainly not only this year and last year, but even before that, starting to move more outside with all of our programs when possible has also increased the demand on that department. And one would think even with Dean Field, or I'm sorry, Butler Field going

068to synthetic, that that might actually decrease the amount of work. The work actually stays the same and just sort of shifts to different responsibilities and the upkeep of that to make sure that it lasts as long as it is meant to. We are also paying more attention to our fields as they become aged across the district. We tend to think of our athletic fields, sort of our interscholastic athletic fields here at the high school and middle school predominantly, but we have these spaces all across the district that we need to make sure that they're taken care of, that they're safe for our students to be on and our community to be on. you know as much as as possible we would also like to focus on taking um on some additional activities that the additional

069fte would provide us getting more into sort of making sure that we rest our fields when we can getting into more of uh you know the aerating and fertilizing um and you know reseeding more on a more regular basis than we're able to at this point we would anticipate with these individuals. Not only are they sort of hands-on mowing and all that every day, but also when we have athletic events, they're also on site to make sure that the fields are prepped and ready or providing manpower on game day. So some of this additional FTE would offset some overtime in that department. And keeping with the facilities perspective, the next one is a 1.0 FTE high school cleaner. I believe this was a tier two last year. So now it's risen to a tier one

070as we've been able to study this area a little bit more, if you recall from our conversations last year. We do look at square foot per cleaner and overall cleanliness in our buildings. If you recall, we really try to strive for a level two, which is way down at 18,000 to 20,000 square feet. per single worker per shift we're not quite at that but with our standards and processes and even using that new product that viking pure has helped some of our efficiency you see the chart below you can see the high school with their 9.0 fte cleaners is way above and beyond that and and certainly above where we are for the middle school and elementary school. And the high school, as we know, it's highly used on a regular basis. And our gymnasiums,

071auditoriums, our classrooms, adult school, all of that, it's a very highly used facility. The addition of another cleaner here at the high school would bring that down to 39 a little bit over 39,000 square foot and would help immensely I will say across the district with our facilities leadership team They are looking you know when we talk about staffing efficiencies They are constantly looking to see you know how we're using our cleaners and different shifts to make sure that you know we are putting you know the right people in place at the right times to make our buildings as clean and user-friendly as possible and i'll turn it next over to dr patrick thank you very much so As I alluded to earlier, one of the things we're proposing to you tonight is making a

072shift in a collection of positions that are currently titled part-time 10-month clerks. We have employed 14 of these positions over a number of years, a long time, across the seven schools. And the characteristics of the position are they're all providing some kind of clerical support and they cannot work more than 17 hours a week by county rules because they're non-competitive positions this group of employees is represented by the secretary's unit and we really have three different configurations of how their work is performed. As you know, we have five elementary schools, and our two largest elementary schools, Quaker Ridge and Fox Meadow. Each have a second office secretary. So all the buildings have a secretary to the principal. And then those two buildings have Quaker Ridge of 1.0 full position and Fox Meadow 0.8 position secretary

073supporting the main office. In the other three buildings, that second position has been shared between multiple people over time. And none of those people can work more than 17 hours a week. So it's been a piecemeal. building together that that second office position to support the functioning of the school so one of the things part of this proposal is to eliminate those positions those non-competitive 17 hours or less positions and turning it into a single full-time second full-time ten month position so functionally they're 80% employees because they don't work in July or August but they're there full-time during the school year the biggest cost differential there being the eligibility for benefits particularly the the health benefit and I'll say more about that in a little bit The second function that these individuals have played in

074the role is at the middle school supporting production, copying and preparing materials for teachers. And that's work that we, it's been piecemealed together and we imagine being able to accomplish that more productively, effectively and support the school in a more effective way. by turning that into a full-time 10-month clerk position and then we've have five additional part-time 10-month clerks who've been supporting fox meadow the middle school the high school and district special education office and again envisioning that work being more effective more functional to turn basically take the individuals that were in in that particular and turn them into full-time 10-month clerk positions that can work the regular full workday. We realize that this is a proposal that is not directly connected to classroom instruction. But we have been experimenting with this at Edgewood. We

075did, as I explained earlier, make a decision to, when we lost both of our part-time 10-month clerks at Edgewood, we were unsuccessful in recruiting a replacement. We were successful, finally. in recruiting someone who was in a position that that had the benefits and that has been working out so what what we're proposing here is to eliminate those 14 positions and replace them with six full-time 10-month clerks to be assigned across the three elementaries, one in the middle school, one in the high school, and one in the district office to accomplish that. There is an estimated salary difference of about $15,000 total plus the health benefit. Now, with a self-insured health plan, we don't have an exact accounting of what those health costs would be. First, the individuals would have to take it, but we assume

076they will. Second, whether they're on the individual plan or the family plan and then how much they actually use the plan because we're self-insured, it's based on that actual cost. But it could be probably an high-end estimate would be an additional $15,000 per person. It's a very high outside estimate or $90,000 total. And that is the part-time clerk proposal. great thank you very much true um and then lastly just a review of sort of where we left off with uh requests from last year or any tier two staffing requests this year uh so uh i'd like to go back and sort of give you a status so carry over from 2021 if you recall there was a tier two request from the high school for freshman team teachers two of them and a freshman dean

077uh and they did not come up in requests this year due to the real the focus on the social emotional support of our students and that's been moved to a tier three uh the middle school cleaner uh was also moved to a tier three uh and then there were no new uh tier two requests uh for next year through this year's process and i'll turn it back over to drew so we will um We will go ahead and take a look again at the chart that we looked at a little bit earlier before the staffing recommendations. showing both the current year's budget and actual and now introducing the proposed budget and then showing the the budget to budget difference so we the the budget as proposed based on the staffing recommendations we we just made

078would have elementary school staffing level overall but with a 1.0 budget to budget increase The middle school staffing would have a 6.9 position budget-to-budget increase, inclusive of those positions that I talked about earlier that we added in the current year. A two-position increase at the high school. District-wide, we would remain level from actual, 0.6 in that IHM position that Eric helped describe earlier. and then a 10.3 increase in the civil service positions. Again, that is a little bit artificially large because it's eliminating 14 part-time positions and creating six full-time 10-month positions. So overall, a total change of 20.8 positions from the current year's budget plan overall. The next slide will just... add the projected staffing we'll look at the same two graphs that we looked at we do have a an early enrollment projection that

079shows a little bit of a decrease in enrollment that project we did not commission a demographic study this year but that projection we think is fairly reasonable it is cohort survival so it would be all the kids here now currently returning graduating our 12th graders and taking the most recent demographic projection for kindergarten and putting that in into the mix i went back last year to this year and looked and that projection was pretty pretty close to accurate the biggest impact is of course on elementary sections where enrollment can cause a collapse or a break of a section as we move not just through the budget process but into the summer time as well so that would look at 479.7 on the certified staffing side and then if we take a look at the overall

080staffing picture we would be looking at 664. point seven Thank you very much, Drew. Then the last slide is just an update on where we are with our budget discussion timeline. As I mentioned earlier, we're lagging a little bit behind, but not to worry. We're still not way out of whack from where we usually are. So you can see February 7th for our budget session number one is coming up in about a month or so. We do hope to have the year-end projections for this current year ready at that point. We will have a draft budget plan for the 22-23 school year. We'll go through some of those budget drivers in a little more depth, and then we'll start to get into our different department budgets. We'll be talking about transportation, employee benefits, athletics, and

081we'll continue to get your feedback on the staffing recommendations we made here this evening. Budget Session 2 will follow the familiar or that same sort of format. Any sort of updates that we have, as you recall, this is a sort of a process that... is active uh there we're constantly getting in new new data getting different types of feedback from the community and the board of education getting sort of a tighter focus on what the numbers may be so they do change a little bit as we go throughout the spring process budget session three is in early march we'll go through a full budget presentation at that point at that point it's getting very close to the finished product, if not full finished. We'll go through all of the revenues and of course get further

082feedback from the board and community. We'll have the budget forum on March 21st and the board is scheduled to adopt the budget on April 4th. So at this point, I'd like to entertain any questions. I have a quick question. I guess this one is for... Drew, probably. With the freshman team teachers, the two freshman team teachers and the freshman dean that were sort of demoted from tier two to tier three, as I understand it, since I was not part of this budget process last year, I'd like to understand a little bit what the rationale was originally for adding. staff and if that staff is going to be addressed by some other part I don't know if that's a Ken yeah I'm gonna ask Ken can speak much more code how that fits into the picture

083but thank you Kim yep so we had been examining over time the ratio of students coming into the high school from eighth grade who were interested in the freshman seminar program versus those who were interested in the civ ed program and uh it's we never get it perfectly right but we try to match the number of seats um as closely as we can to give the students the program that they they indicate interest in we had we were leaving north of 25 to 30 students were not getting the program that they wanted. In addition, our caseloads for the counselors were exceeding our historical maximums and also were starting to exceed the regional maximums for students per counselor. However, Two things I think recommended that we not make this request this year. One was that the

084request for freshman seminar vis-a-vis Civ Ed are actually more closely aligned to the seats we're offering. So there are fewer students and families who are not getting the program they want. And second, with the small decrease in enrollment, the counseling caseloads were coming closer to historical norms and closer in line with the region. And so that was not a pressing concern on either front. So, we will continue to study both the caseloads and the demand for the different freshman programs to see if it recommends elevating it in the future. So, we keep it in the background, but it's not right now a pressing need. Thank you so much for that answer. That really helps me. Okay. First, I want to say thank you to everybody. That was a really thorough presentation, and I appreciate all

085the time you put into that. Ken, I'm sorry you just sat down because I have a question for you as well. You mentioned the Scarsdale support program that we have, and I was wondering, you mentioned also I think that there's one psychologist right now. Do you have any concerns about needing to grow that program given what we're seeing with the mental health situation? That's a great question. Thank you. We have had that program pretty much running close to or at capacity since we started it. We have come, Eric and I talk periodically, perilously close to exceeding the ratio that we have recommended giving the support structure we have written into the plans for the students as well as the staffing. As of the present moment, we don't see that as an issue. It could happen.

086where the number of students who are recommended exceeds the capacity of current staffing. And I think, I mean, I would want to talk with Eric. I think we would have to look at certainly the new addition, if there was the new psychologist added to taking some of the overage. The challenge would also be though that they get very intensive LRC teacher support. And so you would have to look at the overall teaching power of special education before taking away a resource room section to dedicate to the SSP. So it's both factors. I think it's also important to understand that the hope of expanding SSP down into the middle school will also provide students. So the goal of any more restrictive program is to attenuate, intervene with the need and then provide scaffolding for the student

087that then can be taken away as they as they improve in their skills in there. So we have had situations in the high school where students are moving back into an LRC and regular counseling type of program out of the SSP, which is one of the things that has allowed us to keep the program staffed the way it is because there are students who are getting the skills they need and being able to move out. Hopefully as we move that program down into the middle school, that will accelerate that for some students who are starting it in the middle school and allow that number to stay relatively steady. Thank you. I have a couple other questions, but they're not for Ken. So in an effort to not make him come back up, does anyone want

088to ask Ken any questions? Any other questions? Thank you. Okay. Thank you, Ken. Eric, you mentioned the life skills teacher. Did we used to have a life skills program at the middle school years ago? Yes, we did. Is this a different? Yes. Okay. So the cohort that's currently in Quaker Ridge are not alternately assessed students. They're regularly assessed students. So it is much more of a hybrid program than what we used to have. We did have a cohort of students that moved through the middle and the high school with the last ones graduating the high school. something in the neighborhood of six or seven years ago and they were alternately assessed students who were working on CSE or IEP diplomas doesn't exist now there's something different for that but it's different than a regular high

089school diploma and it focuses more on life and work skills for post-secondary we will be this this will be more of a hybrid program in that we're exploring the students ability to take and pass regular assessments and and gain a regular high school diploma and Look also towards eventually the CDAS requirement, which is an internship requirement for students That allows them to have work experience prior to leaving high school. So those are all options for this what has happened is the two students who have come in this year actually are are similar from a social interaction standpoint but there's some different academic needs there so there needs to be some differentiation in that program and we can't move the entire cohort of five up to the middle school without having someone to support the two

090kids in the times that those other three students will be moving into some of the parallel aspects of the program Thank you. And Edgar, my last question is for you. With regards to the elementary math teacher, so this position, the special teaching assignment, would only be for a couple of years? Did I hear you say that? We anticipate at this point it would be for the launch and the rollout and to give that support in the first two years. Because, you know, as we get to know the materials, the structure right now only has one math coordinator, Nancy. And so much of the success of the rollout of the program relies on a teacher to be able to get around, model, distribute, support, and be lots of different places. And I think you mentioned the

091last rollout was like 10 years or so ago? Yes, over 10 years ago. And were there only two, Soybean Nancy and one other teacher for this? Is that how it was before? There were actually, at that time, there were three, what they called helping teachers at the time. And that was moving from... kind of a traditional program into one that was more constructivist and more aligned with the way that we are now. But it was, it required at that point, I believe three teachers. Right now we're working very closely with a consultant. And with Nancy's support, I think one teacher on special assignment, given the support that comes with the three finalists that we have, will be enough support to move it in a positive direction. Great. Thank you. I have a question related to

092that. I'm just trying to understand the long-term financial impact of increasing our staffing more. So I'm trying to understand, it seems like several of the people we have or we're looking to put in place or to support us in this, the current situation we find ourselves. I wasn't sure I understood like how many of, are we looking to bring on as potential tenure track positions or are these all support? positions or you know several civil service you know i didn't know how that worked as we see a growing yep so that any of the proposed positions that we just presented that are not civil service would be certified positions therefore on the, you know, potentially on the tenure track or what we call probationary. So as long as they're full-time appointments, they would be probationary

093appointments. Okay. Thank you. And it's not in any particular order other than how I may roughly go in terms of presentation. Anyway, I just want to, we kind of go through the process for the budget and this is as much for Stuart as anybody else but you know we go through this process and we vote on it and then the community votes on it and Obviously, there are things that are quite specific, hired, and firm in their amounts, relatively speaking. And then there are other things that we bid out or projects or things that get undertaken during the year. And I'm just curious, I'm looking at Stuart mainly because you did the presentation, but it's not limited to you. Where is the line during the year between You know, something's budgeted, something goes under budget,

094something goes over budget, and how do we determine during the year what that means versus the budget that's been approved, I guess? If something's going over, do we just stop the project and right there, or how does that sort of materialize? I know it's not right on this conversation, but I think it's important for everybody to understand what we're doing. I think the biggest... I think it sort of made it back to that first slide where the budget supports the educational program and all the programs of the Scarceville School District and the budget is an estimation. right so we're not we're not budgeting to the dollar we're not you know oh it's a thousand dollars we know exactly how much we're going to spend that's exactly how we're going to budget so if we budgeted

095to the dollars good chance we could be over budget at the end of the day because things come up that we don't know about can't anticipate now for what could be 14 months from now Right and that budget so as we go through the year we We certainly anticipate that we would have a surplus that's where those projections come into play you hear about those Throughout all of our conversations or many of our conversations throughout the year the big ones would be like utilities where we have a guesstimate. We're gonna guess a little bit high because we don't wanna be short and hopefully we have surplus there. The health insurance budget, that's another area that it's an estimate. We don't know what our usage is gonna be. Hopefully we're under budget there. It might be

096on teacher substitutes. That might not be the case this year, but in normal years, teacher substitutes might be like another area. And there's all these you know, hundreds of categories. It might be $30 here, $50 there, or $1,000 here. Facilities, there's guesstimates of projects that we might do or might need or might not need based on what breaks. So during the course of the year, we have sort of a formal anticipation of what we need, and that's when you see our projected year-end expenses. Typically, you know, you would have had that by now. You don't have that yet. We're working on that, and that will give us, you know, almost a line-by-line anticipation of what we're going to spend by the year end. And that sort of, all of that helps us build the next

