BOE Business Meeting 2021-9-20

001(upbeat music) Welcome and thank you to those attending this evening's board meeting, whether in the audience via live streaming or watching later on demand. It was really wonderful to welcome our students, faculty and staff, back to school, on Wednesday, September 1st, for a regular schedule, a full daily in-person learning. It was certainly unexpected to have school canceled on September 2nd, due to extensive flooding from Hurricane Ida. But I would like to acknowledge and give sincere thanks to our custodial management and other staff who assisted in helping to clean up all of our schools both during and after the storm, so our students and faculty could return so quickly. Your incredible efforts are most appreciated. I also hope that the many Scarsdale families impacted by the flooding are well on their way to getting back to

002normal. I have really been struck by the energy of our school community since school began, it has been palpable. In fact, I could even hear the joy of the Greenacres Back-to-School Picnic from my house down the street. In spite of the ongoing COVID risk mitigation efforts, including the continued use of masks, our incredible school community prevails and continues to make strides forward on behalf of our students. Thank you to all faculty and staff, parents and caregivers for forging through the difficulty of last year, continuing to cope with the challenges of this year and working so hard to foster such a vibrant and positive school environment for our students. I also wish to note that tonight's meeting is taking place in person that while it is taking place in person, the governor has signed legislation that

003reauthorized local government bodies, including school boards to meet virtually under the open meetings law until January 15th, 2022. The legislation permits school boards, the flexibility to conduct hybrid public meetings, meaning in-person and remote and public comment, both in-person and remote. The board appreciates this flexibility and we'll revisit the discussion of remote public participation and the time and manner of that participation under agenda item four this evening. Dr. Hagerman comments. Oh, I'm sorry. I spoke before you, didn't I? What's that? You always speak before me I'm on an earlier version of the agenda that's just got flipped. They got flipped. This is the right order, so you're right on. Thank you. Go ahead. You're on cue here. So like Karen, I'd like to say good evening and welcome to everyone for tonight's board meeting. As Karen

004indicated, we're happy that folks are participating in this important work, whether you're intending in person, watching virtually or viewing after the fact, we are just over halfway through September and the last few weeks have proven both exciting and challenging and we have a lot of information to report and review tonight. As Karen said, the first day of school was a miraculous homecoming for our returning students and staff and a gracious welcoming for all of our newcomers. This of course was followed by the ravages of Hurricane Ida and the closure of our schools for a day of recovery. Then thanks to the heroic efforts of our custodial team we were back to school on Friday, even as many of our Scarsdale families struggled with flooding issues in your homes. I would like to, again, publicly acknowledge

005and thank all of our teachers, administrators, custodians, secretaries, technology team, and other employees for their hard work and preparing for and kicking off this school year. As has become our tradition in the past few years, my cabinet uses the first week of school to visit our schools and classrooms. We'd like to welcome new and returning students and teachers, ensure safety, security, and other logistical measures are being implemented with fidelity and observe the beginning of our students' annual educational journeys while our visits were more limited last year, due to the risk mitigation efforts in place, this year's visit served as a particularly good reminder of all the groundwork that has been put into place over the last couple of years in the areas of capital improvements, academic enhancements, wellness, sustainability, and of course, diversity, equity and

006inclusion. September is also an important month of observance for our students, staff and families. Within the first few weeks of school, we remembered the lives lost on September 11th, 2001. Our Jewish families acknowledged the High Holy Days of Rosh Hashanah and Yom Kippur, and starting this evening with the observance of Sukkot, for those celebrating tonight, we'd like to say Chag sameach. And we've also just kicked off National Hispanic Heritage Month in which we have, and will continue to recognize and celebrate the achievements and contributions of Hispanic American champions who have inspired others to greater levels of success. Along with the independence of many Latin American countries from Spain over time. As we acknowledge these annual observances, we're also cognizant of the sorrow experienced by our community, both with regards to local victims of 9/11 and

007the recent death of a 16 year old child who was brutally murdered after a football game last Friday at Arlington High School, I asked that we take an extended moment of silence in recognition of these losses. If you please join me in a moment of silence. Thank you. As we turn the page at tonight's board meeting, we have a lot of information to share, review and discuss. As we did last year, we'll begin each meeting with updates regarding COVID data and our ongoing risk mitigation efforts. We'll also cover a number of topics around the opening of school that are typical for the first September board meeting. For those of you who are newer to board work in alternating months, we have both a business meeting and an education report meeting. During the latter, we focus

008on educational topics of interest, strategic plan updates, and progress on our DEI work related to board policy 01105. Again, we thank you for your ongoing support as we began and proceed through the school year, our primary goals remained to prioritize the health, safety and wellbeing of our students and staff, and to provide an outstanding education to our students so that they're able to reach their fullest potential. And much of that work gets discussed right here at these board meetings. So again, we really appreciate everyone's participation in this meeting. Karen. Thank you. Do any board members have opening reports? I'd like to move to item three information discussion items, which will be led by the superintendent, 3.01 back to school update. So we are going to kick off. There's gonna be a number of us, I'm

009just gonna ask my colleagues to join in at their designated point. We're gonna run through the assessments, COVID 19 metrics, quarantine requirements, new county testing program, instruction during quarantine, some meals and snack protocols and the American Rescue Plan Act funding plan. Ray's gonna talk to us for a moment about athletics, and then we're gonna close out around the visitor policy. So a number of items that we're gonna work through, and again, I'm gonna thank my colleagues in advance for their work on this. As we both described Karen and I in our opening comments, this was not a typical opening of schools this year, but nonetheless we feel that we're on a positive trajectory and kicking off the school year and sort of moving forward. I think we've noted in most of our meetings that we

010will continue to follow the health metrics that are in place and we'll be iterating our plans accordingly. So there are some practices in place that we understand provide some limitations, both to our students and to our faculty, but as health metrics allow, we are still committed to the same idea of making sure that we, make that gradual progress back towards normalcy as school used to be. And of course, we'll continue to assess our practices and make changes as appropriate and those certainly that are given to us in terms of guidance from the CDC and other health regulatory organizations who have the authority to make these kinds of public health declarations. So with that, I'm gonna ask Eric to talk to us about mental health and academic assessments. Thank you, Thomas. So I just to give

011everyone an update on the start of the school year and our mental health and social, emotional wellness. Our psychologist and our social workers have been, and are continuing to survey teachers. They're engaging the mandated cases and the cases that were new during the pandemic throughout last year. Kind of doing a survey of what those numbers are, understanding who they are, the amount of counseling that it may take and working with those students to reach out to any other students that may be having difficulty, as that was happening, I think the psychologist and the social workers and our guidance counselors all realized that the case load increase last year was significant, not orders of magnitude, but certainly significant as our psychologist and social workers already had fairly full case loads that will require us to bring

012in an additional consulting social worker, which we are in the process of identifying and bringing on. Unfortunately, we have had word from the Youth Services Project, which is our Edgemont, Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling partnership that, well, not just that word, we had word of another resignation. So if you remember Lauren Pomerantz had resigned late in the summer to take another position. Our other social worker at the high school or at the high school has also announced the resignation starting October 15th. So Jay Genova is in the process of recruiting and hiring additional social workers. So we will be bringing on additional social workers ourselves and the Youth Services Project we'll be hiring. So we're looking to get those people on board as soon as humanly possible. If that is delayed in any way, we will

013look at some of our retired counselors, to fill a gap. Right now that is on track and we think we will have people ready to go before Allie leaves at the high school. We will probably have a discussion come budget time around whether or not it makes sense to look at our mental health staffing for the next year. Consulting would be a year to year gap filler and we'll see, as we come towards the end of this year where our case loads, if they returned to baseline, or if we continue to see an uptake of those, but we will continue to be looking at mental health through the eyes of our guidance counselors, psychologists, and social workers on all levels. They continue to interact with teachers to make sure students who are showing any signs

014of difficulty are addressed quickly. From mental health, I will move on to kind of our COVID 19 numbers and metrics currently, so the metrics remain flat over the last week or two. We have an infection rate that's ranging between 0.95 and one. Right now there are 17 point cases per 100,000. That's the daily number, and that's been fairly level for the last week, week and a half. And our positive positivity rate is at 3%. Again, that's been level for about the last two weeks. It is down from the ultimate highs that we had a couple or about four weeks ago. So that is good, but it is not continuing to drop in the way we would have hoped to see it. The CDC has us in the high transmission tier as every other county in

015New York State and with the exception of a couple of dozen, every other county in the United States right now. So we still remain in that zone of high because of our 100,000 number, rather than our positivity rate, positivity rate actually has us in the lowest category. Our per 100,000 over seven days has us in the highest category. We have had school district cases since the beginning of school, I'll give you a rundown, at the high school we've had three cases, two students in one staff. At the middle school, we've had nine cases, seven students and two staff. At Greenacres we've had four cases with a breakup of three students and one staff member. And at Quaker Ridge, we've had two, one staff, one student. So a total of 18, since the beginning of the

016school year, we had 12 cases reported prior to the opening of school. Those students had never attended school, but needed to quarantine for the most part for the first couple of days of the school year. As far as quarantined students over and above the cases with the exception of the Quaker Ridge student who had eaten lunch prior to the quarantine changes instituted by the Department of Health, that one case had 12 quarantines associated with it. All of the other cases have been averaging one or two additional quarantines besides the positive case. So that is good news that the quarantines have been held down generally with the new quarantine guidelines. Just to reiterate how we're communicating around cases, we are only communicating with those families who might be affected by the positive case. So the positive

017case family itself, obviously, and then any students or staff who are quarantined around them. Well, maybe making reports that the board like this, each board meeting and the state report card has been reinstated for districts to report. We have been actively reporting since last Monday. However, the state report card public facing is still being built, which I'm not sure of. I'm not sure exactly when that's going to be up, but we hear it will be soon. So they've had data since last Monday, all of these cases have been reported to that state dashboard. Our plan is that if in the next couple of weeks, that state report card doesn't come up online, we will publish a ongoing chart on our own website. But at this point, if the state publishes one, we'd rather have all

018the numbers in one place. So just to expand on what I said before, quarantine requirements from the Westchester County Department of Health, the weekend of the 13th changed. So there used to be two definitions for contact that required quarantine. The first was close contact, which means within six feet of a positive individual for more than 15 minutes, over a 24 hour period, that remains that is still the main form of contact. The second form of contact was proximate contact, which was sharing a room with an individual for more than 15 minutes unmasked, a regular sized room that would require the entire room to quarantine. The Westchester department of county up until last weekend was delineating between a smaller room and a larger room. And in a larger room, only the perimeter of that student needed

019to quarantine. They have dropped pro approximate contacts, so now only close contact is used for quarantine. Students are exempted from six feet in the classroom, and they have to be within three feet for more than 15 minutes to require quarantine. Other than that, all of the other exemptions for vaccines and being positive in 90 days remained the same. And finally, for my part, the county testing program, we've run into a little bit of frustration over the last few days. Our expectation is that the program will start next week. Today, we were hoping to have all of our data uploaded to Verbosity, which is the company that we'll be doing the electronic consent. They have to still review the data privacy that they're receiving from every school district they're working with. It wasn't something they had

020put into their calculations when signing the contract with Mount Sinai and the county. So we hope to have those signed by them in the next day and have a welcome letter out to parents sometime either tomorrow or by midweek. Originally, our timeline was to have that letter out on Friday, but there was additional contract discussions going on between the county and Mount Sinai. So it looks like we will have the opportunity to do about 1200 tests per week. It's 20% of our total population of staff and students. And we will have the opportunity for gateway testing on the way in which is a one-time allotment of our entire population, which is 5,500 or so tests. So again, we look to start that program next week, as long as everything goes smoothly with finishing up the

021contract with Verbosity. Any questions on those few things? Eric, when you say start the program next week, do you mean like actual testing will start next week? Yes. So like parents will get the vial sent home this week? Well, no, we would only send the vials home 24 hours before collection. So we would both hand out and collect the vials next week. Okay. Eric, can you just remind us has the consent for the testing gone out yet? No, because originally the county had told us we would be doing that, well originally they told us we would be doing that via paper collection to which we Rachel wonderfully developed an entire Google Form for us to do that on then the Mount Sinai and the county thought better of it and engaged Verbosity to do a

022online consent collection. So that's, what is. We had asked parents before if they were gonna be willing-- Correct. We wanted to get an idea of what participation would-- I'm just curious if you have a sense of what that looked like. It was around 80% of the respondents to that survey. So we had two, 2000 or so respondents? I'm just curious-- Around 2000 respondents out of the community with about 80% willing. And just for those watching home 2000 respondents was it by student or by family? So does that represent-- By students. So that's 2000 students? Correct. So roughly a little less than half. Okay, thank. The next portion. Sorry, (mutters). Yeah, please. Eric, so the priority is still to test unvaccinated students and un-vaccinated athletes and teachers? So there's two classes of mandated testing that will

023fall into the 1200 tests. And that's the student athletes who are un-vaccinated and staff and teachers who are unvaccinated. And then we have the opportunity to use the rest of the test to screen students, we will focus most of that testing on the elementary and early middle school students as they are the uneligible they're ineligible for vaccines and our data has shown us that we have a very high rate of vaccination in the middle and high school. Just to give you a little window into the cases that we have had at the middle school level, they're almost exclusively students who are six then early seventh, early year, late or late, early birthday, young seventh graders, I'll say it that way, and sixth graders. And then at the elementary schools, obviously, and that's where most of

024our cases have been. So you may not know this number, but I'm wondering how many elementary school students and sixth grade students plus like out of that 1200, what percent of the unvaccinated are we? We have about 2200 elementary students-- 2000. 2000 elementary students and probably another 450-- 350 But that's sixth grade plus probably half of the seventh grade. Yeah, for sure. So probably call it 2,500 for a pretty reasonable number. So we can test about 50%? Remember we can only test those who consent, so I'm not sure exactly who will actively give us consent for that. But once we get that number, we'll know what percentage of those we can test each week. Thanks. I'm just curious for the people that will be tested, because it's not everybody who's eligible to be tested. How

025will those names be selected? Is it at random? Is there by a certain percentage by school? It will depend on how many and at what grade levels they separate out to. Once we do that, we'll develop a rotating, a rotating schedule of who would be able to test because I'm assuming with 1200 tests, there'll be a three or four week rotation where we could get everyone on that on the consent list tested. So rather than doing random each week, we'll just do it in a succession of, so everybody gets tested on a cycle. Thank you, Eric. So the next section we're gonna talk about is instruction during quarantine and Drew is gonna lead us through that. Thank you, Dr. Hagerman. So we've been actively working to develop a plan at each of the three levels

026that's a unique to each of the three levels. Although obviously some overlap or similarity exists to support our students who are unable to come to school due to quarantine and are otherwise well. So high school, the administration and Scarsdale Teacher Association representatives have been in discussion since before school started, same with the middle school, and we pulled together a K through five representative group to work through questions and issues related to the model we would put in place for quarantine instruction. So I'm gonna review each of the three levels and then talk about some big picture principles or ideas that we have in the back of our mind. So what's common among the three levels is there's going to be two commode. There are two components to supporting our students who are home on quarantine.

027One is a role that is played by the classroom teacher or the subject area teacher. And then the second is tutoring support for virtual tutoring because obviously we're still in that virtual mode. If the reason a student is out is quarantine. So obviously, the classroom teacher is plays the role of trying to, or the subject area teacher plays the role of trying to help keep the student engaged in activities through the tutoring that help them prepare for a seamless, a possible return to school as can be achieved. We acknowledge though that that tutoring is not a substitute for being in the classroom and certainly there are some favorable things like perhaps a one-to-one ratio between the tutor and the student different from a classroom ratio, but obviously it's not an exact replica of classroom instruction.