097year's budget and lets us know how much surplus we have to put towards the next year's budget if we so choose, or to put back into fund balance or any of our reserves and all that, all of which sort of makes the overall budget plan, as I like to say. Okay. Does that help answer your question? Yeah, I think so. I mean, I think it's just... for everybody to understand because there are things that I mean fortunately in my experience mostly we come in at pretty close on a percentage basis to where we're at but sometimes single items go come in much less sometimes they come in somewhat more and what we're doing kind of gives some context to what we're doing here for the for the next year Now I'm going to ask some

098questions which may, you all may not have the information right now. I just want to throw it out there. You know, one of the things that's quite evident is we've had, obviously, in the past. say six years of reasonably significant increase in staffing and of course it looks odd because you've got the staffing going up and the the population going down we've talked about this more or less every year and we added cleaners last year and we looked at this square footage that they had six years ago or ten years ago versus today and you could see that there was differences I'm just curious, and you covered some of it, and Drew has that slide with the bars and the colors, and it kind of shows by school. But I know that we've had also

099increases sort of more like a category, like student supports. So I'm wondering if out of the 40 or 50... positions, now making up a number, whatever it was, over the past five or six years, if at some point you could just show us the different categories that we've added in, I think that would be helpful because it sort of demonstrates not only, oh, here's the categories, but it shows where the need is that we're addressing. And we've said it, and I know I have an idea, but I think it would be helpful to hear that spelled out a little more specifically. The drew there was a slide. I don't remember who was telling us. I think it was drew the TRS ERS slide Okay, sorry, I can't remember who was But you have the percentage

100at the bottom each 1.6 million represents 1% increase, but that's 1% increase in the overall That's in the overall budget. So my question is, if we go from up a percent on TRS or up a percent on ERS, what does that mean in absolute dollars? And then I'll know what it means in terms of the percentage. So, yeah. So like 10 basis points on TRS is about $70,000-ish. So that gives you an idea. ERS, I'm not sure of that one. Top of my head is not as large of a difference, much smaller dollar amount. So we're looking at, in general, these numbers, we're looking in the most likely hundreds of thousand dollars range, not millions. Correct. Okay. I mean, it's not, I had no idea. Edgar, the teacher on assignment that you talked about, the

101math curriculum, which was 13 years ago, by the way. I remember it quite well. My daughter was in third grade, and it was an interesting transition. Is that a permanent position or is that a period that we expect that we would be transitioning or? It would be a finite position. It would be somebody who is currently a classroom teacher, who knows the current curriculum, who would get training. special training along with Nancy, with the vendor that we choose. And we anticipate that person would be in that position full time for two years and then go back into the classroom. Okay. So that's helpful because that's different than a... It's not a permanent... No, it's not anticipated to permit. It's just during the launch of it, but also to make sure that the launch continues into

102the second year. Now this really was a Drew issue or Drew comment. You had that analysis of the part-time clerks versus the total to proposed clerks. And there was a $35,000 number and maybe a $38,000 and then the health benefit. What I wasn't clear on was the total net dollar difference. that that actually ends up making in the budget at least this year? The high end would be $105,000. Could be lower. Okay. Like, for example, the person I talked about who were doing this at Edgewood presently doesn't use the health plan. So that's a zero. That's $105,000 including the health benefit? Okay. So that's not, okay. So that's actually It's not as much as just adding those people. I know you said it, but I think that- We'd be eliminating these 14- Right, I just

103wasn't sure what that added up to exactly. I had an idea, but okay. And then the last thing, and this may or may not be available for Eric, but you talked about the Scarsdale support program. And by the way, in general, I think it's- It's been clear to me, at least sitting here and over the years, that the mental health and stresses in general that the, especially high school kids, but now it's everybody, especially with what we've been going through, is significant and can interfere with the ability of the kids to learn. So addressing this in school is not, I think, you know, like a long time ago, I feel like it was, well, mental health. They can go see their person and they come to school and that's it. But we know that it's

104not that simple. And so I certainly think it's a significant issue that we should try to address as much as possible. But I'm curious on the, I think you kind of referenced the, there was some savings from Scarsdale support program by not using outside consultants and all that. And conceivably, I guess we could see some savings in the middle school from doing a similar program, maybe at a. I don't know if you have it off the top of your head, but at a later time that might be something to know or to have an idea about. When I do the specific budget presentation on special education, I will add more specifics in as far as those numbers go along with you'll see next meeting when we do the special education education report, we will talk

105through the students that we have we previously had out at therapeutic placements that we have brought back so you'll get an idea of our usage of those day placements with the program and then without the program. The longer program is there, it's harder to pinpoint obviously what the exact savings on each because you start to not rely on them as much so you can't say that student or that student would have definitely been someone we would have pulled in or not. Hopefully you're catching those students earlier. not needing to use those outside placements. But I think it's also reasonable to remember that when you do mental math, every student we bring back from an outside program is somewhere between $65,000 and $80,000. And I think, you know, that's why I prefaced it. I mean, I

106don't feel it's strictly dollars and cents, but I do think given that each of these things ends up staying forever and having a long-term impact and we get to the ERS and TRS and all that, it's certainly worth at least having that information. And then very modest, you know, I don't know if it's fine. It's, I think, nice to aspire. impression and this is not really budget but cbt and dbt and these types of therapies are fairly intensive i mean i don't know that that's i don't discourage us from whatever we feel is appropriate mental health i don't know how feasible that really is but if it works and they can do it i think you know hopefully that helps some students so yeah i think it's important to recognize that our counselors are trained

107in multiple methods And each cohort of students that they're seeing are better served through different tools in their toolbox. So they use kind of a base level of, they use skills from DBT as a general situation. There are other students who get more intensive DBT training through the SSP program. There are other students, though, who are benefiting more from a CBT approach and still others that traditional talk therapy is more effective to. Okay, great. I mean, if they can do that and it works, then that's great. Okay. I think that's it for me for now. Thank you. I appreciate this depth, detail, answer to the question. I know that you all are working, you know, over the holiday breaks on all this, and I also recognize, I think we all do, that the circumstances right

108now in managing What is normally an intensive process has been made more so by all of the other things that are going on in the last couple of weeks. So I'm sure your weekends have been less relaxing than you would hope, but it's not lost on all of us, and we appreciate it. I do have a couple of questions. One of the themes that I keep hearing which makes a lot of sense is the general trend towards bringing as many students back to the district as possible that perhaps were at one point outsourced. But there are two kinds of ways of providing services. It seems to me there's an in-house model and an outsourced model. So what I'd like to understand a little better is for the non-student specific elements, you know, I'm just going

109to throw these out. I don't know if they're outsourced honestly or not, but something like as I believe food service or transportation or certain kinds of maintenance, I know from my own experience as an architect, there tends to be trends where things are outsourced for a while and then people find it's expensive and then they bring them back and then they find that the benefits are expensive and then they go and they outsource them again. So I'm just curious, is there any part of our methodology that revisits certain ways that we do things to say, you know, is there a more cost-effective because obviously healthcare is expensive. Benefits are expensive these days. And it seems like particularly in a COVID environment, we could be a little more nimble in terms of hiring and dialing up

110and dialing back if it was outsourced. So it's really just trying to understand how we approach trying to be as cost effective. for some of those elements that are not impacting the learning or the child. So non-instructional? Yeah, non-instructional is what I mean. So non-instructional, it's a balance. A lot of it has to do with labor contracts. So if there's work being done in the district by current employees, then those labor unions sort of own that work. It's very challenging to step outside of that to go to a contract. contractual type of arrangement right now the district predominantly the one that everyone sort of knows about is the food service right that's been contracted out for decades the leadership of that is employees of the district we have three two district employees and that sort

111of head up the food service operation along with myself and i would say you know Transportation is in district and again that's sort of owned by that labor union and it's very challenging to step outside of that just to say, oh, we're going to go contract that out. Aside from that, there are challenges when you do that because you sort of don't own, you lose something, right? You're contracting out and there's a reason why you're getting it for perhaps a better price. That you know in our case they might not know, you know the scars to know why You don't have people that you know work for scars Dale Have sort of that vested interest With the stakeholders all of our stakeholders So, I mean, those are sort of the big ones under my purview

112that are typically contracted out. We do contract out all of our safety monitors. If you recall that conversation from three years ago, sort of the internal conversation was do we look at hiring our own safety monitors versus contracting out one of the cost-benefit analysis of that. you know the disadvantage of employees is they do have a labor contract which is wonderful but then also you have sick days and well all of that stuff they have to manage so that's one of the reasons why in that case we went to a contracted arrangement not only was it more inexpensive but we could assure that we always had someone in place right so that that made sense at that point in time and it wasn't previously negotiated labor, a labor contract. So, for example, the food service,

113which obviously has been challenging during the COVID because of the change in shift in demand because of the, you know, being remote and whatnot. Is there, did we investigate the notion of rather than outsourcing those? that staff doing it internally and having a cadre. I'm just curious if we investigated. Well, that would be sort of the inverse conversation. Right. I think that actually that would probably be almost like the worst time to look at it because then we would have possible labor obligations that we did not have in a contracted sort of situation. The other thing with the contract situation, pros and cons, but historically with the food service is that the typical contract has guaranteed revenues. or profit that they must meet. In these larger organizations, they have a lot of the cost efficiencies

114of purchasing and management and other types of efficiencies that we couldn't possibly meet running an internal operation. And then you also have that same issue of employee absences and all of that. Although we sort of manage from a district level high up, it's really the obligation of the food service company to provide that labor. And we're not bogged down trying to find employees in Dr. Patrick's office. I need five food service workers on Tuesday at the middle school because they're all out. So we unburden ourselves from that. Yeah, well, that makes sense, which is sort of why I was asking about the outsourcing because it does unburden you. There's not a contract to negotiate. If someone gets sick, it's their problem. It's not yours. So I was just curious if there's any way that that...

115thought process is there anything that could it could else it could be applied to maybe the answer is no there isn't but i'm just raising it as um you know a question um the other question i will say this um that we do look from like a facilities perspective so that's something that we always look at too because we have very talented individuals in our facilities department So we often look at sort of that time benefit analysis. So we might have people on staff that can do the job and they do great work, but do we pull them away to do that job? Or we have a GC on contract that can do that work that frees our person to do something else. So that's a constant day-to-day that facilities leadership and I sort of

116look at to see what makes sense at any given moment or any given time. at any given time. Okay. The other question was more of a definition. Maybe I'm the only one who doesn't know what this means. But we talked about mandate counseling. And I guess I don't know what that means. Like who mandates counseling? Sure. And is there something that we want to be on top of? Because if more of it was mandated, mandate to me implies it's not discretionary. We have to do it. you know what sets those mandates sure it's a it's really just a definition of whether a student receives counseling under a 504 accommodation plan or an iep through the cse so when you hear a mandated number that's the combination of students that have it either through a 504

117or through an iep There are many students who don't have an identifiable disability. So let me start from the beginning there. In order to qualify for an IEP or 504, you have to have a recognizable disability that impacts your ability to access the general education. There are kids who meet that standard and kids that don't. There are kids who don't meet that standard that do need. relationship with one of our counselors whether it be the guidance counselor a social worker youth outreach worker or one of the psychologists if they're Their need in that case just doesn't happen to affect them academically, but if not intervened with could certainly grow in that in that way so they're the psychologists are guidance counselors and our youth outreach workers also see At least an equal number if not

118more students that aren't mandated for counseling on Usually a little bit less frequent of a basis or a more as needed basis but sometimes as as you know a regular every other week or weekly session All right, but is it true that the number of students that are being classified is on the rise? Correct. So therefore the amount of mandated counseling is by definition on the rise. That's correct. So they're sort of in. They do go in and not every student who's classified receives counseling, but yes, as the numbers of students increase that have 504s and CSEs, certainly there's a commensurate increase in mandated counseling. I mean, is it fair to say that because of the reputation of Scarsdale, people move to Scarsdale? In other words, part of the attraction to moving here is the

119strength of our skill set in that regard. starts to build as a you know if you have a child with these needs this is a the kind of unity you want to be in because they take it very seriously so it kind of i think i think one of the good things i'm not saying that's a bad thing i think one of the places where that's very evident is on the elementary level and we've moved in our ict program from about 10 sections to i think we're at 19 right now over the past six years and that's not fully not only because people have moved in but many people who are moving in are coming there i we get whether it's me or one of the chairs get regular calls from prospective home shoppers asking

120about special education programs so that's certainly a factor thank you I had two quick questions for Eric, I hope. I mean, I hope they're quick. Not I hope. I think they're for you. So I was curious, looking at those salaries sort of as a follow-up on Carl's question, obviously we would be competing with therapeutic schools and other. private pay situations potentially to attract the kind of talent that you're looking to put in the roles for a middle school SSP. Are those salaries realistic? Those numbers, yeah. We have from a teacher contract standpoint an attractive contract to teachers and to psychologists because they are in our contract as well. The numbers you see there are a standard number for a full time equivalent which is $110,000 and a standard for a psychologist which is $125,000 because

121they get a stipend within the contract due to their clinical degree. So basically they would be hired not necessarily at that number but on our salary scales commensurate with their experience as Dr. Patrick would do for all hires so yes we are an attractive place to come all right and then also on that SSP program at the middle school level that wouldn't have a designated house like parallel so right that's exactly what we were waiting so Megan and Michael Hirsch there have done a phenomenal job in playing the scheduled Tetris that would allow multiple houses and grades to utilize the same program it may require multiple graded LRC's rather than what we have in the more like the high school where the kids are multi-graded in an LRC versus the middle school where it's now

122grade level specific but some of those last little details are still being planned out but yes it would be a for any any student in any house and ballpark do you know how many students we currently have and I know you said you couldn't identify exactly who would be able to move back in district but ballpark so I mean do we have enough therapy we have we have a number of students in the middle school now who are not so one of the One of the things that guides us towards this program. Most of the students that need to go to outside therapeutic placements don't necessarily need to move in middle school, but as they transition into high school where there's less environmental support, in other words, the middle school, because of its teaming and

123having cohorts of teachers that can speak with each other on kind of a weekly basis, because there's a house counselor that is focused in one geographic area in the building. Those are... Those are natural supportive structures that allow our guidance counselors and our psychologists in many cases to provide the ad hoc intervention a student needs to do while in middle school. And sometimes when you move to that next level of freedom, that's where things start to fall apart. So we have a number of students in the middle school that we think giving them this type of program will do kind of what I said before which is give them the skills they need to kind of graduate out of it if you will once they get into the high school and have it for a

124little while there. We do have some students in outside therapeutic placements that we certainly will be looking at. It's probably in the neighborhood of two to four. Thank you. And Drew, I had one final quick question for you. We talked a little bit about the reclassification of the clerical staff, and I know there were questions about the health spending that Carl had posed for those folks. What about the retirement costs? I guess I don't know if that's a question for you or for Stuart, but will that... That's also part of the cost. It's currently part of the cost of the 14 employees who are part of the employee retirement. It's the same retirement system. But we pay a percentage on total salary. So as salary goes up, there's an incremental cost there. All right. Thank

125you. That's all from me for now at least. Can we talk a little bit just about mental health staffing in general? And this is following a little bit on what Karen was asking, I think. Is this proposal in front of us to address the needs during COVID or the ongoing needs? And underline that as my assumption that at some point past COVID, hopefully mental health needs will normalize. Yes. So I think... It can best be described this way. We have seen the trend moving in this direction pre-COVID. So six years ago, we started the emotional support program in the high school because of that trend that we were seeing. There's no doubt that COVID has been a... catalyst to increase that trend on a scope that we haven't seen. Now, whether that means without COVID

126would we not be asking for a psychologist and a social worker at the high school this year? That's possible. I think as needs arise and fall, we certainly reestablish what our needs are there and we'll look. at that staffing if we see a real decline, certainly as we move forward through attrition and different things, we would certainly look at those positions and rejigger them. I would not say this is a need specifically for COVID. I think you probably have the needs. The ask is all at once probably because COVID got us there quicker than we would have otherwise. I think that's probably the best way to describe it. That's really helpful. And this gets back to another question that's a little less budget related. So maybe it's probably not the right meeting, but, you know,

127sitting here, seeing all this requests for mental health staffing gives me a little bit of a red flag. We've talked about this a lot, but what is going on right in the schools and with our kids and the fact that it's not just COVID, but pre-COVID. And I feel like. This is just really crystallizing the need I feel like for us to talk about it at this table. I'm hard to hear things like This staffing will free up house counselors to address many hope of those needs, but I just want to put that out there. Sitting in my seat when you see a request like this, I really like to understand a deeper dive in what is going on. I think that's absolutely worthy of conversation. It's not conversations that haven't happened certainly on the

128professional level amongst. teachers, clinicians, and administration. Obviously, we've been talking about that for quite a while. I think you have a number of things happening. I think you have one, a destigma, yeah, I can't speak today. There's no longer a stigma as much as there used to be on mental health, and more students are coming and asking for that help. I think we have a... society that is also continually looking at achievement and ratcheting the need for achievement up. And I think that's not just a Scarsdale thing. I think that's a across the board societal piece, especially in this area, in our district and neighboring districts, which are very similar. So I think there are a number of things that are contributing to that. And I think there's also the COVID factor that is, you

129know. Yeah, I mean, and that's part of the reason I bring this up is there is in my mind, some potential budget impact in the sense that, you know, we have finite resources, we have to decide how to deploy them. And are there aspects about mental health in general across the district that need to be addressed? So some of this staffing, you know, one of the great things about the staffing is it's very one to one. It's not one to one, I understand, but We have 5,000 students, and there might be many that don't reach this level. Like, is this a little bit of a canary in the coal mine that we have many students not reaching the level that they need to reach out to a psychologist, but are elevated from where they would

130have been? And is there some type of funding we need to address that? Yeah, I think that's a great question. You know, I think what I would... what i would say is i think we provide a very high level of service to students in general so i think we're not talking when we make these asks we're talking about maintaining that high level of service we're not talking about going from a lack of service to service if you will the other thing i think it's important to understand i'll give you one example of how the increasing need has had our clinicians focus in on intervention, individual intervention or group intervention. to an extent that has lost their ability to do some of the wider, I'll call it pastoral care for lack of a better term, on

131the whole, right? I'll give you an example of Dr. Cohen, who's our director of psychologists and middle school psychologist, who has really been one of the driving forces around our positive psychology movement in the middle school and across the district. In fact, ran a tri-states visit around that. This increase in caseload has given him less time to spearhead some of that. Hopefully that gets re- rejiggered as we add the additional resources and allow for some of those other pieces which address very much what you're talking about. How do we move positive psychology along? How do we make sure our community understands the idea behind happiness and success in a healthy way so that there is less overall angst about that? I appreciate that. Drew, can you just talk a little bit about enrollment projections? The

132first question is, are current year numbers in the charts, was that from the start of the year or is that as of today? The current enrollment is as of the first Wednesday in October. That's called Beds Day. It's a day we report enrollment to the state as the official marker for the year. It does fluctuate, so this particular moment. We're at 4,612. That's three up from what's in the chart. Gotcha. Just because I know looking at home sales in Scarsdale, they were up significantly this year. I personally was a little surprised to see projected enrollment down based on that. I just wonder if you could talk a little bit about how those are related. It's all related to the replacement of... you know, the graduating senior class versus the incoming kindergarten class. Almost everyone else,

133we, obviously there's in and out, we know that, but those are the two biggest drivers, right? If there's a differential between those two, and our incoming kindergarten classes have been smaller. Interestingly, though, the projection was, I have to go back to, I believe it was under 300, and we're at 304. So, You know, it is a guess, but the trend has been smaller kindergarten classes compared to the graduating class for the last several years. And is there, as you do this, do you have the data to look at potential in elementary sections? Because that is what drives the staffing at the elementary. Yeah. So in our look at this, we have done that. we are projecting the same number of sections as we have currently this year next year now but of course that can

134move in either direction toward collapse of a section or toward breaking a section but right now what we would build the budget around is the same number of sections based on where the kids are enrolled both by age and school And then just some general requests for additional data as we continue this discussion. For the civil service positions, I would find it helpful to have some comparable data. So whether it's cleaners or the clerks or even the CPSC, you know, for example, CPSC, we talked about other districts have much higher caseloads or 12 to 15%. Just help me to understand, you know, somebody in those districts are comparable that is handling that. What does their staffing look like? I think that's also something that would be valuable for the community to understand. Same for our

135custodians, just to understand where we compare to comparable districts. I don't imagine I know that there's a hard number for this Stewart but you know we've done a lot of quote enhanced cleaning with COVID I think it'd be helpful to understand what sort of percent of our time our custodial time is spent on this the enhanced part again hoping with the assumption that as we move forward and we've learned more about this disease that we can get back to sort of a normal run rate of time the custodian needs oh that'd be good product that we introduced So I'll repeat that. Our enhanced cleaning is really sort of our regular cleaning. It doesn't really differ too much labor-wise from what we are doing in the past. It's just that our product allows it to be

136sort of a disinfection as opposed to a cleaning or a wipe down. So it really hasn't made that much difference. What it really is, is in our analysis, and we've talked about... if you go back in time, it's probably more of a tier two, although we didn't call it at that point. We're really close to asking for additional cleaners because we weren't happy internally with what our buildings were looking like. And I think with the turnover of our facilities leadership and getting more familiar with our building needs and looking at what... really at the level that we wanted them to be at is really sort of why this became a tier one. So it's always really been there. Certainly. the onset of COVID, you know, sort of brought it to that forefront, you know, much

137like we were talking about before, the social emotional support for the kids or for the students is sort of that same thing, sort of like brought it forth maybe a little bit quicker with the urgency. But really, I don't anticipate that changing as we go forward into the future. Thank you. And just a couple more questions. One on special education. So back to Eric. Can you remind us, the middle school student support program, how many students could that group, the psychologist, special education teacher, and aid, how many students can that cover? The program holds 15 in the high school. We would expect to start as the cap in the middle school. Gotcha. That's a $250,000-ish program. Can you just help me understand a little bit about, again, this just gets to resources and where we

138deploy them for 15 students. Can you just explain? Yeah, so I think probably the easiest way to conceptualize it from a cost standpoint, when we send a student to a therapeutic day placement, it runs anywhere between about $65,000 and $80,000 a student. That would be whether it's a BOCES program or one of the private approved schools. So when you think about it that way for students at a... at an outside placement kind of is the payoff, if you will. Got it. And not that this drives our decision, but it's important. So we don't know if four students will come back, but that's all it would take to make this program. Correct. Correct. And I think it's. I would rather be in the game of preventing them from leaving than bringing them back. It just so

139you know that's that's one of the reasons why we want to move it down into the middle. Yeah, now that's a much better way to put it. I appreciate that. And then just the last two things. Drew, when we talk about the civil, sorry, not the clerk positions. If you could just lay, I'm sure you'll do this when we get into the detail at a future meeting, sort of lay out all the financial piece and also, you know, what are the we heard about retirement. I mean, since we are self insured, anybody we add to our health insurance plan, there is some tail risk if they get very sick. Well, we do have to cover that. So just it would be helpful to understand that financial piece. As the other side to the benefits of

140bringing them on full time, which I understand. Yeah, I'm not So I've described what we would use as an average. I couldn't possibly predict what a catastrophic cost would be. I'm just asking you to lay it out just so we have, like on a slide. Because on the slide now it just says, I think, like 15,000 plus benefits. Okay. So add the 90,000 possible in benefits. And then just if you could, so this will add retirement benefits too, correct? Potentially. I mean, the employee would have to be eligible for those benefits. Just putting that out so we have that in our decision making would be helpful. Thanks. Thank you very much for the detailed presentation. Can I just ask a real quick question, piggybacking on Ron real quick. When we, the district, takes a child

141and sends them to another institution, I assume it's because we cannot meet their needs in Scarsdale. So when, maybe my logic is flawed here, but if we hire the teachers that can provide that service. we no longer would offer them the option to go out of district because we now have it in district, right? It's only if you can't meet their needs that you have to pay for it. So by definition, if we have the staff that can meet that child's needs and it's a good fit or appropriate fit, we would say, here's the good news. We now have that person located in Quaker Ridge or Green Acre. No, that is true. it becomes more nuanced when you start talking about a student and particular needs, but you're absolutely correct that when we build a

142program here, we are building that program here to avoid the need to use those outside programs. That being said, kids don't fit neatly into buckets per se. And in a school district our size with approximately 4,600 students, we often have one of everything but we don't necessarily maintain critical masses that allow for program so when we start a program we want to think not only in terms of the individual students that we have at the moment but do we have a continuing cohort that we think will be there because any of these programs especially with students who have more complex needs are highly specialized and the people who are doing them need very specialized training so you know it's it's a weighing of those things for the on the moment cost savings if you will

143versus is this a viable program or we can actually provide a program that is very high quality. Okay, understood. Okay, thank you so much. Again, we appreciate all that's been involved in your initial budget discussions and deliberations, certainly in preparing tonight's presentation and again, taking so much time to answer our many questions this evening. So thank you so much. At this time, I would like to have a motion to adjourn this presentation and move to our business meeting after a five-minute wellness break since we've been sitting for over two hours. So moved. Second. Second. Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Motion approved. Okay. We'll return after five minutes. Hi. Good evening. I call this business meeting to order and note that all board members are present with Jim Dugan participating virtually. I also

144note that all cabinet members are present with Rachel Mosley participating virtually. Good evening to everyone and welcome to all of those attending this evening's meeting or watching later on demand. Happy New Year to you all. We hope you are well. And to those who are affected with COVID or other illnesses, we hope you feel better soon. along with some rest and relaxation the new year has brought some renewed stress and difficulty many are understandably weary and worn from the impact of the pandemic nonetheless we must continue on as the pandemic has emphasized the profound and vital importance of school the board remains committed to following the guidance of health organizations and experts and supporting the efforts of our administration to keep our school community as safe as possible and our students physically in school. As

145a reminder, New York State school boards do not have legal authority to mandate testing and vaccines. And the New York State Education Department expects school boards to comply with legal regulations and state mandates, such as indoor masking. As a point of clarification, the district, in its efforts to be proactive, has set up a volunteer testing program, but the board and the district cannot require testing. COVID quarantine and isolation lengths are health agency protocols, which we must follow. The district has set up a test to stay and test to return program to get a many of our students back to school as quickly as possible. We do understand that individual opinions within our school community remain broad and at times disparate, especially with regards to testing, masking, remote learning, spectator and visitor policies, and even snow

146days. Some feel that a return to pre-pandemic norms are necessary. Others believe that measures currently being taken by the district are sufficient. Some think that more stringent testing and remote instruction should be offered, and others see gradations in between. As part of our role, the board is actively listening to the community and overseeing the administration in its efforts to find balance and offer as much stability as possible for our students, faculty, staff, parents, and caregivers. This past week, providing for balance and stability was exceptionally challenging due to the effects of the Omicron variant coupled with inclement winter weather. Providing adequate staffing, making sure student needs are met, adjusting lessons and teaching methods, tending to live streaming, lining up and providing tutoring, assisting with contact tracing, pivoting to remote learning, and drafting comprehensive communication. all require

147much time and careful coordination on the part of our faculty and staff. We are also sympathetic to the impact on our students, parents and caregivers who may need to adjust schedules and are also burdened with following protocols and finding scheduling and receiving vaccinations, boosters and tests. As we strive to restore a culture of togetherness and trust that COVID has threatened both nationally and locally, I would like to thank everyone for their continued resilience, their patience, flexibility, and hard work, including our students, our teachers, our administrators, our staff, our parents, and our caregivers. It is truly taking a village, and so thank you also to SVAC, our local health care providers and leaders, and our residents who work on the front lines. I encourage everyone to stay informed by reading Dr. Hagerman's and our principal's updates.

148He, his cabinet, our administrators, and the board have worked hard to listen to and address community feedback regarding increased transparency and communication. To assist with that process, last year's ad hoc Board Committee on Community Engagement developed a Board Community Engagement Plan, which can be found on the Board's webpage. This year's Board Subcommittee on Community Engagement is scheduled to meet on January 26th to continue the Committee's work. We encourage you to contact the Board with your thoughts via email, but please do note that because open meetings law requires all Board deliberations, which may lead to action or policy changes, to occur in public and therefore our email replies are by necessity limited in scope. Please know however that all board members receive and read all emails sent to us. I would like to address some other

149upcoming board business. We will have a board retreat on January 22nd to work on board and DEI development. We will conduct our mid-year assessment of the superintendent and our board self-evaluation during the executive session scheduled for January 24th. Both assessment tools are posted online on the superintendent's homepage and on the board's homepage. Since budget season has started, a letter to our community partners was sent last Thursday to encourage their participation in the budget process. The budget calendar was presented as part of the annual budget presentation on budget development and staffing recommendations, which took place before our business meeting now. The budget calendar is also posted online. We encourage the entire community's participation in the budget process and hope you will attend our upcoming budget study sessions, public forum, and board business meetings where you may

150speak during public comment periods. You may also write to us via email. In closing, again, I'd really like to emphasize that we are grateful for and appreciate everyone's ongoing understanding and constructive civil feedback. I believe we can continue to provide excellent educational opportunities and outcomes for our students and also meet the challenges of COVID by supporting and helping each other, especially since it is hard to know how all of this is impacting each of us at any given time. Please be in touch with us and please do stay well. Thank you, Karen. That was quite comprehensive. So I don't know that I have a lot more to add except that I did make some specific remarks. So I'd also like to bid you all a good evening and a happy new year and welcome to

151our first board business meeting of this calendar year. On behalf of the entire district, we do appreciate your continued interest in support of our collective work. Those who've been following along know that we have a robust agenda this evening. It actually started several hours ago with a budget presentation. We also have a lot more to go on our business meeting agenda, but before we get into all that, I would like to provide some context on two information items for tonight's agenda. A new, sorry, an introduction to our MOU with the village, and also to speak briefly about a new spring sport option that we'll be offering for our female athletes. First, I'd like to address our overall COVID response and say that our number one goal is to keep our doors open for in-person learning.