028So at the elementary level, K five, once we've identified that we have a student or students out on quarantine, the classroom teacher will play the role of checking in with the family, the student, by either emails, Zoom, or a phone call initially once the quarantine first happens, to check in and establish expectations. The teachers will then check in every two to three days, the student is absent due to quarantine with a similar format, phone calls, Zoom or a email. And the purpose of the check-in will be to reassure the student, answer general questions and develop an appropriate plan for the students return. Simultaneously, the teacher's coordinating with the tutor, providing necessary direction on the curriculum assignments and so forth and maintaining their platform, the communication platform, which has typically been Schoology at the younger grades

029and Google Classroom at the upper grades. In terms of tutoring. I think as most of you know last year, we contracted with a tutoring agency LearnWell, and we've had a range of success with that. Some in some instances it was a very good match and some it was problematic. So this year we are first going to ask Scarsdale teachers who are willing to tutor to play that role. The upside is it's our teachers, they know the curriculum, in some cases may know the students. We're not able to a hundred percent guarantee that a Scarsdale teacher will be able to take that job, but that's what we're gonna try to achieve first. Of course, another challenge is that the contact, if it is a Scarsdale teacher would happen after school cause they're engaged otherwise. Whereas the

030tutoring agency could provide theoretically, if they set up the time could provide tutoring during school hours when a Scarsdale teacher would be otherwise teaching. But that is gonna be our goal first to look toward the school itself that the student comes from and then across the other elementary schools, and as a third case, then we may have to engage, LearnWell, our agency in the tutoring, but we will attempt to accomplish all that decision-making within the first 24 hours of the student being in quarantine. Once the match is made, taking the example of a Scarsdale tutor, that teacher will make contact first with the classroom teacher to get up to speed on where the student is and what they're working on, and then develop a schedule with the family for the two hours a day of

031tutoring for the duration of the quarantine. In the instance where it may take a day to get that off the ground, we will provide that two hours on the back end. So if it's a five day absence, the 10 hours will be fulfilled two hours a day, whether it's in those five days or whether it extends to two a day, because it took a day to start. Does that make sense? So we think the enhancement there is when possible having a Scarsdale teacher playing the role of tutor to support our kids at the elementary level. Second moving to the middle school level. A difference here is the role of the counselor or the house office as being sort of a collection point for the very fact that the student has multiple teachers, it's not a

032single classroom teacher. So despite that each teacher that the student has, will also have a contact point with the student, like we explained in the elementary level. the teacher will keep their, Schoology is the platform for middle school, for of course, progress and work and so forth. So as they always do, those teachers will keep their Schoology page up to date. And the counselor's office will work to maintain a shared document that contains the required work for the student while they are on quarantine. So there's sort of a one stop shop for that student and family to go to, to figure out what they need to do. And that will act as the daily guide for the student to go through the work. Every other day, the teacher will make contact with the student that's

033each of the core subject teachers they'll check in with Zoom initially upon learning of the quarantine and we'll check in those check-ins may take place during preps or during the lunch period or afterschool depending on the teacher's schedule, but that will be coordinated through that document and through the House Counselor's Office. And then students will have access to tutoring. We're thinking about it as the duration of these quarantines sometimes can be as short as two days or three days depending or they could be as long as I think we calculate maybe eight days is probably the longest it would likely be. So we're thinking of it as 30 minutes per day, per subject for the five core subjects. Again, we're going to seek Scarsdale tutors and retirees to be Scarsdale teachers and retirees to serve

034as the tutor. In the middle school some of those time scheduled times could happen during the school day on a teacher's prep of retiree obviously has a broader flexibility there, we do have a list of teachers and retirees that is being built in the middle school. Lots of teachers and retirees have indicated interest and so we have that list and we will work to build within hopefully within a day to build the team that's gonna support that student during that time that they're out. And that will continue through the, again, through the duration of the quarantine. The one piece still being discussed is there are some subjects that are interested in live streaming. So those subject, not all, but those subjects that would be part of the mix is a live streaming into that class.

035We're thinking about it as a passive live stream. Obviously the bulk of the students, attention of the teachers on the classroom full of students in front of them. But for some subjects being able to live stream seems to be the preferred mode of that department. And you'll hear a lot of similarities in the high school, same ideas, same fundamental ideas. We do have a team of Scarsdale teachers from each department and retirees who have indicated their interest in supporting our students who are absent due to quarantine. There'll be a check-in every other day with the actual teacher that'll occur via Zoom or a phone call. Again, the purpose of the check-in is to kind of keep the student on track, see what questions are burning and develop the appropriate plan for the return to school.

036Again, at the high school, there will be some departments. It will be course specific. In other words, if there are three, four teachers of a certain course, all of them would agree to livestream, not just one and the other three don't, that would be the unit of live streaming as the entire course in that particular grade level. So where that happens, that that live stream will take place. And again, we're thinking 60 minutes of tutoring for each core subject during the course of a week. So the idea there between the teacher check-in, we don't wanna overdo it on the times that students have to check in with this tutor, this tutor, this tutor, we're gonna start with that and see where we go once this happens. We will also have contact with the Learning Resource

037Center teacher and the Academic Support Center teacher they'll engage their quarantine students via Zoom during class time. So that's an at class time connection that'll be made. And the related service providers, we will work to provide sessions either by Zoom or makeup miss sessions when they returned, depending on the priority will really be on those other tutoring sessions, getting those scheduled and then going to those other services. So this will be managed level by level within each building. And obviously, so we have our, our first test case for this at the middle school today, and that's being put into place and we're gonna learn, we're gonna adapt, we're gonna adjust, but that's what we've got agreement and plans written down for. We will produce a parent facing communication about this, that lays out what I've

038described, hopefully more clearly than I've stated it here, but that will give parents an understanding of what they can expect, who they should expect to be the contact people and so forth. So that's where we are right now. Thank you, Drew. That was very clear actually. Do you have any questions? Yeah, go ahead. Thanks Drew. That was really clear, but I do still have a few questions. So are the students, especially in the middle school and high school expected to be keeping up with all the work while they're away using this model? Yeah. Well, I think they're expected to the teachers are prioritizing the work that is most essential for them to keep up on. So there'll still have to turn in the assignments at the same time? So the teachers will exhibit the kind

039of flexibility that's needed to support the students and recognize the fact that they're not there. That's really gonna be individualized. It's gonna depend on what's being studied at that particular time, what shape or form the assignments or assessments take and so forth. And especially if part of the fun factor is a student is actually not well then our regular policy takes place. The priority for a student is to get better if they're not feeling well, in regular times and COVID times. And as a result of that, that priority means a flexible standpoint for the student to reenter get work made up, have assessments made up in due time after they've had access to the curriculum and the material. Great. And you mentioned LRC in the high school, will the middle school also have access to

040LRC, those students if they're quarantined? So those teachers will make contact. I need to follow up on that and I'll make that clear, more clear in the document. I'm not exactly sure what the day to day plan is on that. I know there is one, I just didn't have it written down here, but I know Megan and the team came up with that answer. One more question. Do we know which subjects might be live stream at either the high school or middle school, or is that still being decided? It's still being decided, there's sort of the perennial interest of mathematics. I know at the middle school, both the math and the world language teachers are interested in this, I think they're still thinking about the logistics of it and exactly what that'll look like, but

041those are the two areas that had sort of raised their hand and said, this is something we're interested in. Thank you. You're welcome, Karen. Is the intent to match the teacher with the students in their classroom as tutors? So the students, classroom teacher being the tutor? Yes, yeah. That is a possibility. It's not a guarantee, but we're open to that and we see that as a benefit when possible. Is it possible, if you have more than two students out from the same classroom that they may be tutored together, if their classroom teacher is the tutor? Yeah. We're leaving that open at actually at all three levels, but yes. I don't think we want five or six kids, but one or two or three makes sense. Firstly, I just wanna say, I think it's great that

042we're trying to get Scarsdale teachers to be the tutors and so thank you to the administration and also to all those teachers that are willing to do it. I mean, I'm sure the tutoring service is great, but boy there's, I don't see how we could substitute for the teachers that are here in our district. So that's really fantastic to hear. I had one question at the elementary related to that. So I think at the middle and the high school it's would work in situation, at the elementary, you could run into a scenario where due to work commitments or other childcare doing it after school would be more difficult for a family, if that were to be the case, could that family request during the day tutoring understanding it wouldn't be a Scarsdale teacher? Yes. Okay.

043That's great. We can accommodate that for. I am sure people will appreciate that flexibility. Just one, and maybe this is a comment from Eric, but I mean, based on what you said before, there should be very few scenarios where we have quarantines going forward between the change in proximate and vaccines-- You'll if I don't wanna say it out loud and jinx it, but yes, generally speaking under the quarantine rules, we should see less quarantines per positive case, which should reduce the stress on the system. I say that fully knowing that should we have something like a community outbreak where the Health Department has the right to be subjective about who they quarantine and why and when? There could always be something like that that happens. But yes, assuming normal functioning of the current quarantine rules

044as they are now, we should have many, few fewer quarantine. It's just important to remember the message that we put out last year, which is this is a compact or a partnership between the school district and our families. Because what we found is while there's not spread in school, many of these cases are related to outside activities and so it's really important that people continue to use some level of risk mitigation if kids are gathering outside of the school for other, whether it's at home play dates or sports activities or whatever, but it is really important that we all are sort of operating off that same principles. And to that point, just correct me if I'm mistaken, Drew, you had mentioned sort of calculate most of the eight days, but if there is a scenario

045where a student gets quarantine and then later test positive, it could be-- It could be 20. Or a family member test positive. Or another family member, right. Yeah. There are situations, they were few and far between last year where students would have successive quarantines due to any number of those types of scenarios. I'd also say just to say it out loud and set expectations, with the Delta variant and the higher viral load, we believe our mitigation strategies will do exactly that mitigate the spread of COVID within our schools. I do think it would be foolish to believe that we'll never have any in school or community spread throughout the entire year, especially with this new variant. And there may be situations where if we have a case that could possibly be traced back to a

046classroom spread, we may have a larger quarantine of that grade, that class, depending on what the Department of Health turns up in their contact tracing. So actually just wanna follow up on that, cause it's both related to testing and instruction. Let's say we do this gateway testing and in a classroom, let's start with the younger kids, it's fair if they're not vaccinated, let's say there's three kids that test positive, we don't know why, it may not be from school spread. If you start to see the whole class quarantine, does that change what instructions? Yeah. Absolutely. So when we're talking about the majority or the full class being on quarantine, that would be a move to remote learning with their teacher. Even if that teacher doesn't happen to be positive or is in quarantine, it doesn't

047make sense to tutor all of those students while not having them together in a remote situation. And we did have an example where we had, how many... So we had the 12 that were quarantined in Quaker Ridge. What we wound up doing was giving them a remote schedule with a substitute while and kind of flip-flopping the substitute and the main teacher each day a little bit to keep them the whole class moving forward, rather than figuring out 12 different tutoring scenarios with those students. Thanks and sorry, just two more questions. Default on Amber's question about the middle school LRC, is that the same at the elementary? There'll be any related service will somehow be. They'll be a daily check in with the LRC teachers. The LRC teacher worked directly with the family, in some cases,

048some of those groups might be a one or two person group that may be able to student may be able to kind of come into remotely. In other cases, they may need to do the check out outside of that, if it's a four or five person group, but it doesn't make sense to have that student Zoom in, related services again are usually one to two a week mandates. So they may just make up that extra session as they come back because it occupational therapy, physical therapy and speech don't always lend themselves to a remote situation. And so I don't think I typed this. I didn't capture this, Drew, at the middle school what is the tutoring you said 30 minutes per subject? Yeah. That's the per core subject per day. Per day. And at the

049high school was 60 minutes per week? Per week. Thank you. And I too wanna extend my thanks to the teachers, the idea of teachers as Scarsdale teachers as tutors came from the STA. And so once they suggested that we work to try to think, how would that work? What are the logistics? How would we get? And so that is a good, good piece of it. At the high school, in particular, that structure of tutorial time and so on, that's part of the fabric of the high school is why we think that teacher contact is an increasingly valuable part of the whole picture and therefore the tutoring time might be a little bit less because there'll be more time with that particular teacher than maybe we would do, be able to do it in another level.

050That makes sense. And I just I'd be remiss if I didn't say, I think you already said this to the extent that we tried this and it's not working us we think, I think we will reassess because I know parents have asked about that. That's a theme that can be applied across all of these issues. All right, so transitioning into meals, snacks and lunch at schools, I think we've been pretty clear about the lunch protocols. We are trying to utilize the outdoors as much as possible. Today was a glorious day, this week we'll probably be glorious. We do know that as the weather turns over time, that that's gonna limit our ability to be outdoors. Having said that not all of our students would be able to be outdoors just because of the physical footprint

051of each building and each outdoor space attached to our buildings. So again, we're maximizing that to the extent possible whenever we can and we're really hoping that the weather cooperates and we have a nice long autumn in order to get those practices sort of fully into place. It is important to me to mention that we are maintaining the six foot distancing as part of the launch program. That's a really, really important part of this protocol. And again, to, to help avoid quarantines if there's any, sort of issues with kids around that, but that's a significant part of it, which also leads into the conversation around snacks. There has been some questions that were raised about the restricting of student activities during lunch. And we'd gotten some early feedback that kids were told that they couldn't

052talk to each other or interact during lunchtime. And we've been addressing those questions one-on-one, we've not put restrictive activities onto the students. We do know that this is a lunchtime, which is an important developmental milestone in the day of a child being at school, those peer interactions, which they were sorely missing last year. It's something we wanna continue to build off of. So, we do want kids to focus on eating and keeping social distance, and sometimes when you engage in a lot of chatter, you find yourself drifting closer to somebody as a natural way. So we are holding to that, but we are not asking kids to be silent or to do those kinds of things. And again, with this idea that as the health metrics improve, we want that to diminish over time and

053have kids sort of returned to normal around that. Just it might be worth for parents to hear the language that our elementary school teachers and aides are using is that if you wanna chat with your friend, just pop your mass back up while you talk and you can take it down. So that's what we're asking them to do is simply pop their mask on when they're gonna have that conversation. But still maintaining the six foot during the actual meal time, the recess is different in which the, we're not following that as closely. And then in terms of snacks, this has been an ongoing dialogue with some parents. And in fact, today we had a good conversation with the PTC leadership team around it. They're not being offered at this time, this comports with our practice

054last year, we came back to full in-person learning. We didn't have snacks during that time and students have adjusted accordingly. Having said that if there's any sort of a need around having snacks, medical or by parent request, we've been accommodating those needs, we don't need a lot of fancy paperwork or things like that. If somebody says, my kid really just has to have a snack in the morning, we've been working at a very low level, just letting the teachers know and making that happen on an individual basis, but there are some complications around offering it wholesale to the schools. We're really at will tell you very cognizant of the educational programming this year, because of all the things that, all the feedback that we received last year about that as a diminished opportunity for students.

055And so really prioritizing the educational aspect of it, same thing goes with snacks that goes for lunch. You have to have six foot social distancing, and you have to have seating charts, you have to know where kids are, you have to spread kids out. And when you start thinking about the time for that, the supervision that's required for that and all the other logistical aspects of it, it really would have a huge impact, we believe on the educational, time that we have dedicated towards students. So we do take mass breaks, that tend to be pretty quick, but also frequent. Again, we're accommodating snacks wherever necessary, but in light of all the other pieces of it at this point, we're not offering snacks. But again, our intent is certainly to move back to that as soon

056as we're able to. And of course this all hinges on the health metrics and again, I just, I want everyone to hear the board and the community that this is an iterative process and we continue to go back and talk about these on a weekly basis, both within the cabinet group and amongst our principal groups. And we continue to use the feedback that we're hearing from parents in today's example with the PTC on how to continue to improve and to make sure that we're being made aware of the student experience of the parent's experience and of course from the teacher's experience. It's worth noting. I think that the PTC actually was in full agreement with this and in terms of their after-school programming and things, they're not gonna be offering snacks as well. They understand

057the burden and don't feel like they can ask their vendors to do the seating charts and the monitoring of that and the six foot social distancing when their programs are really about the programming as well and trying to maximize that time for students to be on task or to have some sort of an opportunity or experience, which they usually find enjoyable after school as well. So any questions about food right now? We do know, I guess another piece of feedback that we have is sort of the grab and go options. Maybe seem a little more limited than other options that kids have had in the past. And again, that's something that Tara is aware of. Stuart's aware of that, as we are able to expand our lunch program, that means we'll also be able to

058expand our lunch offerings and be a little more in liking with the way things were in the past. I have one question about snack very specifically about at the elementary there's three lunch periods. So some kids eat around 11:30 and some kids don't eat till 12:40 or 12:30. The kids that eat at 12:30. 12:40, I believe also have recess before their lunch. So they may have eaten breakfast at seven in the morning, now it's five hours or outdoors, it's beautiful they're running and I have a feedback from some parents that that's very challenging for kids and then to focus in the classroom. So my question about accommodating, and this could be for any kid, but I've heard it more from the people with kids that have the latest lunch, if their kids need, can they