152We will discuss some of the challenges and complexities of this later in our COVID-19 update, but it's important to know that we are dedicating all of our time, energy, and resources to our core mission of educating children. Our second goal is to preserve as much as we can around the student experience, while also minimizing the risks of disrupting in-person instruction. And the third goal is to achieve as much normalcy as we can while still protecting our students, staff, and families. We recognize that some of the short-term restrictions this month are frustrating. Specifically, we know that parents want to be as involved in their children's co-curricular activities as possible, and there is understandable disappointment when that doesn't get to happen in all the ways that we have in the past. As we indicated earlier, we'll be

153revising the current no visitor policy and other decisions in two weeks at the end of January. We are hopeful that both the health metrics and our ability to adequately staff our buildings at that time will allow us to revise these practices. Until then, we do appreciate the community's understanding and support of our efforts around our core mission of educating children first. Next, I'd like to spend a minute on the 2022-23 school calendar. It's hard to even wrap my mind around those dates yet. There have been a number of questions about why we are unable to have a two-week December break. We have been extremely fortunate for the last two years to be able to offer this. However, this is not something that we typically can do. There are both state regulations and contractual requirements that

154we have to meet in order to develop our annual calendar. There's a document entitled Scarsdale School Calendar Development. It's included in the board packet and further explains these obligations and also anticipates some of the most frequently asked questions. We had a number of emails from folks, particularly today, but also over the weekend about the calendar, and I would really encourage anyone who has questions to look at that document. We'll actually be reviewing some of that later as part of the calendar agenda item as well. One other note around the calendar that I wanted to mention that folks are always very interested in having a final version of that so that they can do personal planning for their families and our commitment is to try to have that out in early February. So that's when folks

155can look for that final version of the calendar. Another issue I'd like to address is that the district has been in the process of integrating its lockdown and emergency systems technology. This work has included a comprehensive integration with the Scarsdale Police Department. Given upgrades to our school's internal camera system, it has become possible now for the Scarsdale Police Department to gain access to a live feed in times of health and safety emergencies. This ability will supply our first responders with situational awareness and a better tactical understanding of any emergency that requires a response to save lives. Attached to the agenda is a draft MOU that has been crafted by our district attorney and reviewed by the Scarsdale Police Department, the Village Police Commissioner, and the district administration. And I'm happy to finally put a closure

156on that and move forward with this important aspect of this work. And then finally, to shift topics to our most important commodity, which is our children, I'd like to introduce a new athletic opportunity that will be offered this spring to our girls. It will be a girls' flag football team. In partnership with the New York State Public High School Athletic Association, Nike, and the National Football League, Scarstown High School and approximately 10 other districts in Section 1 expect to pilot a girls' flag football team during the spring of 2022. While the details are currently still being worked out, we do expect the section to provide six games to each school during this inaugural season. Roster sizes will be approximately 15 players per team as the game is played seven on seven on a 30 yard

157by 70 yard field. In addition, a portion of the cost of uniforms and the coaching staff will be covered through grants from Nike and the NFL. We're excited to be a part of this pilot program and to be able to provide this opportunity to our female students who may not otherwise be playing a sport in the spring. And with that, I will turn it back to you, Karen. Thank you. Do any board members have reports? Amber? Thanks, Karen. I serve as the liaison to PTC and on their behalf would like to welcome the community to attend a virtual program titled Understanding Anxiety in Children and Teens this Tuesday, January 11th at 7.30 p.m. The program is hosted jointly by PTC and Child and will feature a presentation by Dr. Rachel Bussman. Dr. Bussman has extensive

158experience providing CBT to children and adolescents in both inpatient and outpatient settings. Dr. Bussman will discuss ways that anxiety presents in children, teens, and neurodiverse learners. Her presentation will help parents identify red flags and provide concrete tools to help children build social emotional strength. Please look for details, including the Zoom link for Tuesday's presentation in your school e-blast. Thank you. Other board members? Okay, so now I'd like to turn to item 4.01, back to school update. Great. Thank you very much. We know that we're sending out a lot of information and that some of our community updates have been pretty complex in terms of the information that's provided. We have tried to listen to the community about ways to truncate it on this last communication last week. We did try to do a very high-level

159highlights followed by more of the details. Unfortunately, this isn't simple stuff in many cases, and so we feel obligated to be able to share as much information as we can with the community. Having said that, we're going to review at a high level again tonight some of the big issues. We're going to start with the COVID metrics in a few moments. We're going to ask Eric to review some of our current protocols. We're going to ask Drew to talk about some of the challenges and complexities with both our faculty and student absences currently. We're going to talk about what it's taking to keep our schools open versus closed. There were a number of questions, I think, and some concern when we started talking about... remote learning last week. Um, we're going to talk a little

160bit about remote instruction. Edgar is going to talk to us about that. And then Ray is going to talk to us a little bit about sports and after school activities. So quite a few things to get through. We're going to try to be as brief and high level as we can on that. We're going to kick off with the COVID metrics. Eric. Thank you, Dr. Hagerman. Um, there's not a lot of good news in the COVID metrics in the world. As many of you know, I will review the County numbers quickly. We're at 365 cases per. 100,000 residents. Just to put that in context, that's more than three times higher than it was at the spike of last February, which was the previous largest surge we had. We have a 32.6% positivity rate. And the

161infection rate is 1.33, which is equivalent to what it was last February. However, that last number is the piece of good news in the metrics that it actually, that curve seems to have shifted and started to move down. It was at 1.49 about five days ago. That is the leading indicator typically of how surges go because that's the number of people infected once someone, that you infect once you are infected. Obviously, a good number is below one. but it has started to move down. We hope that to see a commensurate curve changes on, on the per 100,000 number and the 32.6% positivity number. That being said, the other piece of good news is as of my time of reporting, we have not heard of serious hospitalizations in any of the cases that I'm about to

162talk about. I'd like to just review kind of what we have seen. These are numbers that were reported to us on return from break through today. We've had a total of 317 COVID cases in the last 10 days. So you can imagine that that has been obviously a strain on resources and a monumental task in keeping track of contact tracing, informing and informing our community of those cases. That does not include everything from noon past, which I've seen a number of come in at that point. We've had 126 in the elementary schools, 89 in the middle school, and 102 at the high school. I think it's important to recognize that given quarantine rules as they are now, many of the students who were exposed are not quarantining. And we had hoped very much that these

163new quarantine rules would reduce the number of students that needed to be on remote learning or needed to be tutored. Unfortunately, in the last, they've been replaced by students with COVID. So we've seen an uptick in the number of kids who are needing those types of services. You all know that the high school has moved to a virtual option for that because the tutoring wasn't able to. handle the number of students, we certainly are coming perilously close in other places and are looking at other options for that as these numbers continue to rise. I'm going to review some of our protocols, but I'm going to review it with the full knowledge that about 30 minutes before this meeting, we received a letter from the New York State Department of Health, which has adjusted many of

164the quarantine rules. There are still a number of questions from it and more specific guidance is coming out, quote unquote, shortly. So I don't know if that means tomorrow or next week. we can expect in the very near future quarantine and isolation times probably to move to the five day range, but with some changes in what fully vaccinated means and changes in what activities can be done during those five days. I'm not going to go into details there because we have not had a chance to really look at that, but I will review kind of some of the protocols that we put in place. just before break and right after break. So we have started our test to stay program. We have received antigen tests from the state. We have approximately 5,000 of them. Test

165to stay is only for unvaccinated close contacts and it's only for students. So what this allows for is any unvaccinated student who has had a close contact by definition of the Department of Health, which is within three feet of another student for more than 15 minutes with or without a mask or within six feet of another adult who is positive for more than 15 minutes over 24 hours. does still need to quarantine but can test to stay in school. So every morning we will provide the family, when that happens we will provide the family with enough antigen tests to test every morning for the first seven days, which is what the requirement for tests to stay in. That family can email our nurses a picture of the negative test results with the date and the

166name on it. If that is negative they can come to class for the day so they can go to school. They cannot ride the bus. they cannot participate in any after-school activities and they must maintain quarantine at home other than school so that allows our students to come who are unvaccinated but have been a close contact so that's wonderful we've also started or adjusted our testing to return we are allowing vaccinated students who have symptoms to return with two negative antigen tests We are providing families who have symptomatic kids with those antigen tests given the scarcity of the tests around. Unvaccinated students with symptoms do still need a PCR to return to school. We have focused on making sure that our distancing over the past few weeks is where it should be. That is three

167feet between students, six feet between adults and students, and adults and adults. Looking at our lunchrooms, making sure that our students are sitting six feet or more apart from each other to avoid the need for quarantines, should there be an exposure. I'm going to now turn it over to Dr. Patrick, talk a little bit about our staff absences. Thanks, Eric. So if you read last Friday's community update, we reported that 83 staff members reported being COVID positive. causing them to need to miss one or more days of work accordingly to isolate. Together with seasonal illness, COVID related childcare issues and other individual circumstances, we experienced 266 staff absence days over the four days of last week among our administrators, faculty, clerical office and technology staff, and an additional 97 days among our aides, custodians and

168drivers. So by comparison, that's more than twice a high absence rate that we would maybe sometimes experience. I do want to note really a resounding theme though in the conversations our administrators have had with staff, I've had, Eric's had, other leaders have had, our staff wants to work. They're committed to serving our students and everyone is pitching in to try to make this difficult time function as well as possible. for our kids, for our students. Since Friday, we learned of another 36 staff members testing positive. So under state DOH guidance, our employees can be considered essential workers and are eligible to return to work after five days of isolation if they were asymptomatic or only mildly symptomatic with COVID. Each day, we encounter some staff members who are returning to work. while others begin isolation

169for recent tests. So we're hoping, what we're hoping for is that we start heading in the trend where more staff are returning, able to work, than are going out due to exposure and isolation and getting COVID. Running school has its challenges with absentee rates this high. Early on in the pandemic when we were sort of imagining coming, we were coming back to school last year, but imagining what stress, a stressful staffing outlook would be, we kind of hit 10% absenteeism as like that would make it hard to run school. We've exceeded that and we've been able to keep school running with. all of those efforts being made by faculty staff and administration um it's it is on the edge though each day last week and again today our schools and each department in the district

170are adjusting to the absences just to review how we cover classrooms where when the teacher is out at the elementary level we cover classes through our building substitutes we did at the start of covet hire permanent substitute teachers so we do have some permanent subs they're there every day and they know the kids and can cover classes we do have interns we're using our interns some per diem subs although that's a very precious commodity these days in public education our teacher aides do substitute and we have been using our specials teachers or other specialists if they're unscheduled at a certain time of day we do that sparingly but they've been amazing at stepping in and stepping up where where needed obviously when an aide for example is covering a class that means there are fewer

171adults in the room than than we planned for or that or that we staff oh you know what our staffing model would be At the middle school, we cover classes similarly through our building substitutes and interns, per diem subs, if and when available, then other teachers during their own prep periods do cover classes. At the high school, We sometimes are trying to cover classes and in rare occasions we have had a teacher or two zoom in when we've been unable to provide something else and but sometimes classes are canceled at the high school. Managing all of this falls on the shoulders of our building administrators who are up late at night and early in the morning. They're making arrangements, assignments, and communicating all of that. You should see some of the emails that go out

172to staff explaining the gymnastics of coverage. So kudos. to our building leaders. And it also requires incredible patience, flexibility, and support from our faculty and staff who continue to go above and beyond to keep things running. So we just wanted to kind of paint that picture for you. And just before Dr. Hagerman takes over with talking about keeping schools open and what... metrics would cause us to close school. I just want to take a moment to tip my hat to our school nurses who have been absolute heroes in this doing. untold amounts of work to simply keep track of and make sure kids are understanding what they need to do if they're positive, making sure that the administrators and the teachers know when students can return. And then also, of course, being a front line

173worker and having students who don't feel welcome in, triaging them, obviously making sure they're healthy and able to return to school. So just my hats off to them and all of their hard work. I agree with the sentiments of all of our educators, really, who are working together on this, including our nurses and other folks as well. So I think there was a little bit of a stir last week when we talked about, when we reminded folks about remote learning, perhaps from a parent standpoint, it reminded us of the trauma that we all went through last year. as we kind of went through remote learning. But it's important to note that we've been anticipating that this could be a possibility for a variety of reasons. You've heard some of those this evening in terms of

174staffing shortages, the rising numbers around Omicron and things like that. So, you know, from the beginning of the year, we've been clear that our absolute intention is to keep the doors open for in-person learning as long as humanly possible. And as you've also heard, there's been some heroic efforts around making that happen. There are still two ways, you know, just the reminder, there are two significant ways that we could close down. The first is the public health authorities say that public schools need to close down. And so we understand that that is a possibility. We know that at least three larger school districts, which is similar to Scarsdale in size, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, and New Rochelle are all on remote learning and have been on remote learning for some time. So there are school districts

175that are going through this right now. um we also know that whenever possible we try to close down at the lowest level that we can so as indicated earlier we've had some classes that have gone remote or zoom in some cases we might have a team that goes out a worse case scenario is that potentially a school might have to go on remote instruction and you know obviously as a very very last resort would be the entire district We've been asked about metrics regarding what would cause that to happen. I hope that folks have heard a little bit of the complexity. We first identified that 10% of our staffing might be a significant trigger in which that might happen. We've been making it work at greater than 10% absences. But I don't know if that

176jumps to 15% if we're still going to be able to maintain at this level. So that's something we have to watch. It's also going to be on a case by case level as you heard Drew describe. It really is the calculus of the people who happen to be out on a certain day and the people who are also on that same day able to provide the coverage and sometimes those stars align and it works out and we're able to cover a building and there may be times when those stars don't align so we wish we could be clear that there would be some metric obviously we talk about the positivity rate and i know we've gotten a little pushback from the community that we need to stop focusing on that But the positivity rate and

177the number of positive infections we have do have a direct correlation with the number of folks who are out in quarantine or isolation and again, our ability to cover schools. So that, you know, I understand from a philosophical standpoint why people want us to move away from those. But those are the metrics that are really affecting our ability to operate schools right now. As a third component again, so the two components would be public health authorities or we can't staff our building. The third one obviously is inclement weather. Two years ago, New York State allowed an option for us to participate in a pilot project. Many school districts are doing so, which would allow us to make the determination on inclement weather days of whether or not to provide remote learning. We took The state

178up on that is a participant in that pilot program. On Friday, in what could have been maybe a traditional snow day, we decided to hold remote instruction. There were five other districts around us that also did that, or four other, including Scarsdale. And again, as I mentioned, three other districts who are already out on remote instruction, New Rochelle, Yonkers, and Mount Vernon. So there's no guarantee that we will continue to use this on those days, but we do have it as an option for us right now. And it's, again, when we think about providing no instruction versus being able to provide instruction in this way, it's nice to be able to have that option. And with that, I am going to ask Edgar to speak for a few minutes about remote instruction more generally. Sure.

179This is going to be a brief review because, as Thomas said, on Friday we had a chance to live out these plans, so our community had a chance to experience them. So at the high school, the high school conducted the current regular high school schedule just virtually and would continue to do so if a closure lasted up to two weeks. At the middle school, the middle school moved to the current schedule to a remote environment. Classes started and ended at the designated times according to the master schedule. However, teachers had the necessary flexibility to adjust their class configurations as needed, launching as a whole group, utilizing breakout groups, and assigning supervised independent work as necessary. At the elementary level, Like the middle and high school, their schedules and lunch times remained essentially the same. The

180teachers distributed a schedule and the children were assigned specific times to log into Zoom instruction. Elementary teachers worked throughout the instructional day. To take advantage of the effectiveness of smaller class sizes on Zoom, the students were placed into split groups and instructional minutes were divided. The classes attended their special areas all together. and in some cases uh came together as a whole class as appropriate and with that i will pass it on to ray to give us an update on sports and after school activities thank you edgar um we've heard a little bit about all the efforts to keep schools open um and i just want everyone to consider the context with which some of the protocols that i'll talk about came into place just before the break and then over the break we had

181several teams on pause because of the volume of positive COVID cases that affected both players and staff and we had a continuing number of positives cases coming in directly in the weekend preceding school opening on January 6th so we put some protocols in place to limit the number of visitors on school campuses and in school buildings and specifically targeted non essential personnel and making restrictions there. I just want to mention to the group again that you know, I have a pretty strong bias towards athletics and making sure that these programs keep running for our kids. And so all the protocols that we put in place are really with a focus of prior prioritizing programs for kids and athletes on their teams with the with the purpose of trying to keep those going without interruption. We've

182created protocols around monitoring symptoms for student athletes to remind them just before their practice to start that they should monitor symptoms and if they have any signs or symptoms of COVID that they should not attend their practice or games. I'll tell you our athletes have been incredibly good and our families have been incredibly responsive with testing our athletes and trying to make sure that their teams and their children stay safe. We're asking for the use of face masks indoors in all activities and in outdoor activities where we have spectators that families group in their pods and use face masks as well. You know, there's been a lot of buzz and a lot of emails to the board and administration about this restriction on spectators. And again, it's based upon the restriction for having any visitors

183or non essential personnel in the building. We've upped our live streaming the best we can. We've got lots of live streaming going. We have three channels now, Raiders TV, TV two and TV three so that we can stream in both both of the gyms at the high school and an offsite locations dependent on broadband. And the last protocol we have right now is for travel and that um that really affects overnight. overnight trips at this point affects cheerleading, potentially girls ice hockey. But you know, as you've seen over the last week or so, we've had lots of practices and games canceled on short notice because of the effects of COVID. Thank you, Ray. And thank you to the rest of the team who had reporting responsibilities under this. Appreciate that. I'd like to open it

184up now to the floor for board questions. I think it's probably worth reiterating though that we will be re-looking at all of the COVID procedures and incorporating in two weeks and incorporating the new state guidance over the next couple of days so things will change. Thank you Eric. I had a few quick questions for Ray. I don't mean to make you hop up and down but You alluded to cheerleading and girls ice hockey overnights that were being canceled. What level of competition are we talking about? Regional or national? For cheer, it would be nationals. It's an invitational they qualify for. It's typically a four-day trip, airplane. We have a very short window right now as to whether we could plan it and pull it off, and the airfares are becoming increasingly more expensive. but we're

185generally concerned about how we manage covid if it happens during the trip or in route and um we haven't been able to come up with a really strong plan for that um as we as we would normally take that trip so it would affect them uh with girls ice hockey um right now they're looking at one overnight trip to upstate new york we have a similar concern about that including transportation um and the length of time that kids would be on the bus either direction so We're talking through that right now. The trip for girls ice hockey is scheduled to happen during the month of January, and for cheerleading it would be just in early February. And you mentioned this issue around visitors to the school, and I'm, I apologize, less familiar with the configuration

186of the high school. Is there a way to allow spectators direct entry to the gym, for example, with the security guard at the gym to check vaccination or IDs? Or would a visitor inherently need to enter the high school itself? no the athletic gyms have a lobby entrance that's separate from the rest of the building right so so so someone could enter the gym without being a visitor to the school well they still have to enter the school building right so i think the entrance would be very similar to entering the auditorium or any other space like this this boardroom there's a direct entrance into that wing absolutely but it's still in the school building okay and um What about teams that practice at other offsite spaces like competitions at the WCC pool, for example,

187how are those being handled at this point? So swim swimming last week, they changed their policy. There was one spectator per athlete is now no spectators per athlete allowed. I think they came in either Wednesday or Thursday. With bowling, I'm not sure what the restrictions are. They typically don't get any spectators, so I'm not sure they had to enact that. But many of our off-site locations are not allowing spectators. Thank you. You're welcome. And while I'm talking, I'll just ask. Drew, at the last board meeting, you mentioned that we were hitting up against a wall already with our resources on tutoring in terms of our ability to secure tutors. Have we overcome those hurdles, or is that still a challenge? No, I mean, it's becoming a larger challenge right now. So, you know, the people

188primarily doing our tutoring are our own teachers. So as those, some of those individuals are sort of out of commission because they're ill, that decreases our pool of tutors. I was in contact with one of our two tutoring agencies today. They are scheduling out two weeks right now, so that's not really viable. for us and the other one is sort of it's a smaller shop some catches catch can right now we are we have reached out to some former employees some more to help with tutoring just as barriers come up we I work with the principals to try to get over the barrier and figure out a strategy What is the time lag right now between a student going on quarantine and getting tutoring set up? Well, our model is a day. That's our goal.