059just have a snack during recess, to get that to bridge them to that period since they're already outdoors, they're unmasked, I mean there's supervision? I mean, the way they to answer that, I think it would be more challenging to do that at recess for a whole host we need to know where they are, again, who they're around all those kinds of things. So I think what we'd ask is to direct them back to the teachers and the teachers will find a way to make sure that they have an opportunity to have a snack if a specific student needs that. Any other questions? I do think it's also important to understand we've had this slow start to school, which two day, three day and then a four day week. So this week is gonna feel particularly

060long to students. We did run school without snack for all of last year, both in the hybrid and the full back to school piece. There is a getting used to it, especially if students have been used to having snacks through the summer, they will start to a customize themselves to those periods. There are certainly kids that need the exception, but in general, we did not have many of those kids last year who were in need of those exceptions, they did exist hypoglycemic students, students with diabetes, but also students who may be just, given their own personal makeup really needed that for focus. So those are things that we can accommodate, but kids do get used to that timeframe. I just wanna, I appreciate that. I do just wanna remind everyone, we're talking about little kids

061they're growing. I don't know about everybody else here, but there's often days where I have early breakfast and I need a snack to keep going. So I very much appreciate what this administration did to get lunch outdoors. I heard great feedback. Now it is beautiful out. It might rain later in the week, but it's just fantastic that we get these kids outdoors for lots of reasons. To the extent we can figure out a way more broadly for snack, for kids that are growing. I do think people would appreciate it, understanding all the limitations that you face. Can I just comment on that Ron? I agree, but one thing that came up when I thought, when you were mentioning, like can the kids have snack at recess as an allergy parent that would be a nightmare.

062So I think you really have to think through if you're going to offer any kind of snack in a non-traditional setting and I would encourage you to be very careful about that. So just something to keep in mind. Good points. Thank you. All right, I'm gonna turn it over to Edgar and ask him to talk about the American Rescue Plan Act funding and some of the associated logistics with that. And so on the consent agenda you will see two grants that have been-- Edgar, can you use your microphone? Make sure it's on as well. Thank you. Third try is charm. On the consent agenda you'll see two grants that have been recently approved by the State Education Department. We're currently working we're in the process of repairing our application for Scarsdale allocation for the American

063Rescue Plan Act. Our multi-year plan for these is posted on the curriculum website in our COVID 19 adaptation section, under federal grants. We invite the Scarsdale community to offer feedback through Tuesday, September 28th, by way of a Google Form that we've set up. The application is of course, a quick turnaround for the New York State it's due by September 30th. Any questions? Mine was short. Very good. Thank you. All right, we're gonna ask Ray to come up to the table or maybe the podium actually. And talk to us a little bit about athletics, please. Thank you, Thomas. We've had 680 students at Scarsdale High School, which roughly 46% of student population cleared for 27 teams in 11 different sports based on the self report at the time of the gold card processing, we're about a

06494% vaccination rate, but we've seen that go up since school has started. So we think we're upwards of 95% at this point. And we're in the process of confirming that now. At the middle school, we have 198 students cleared for six teams in four different sports. And right now the only limitation on students who are not fully vaccinated is that they'll be tested on a weekly basis. There've been some rules and restrictions that have moved a little more towards normalcy and it just plastic athletics, but obstacles still exist. We have shortages of officials that are changing the way that we schedule a boys and girls soccer games. We have a shortage of bus drivers across the section, which are forcing some games to go later into the night. And there's some delays in the supply

065chain. We saw that with our football helmets, which finally came in on September 14th. Dean Field close until the spring, but it's starting to look good and we're wrapping up the final touches there, but the three hard rainstorms we've had have caused some damage that you'll hear about later on Butler Field. We're hopeful that those repairs at least to finish out the season that will be done toward the end of this week. But all in all, we're pretty fortunate, sports started on time this year, we have the largest subscription rate that I've seen in my time here. We haven't had any debilitating restrictions at this point, we're operating a good hygienic practices. All of our teams are underways and really the restriction that you'll see most, I guess the most restrictive is that we use

066masks indoors. And if we've had multi school events, we've limited no spectators. But again, we're fortunate, our audio visual has set up three dedicated live streaming channels, our Raiders TV 1, Raiders TV 2, and the Sports Backup Channel. Indoor events will be streamed on Raiders TV, outdoor on Raiders TV 2 and we'll use the back the Backup Channel to supplement as well as YouTube and Zoom when we're offsite. As we go throughout the year, we're gonna continue to monitor, monitor status of COVID and adjust accordingly. But so far the kids look really happy they'd be participating and we've had a good turnout so far. Thank you. Any questions? Ray, has competitive cheer had opportunity to compete? So the fall season is not a competitive season, but they are stunting, tumbling and flying. I was with

067them today, we're working on some tumbling is outstanding, but yeah, they're slotted for competitions. We don't know what that will look like yet, just because all the protocols aren't in and those things are continually evolving. Some of the other, like, I guess, restrictions, we have no control over our facility, offsite facility restrictions. So, see we have a swim meet against Sarah Lawrence against Eastchester High School, which would be held at Sarah Lawrence College. And they require all attendees to be vaccinated. So that's, student athletes, coaches, and any visitors, we're fortunate as we scan through our roster and our coaching staff, that we would be able to participate in that. But because the requirements came in so late, Eastchester was not yet prepared for that implementation. So, these things are continually evolving, but right now we're

068poised for cheer to start to start competing at the end of this fall. I think they have one competition early November, and then to be competitive throughout the winter season. Yes, Ron. Ray, on live streaming, are you able to do that for any outdoor sporting events? Where there is cell service, yes. So right now we can do most of the activities that happen on a Butler Field because we can either get a hardwired connection or we have access to our Wi-Fi out there. The major limiting factor would be any sort of broad band like limitation, where the cell service is not strong. Last year, we had a hard time doing that throughout the town and at some off-site locations. Gotcha. And last year, if I recall correctly, we had student announcers for some of those

069live streaming that people very much appreciated that continue that program? We will continue that it's based on student availability, but yeah, we are pursuing that. We're pursuing other areas of student using students in sports management with teams. We do have a website and I'll hold off on the team right now. But we have a student who redesigned a sports team website. That's much more spectator and family friendly. We're gonna use that as a template for other teams where it has recent results, it's easy to post. We're using Google Sites for that right now. And I think it will be compatible with school wires, number one. And won't won't impact that in any negative way. So yeah, we're looking at ways that we can include students who may not be competing on teams in the management

070of our program and and publication of our, or get more our teams more publicity. That's great, thank you. A lot of people had a lot of positive feedback about getting the students involved who may not be an athlete in other ways. And then last question, but this might be more for Stuart later. I've received a lot of questions about the sound system at Butler Field and the status of that, that might be a facilities, but I figured. Yeah, I can talk about that in depth. So when I got divorced from the lights project, there was some infrastructure that was missing from the installation when the lights went in that's really what's been the holdup. And we wanna make sure that we do that right, so that we fixed some of the, I guess, some of

071the practical problems that we have there, like, cell service, Wi-Fi connection, the ability to put cameras outdoors. So we need that infrastructure on the west side of the field cause that was not there. The east side is covered, but we're working with our architects to get that up and running as soon as possible. Do you have a general sense, cause if I recall correctly, I think our original plan was for this summer to get it done and it came after the first football game, when a lot of people asked, do you have a general sense of time? I do not. And for me, the key part was to solve the amplified sound issue, where we had lots of the sound escaping the stadium area. I wanna make sure that we're able to put speakers wherever

072they need to be and not just band-aid and put speakers on one side of the field and just create a more expect, spend more money to still have the same problem. So I don't have a deadline on that, but I'm happy to bring it to the board once, once we do have an estimated deadline. When the previous board took it out of the budget, the community stepped up to fund it. So I think everyone's very appreciative and we accepted the gift. So to the extent that we can make sure we keep them informed on what's happening. I think it's great we're doing all the Wi-Fi and everything. I can understand some who may be committed financially, so that's a different thing, right then the speakers I get why it makes sense. It's just the infrastructure.

073So the infrastructure is the same because it's the running the conduit and the power. So those are the critical pieces, us doing the Wi-Fi at a later date is not imperative, but having the conduit there and the power run to those poles was not done. So those things need to be there. But we can do that, even though it wasn't done as part of the original lights and like it's not an issue? Correct. Correct. It just some trenching needs to be done and it needs to be put in the right place. And a power needs to be run to the poles, the light poles on the west side of the field. So that's additional power to what what's already there. So it's one additional circuit on that side, it's not another hookup. The power we

074need is onsite. There's just one additional circuit that needs to be run to each of the poles, in addition to conduit, to convey that power and the audio visual, any fiber table that needs to be run for networking and for audio visual. Understanding what you said about not doing the wrong project, essentially, and not to which we don't wanna do. Obviously it's gonna be here for a long time, so we want it done properly. But if there is an opportunity to stage it, I guess where some of the sound gets done, that might be a place where you could make some impact, just a thought. We've been using a temporary system and just, playing it not as loudly there to cover those games. I just wanted to ask, is there a timeline for getting that

075work done. There isn't at this point? Once there is, I'll share that with the board and with the community. Thank you, Ray. I appreciate that. And then we have one last section for this back to school portion of the board meeting, and that's the visitor policy. So, as we've been speaking about, we have drastically reduced the number of visitors that we're having in the building. The sort of monitor that we're using is that we're restricting access to the building to mission critical meetings and events. So in other words, anything that is really critical, including parent meetings or things like that, that really have to be done in person due to the sensitive nature or by the request of the parent, we're continuing to accommodate those kinds of requests. We are avoiding large scale gatherings in

076the buildings and non-necessary kinds of meetings and exploring the option. I think, one of the silver linings of last year is that using Zooms and things like that, we've actually had more parent involvement and more parent participation, particularly of two sets of parents in meetings because of the availability of people who may be working to actually attend those meetings. So we're gonna continue to utilize that practice until we can really have more people come back in. One example that came to the board, I think, was the College and Career Center at the high school. And that has been a parent hosted kind of center for a long time. So first of all, many of the college visits are now gone virtual, which takes away some of that issue, but we are still allowing a parent

077to come in and host for college that wants to be in person. And so, because we believe that that is mission critical in terms of obviously everything that we do is to prepare students for future learning I.E college or university. And so again, that's sort of the lens through which we're looking at this work and, again, continue to iterate and think about this as unique circumstances are presented to principals or to our cabinet team as well. So, and then just to be clear, there's also an attestation process at Raptor in which people need to, obviously share their current health condition, make sure that they're healthy. They don't exhibit any signs of COVID and they go through the other screening questions. And again, going back to that partnership collaboration piece, we just expect people will be

078honest with us about that to make sure that we're not endangering students or contributing to the spread of COVID in any way. And those folks are still susceptible to the same sorts of quarantine on rules and regulations. So people who are willing to volunteer in that way, just have to realize that's part of the deal. Any questions about this or any other aspect of this had a lot of different tentacles of information. So just wanna go back and see if there's anything else. Yeah, Karen. I was so curious as we hear that participation is up to the highest level you've seen in sports. I was curious to know, you may not know now, but just as a follow up question, are we seeing that same participation level increase in activities for students after school, so

079in terms of mental health and the thrill of being back in school, I was wondering if we're seeing that in other areas as well? It's a great question. Afterschool clubs at the elementary school, middle and high school are really just getting off the ground. So I don't know, we don't know yet. It's our first days, but I suspect Karen for the very reasons that you described in your question, that I think there is just this sense of hunger on the part of kids to be involved, to see each other, again, you know many kids love school, but they also love all of the co-curricular opportunities that they get to participate in. And they've missed those quite honestly. And there will be some diminished, as we know, we had some changes to our insurance policy here

080in which some vendors are not gonna be able to participate. So I suspect that the classes and offerings that are provided will be actually very full this year. Just as a FYI, we did receive an email from Mount Sinai. They expect to have our privacy documents signed tomorrow. That will be very helpful. It means at least by Friday. (chuckles) Ron says, is the insurance changes you just mentioned COVID related, is that what's? No, this was through nicer and are larger and they're just requiring much more. I mean, Stuart can speak to this, it's more hoops and it's more expensive for folks to be able to. And we don't have any ability to kind of write off that expense or to take that on as a school district, because these are really from outside vendors. Stuart

081you wanna say something more? Yeah. I mean, that's really on. Correct what Thomas said, we have offered like another option as far as umbrella goes, that could be cheaper. In many instances, the outside vendors are able to meet those requirements once we shared that alternative. And this isn't limited to Scarsdale to be clear, this is a statewide issue and all the school districts are dealing with the same issue. No, I totally understand. It's just, I'm thinking about some of the after schools are smaller vendors that are starting to get into a new area niche, maybe it's stem or robotics, they may not be a big company yet and I just hope that we don't, not we--- The state. The requirements don't stifle the ability to have some of those cool fun clubs that are new

082for kids. We're in total agreement and we're as frustrated as the vendors and the PTA's are. And I'm sorry, I may have missed this under the first assessment, I know Eric did mental health under academic, did you talk to about that and we're gonna do an update at a later time? We have a star dates are opening up Edgar end of September, I believe? Yeah. Closing October. So mid-October, we'll have our first universal screening numbers in which will give us really an analysis of where students are. Additionally, teachers will be working through their F&Ps with students over the first few weeks of school. Say what F&P is? Sorry, Fountas and Pinell, which is a reading assessment that we use across all-- It sounds terrible when you don't say the full name, we do just as

083a reminder as well, Edgar presented a lot of data and so when we have this new set of data will be really important for us to sort of see where kids were last year and compare that to sort of this year's assessments to get a truer understanding of the progress that students have made. So that was a lengthy report. I think it was all important information for both the board and the community to hear, so we appreciate your indulgence of that. And I'm gonna turn it back to Karen for hearing from those present. I was gonna say, and we thank you for your comprehensive report and especially for the iterative approach you are taking to the work you're doing. So next does item four, a hearing, I'm sorry, agenda item for hearing from those present

084and we will begin with a board discussion related to remote public comment. At our last meeting, the board came to consensus that it wanted to enable remote public participation. We formed a committee to examine and amend the four policies that are currently limiting that opportunity. That again, members on that committee are Ron, Jessica and me. We are meeting this Friday for our first subcommittee meeting on that, which will be televised. But in the meantime, as noted in my opening comments, the governor's recent legislation permits school boards, the flexibility to conduct hybrid public meetings, meaning in-person and remote and remote public comment in-person and remote through January 15th, 2022. After consultation with our attorney, I propose that the board resolve to restore the protocols used last year for in-person and remote public comment and also add

085that remote participants be required to turn on their cameras when speaking. I'd like to move to item 4.02 and read the resolution as attached in the agenda, be it resolved that the Board of Education hereby adopts the following rules for public comment at regular board meetings, members of the public are cordially invited to be present either in-person or via remote means and to speak at designated times on agenda items or other non personnel related matters. Each individual she'll 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 present at the board meeting will speak first, community members speaking via Zoom will speak second, community members speaking via Zoom must have their camera turned on when it is their

086turn to speak. Be it further resolved that the Board of Education shall maintain these rules for public comment until such time as it has had the opportunity to formulate, develop and adopt amendments to its existing policies in accordance with policy number 24 10. I move that the board approve this resolution. Is there a second? Second. Do we have discussion? Actually, I have a question which is sort of slightly off on the resolution, is there a second public comment, has that been, I'm trying to remember that that has not been impacted by anything, so we're still just at the same, I think it was three minutes, but no 90 minute limitation? Yes, that's correct. That's correct. I support this resolution. All in favor. Wait, sorry. Sorry, I just, as a comment, just like last year the

087aspect of it that I don't agree with is the three minutes and the 90 minute cap, however, given that we have a committee that's looking at this, this is temporary. And that I think remote getting the remote public comment is the most important piece is paramount. I'm happy to support it, but I felt important that I share my views since last year is something I wasn't able to support. And just to add to that, that as part of our review, the public is invited to open to opine on the amendments that we are, I mean, sorry, on the policies that we are looking at. So we will also be able to garner public feedback. So, sorry, just to that, that sort of goes to, agreed partly with Ron last year, which was, I wasn't happy