189But realistically, given all the challenges that you're facing. Well, I mean, we fulfilled all of our tutoring last week. came in. I know today there are two buildings, elementary buildings today that were struggling. Today was the first day. They were trying to, because it's Monday, they were trying to fulfill those tourings. So, you know, theoretically we're still at a 24-hour time period, but tomorrow we'll know more. Could take two days. Thank you. Yep. Carl. Sure. Drew, you talked about to staff the building. Sometimes we use the per diem substitutes, but they're very hard to come by now. I was just wondering, how would somebody, can somebody get on that list to become a per diem substitute? How does someone do that? I mean, really what I want to say is many people in this community

190are former educators. And I'm just trying to think of if we come to a situation where sometimes we just need a body to help out somebody else, I'm just wondering if there's something people, former educators in this community can do to become part of that. ScarsdaleSchools.org slash apply. I'm serious. That's our website. I'm serious, too. And there's a substitute teacher application right there. Okay. And just for the community's sake, I personally know many people that were, for example, private school teachers that have different certifications. Are there certain certifications needed to be a sub? So a substitute teacher can sub a limited number of days with a college degree beyond. Basically beyond 40 days it needs to be a certified teacher And there's a nuance within there about one assignment or multiple assignments, but No, you

191know, there's a variety of people who could substitute teachers. I appreciate that. I mean, you know, another knock on wood that we don't get there, but just trying to think about how to keep students in the building. Because the teachers are doing an amazing job, both in the building and remote. You know, speaking as a parent for a second, I very much appreciate what my kids' teachers are doing and all the teachers that I've seen around the district. So thank you very much to all that. You know, we don't get to go in the buildings to say it, so I just say take my opportunity with this mic to say it right now. The other question statement I wanted to talk about was about spectators at sports. You know, I really want to talk about

192this not so much as spectators at sports, but about mental health. We just finished a two-hour budget discussion where most of that budget discussion is around the need to hire mental health professionals. I personally view this as... There is a seems like there is a middle ground. Many of our comparable districts are doing this to me. Anything we can do to help our students, you know, have some of that normalcy in a safe way without, um, you know, within our mitigation guidelines, which I think seems like we can do. I think we got to do for these kids. Um, I just, I understand there is a timeline to review things, but I also understand COVID is a time we have to be nimble and I just like to understand why we what is precluding us

193from from doing something there. Well, I mean, I think I sort of addressed it or at least tried to address it. Maybe I didn't do it as well as I should have. But right now, when we describe all the challenges that we have with staffing, we are preserving all of our energy and trying to keep the core instructional program going and to keep our doors open for in-person learning. I mean, that's really where we are. As I said, there's already three major districts who are out in remote learning, have been, and don't know when they're coming back at this point. We're trying to avoid that at all costs. When Ray spoke, he eloquently spoke about the idea that we are absolutely concerned about the mental health of students and our first priority in that is

194making sure that we preserve these experiences for kids. While spectators will be a wonderful thing and hopefully we can have that back, again, this isn't about spectators for us. This is about visitors of non-essential folks in our building. We're not applying it to sports. We're applying it to all areas. And I don't know how we stand up to the rest of the community and say, We're going to allow this to happen for athletics, but not for the music program, not for the drama program, not for the other program. And it becomes very, very difficult to say that. So we are choosing in this moment to really stick to our critical mission and try to make sure that we keep these doors open through this surging time with every. um you know commitment to revisiting this

195as soon as we can and come back and provide as much normalcy as we can we needed that throughout the fall when the numbers were great we were very supportive of that i think we had a lot of involvement i was at homecoming as were many of you sitting around this table it was a you know we understand all of the great aspects of that but when it comes to you know offering that at the peril of closing down our schools for remote learning that's just not an open question for us at this time I do just want to clarify the three schools, Yonkers, Mount Vernon, New Rochelle, chose not to reopen after break. I don't believe it was related to spectators. No, not spectators, but staffing, the ability to staff their building. You know,

196I think... There are many other districts that I would, when I think about our comparables in terms of size, student body, facilities, that I would think of that are allowing spectators. And the reason I want to talk about it in terms of spectators, it sounds like we have so much to deal with spectators. Why are we even talking about it? To me, it's about the mental health component. I really, I mean, I link this to the discussion that we just had. I hear this every day from more and more people, especially with the older kids, just about a sense of days dragging on, not coming back from vacation, full of that energy. I think this is something we can help them with. I don't see how having a few people in an 800-person gymnasium puts

197that at risk. And I would be happy to talk about it for music and performing arts. I think we have certain... constraints and if there's a smaller space that might be a constraint and we got to try to help every kid where they're at and so I Ron I just like to bring up one thing because I think this really factors into the decision making when we had reopened spectators for the various not spectators but performances for parents. What we found is in many cases it's not necessarily the spacing in the auditorium where yes if people are sitting six foot apart it's also the entry and the exit the mixing which is totally I'm not saying it's a bad thing, but it is a time when parents and kids are mixing very, very freely across

198what is a homogeneous group from Scarsdale. So if there is spread in those activities, what you're doing is you have a captive audience spreading. COVID in and amongst all of the kids that are coming to school the next day and their families. So the other piece is when we look at the screening testing that we did, I was talking to Mount Sinai the other day, we actually had 40 positives in this last about 900 tests we put in. Our infection rate was significantly lower than many of the other districts working with Mount Sinai. And I think it's important to recognize that that has allowed more kids to come to school today than would otherwise be able to. And I think that's where we're talking about how it really affects whether or not we can run.

199programs here because if we have hundreds and hundreds of kids who are not able, like most of the other districts who are with Mount Sinai were getting over 100 positives in their return screening gateway testing. We had 40 out of 900, again, much lower than many other districts. I think part of that is because of our mitigation strategies. And I do think there is spread in these larger events. And when you have parents who are sick in a house, that obviously raises the chances of kids being sick in the house and the more we have kids that need to avail themselves of tutoring or avail themselves of remote education the harder it is to run a quality education program so i think it it is a prudent measure over the next two weeks to look

200at the numbers in two weeks look at it again if those numbers are on the way down we need to go back to where we were which was opening these things up for for people i agree can i Can I just ask a little bit more about that? Because I do struggle a lot with this decision of the spectators and I'm sort of... I understand where Ron is coming from in terms of what can we do to get our parents in, whether it is a sports game or it is a play. So in two weeks, when you're talking about looking at numbers, are we looking at staffing numbers? Are we looking at spread numbers? And I know it's hard to put a line in the sand, but I think for those parents and student athletes

201and... children in general who are wanting to perform. You know, we talked about that with the orchestra concerts and band concerts, the joy that these children get from actually performing for someone. I'm concerned that, you know, what's going to be different in two weeks? What are we looking at? And so I think that's a great question. You know, when And it's not about it's a instead of a 32.6 positivity rate, it's a 15. It's not those metrics. The metrics really are what Drew talked about and what I talked about in our student and staff cases. Are more kids coming back than are going out at any given point? Right now, more kids are going out than. coming in and we have rising rising levels of kids who are who are coming back positive and needing

202to isolate and be out of school when we see that switch. That's when we can move back into moving some of these things back in. And I think, you know, if if it follows along like South Africa went and if the infection rate is an indicator which has started to take that curve, then in a couple of weeks we may very well be seeing you know that shift where the amount of kids getting it are much is lower than the amount of kids who are you know coming back into the fold if you will so i think those are really what we're looking at to say are we are we on a huge spike right now that we want to try and make as short as possible or are we coming down from a peak

203and and i think we're certainly not there yet but So we would be looking like internally at our Scarsdale numbers and not necessarily at what's happening within Westchester. Like how are students, more students coming back in? Are more staff coming back in? The two track each other. right so the westchester county numbers track what we're seeing as far as kids scarsdale is not immune to to what the rest of the county is doing from a from a trend standpoint so i think they all work together but it really is about what's going on with our students and can we feel like we can safely move back to having spectators one other point just on this i'd like to make i think we did receive an email from the basketball team and it struck me that

204you know, the winter sports have suffered quite a bit, just the nature of winter sports indoors. And I hope that if in two weeks we're still looking at struggling metrics, that we can find ways, more creative solutions to help get some spectators for those students. It's just, you know, the child who mentioned senior. you know, the fact that this was their last opportunity really resonated with me. So I think that's something I'd like us to think about. I just want to add, I appreciate those metrics, Eric, but I don't think we can quote those metrics if we don't quote how many tests they did. So 100 may have come back, but we would need to know how many tests they did. It was the percentage of positive tests, which was much higher in other districts.

205You know, I... I can't speak to what is driving in other districts, but I know that, you know, our district has followed what needed to be done in many cases. I don't know what other districts have done. And I just get back to the mental health component of this. This is something we can give our students. I don't see this as impacting our risk mitigation. As living in this community and seeing what is going on, I can see where the spread's happening, and I don't think it's from a couple spectators at a sport. It's just not in line with, I think, what is happening on the ground here. And I think it is having a mental health impact for kids. And I understand we're talking about two weeks, but this is not two weeks. This

206is two weeks on two years. And I find it heartbreaking for these kids. Couple of things. First of all, I know you're working, I said it before, overtime to address these issues as well as the various perspectives that I'm sure live within the administration, within the faculty, within the staff, and within the community. To be clear, and take me one moment, but we've gotten feedback that I know you've gotten as well, and you've tried to parse it and figure out the best way to deal with these things. And, you know, not everybody knows, but the feedback has been as diverse as people saying to require testing, to people telling us they don't think testing is particularly helpful. People thinking we shouldn't do as much masking because it's ineffective, to people telling us we should. close

207schools, eliminate all events, and extend the school year for two weeks. We've had people asking us, no matter what, to keep schools open. We've asked people to, people want us to make sure that we, people want us to provide a full remote option to give kids and students the option of not attending if they're worried about getting COVID. We've had... complaints when we had the full remote option on last Friday because we had remote school. We had requests that we give advance notice of when a class will be subject to quarantine and therefore remote or when there won't be enough substitutes or staff, which of course they're asking for some information that we don't have. It's not just a metrics. People want metrics, which I appreciate, but we don't know how many people are going

208to call in sick. We don't know how many kids are going to... test positive you know to the point that a class needs to be quarantined um you know we've had people tell us that it's really no coveted omicron specifically or omicron whatever it is i don't know how to say it right it's really no worse than a cold and we have people who tell us it's very contagious and dangerous and they're afraid to send their kids to school and that all students have been vaccinated and people have emailed us and saying all students haven't been vaccinated and we should be requiring vaccinations for all students without really considering what the legal requirements are. You had emails from people asking you to follow the DOH and New York State requirements, which is, of course, what

209we do, and recommendations. And we've had other people asking us to follow the CDC requirements, which don't necessarily match the New York State and the DOH requirements. And I know, by the way, that each of these... Comments or concerns is addressed in a very specific way to the person that shares them with you. So we've had a lot of different feedback from we've got to keep the schools open to we can't allow the schools to close at all. And we've had the comment repeatedly that we're really negatively impacting by many of the decisions we're making the mental health of our children. to the extent of even comments that it's child abuse. And I think that these comments... I mean, they have an impact on me. I'm sure they have an impact on all of you.

210And it may not be the impact that people want it to have, but it is upsetting. I do believe that everybody in this room is trying to do the best that they can for the students. And to the extent that there's a difference in opinion about that. We have to keep working at it and trying as best we can to get as close to a consensus as possible. But on the positive side... I hear no complaints about teaching. I hear no complaints about the tutoring that the students are getting. I hear no complaints about curriculum, no complaints about academics, no complaints about anything that's going on day to day in the schools. And I think that's a tremendously significant thing because bottom line is that's why we're all here. So as far as I can

211tell, people are pretty happy with what's going on in the classrooms. And I think that that's a real compliment. You know, the fact that the most emails we get, and not to minimize this, the most emails we got were about not having spectators at the games is a real compliment to what's going on every day from 8 to 3. And so that's how I'm trying to look at it, you know, a little more positively. And if we can get to a resolution on... events in general, whether it's sports events, theater, whatever, I mean, I would be very happy about that. I will say that I think it's unfortunate if parents don't get to see live their kids play. I find the, and I'm going to say something which might get myself in trouble, but I

212think for the most part the suggestion that kids not having their parents in the stand is some type of severe mental health. impact is to me demeaning to the many serious mental health impacts that we're seeing in the schools every day. You have kids that are having a lot of depression, a lot of anxiety, a lot of stress because they're dealing with COVID, because their parents had COVID, their grandparents had COVID, somebody died. I hope that they get back to see. I think it's important. Thank God we have live streaming. I mean, if this happened a few years ago, you wouldn't be able to even see it on the screen. So I just would like to, without minimizing that it's important for the kids to have the support of their parents, I'd like to have

213maybe a little bit of perspective on the impact that that has on the kids. It's upsetting. It's disappointing. It's certainly, if you're a senior, you know, the last thing you want this year. I totally acknowledge that. But I would hope, and if it is that seriously damaging to any particular athlete's mental health, I think that should be taken very seriously. And steps more than sending an email to us asking us to change it, in my opinion, really need to be taken because there's something more going on there. Anyway, so I probably get myself in trouble with those comments, but I do think I take mental health very seriously. We all take it seriously, as demonstrated by the budget discussion here, and we take our obligation to the students seriously, and I think that, you know,

214I want to give that type of concern the appropriate respect. that it deserves. And I think there's a, you know, I think it gets thrown around a little loosely for my personal taste. And I just think that we should focus on de-escalating. the intensity of some of these things and putting them in perspective to what's going on in this community and the world. And hopefully we can come together and work out, as I think Ron or as Jessica said, some creative solutions to help out at least a little bit in the coming weeks. So anyway, thank you all for trying to do the best thing you can. Jim, did you want to comment, Jim? I did want to comment. Did you want to comment, Jim? Yes, I did. And this is not really a reaction

215to Carl. He doesn't take it that way. Can you hear me? Yes. Make sure your background. Hopefully you can hear me now. I'm not sure I can. Okay, great. So I just wanted to, again, you know, and I don't think my voice is. Maybe it's unnecessary given what Ron has said, what Amber has said, what others have said. But from a personal perspective, I have two athletes in my family who are children, and they've been affected by the no spectator policies that have been in place, not just in the schools. One of my children is a varsity high school athlete, but also in the league that they compete in, they're swimmers. that's not in the schools but also have encountered those problems. And what I have to say about the no spectator and the impact

216it has or has had, I mean, this is our, you know, our children are, you know, doing their varsity sports, and this might be the only time they ever can do that. They might not be college athletes. hard to be a college athlete. It's very competitive. But this is a time in their life that I think is very important to them. And I do think not having spectators. and certainly not having parent spectators for all of the athletes who compete is sort of a downer. I mean, it impacts performance. It impacts the spirit they bring to it. It impacts the joy they get from it. It impacts the memories they're going to have of it. It impacts everything about what they do for the rest of their lives. And I'm not saying it makes them

217depressed. I'm not saying it makes them have suicidal ideations. That's outside of my ken in terms of what impact that is and how far that goes. But it does impact them, and I've seen it directly in my family, and I've seen it in the family of other athletes that we compete with. It affects the children. It affects the parents. And I understand we've got new guidance, and we're going to be interpreting that guidance and putting it into effect. The only reason why I say anything is because I really want to implore the administration to take any step it can to... come up with a workable solution to allow spectators into these athletic programs to the extent that we can. And simply saying that because there can be no visitors in the buildings, there can be

218no spectators in sports programs, I don't think is an application of rigorous thought to this. And I say that with all due respect, and I say that understanding and appreciating all the hard work you're doing. And I don't mean to amplify the voices of those in the community who are overly critical of you. I take umbrage of criticism that becomes personal or vindictive. But I do support the implications and the statements of parents who really want to see spectators at the athletic events again. Thanks. I just, I had one question that I just wanted to clarify because unlike Jim, I'm not the parent of a high school athlete and I don't know. Ray, when our teams are away, at away games how does that work are are the parents from their opponents allowed to be

219there but starsdale parents are not so every school district has their own policy so it's the home schools rules that would apply so our parents could go say to a game against ardsley correct that could happen yes there are some school districts that aren't allowing away visitors but yes it's correct if they were to allow away visitors our parents could go there okay thank you Any additional questions? I actually have a couple on test to stay and test to return if that's okay. Eric, I know we got some new guidance from the New York State DOH so I'll just take this for what it is but when you talk about unvaccinated students for test to stay that's as defined by New York State Department of Health is that correct? Correct. And so for children that

220may not have had a booster. So. not being boosted under current regulations is not being boosted is not required to be fully vaccinated. It's the two shot series of Moderna and Pfizer or the one shot series of Johnson and Johnson. Okay, great. Thank you. And for the test to return program, when we talk about that for vaccinated students with symptoms, that's to prove that they don't have COVID, right? That's correct. It's not really a change in what we have. it it has always been required that if a student is symptomatic they need a pcr test to return just prior to break we expanded that for vaccinated students that if they could not get a pcr they could use two antigen tests given at least six hours apart test return is really just our ability to

221provide families with those two antigen tests given how scarce they are thank you other questions I guess I wanted to just end with saying that these certainly continue to be trying times. And I thank everybody again for their patience as we navigate this current spike. And for all those who are working so hard, our teachers, our administrators, this cabinet, building leaders. and even and and also to our students for your endurance and your patience and your resilience i know this is not easy my heart really goes out to you and um to our parents you know my heart goes out to you too my heart goes out to everybody and again you know i know this is a strong community i've been here for almost 20 years i've seen the best of it and i

222know we will continue to move through this together and resolve outstanding issues and just do what's best for everybody and again so many thanks for keeping our schools open and keeping us all as safe as possible so now I would like to move to and hearing from those present We have a preamble quickly I would like to read. Members of the public are at this time invited to speak on agenda items and our other non-personnel related matters. Each individual shall have three minutes to speak with a 90 minute cap during the first public comment period. The order of public comment will be as follows. Community members who are present at this board meeting will speak first. Community members speaking via Zoom will speak second. Community members who speak via Zoom must have their cameras turned

223on when it is their turn to speak. And the Board of Education, we will continue to maintain these rules for public comment until We adopt amendments to our existing policies, the policy number 2410, which is on our agenda later this evening. Since the school board consensus at our last meeting regarding the agenda format was to allow for follow-up to public comment to occur after the first public comment period, we have made that change on the agenda for today. I just want to thank everyone who speaks this evening in advance. Thank you for your constructive and for your civil feedback. We do really appreciate that. So if anyone from the audience would like to come to the microphone, we invite you at this time. Hi. Can you guys hear me? Hi. My name is Dylan Manning,

224and I'm here with Asher Krohn and Maura Conlon, and we are captains of the varsity basketball teams. And we are speaking. On behalf of the teams to ask that the no spectator rule at the games be lifted. The gym is large enough to accommodate a small number of spectators safely. And our parents are vaccinated, boosted and responsible about wearing their masks and safely distancing themselves. Having spectators at the game is meaningful and motivating. It is not the same to play games in a quiet and empty gym. We have learned that 23 neighboring schools have not implemented the no spectator rule. For us and the other seniors, these are our last games that we will be playing in our home gym. This is also the last time that our parents will be able to watch us

225play at Scarborough High School. COVID has tremendously changed our high school experiences. And please reconsider allowing this bit of normalcy now because we don't have much time left. And thank you for giving me the opportunity to speak. Thank you very much, Dylan. Hi, my name is, can you guys hear me? Yeah. My name is Asher Crone. And as a sophomore on the team last year, it was a strange experience to play in front of nobody. At the beginning of this year, when I heard the news that we would be at 50% capacity, I was ecstatic and extremely excited to get the opportunity to finally play in front of my friends and family at the varsity level. When I found out that no more spectators would be allowed at home games, it was devastating to me.

226With our varsity gym's maximum capacity of 700 people, we think as a program that it is fair to ask for 10 people per player for the home team. No way fans would mitigate the spread and risk of exposure of COVID. The Scarsdale varsity basketball team has 15 players. 10 people per player would total out to 150 people. That is 21.4% of the gym's maximum capacity, under half of what was originally allowed at the beginning of the season. On top of that, I would like to propose the idea of requiring the use of KN95 masks and proof of vaccination. Please consider my words now instead of later as we are in the heart of our season and these next two weeks consist of four league games that have big playoff implications. Having our fans behind us

227to cheer us on would be a huge boost. COVID has already taken so much away from us. Please don't let it take away the support we receive by prohibiting spectators present while we play. Thank you for allowing me to speak. Thank you very much, Asher. Hello, my name is Maura Conlon, and I would, do I have to press this, or can you guys hear me? Okay, I'd like to say thank you for hearing us out tonight about the Spectator Band. This band is not only restricting to come to watch the games, but is taking away school spirit and pride, the enjoyment of the game, and the intensity. Everyone knows that these games are intense to begin with, but with family members and friends cheering you on and your teammates, it makes it so much more

228exhilarating and fun. As high school athlete, Having people at your games is everything and it's not fair to take that away from the misguided fear of COVID and that it will spread from being in the stands. There have been studies done that show COVID does not get transmitted from people sitting in the stands wearing masks at sporting events. Along with that, this ban has been more restricted than last year's season before people were even vaccinated. This is mine and along with many others last season of high school basketball, and we just want to be able to share it with the people we care about and them cheering us on. And the fact that we are able to do this, but our school district is not allowing it is shameful. I went around and texted my

229friends from other school districts asking them about their spectator restrictions, and some said a certain number of people, like two to four, while others had no restrictions whatsoever as long as they wear masks. The CDC guidelines states that we can have 50% of capacity in our gyms, and as Asher just stated previously, this is more than possible to have our parents there. There is no legitimate reason to lower it all the way back down to only the teams and the managers and the coaches. Please consider changing the ban to allow two to four spectators per person, and thank you for your time. Thank you very much, Maura. Hi, my name is Claire Pequen. Can you guys hear me? 13 Harcourt Road. Before I have my... three minute almost on the money speech. I want to

230address a few things. Yonkers fully back in school today, so happy to report Yonkers is back. Also, cheerleader today told me she's completely depressed that she has no spectators at her event. So there is mental health happening. Heard it today from a cheerleader at Scarcell High School. Three, the majority of our gyms in this district, except for one, I believe, and that's Greenacres, have direct access from the outside to the facility itself. You do not have to enter a wing of the building or a hallway or anything like that. You can go in direct. Okay, on to my speech. My name is Claire Paquin. I live at 13 Harcourt Road, which is right over there. I've come to this board several times regarding athletics. I love living close to the high school, which allows me

231to pop over to sporting events, football, volleyball, soccer, field hockey, basketball, and lacrosse. I have been at many of these games for all these sports over the years, and until this year, I didn't have a child playing in any single one of those games. This is what community is about. You support your friends, you support your friends' children. And this type of school spirit spreads throughout the community. There is a no spectator rule right now that is dampening school spirit and compounding the losses of two years without any gain. My daughter now plays on the girls varsity basketball team. Do you know how many spectators typically come to a varsity basketball game when there are absolutely no restrictions? About 30. Our gym capacity is 700 people. That's less than 5% capacity. At away games, our

232spectator number is vastly fewer than that. With social distancing and such low numbers, the risk is nearly non-existent. Even if there were a risk, who would we be protecting? The spectators are the athletes' family members. We live with them, eat with them, sleep in the same house. We're unmasked with them. They are unmasked with their friends and with their extended family. We're not protecting the coaches or the staff or the refs as they are exposed to spectators at all the other venues where they work and play. You are allowing our kids to play in front of other spectators. You just aren't allowing them to play in front of us. This is not for their safety. As a result, because of this, this is not for their safety. So what is the reasoning for allowing no

233spectators of Scarsdale families? I think the district has an obligation to provide a clear rationale. I have been told that the administration has said that it is quote unquote unsafe and that visitors quote unquote are not allowed on these campuses. And yet here we are at this meeting. We are here. We are visitors to campus. This reveals the inconsistency and arbitrary policymaking. Eliminating spectators is unfair to our kids, coaches, community who work so hard behind the scenes and deserve a chance to be celebrated and cheered on by their loved ones and friends in person. Here are a few ways that... Claire, Claire, Claire, excuse me. You're at your three minutes. I'm sorry. Okay, but I have a few more things. Here are a few ways that have nearby schools handling the spectator issue. Eastchester, Rye,

234Harrison, Ardsley, Fox Lane, Bronxville, White Plains, Mount Vernon, Pleasantville, no restrictions. Byram Hills, six for home, two away. New Rochelle, five home, five away. Greeley, four home, four away. Dobbs, four home, four away. Why can Scarsdale not figure out a way to make a balanced... policy on this issue thank you for your timely change to this rule thank you very much claire i'll give you this you had a question should have gotten that in an email today please we don't at this point we do not um We are allowing for public comment only, not for an exchange with the board. Thank you. Okay. Hi, my name is Kate Conlon. I live at 212 Madison Road. I'm here tonight to talk about the sports spectator ban. Sadly, I have to say I am very disappointed with

235the BOE, the administration, and Dr. Hagerman. The spectator ban was not developed based on science or guidelines from the CDC. the new york department of health there is no public or student input and the response to our objectives so far have been deflection without providing any justification for the decision the closest explanation we have received is since the main goal is to keep our schools open and to keep sports running we have to adopt stricter health and safety procedures let's be clear about this statement the administration absolutely did not have to ban spectators from games there's no federal mandate state mandate or county mandate requiring this action, the administration unilaterally chose this policy, a policy that is overly punitive, ineffective, and out of step with regulatory guidelines. I emailed the board and the administration a

236chart of 24 school districts in our surrounding communities. Of the 24 communities, Scarsdale is the only district that has implemented a spectator ban. Eight districts have no spectator restrictions 15 districts have well thought out spectator limits that consider the density of spectators in the gym from pelham who limit 88 spectators in the gym to new rochelle who limits spectators five per athlete for both home and away teams Again, Scarsdale is the only school district that has banned all spectators. These kids know the science. They know that they won't get sick from masked spectators 30 to 50 feet away. They know the CDC guidelines of 50% capacity. They see their neighboring communities, and these communities allow spectators at games. Today, the freshman boys parents were allowed to go to White Plains to watch the game. How

237is it that White Plains is able to manage spectators and keep everyone safe and Scarsdale isn't able to? These students have seen all this and they know that the district is not acting in the best interest of the athletes for no apparent reason and definitely not based on the available information. These kids know that they're being punished. These kids know that the spectator ban is overreaching. It does not provide any health benefits. I implore you to talk about this band tonight and swiftly come up with a reasonable policy for spectators per athlete in our 700 person capacity gym. Please don't put this off for two more weeks. You're saying the end of January? That's three more weeks. January is the heart of these kids' season. um for most seniors this is their last senior they

238were denied spectators last year they will never get these games back please don't rob them in their families another mem of another moment of another memory please be reasonable understand the urgency understand that spectators do not spread COVID and appreciate how out of step and needlessly punitive the spectator ban is with the rest of the county and please act tonight. Thank you. Thank you, Kate. Hi, good evening. My name is Eric Miller. I'm on Overlook Road in Fox Meadow. I've had two kids that have graduated from this district, and I have one that's a senior in high school that plays basketball on the varsity basketball team. So at the risk of repeating a lot of what's been said, I guess a couple things. One, I do think end of January seems like a lifetime in

239the current environment that we're in, and the fact that it's so inconsistent with what's happening across... the county of Rockland County and Westchester County that I'd ask the two words that we'd focus on would be consistency and science. Science has not told us anything. over the last number of months that this board hasn't acted appropriately in a lot of the ways to keep our kids educated and safe but this seems like a very arbitrary decision when you were faced with changing the outdoor mass policy i thought this board was was very quick to act and say that it did not make sense to have kids walking around outside with masks on it's the it's the same question i'd have about having school sports and the ability for kids to compete i would have to say

240that four members of the board tonight I thought gave a pretty passionate reason why it made sense. One of the comments around mental health I'd have to say I just think I completely disagree with its cumulative and I'm not sure that that was coming with experience and education to know whether or not it truly is having a mental health impact on our students. So I do think by saying that our athletes aren't necessarily being impacted I think is a pretty off basis and i would ask that this board really think hard about taking action now or as soon as possible because we did lose last season and the fact that all of our kids have to get you know in their cars to go watch their friends play at other schools when we're the only

241school and i think the point was made very well by claire that you can actually enter our gym facility without going through the school and I've been in this room for almost four hours, so it's completely inconsistent. If we don't want people in our building breathing each other's air that we all sat in here together for almost four hours this evening, I would ask you to really reconsider that. And I thank you. I know it's a hard job. There's no right answers. Everybody's going to have a yes and a no on different on different topics. But thank you for everything you do. And I'd ask that you really reconsider it. It's a very important point for our kids. Thank you very much, Eric. Hi, my name is Jen Susberg and I have a son Jake

242who's a freshman on the varsity basketball team. I wasn't actually planning to speak. I sat here for four hours just to support our athletes and our students. The truth is that that's who we're here for. So to take this opportunity away from their families, away from their athletes is actually not looking out for the best interests of our students. It's also inconsistent. The email keeps saying we're looking for consistency. We're looking for consistency, but it's not consistent. Look, we have guests here. So it's not consistent not to allow spectators. Also, it's been mentioned that spectators go straight into the athletic center. There is they do not go into the main entrance. And if the real reason is. the exit and the entrance of the spectators. I question what happens when school is dismissed or when

243kids enter the school. There's no one directing traffic and telling them they can't speak to each other. It is exactly the same. Actually, it's going to be less people. So it's inconsistent there as well. Two weeks is a lifetime. We have so many games and to take the next two weeks that can turn into three weeks is absolutely unfair. It's basically leading us to the end of the season. So I ask you to make the decision tonight. It's worth it to discuss tonight in the interest of the students. Um, I thank you and I really hope that you take the time. and really consider what you're taking away from these students. Thank you, Jen. Different topic. So thank you for this opportunity to speak. Over the months of a pandemic that seems determined never to