088about the second public comment being limited because I didn't see it as significant, but that's not being changed here. So I'm not voicing that. Although I would question the three minutes at this point. It's a little awkward because, if we have a lot of comments that go beyond, if we happen to have a problem where a lot of comments or a problem, a situation that involves a lot of public comment and people do speak and we want them to be able to speak and they go, we had a lot of people beyond three minutes, it does, and potentially interfere with our business. On the other hand, even considering last year, it's not terribly frequent. So, I mean, I'll just ask, I'm not gonna support the resolution, but I think that's definitely something that should be

089considered in the upcoming work of the committee. And I wish there was a way to kind of do it as crises arrived, but that doesn't work either for obvious reasons. So it's hard to come up with the right medium, but certainly getting this done, I think is helpful. I shook my head, no, instinctively. But in fact, you can suspend this policy at any point and if it needed to be, we have the ability the board has the ability to do that. No, no, that I understand. But I mean, I think my point is that on the one hand, I feel like if we get to a situation where we're having meetings, that we can't get through the business or we're not getting through it at a proper time of night and we're tired and it

090doesn't go well. So if that happens repeatedly, it seems like you would might wanna adjust. On the other hand, it also seems like it's good to have a process that you go by every time and you don't adjust it just as whim may come. So anyway, but yes, this is definitely something I think I can support tonight. Any additional discussion? Well, I just like to add, I mean, with respect to the three minute limit, I'm not sure that I oppose it. I do think that you, Karen, as the president have the ability to control the meeting and also if need be control the amount of time speakers have public speakers have in settings where it appears that things are getting disruptive to the business of the board. So I think that's the power you have.

091Yes it is. Whether we say it's three minutes or not. Yes. Thank you, Jim, for pointing that out. And again, we will have it again, more in depth discussion about public comment as we work on our policy revisions. So I'd like to close this discussion and ask if all are in favor of adopting this resolution? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, great resolution passes. Thank you very much. So now we will move to 4.03, public comments. Members of the audience who are here in person are invited to speak on agenda items and other non-personnel related matters. You come to the microphone, please state your name. And if you are speaking on behalf of an organization. Name and address, sorry. Thank you. Hi, how are you? Hi. My name is Diana Cohen. I just moved here a few

092weeks ago. I have three children. My eldest is in the Heathcote School and I'm here to talk about two items. First, as you discussed, it's the no snacks in school policy. My daughter and many other moms with children have told me that they're too hungry to play at recess or focus at school. You said that the kids may adjust to not having snacks, but according to the American Academy of Pediatrics, children must eat frequently and need to eat two to three snacks per day to meet their nutritional requirements. New York City public and private schools have snack breaks in the elementary age. New York city has 20 times, the COVID caseload that we have here in this county. Darien Connecticut Public Schools have snack break and they have doubled the caseload we have. Yonkers Public

093School just right around the corner also has snack break, in fact, they have it twice a day. So why are we allowing our children to be hungry and sacrifice their ability to focus at school while our neighbors are not doing that? The second topic I wanted to talk about was social distancing and masking. Social distancing and masking were implemented in the height of the pandemic, but there is a to help us get through and they're clearly very important, but there is also a toll on the young children in terms of social and psychological development. Also most public health experts at this time, agree COVID will be with us forever in some form. It will circulate like other Corona viruses for the rest of our lives. So keeping this in mind, I wanted to understand what

094is the end game for these policies for the county, will mask be removed when children are vaccine eligible? This could be very soon. It's very exciting. Are we waiting for zero COVID infections> Are we waiting for zero deaths? In Westchester County, we're very lucky to have that almost already. So what is the plan? The community wants to know so we can debate the pros and cons together. Thank you very much. Anyone else from the audience? Do we have any hands raised for remote? (mutters) Yep. Thank you, Jerry. I couldn't get it. (laughing) Amber, feel free to speak. I can't get in as a host right now, there you're promoting me. Great, thank you. Were you raising your hand? No, but I just want it to be a host, but I can't be a host. How

095do I turn off? Mayra, go ahead. We can't hear you, Mayra. We can't hear you. Are you muted? Mayra, we can't hear you. You need to unmute Mayra. We still can't hear Mayra. Can't hear you. It looks like you're un-muted and we can see you moving your mouth-- Is the microphone volume up on your computer? Make sure you look at the volume on your microphone. She said, she'll try again. She's on a big microphone. She sent it in the chat. Sorry, Mayra, if you wanna try it again. (coughing) Are you trying again now, Mayra? We can't hear you. Nothing, sorry. Sorry. Can't you call her again? Try calling her again. (mutters) Should we ask her to call to try again? That is it for the people willing to speak. She said thank you. I'm not

096sure if she's wants to call back. She's back. She's still on mute. She's showing that she's still muted. Right now, Mayra, it looks like you're on our end. It looks like you're muted. Now she is open. Nope. She's open. Now you're open. We cannot hear you though. Kinda almost hear her. It's like there is a sound. That's very frustrating. Right now, Mayra, it looks like you're muted. I'm not. Yeah, we can hear. We hear you. We heard you. Now we hear you. (chuckles) Okay. Can you hear me now? Yes. Yeah. Yeah, you can hear? Yes. Okay, great. Very strange it's worked all day. Really? Again? We can hear you. Go ahead. You're good. Okay, fine. Camera on. (speaking in foreign language) For all that celebrate the year 5,782. (indistinct chatter) Mayra, can you turn your

097television? Can you turn your television off, Mayra? Turn your television off. Your livestream. And turn your camera on if you would. There we go, perfect. There we go, we're gonna get it to work eventually. Got it. So thank you very much. Mayra Pakendol Rodriguez... For all celebrating the year 5,782. (speaking in foreign language) I am speaking as one of the three co-chairs of the Scarsdale Middle School PTA Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Committee. Thank you, Dr. Hagerman for mentioning Hispanic Heritage Month and highlighting the many Latin American countries independence phase that are being celebrated from September 15th, and October 16. (speaking in foreign language) We wanted to report that we had 14 arts permissions for Hispanic Heritage Month. We thank all the students and families who participated. We were really impressed by the creativity of the

098students. We have a special thank you for the Salvadori grandmother who donated a lovely oil painting that she painted to celebrate Hispanic cultures. We had a diversity of students who participated, which we found really heartening. And each of us art instructor Jessica Fass very kindly gave up her time and expertise and displaying the art in the hall of her class. I'd like to invite all of us as parents and other staff save October 12th at 6:30 PM here at Dr. Edgar Mclntosh and SMS principal, Meghan Troy, talked about DEI in the middle school curriculum. Closer to the time we will send out the Zoom link. The event we'll have a question and answer session, but at the end of this week, the SMS PTA DEI committee plans to finalize the Hispanic resource page, which will

099have information about Hispanics in United States, as well as the presentation called Hispanics in Numbers with a variety of tables and different data visualization graphs, to help understand that the but growth in America's largest minority group. Subsequently, we intend to add other pages to include other groups. I would welcome SMS parents or students to volunteer, to contribute articles, art, or other resources to the SMS PTA DEI page. In July, over 20 parents that to talk about DEI activities and events that they're interested in, so we will be having a number of speakers and activities later in the spring related to LGBTQ, neurodiversity, the Bali and the inclusion of Asian and African-Americans. And we welcome volunteers to join us, to run these events and to adjust any others that they might see meaningful for the SMS

100community. Thank you very much and good night. Thank you, Mayra. Now we'll move to no, the hands raised, right? So I'll close the first public comment, let's move to item five, follow up to public comment addressing matters raised. Yeah, I just would like to thank Mayra and the other folks on her committee on the school's committee around these efforts, in speaking with a PTC today, there's a very strong, willingness and commitment to doing this DEI work. And the nice thing is everyone's committed to doing sort of the district work and working on the district goals, but also to keep site-specific work going on, which is obviously as Mayra just described, it has a really meaningful impact on students who are engaged in this work, in this case, portrait projects and learning about Hispanic cultures and

101other kinds of things. So I remain excited about the opportunities for this collaboration and partnership and I appreciate Mayra's report about what's going on with the middle school. Do you wish to address the points raised about snacks and masks and social distancing policies? Yeah, I mean, I think we probably mentioned that as part we certainly heard what was said, and we understand, the parents have different perspectives on that and concerns and we're gonna continue to think about how we can iterate that. There was a question that Eric might wanna speak about this in terms of how decisions are made and what are the critical pivot moments in which we are making changes. And particularly for, I appreciate that you started off by saying you're new to the community because you wouldn't necessarily have the perspective