244end, voices on the board in central administration and the Scarsdale community have spoken. Oh, sorry. I'm David Wickstead, president of the Scarsdale Teachers Association. Apologies. Back to the speech. And the Scarsdale community have spoken about the need to prioritize the wellness of students and staff in an attempt to return to some normalcy in the work of our schools. The wellness of everyone engaged in the human enterprise of education was recognized both as a condition and desired outcome for in-person instruction. I come before you tonight to describe how recent events have placed the physical and mental wellness of the faculty under worrying stress. With the December break winding down, every faculty member, and indeed everyone paying attention to the news, understood that the pandemic had taken a sudden and dangerous turn. While the weeks of the

245fall semester unfolded against the backdrop of COVID, the risks seemed mainly understandable and manageable. But the emergence of Omicron in December, with its unprecedented power to infect, resulted in a shocking spike in cases and cast a heavy black cloud over the return to school. As January 4th approached, teachers knew that they would be walking into building with literally hundreds of other people. They knew the conditions of their employment would require they be in the company of an unknown number of individuals with the virus. They knew that they would need to walk into their classrooms on January 4th and begin again the work they do with students. In the face of all this actual concern and risk, this is what teachers did last week. All of us came to work apart from the growing number of

246staff members placed in quarantine. The work of the school year resumed last Monday. Then Wednesday morning arrived with its ice storm and dangerous road conditions. At the middle school and high school, school days start at 8 in the morning. At the elementary, that time is 8.35. Because of this, teachers who need to prepare for the coming day leave their homes early so they can be ready when students enter their classrooms. So, so many of us were already on the road enduring hazardous conditions to get to school when we received the call at 6.50 for a delayed opening. Already stuck in traffic when I heard this news, my trip from Croton, which typically takes 35 minutes, took over two hours. Then, after finally making it to school, I and others received word that it was all

247for naught. that schools needed to be closed, but the message sent to the community this was due to an inability to staff our buildings. Perhaps while expressing a literal truth, such a message clearly written in haste failed to acknowledge the efforts of the majority of staff who attempted to come to work despite the threatening weather, or the fact that so many staff were absent due to COVID quarantines. the true culprits here were the weather and the pandemic and not the staff's inability to get to work. I have about another minute, I would say. That's a three-minute limit, David. Could you please stop? No, I'll be back. Thank you. Okay. Or could you wrap up and then come back, maybe? Did you have a final statement you'd like to make? Well, I would say that my

248sense is – let me read the last paragraph, if that would be acceptable. That's fine. Thank you. So, talking about last Friday's decision. My sense is that last Friday's decision was made in the belief that parents had an expectation that there would be such a pivot to remote instruction. Perhaps this is true. However, the conditions of the week and the ongoing specter of COVID argued for student and faculty wellness to be put ahead of academic concerns for one day. As I taught my first period class remotely Friday morning, there was a beautiful snowstorm ranging outside. As I looked at the faces of my dutiful students arrayed on my computer screen, I thought about how they were being denied the wonderful freedom of a snow day. I knew for the next several hours there they would

249be, sitting in front of a screen. And I know this expectation of a full day of remote learning placed a challenging obligation upon a faculty that has been steadfast through the ordeal of the pandemic. I would ask everyone to remember that such moments provide opportunities to demonstrate humanity, empathy, and appreciation for a staff of educators who continue to come to work, surrounded by hundreds of others, each of whom potentially carrying the virus, all to support children in learning. I encourage the community to prioritize the wellness of all of those working in our schools and to let actions and not just words speak. Thank you. Thank you, David. okay at this time we will turn to those wishing to participate remotely we have two hands raised okay okay i'm gonna try hi good evening everybody i'm

250maida kirkendall rodriguez speaking as the budget study co-chair myra can you turn on your camera i'm sorry turn your camera on please It is. I had it on and I don't know why it isn't on. Normally it is on. It's for some reason it's not going on. There we go. I think it's because you didn't have me as a panelist. Can you see me and hear me now? Yes. Great. Brilliant. Mayra Kirkendall-Rodriguez, good evening and happy new year to everybody. I'm speaking as one of the parent teacher council, PTC budget study co-chairs. Many thanks for your detailed presentation, Mr. Maddie and team. Thank you as well for your focus on mental health. At the November budget forum, the PTC stated that we identified the need for mental health resources at all our seven schools. Given

251the brevity of speaking time, right now we will only present six questions and we will be sending you many more detailed questions. First... the enrollment has declined about three percent since uh since about a decade since 2012 2013. are there more granular data available to see how many students of different abilities are coming to or being brought back to the district and how many students have left the district in other words we need more detail to what leads to that net number In the same time period, that is, since 2012-2013, staffing has increased 9%. Are these enrollment and staffing trends what you anticipate for the near future as well? Will the associated spending rise impact the leverage ratio, which Moody's uses as part of its rating methodology? Two, when is the special education report coming

252out? Could the data in that report help provide taxpayers and parents more content about and context about your overall initiatives to support special ed students. Three, last year, average spending per student was $35,000. Do all seven schools have the same per student spending? Are there schools that get more or less? What would be the reason for either? Four, will there be more budget details in the near future that show directly how the district's 13 budget development guiding factors are supported with dollar amounts? For example, how much is allotted to global citizenship education or student support? Five, are building specific budgets publicly available? Six, with flu season here and rises in COVID cases, how much do you anticipate will be spent on substitute teachers or tutors? If that is a rise from previous years, by how

253much will the associated spending rise? Thank you very much. And we will send in the remaining questions later this week. Thank you very much, Myra. Say it again. Is that working? Yeah, that's good. All right. Somehow my volume isn't working, but if it's working, then great. Hi, Sarah Hopkins, 40 Burchell Drive. I have two kids, one middle, one high school, one college. So we're entering the third year of this pandemic. And for many of our kids, this is 100% of middle school or the majority of high school or the majority of elementary school. It's not their fault that they are unhappy as a result of these restrictive policies. I want to emphasize that. While there have been many attempts to explain away spiking mental health and academic issues in teens, the bottom line is that

254the abnormal experience our kids are having in school is directly linked to the declining mental health and limited academic advancement in all kids. We are all going to get COVID. This administration seems to be living in a time when zero COVID was believed to be possible. It is not. We have excellent vaccines and therapeutics. When we're talking about getting infected walking into a gymnasium is insane to me. Everyone is vaccinated, boosted. We have therapeutics. There's no reason to be acting like the way we are. And childhood does not wait. Two years ago, my younger two boys were cast in leads in school plays. These are the memories we carry for our lives. My then middle school student didn't get to perform in the play as it was shut down for the pandemic. That happens. I

255tried to explain it to him. Last year, neither of my boys participated in Zoom plays. They were too depressing to participate in. I really appreciated the parents who organized them, but it was just too much. Now, almost two years into the pandemic, My son was cast in a high school play that is now going to be Zoom only again. We are actively hurting our kids. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much, Sarah. Hi, can you hear me? Yes. DIRECTOR RIVERA- Perfect. Thank you. Rachna from Griffin Avenue. I wanted to thank Eric and his team for such a detailed presentation on staffing recommendations for the upcoming budget. I'm very happy to hear about all the middle school staffing recommendation especially recommendation to hire a dedicated in-house social worker and plans to have an emotional support

256program. I do have some questions regarding such. Since the emotional support program will be a setting with a dedicated space, will it be in addition to LRC? Sounds like it will be, but please clarify that. How will the kids get identified for such a setting when there are so many kids who meet the criteria for direct instruction, test-taking strategies, executive functioning skill? Will it have a sensory room setting component to it? As far as social worker component is concerned, clearly the middle school administration is seeing quantifiable data to seek the support along with the need for an emotional support classroom. Where can we as stakeholders get access to such data without, of course, compromising student confidentiality? For example, as a need assessment approach, it's important to know where we are currently and where do we

257want to be as a district, you know, as a cohort of special education who need services. But without such data, it would be hard to say. How many at-risk students were there before the pandemic and how the pandemic accelerated the mental health impact or increased the population requiring mental health support? Without the data, it would be hard to answer. Which brings me to another important point, special education report. Getting this report in front of us, especially after two years of pandemic, is critical before the district votes on this budget. A special education report is critical as it defines its goals and objectives and matrix. Special education report ideally is what provides us with that quantifiable data based on which we can talk about developing supports. So I please implore this board to wait for that

258special education report and look for that quantifiable data without which it sounds very anecdotal, but I do support all the recommendations. that Eric and his team has made. Lastly, I had a question about the bridge program at middle school. I'm confused by this section of the presentation. Will there be a bridge program at middle school or is it going to be at Quaker Ridge and they'll be at middle school? It's kind of confusing, this part of the presentation. Also, I just wanted to point out because the board members brought this up about the need in mental health support. I think it has, it's related to academic regression. And because of pandemic, we have not done any survey with parents and who are feeling academic regression with their kids who have seen the impact of pandemic

259on academic achievement. And I think that plays into some of the mental health issues. Thank you. Thanks for your time. Thank you very much, Roshna. Okay. All right. I will close hearing from those present, move to item six, follow up to public comment. I mean, I think we talked a lot about the no visitor policy in terms of where we are with that. And as Eric indicated, we will look at the guidance that's been released and continue to have conversations about how to proceed with that piece. I think that that was the first many. I just want to thank David for acknowledging the teacher's perspective and experiences. I understand that last week was particularly challenging and that beyond that, that pandemic exhaustion and fears around Omicron and other issues are still certainly something we need

260to be thinking about and being tending in terms of priority for us to be thinking about. So appreciate those perspectives. And then there were a number of... questions about the budget from Myra as a budget rep for the PTC. Rachna also brought up some specific both special education concerns and some budget concerns and we can work to clarify those in upcoming presentations. And finally Sarah Hopkins did a different iteration of the, well not really a different iteration of the no visitors, she spoke to the no visitors. but through the lens of drama productions rather than athletic events. And so again, you know, in terms of our response to that, it'll be the same for all those categories. Just to answer an easy question, there will be a special ed presentation in the next education report

261that will cover many of those metrics, our goals and moving forward. There is a formal special ed two year plan that was delayed at the beginning of the COVID pandemic that we are hoping to have done by the end of the year. Okay, thank you. Now we'll turn to the personnel report. Eight, automate. Oh, I'm sorry. I skipped seven. Sorry. Written communications, Amber, please. Please note that the Board of Education email is also viewed by the superintendent and district clerk. Open meetings law requires all board deliberations which may lead to action on policy changes to occur in public. Therefore, your written communications and emails will be reported at an upcoming public board meeting. A board member will respond at their earliest convenience. This report, one second. This report is for emails received from December 6th,

2622021 through January 5th, 2022. This morning, it was discovered that nine messages while sent to the correct email address during this period were not delivered to our inboxes. We apologize for this error. Those messages will be reported on at our next board meeting and we'll receive a response from the board or district as appropriate. Please note that because open meetings law requires all board deliberations which may lead to action or policy changes to occur in public, our email replies are by necessity limited in scope. During this period, we received 112 emails. 97 were on district matters and 15 were invitations, publications, or related to board meetings. With regards to the district matters, Six emails were non-COVID related emails with questions regarding the DEI consultant, support for Zoom parent-teacher conference, concerns about exceeding arrangements at the

263ACT, questions about safety, comments about an orchestra concert, and personnel matters. For COVID related emails, there were 92. Two were with suggestions on reporting COVID information. One was against the reinstatement of the SNAC policy. One was concerned about the district's response to COVID cases as it related to the track team. One was about concerns for COVID protocols related to winter concerts. Three were with regards to use of the Heathcote gym. Two were against masking during the school day. 20 were for on clarification on masking on school grounds or advocating for a specific policy. Six were advocating for Zoom in the high school for students needing to quarantine. Two were questions about quarantining. With return from break, seven asked to consider remote option for after break. Three asked for additional COVID testing for students. Seven were

264advocating for in-person schooling. Six had questions around tests to stay. With comments around indoor spectators on school grounds, there were 30 emails. Thank you. Now we'll move to the personnel report. Drew? Thank you. I have two things tonight. The first is just an announcement that at noon today I sent out an email to parents inviting them for the annual feedback related to teachers who are in the probationary period or who are leave replacements or part-time teachers. So we do encourage parents to complete that survey. It's open through um the end of next week uh friday the 21st uh at 5 pm uh second is this is the time of year where we start to learn of of uh retirements and the first such item is on the consent agenda tonight and i just want to

265take a moment to recognize the service of totaling 21 years of michael gluck who's a teacher at Edgewood Elementary School. And obviously there are more events to come this year, but I just want to recognize Michael for his service and decision to retire. Thank you very much, Drew. Now we move to item nine, the consent agenda. the preamble states that the board may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda in an effort to achieve greater efficiency at board meetings a consent agenda condenses some of the routine business of the board of education into a single motion items are selected for the consent agenda when officers of the board and the superintendent believe there is no controversy regarding them a member of the board who feels that any item requires discussion prior to action

266may remove that item from the consent agenda does any board remember board member wish to do that okay so then we'll move to item 10 the consent agenda carl thank you um so the there are Four items on the consent agenda tonight. One is the minutes from the business meeting of December 6. 10.01, 10.02 is a certified personnel report. 10.03 is a non-certified personnel report. 10.04 is a claims audit report. And I move that the consent agenda of those four items be approved. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. Now we will move to item 11, information items and discussion. Do we want to do the calendar quickly? Or do you want to take a break first? Should we move through a couple of these? We can. You

267had talked about, did you want to talk about policies before we? I was suggesting that perhaps we table 11.07, the review, first reading of the 1000 series, considering the time. Do I have consensus from the board regarding that? Yeah. Okay, so we will table that item. Perhaps we can kind of go through some of these other ones more quickly. More quickly, yes. Start with the calendar. Yep, let's take the calendar discussion. Item 11.01, the 2022-2023 preliminary calendar. The background on here in which Drew will supplement talks about the overarching parameters influence the calendar development as I talked about in my opening remarks. It's not as a matter of just sort of picking the days we want to come to school. There are a host of regulatory and contractual requirements. Those are listed here. Drew will

268review those briefly. In addition to that, there are a number of days which are statutorily required and breaks that have happened by tradition as well as start and end times that we have to be thoughtful about. So with that, through. Sure, I will try to hit the broadest strokes of this. So our school year needs to be 180 days and one of the more recent changes that are relevant is the 180 days of session is inclusive of superintendent's conference days of which we can have up to four and Any part of a day where student attendance is taken counts as a day of session of those 180 days. The second factor is we need to hit a minimum number of instructional hours in the year. 900 for grades K through six and 990 hours of

269instruction in grades seven through 12. So those two factors together are what determine that we've met the state's expectation or the state's requirement. That's a major external factor. The internal factors, we do have an agreement with the Scarsdale Teachers Association to discuss the calendar together before it's presented, and we have done that. We met to review the calendar. we do have a past practice of setting 185 days in the calendar as a maximum so with the sta the 185 day year is our maximum so when people think about and we get asked the question how many snow days are built into the calendar really the answer to that is the difference between the total number of days that are in the calendar and 180. so in the proposed calendar for 2022-23 the answer to that

270question would be five there are five inclement potential inclement weather days built in before we would have to take a day from april vacation or some other strategy to to meet that that minimum so the calendar is proposed for next year begins with two superintendents conference days august 31st and september 1st school cannot begin statutorily before september 1st just as a note by law and school must end on what's called rating day which has been established for 2023 as june 23rd so the 185 days have to fit within that window and our contractual holidays that we have we have 17 civil service holidays some of which are spelled out explicitly and others are determined based on holiday you know school breaks that we establish so we're looking at a first day of school of september

2716th December break, which we've gotten a lot of feedback on as being relatively short between December 26 and January 2nd, a February break of between the 20th and 24th, an April break between the 3rd and the 7th, and graduation on the 22nd, and the last day called Rating Day on the 23rd, both of June. A couple of things of note. There's one omission on the calendar, which is Typically we would set December 23rd as an early release day, being the day before the break. That is something we've traditionally done. So I would expect you'd see that on a next draft that comes forward. So that December 23rd. And we've had some internal discussion about, oh, there's one other mistake too, which it says November. the calendar lists 19 school days plus one meaning superintendent's conference

272day the count is actually 18. so you'll see that that correction 18 plus one i miscounted um And then we've had some internal discussion about the March superintendents conference day, knowing a great deal of professional development work that is underway and will be underway next year. So I'm going to ask Edgar to talk a little bit about that. It's currently listed in our proposed calendar as a half day for students, full day for staff. but edgar yeah i'm happy to just briefly give a rationale for moving it from a half day to a full day because of travel time and logistical challenges half days prevent teachers from meeting in person across district across the military elementary buildings and the middle school in the high school and being in person across grade supports alignment and content

273areas math science ela and social studies and also finding time for this articulation can be challenging This gives us highly valuable resource, which is time together. Teachers can also engage with colleagues in other buildings in broader topics, student-centered learning, financial literacy, executive functioning, and of course, diversity, equity, and inclusion. And teachers have described these opportunities to meet with each other across grade with colleagues that they don't normally work with as some of the most rewarding and illuminating professional development opportunities. That's my plug. So a subsequent draft the next meeting would propose that March 1st would be recast as a full superintendent's conference day. Still a day of session, still within the four total allowed by the Commissioner of Education. Just a couple of points to add to that. We have a number of Questions relate

274to the beginning and end, which I think Drew contextualized very well for us. I was trying to think of the other questions that were raised. There was a bunch of questions about if we, you see we have a tradition of the last days in June being scheduled as half days. That's for a number of reasons. Those are exam days at the high school and for some eighth grade students in the mathematics area. and it's also a closure to the year we give teachers time to close out their classrooms their years their report cards all of those things even if we extended those days to full days of instruction which incidentally could potentially be necessary to meet the 900 or 990 hour requirement if we have a lot of inclement weather days. But that wouldn't give

275us extra days of session. Because kids come to school those days, that's one of the 100. Each one of those is one of the 180 days of session. The other aspect was that folks believe that we've had a two. a week break for a long long time and so drew and i went back and looked today out of the last five years we've been able to do that three times before that it was even more challenging the two alternate years we were not able to do that and we had six days off and eight days off respectively so again we we try to make this work it tends to be cyclical i forget whether it's a five year or a seven year cycle in which we're able to do more of the two week breaks

276but there just comes a time where we can't you know meet all these date requirements without going to a shorter winter break without sacrificing one of the other two breaks that would that would be the only other option is giving up a portion of the february break or a portion of the april break any questions from the board i have one go ahead amber okay uh was there a reason why you chose march 1st for the superintendent's conference day i'm just noticing it's kind of close to the winter break yeah that's something we that could move that is not critical uh that it's in that it's traditionally been in the first week in march or the first wednesday in march but because that's so close to the february break yeah we could look to move

277that to the 8th Yeah, I just feel like, you know, you come back for two days and then for students to have a day off. I was just wondering if there was a reason why. That's a good point. And Ray, do you know when the fall athletics would start back up? Do you have that date already? I think, and I'll double check it. I think it's August 22nd, but I will double check. Thank you. Is it ever? Is it ever where we schedule 183 days as opposed to 185? Obviously, we're trying to gamble to some extent about the snow and the discretionary, but could we, for example, in response to the... request for a longer Christmas break. Could we add a day or two at Christmas and just have 183 and then use the half

278days as sort of our, at the end of June as a. The half days as Drew described already count for the full amount of allocation. We have a historical relationship with the STA and other groups again. It's typically that 184 to 185 days. going under that would significantly potentially jeopardize um you know one of our breaks so that's just something we'd have to you know february or um april and i think folks have been pretty used to having those right that would be a pretty abrupt change right I have two questions, both of which I hope are very easy. The first is this year, Rosh Hashanah falls, actually it begins Sunday night and goes till Monday. Is that Monday and Tuesday holiday contractual or would it be possible perhaps to take that Tuesday and put

279it somewhere else, like at the beginning of winter break? It's not contractual to that part of it. just sort of been traditionally how we celebrate that? Sure. And look, it's a two-day holiday. And as a Jewish person, I feel strongly that it's a two-day holiday. I understand that. But this year, the first day of that holiday happens to be a Sunday. So I'm wondering if it gives us a little bit of flexibility. It could. Yep. It's I would just say it's been in place as long as I've been here and David could probably say longer I think that's been our standard practice for a long time Yeah, right, but I guess large change and every Jewish faculty member would likely take that day as a Day of religious observance. I mean they would have that

280right within the contract so so that so that answer is my contractual question thanks david is that they would have that that we would be potentially putting ourselves in a position of being short faculty even if students were not observing both faculty and students i mean i think it applies across sure um even though the holiday is technically on the sunday and the monday this year i understand that so okay so then my other question is You sent out, Drew, a very useful explanation, I think, that was linked in this board doc's... the document providing detail on the factors that influence the calendar development. And I think that provided a lot of clarity to a lot of community members and stakeholders who had questions around this. Is it possible to share that at least for

281the period of time during which the calendar is being discussed or until it's finalized on the district's calendar overview website page? Sure. I feel like that would be very helpful to be able to direct people to that. I also just to that point, I think it's a great point. Maybe you want to just add a link into the actual draft calendar so somebody has it, they'll see it right there. The, sorry, just to clarify the Rosh Hashanah, I think it's not Sunday. It starts, I believe, Sunday night. Yeah, I thought sundown, Sunday, sundown, Tuesday. So it's a two-day holiday, which is Monday, Tuesday. So it goes from Sunday night to Tuesday night. So even though you may see on a calendar it starts Sunday, Sunday is not actually the holiday until after sundown. It's Monday

282and Tuesday that are the holidays. so i think that's why they had those two days right look i'm googling it while i'm well right right right so i'm just trying to figure it out i understand i got it because i'm looking at creative solutions to a problem that's impacting a variety of people from various different cultures who are asking for different days off too yeah i don't object to you're trying to solve or or i don't object to that i just want to clarify why it was monday tuesday sure are there additional questions Drew, I just have one question philosophically on the superintendent's conference days and the day of the week. One of the things we got a lot of feedback on was about people that their family's not close by and just their ability

283to visit. And I'm just wondering any thought about putting superintendent conference days on a Monday or Friday as just more opportunity for people that aren't from here to have a three-day weekend to visit rather than in the middle of the week? Yeah. It's a possibility these are days that we get to choose The practice has been to stay away from from those days because it tends that Friday Tends to turn into Thursday or Wednesday in terms of student attendance. So we have tried to intentionally avoid avoid that Monday is present a huge challenge for us to have a weekend and try to get ready for a huge staff meeting on Monday morning. You know, typically when we do that, we have a couple of days to build up to that. We do all of our

284logistics and planning and organizing to, you know, food stuff. I mean, all that happens. Over a weekend, that becomes nearly impossible to do. Okay. Well, good. Thank you all. Amber, it is the 22nd. Thank you. Okay, so the next item is 11.02, which is proposed textbooks. And I'm going to ask Edgar to move us through that, please. So this is Chester Nez in The Unbreakable Code, A Navajo Code Talker's Story. This is a nonfiction picture book to supplement an eighth grade social studies classrooms. This book artfully crosses several barriers, content areas. It describes a Native American experience through the perspective of a Native writer. This book both highlights the struggles and the contributions of those who spoke the Navajo language and their contributions to the U.S. efforts during World War II. And I did read

285it from cover to cover. This is one. And it's... Thank you, Edgar. Appreciate that. Beautiful. Any questions for Edgar on that? Okay, the next item is 11.03, which is the Village Memorandum of Understanding regarding camera access. Again, I hit the high points of this in my opening comments, so I'm going to ask Eric to walk us through the highlights of this quickly and see if there's any questions. Sure. This is a relatively straightforward memorandum of understanding. We are in the process of sourcing a server and adding software modules that will allow our current camera system to have and access through a web portal that we can credential Scarsdale PD to be able to do. There are really only two. situations where they would be able to do this. The first would be for a testing

286situation and that would be when students are not in the building with prior notice to us. And the second would be for any type of emergency where life and health of students are at risk. It would allow them to gain tactical understanding of any emergencies going on in the school by giving them live feed to our to our video cameras so basically this is to strengthen their response in some of the worst case scenarios. So I think it's a good move. It gives us more integration. Their tactical sergeant was over last Friday looking at our camera placement and was very happy with where those were and was understanding. We were starting the understanding process of them using our system so they understand how it works. We will continue to integrate with them over the next

287few months. The software probably will not be online until close to the end of the year when that will go live, because right now the sourcing of servers is not the easiest thing in the world. This furthers our goal, I think both a village goal and a school district goal, of having greater collaboration around health and safety issues and to have more of a collaborative relationship and partnership, particularly with the Scarsdale PD. And so we're thrilled that it took a little while to work through, especially with all the other challenges going on, but we're very appreciative of everyone's efforts. I'd like to acknowledge Eric and the rest of the safety folks who are involved in making this MOU. And on behalf of the board, I'd like to echo that. So thank you very much. Any

288questions by board members? Thank you very much. Does this come back to us as an action item? Yeah, it will. Next meeting. Next meeting, 24th. Thanks. And then the last item I'm going to cover as part of the information items, typically I cover all of these, but I'm going to hand them over, the policies over to Karen after this one. But 11.04 is the 2018 Bond Mechanical and Electrical Bid Award that affects Scarsdale Middle School and Heathcote Elementary. And again, this is connected back to our 2018 bond, if we can remember that. And Stuart, I'm going to ask you to kind of walk us through this. Yep, this is second to last bid related to the 2018 bond work. There's a small scope of work still to come. But this is work, as Dr. Hagerman

289mentioned, both at Heathcote and the middle school at Heathcote. replacing the boilers and all the electrical panels as well as the installation of a new rooftop unit for mechanical ventilation and air conditioning at the gymnasium that's something that we've been talking about for a while so that'll be exciting to have that work done at the middle school replacing all the electric electrical panels and some additional more extensive electrical work like some feeders, electrical feeders, and also some older unit ventilators. the it's also recommended to award two alternates so medical bid alter at alternate number two the electrical bid uh at alternate number one these alternates are related to putting mechanical ventilation uh into the youth outreach office slash meeting space in the middle school which currently does not have any mechanical ventilation at all it's

290an interior interior space The other alternates related to asbestos removal related to the boilers, it's not anticipated that we need that. If it turns out we do need that, we would come back to the board and ask for a ward at that time. total construction budget about 1.55 million dollars the total of the lowest bids is slightly or sixty thousand dollars more than that however being under budget overall for the bond and if you recall the last bid award we did was about nine hundred thousand dollars for the last work we awarded that we do recommend awarding the bid and getting the work started as soon as we can you know obviously most of it's summer but we are going to try to get the heath coat uh gymnasium work started uh before the end

291of the school year great that's great thank you very much any questions i mean the the plan is we've essentially committed to doing this work so the only real issue is it's a slightly more than what we had hoped basically right with the sixty thousand dollars yeah yeah this was uh original construction budget put together in you know three years ago right so so if we don't if we don't accept the bids our options are limited we rebid it it's six months later it's just most likely it could be more not you know it absolutely is the recommendation to award the bid there's there would be no reason to defer it uh to rebid or cuts you probably would want to cut scope to get the bid prices down um and then the longer you

292go you know the higher the bid prices get right so then you keep cutting and you keep going up and keep cutting going forever right okay anyone else okay then i'm going to turn it back over to karen for 11.5 yeah item 11.5 is that this is the third reading of our policies related to remote public comment at our last meeting the board came to consensus regarding allowing for four minutes for individual remarks the first public comment period of one and a half hours and a second public comment period with no time limit the preamble to the public comment has also been updated to reflect our policy changes and at this time is there any discussion or comment from the board before we move to a vote under action item 12 Okay, then we will

293move to item 11.06. This is a second reading. We agreed last time we would bring this back. The Board did come to take action and passed policy 2342, but we did say we would bring it back for a second reading. I know I wasn't sure if Ron, if you had any additional questions or comments at this time or any other Board members. I mean, I appreciate you reaching out to our legal counsel on my questions. I may have some follow-up about them, but I'll just send that directly to you for the lawyer. That's great. Thanks, Ron, very much. Okay. And as we agreed... Any other questions? Oh, sorry. okay um as we just agreed as a board that we would table 11.07 the first reading of the 1000 series policies um so now we'll move

294to item 12 action items 12.01 is bob yes um item 12.01 this relates to to the 2018 bond for mechanical and electrical bid award for scarsdale middle school and heathcote elementary school we recommend that the board approve and adopt the resolution as presented. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. 12.02 is Jessica. All right. So as was mentioned in the previous item 11.05. It is recommended that the board approve the preamble for the public comments and adopt policies 1230, 2310, 2320, 2340, and 2430 with the revisions that have been presented. And we did the reading at the last meeting. Obviously we have the clean copies here. Is it traditional that I would go ahead and read them? I don't have to actually read them. Make a

295motion. I just would move that we adopt these policies as revised. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? I'd just like to explain why we'll be voting against this and sum up for the community that might be listening. I've given in detail at the last meeting. The aspects of this I think are great and the aspects that I think are misguided. But to sum up my views about these changes, while I believe allowing remote public comment is a very positive change. I cannot support these new and additional restrictions on community engagement at board meetings. I do not believe they are needed and rather they send a negative message to the community on the value of their engagement and feedback, namely the limit of four minutes per public comment and the 90 minute limit. for the

296total public comment period. I think we've seen people come to this podium with written speeches, well prepared, a lot of very important comments. And tonight we were only three minutes, but I think they even would have gone over four minutes. So I will not be supporting this tonight, but I do appreciate working with Jessica and Karen on the subcommittee on this work. Thank you, Ron. Any other discussion or comments? Okay. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Opposed. Motion passes. Now we will move to item 13, gifts. Ron? Thanks, Karen. I recommend that the board accept with thanks the gift of $500 from the Scarsdale Middle School PTA to replenish mosaic glass tiles for the SMS Mosaic Club as presented. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion passes. And now we will

297move to public comment. Is there anyone from the audience who would like to come back to the... David, did you want to come back? Okay. Anyone raising their hand remotely? no okay so that i will close that and let us turn to our wrap-up items i'm sorry follow-up to public comment we will move on from that and to 16 our wrap-up items Yeah, I mean, I think we've identified most of them as part of the follow-up to the first public comment. I think there's an additional request for some special education information, which we will do. There were some suggestions on tweaking the calendar to bring a version forward that reflects some of the conversation that happened at the table today. We will be reviewing the or bringing back the first reading of the 1000 series

298that we have delayed this evening. I think those are the big items. Yeah. Any additions? Okay. Item 17, meeting dates for the coming month. Amber. On Friday, January 21st, the Edgewood School Board Committee will take a tour at 845. On Saturday, June 22nd, there will be a board retreat at 9 a.m. in this room. On Monday, January 24th, there will be a special meeting executive session in this room at 5 p.m. A board business meeting and education report immediately following in this room, an executive session if needed. On Monday, February 7th, there will be a budget study session one at 6.30 p.m. in the high school. auditorium followed by an executive session if needed and Monday February 14th budget study session number two at 6 30 p.m. in this room a board business meeting immediately

299following in this room and executive session if needed I know we have a board study session but I don't it's what it says Okay, so correction, the budget study session on February 7th is in this room and not in the auditorium. Do we have a board meeting on February 14th? Thomas? I have a quick question on the wrap-up. Sorry, Carl's asking a legitimate question at 11.06. Sorry, quick question on the wrap-up. In response to Public Com, maybe you said it and I missed it, but... There was a concern about the fact that we allowed people here, but not any other. And I believe we're required to allow them here by law. And I just, you know, I'm not. i don't want to split hairs but it just seemed since it was brought up several times

300to confirm my understanding that we're legally required to do that and we're legally all required to basically be here right yes that those are both true statements we did encourage people but we didn't you know say you could not come in person we encouraged folks to participate remotely um i don't know how many people did do that But yeah, the distinction of course is that there's typically not students here. And when we're talking about events that affect our students, those are where students will be very prominent in those activities. So that's a distinguishing point for sure. All right, thank you for the clarification. At this time, may I have a motion to adjourn this business meeting? Motion to adjourn. Is there a second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion carries. Good night,

301everybody. Thank you.