102of how we've sort of made these decisions in the past and Eric I'll let you kind of speak to that, but we really lean on the Westchester County Department of Health, as well as the CDC to provide the guidance for us in terms of making those kinds of changes. Yep. I think that really covers the way this moves forward. It's very hard to predict out into the future of whether there are other variants coming or what that risk of transmission. I do agree that COVID will probably be with us for the long-term, that being said, the opportunity for five to 12 year olds to become vaccinated, hopefully within the next weeks, rather than months could be a very big game changer and I think we would absolutely take our lead from the New York State

103Department of Health, the Westchester County Department of Health and the CDC when it comes to removing mitigation strategies that are there now, I think it's hard to tell when that will be implemented, but we certainly will follow those mandates as they come down, as they leave things open to discretion within a district, we will certainly discuss those with stakeholders and at the board table to understand what the pros and cons, if any choices that are left to us. Thank you. And at this point, there is a mask mandate through just to reiterate, there's a mask mandate through the New York State DOH. We don't have the option of ending that practice until that mandate is rescinded. Using last year as sort of a guidepost like we know to your point, we're not gonna be getting

104to zero anything before we're making decisions. As soon as we're able to provide opportunities and we feel like we can do that in a safe way that protects the health and safety and wellbeing of our students and faculty, we understand the importance of returning to normalcy as soon as we're able to. So thank you. Thank you. Now we'll move to item six, the personnel report, Drew. Thank you. I'm gonna ask Jerry to put up the presentation. I just have about five slides to share with you to provide the board and the community with an update. Obviously we go into the budget vote with a plan with a budget plan for the year, and it's based on our projected enrollments. And then summer comes and things move around. And here we are at the start of

105a school year. So this is reporting the actual against the plan, the budget, if you go to the next slide. This is a graph that we pull out and show throughout the budget process to show our historical staffing, this particular graph, it looks at our certified staffing. So these are our teachers and administrators. And in the most recent year, the red bar shows that what we ended up budgeting and the community approving. So we budgeted a total of 469.8 certified staff members and projected in an enrollment K-12 of 4717 through our demographers report. The actual we start as of today, we are stand at 471.5 staff. So we're one point, can I do that, at 1.7 staff members over budget on that with 4,608 students enrolled as of this morning. And we'll look at where

106that increase in staffing went in a little bit. The next slide is same idea. This just includes our civil service staffing or full-time civil service staffing. So again, we're up 1.7. So no increase in our civil service side, but an increase in our certified side. The next slide it's, I'm sorry, it's a little hard to see there, but this is shared in BoardDocs for people to follow at home, but it shows where our elementary student enrollments are. We show the projected enrollment by grade school and grade the actual enrollment, the projected number of classroom sections, the actual number of sections. And then this year we're showing the projected number of integrated co-teaching and special class sections versus the actual, and this sort of tells the story of where we are with sections. We do have

107a class size cap that we set of 22 students in grades K through three and 24 students at grades four and five, so even when enrollments go up or down, it doesn't necessarily change staffing unless, and until we push up against those caps, and we did experience some breaks this summer. So we budgeted a total of 104 sections, if you go to the next slide, the blue tab at the very bottom, we did budget 104 elementary class sections going into summer. It moved throughout the summer, we were down, we were up again, and we finally ended up by August 15th having 105 sections. So we were one over budget from our total class sections. When we look at our special class and projected number of ICT classes, that's where we saw some change. So I

108described the class size caps that we have for our general education classroom sizes, but we also look to maintain a ratio of no more than 40% special education students within a classroom ICT setting. And we projected a couple of, we had one fifth grade ICT class graduate into the middle school last year, and we knew we were gonna have at least two coming into kindergarten and we ended up with three and we also had some class ratio section breaks of ICT causing two additional sections. So we opened the school year with four more total class sections of ICT than we had in the budget. However, we also had four contingency sections in the budget built in. So those kind of washed each other out there and we're left with the one extra elementary section over.

109So on the elementary level, we ended up in terms of sections one position over budget. If you go to the last slide, this kind of shows the overall points of note at each level. The first is, is our enrollment summary. So we are, and it keeps changing every day. We're actually at 2002 students as of today. So we're about 50 students below projection and it averages out about eight or nine students per grade level. We have students come and go and we ended up about nine students on average down in each grade. We projected 1,150 students at the middle school and we're at 1133 and we projected 1,515 students at the high school and we're at 1473. So there's our 4717 overall that we projected way back in February and we're at 4608 actual today.

110So if we look beyond just the elementary classroom and we go to the full elementary program, we did end up making a couple of changes that resulted in an overall increase from budget of 1.3 positions. We reduced in one area, we reduced our special education skills support because we have more ICT. So that was a pullback where we grew in the other area. We used all four contingencies, as I said, and because of the large number of sections that both Quaker Ridge and Fox Meadow, we did need to add 0.4 art and 0.4 PE to fill out the schedule. So those are new added positions that we did not budget for. Over at the secondary level, we came over the course of the summer determined that our EML English as a new language population was

111going to need more support than the one teacher that we had allocated is able to provide in her schedule. So we did add back 0.4 FTE, that is 0.4 position that we did two years ago, but we found we needed to bring that back and no change at the high school. So together the 1.3 at the elementary school and the 0.4 at the middle school, bringing us up 1.7 positions from budget. So that's the re the overall picture. Any questions on staffing and enrollment? I have a question. What accounts, if you know, at this point for that really quite significant bump in Greenacres from 45 to 74, because that seems like that's a lot of the-- That's where we placed our integrated co-teaching program, so we have students who would have otherwise been enrolled in

112the other elementary schools that are now assigned to Greenacres. There's no way for the demographer to project where we are gonna decide to place our integrated co-teaching classes. Sorry, Drew. But they did, they had projected that there would be two classes. But what the demographer can't project. So we projected budgetarily that we would need two positions. There's no information we can give the demographer eight months, nine months before we begin school, that helps him to determine students who will flow out of one elementary area into another. Does that make sense? It does. So in past years, you'd see a similar discrepancy in the school where we placed the ICT program. Greenacres is the only elementary that hosts kindergarten ICT. I understand that. I guess I'm curious, how generally do we protect the number of ICT

113court ICT sections that we'll have, is that just based on early intervention and other programs that we know. That's a great question. So coming into kindergarten, there are two things that feed that number, it students who are in the CPSE system and then there are also students who, for lack of a better term come out of the woodwork, who weren't necessarily in the CPSE. So we have a general idea when we're, about six months before the school year starts. And when we said there was going to be two, we knew that was on the cusp of two or three and that's right where we landed out. The other section breaks actually in large part were due to move ins during the summer and the end of the year. Yeah. That was really-- It was mostly

114due to move ins it wasn't, we certainly have students in the district that moved and were new to the program, but the majority of our breaks happen due to move ins. Great. Thank you. That's perfect. That's exactly what I wanted to know. We have just as a general fact about enrollment, we have seen in the Special Education Department, many of the students who are moving into the neighborhood have come with IEPs and or 504. So that is just something that we're seeing anecdotally, I don't know what percentage of the total move ins that is, but just being here a while, it feels like a lot right now. Thank you. Drew, do we have insight into the change in enrollment? If you just look at the graph sort of, moves around, but it's kind of constant

115and then the last couple years enrollment is down, do we have insight into what's driving that? I mean the biggest driver of that is larger graduating classes than incoming kindergarten classes. So that can be driven by lower birth rates of those who already live here, coupled with maybe lower move ins to replace those outgoing families. And does that explain, I mean, the big, so the big drop was from 1920 to 2021 when it went down like over a hundred in enrollment, do you have a general sense just a ballpark that does the graduations versus the incoming explain half of that more than 90%. Maybe 75% of that. Gotcha. And the reason I am trying to think back towards, I know we had this discussion when the demographer reports, I think back then, one of the

116things we were thinking is there might just have been redshirting it was a one-year job, but you it's hard to make a judgment off of a one year change, but if that were the case, you would have expected to see sort of a V, which you don't see this year. That's true. And we always experienced some redshirting and we have had some conversations about, is something happening to cause that to be bigger than usual, before COVID, we knew some programs were being created to support five-year-old preschoolers let's say outflow of students for other programs, private schools, and so forth, I think we did see some of those students come back and but we did also expect a drop in enrollment associated with the larger exit in class than incoming. And for the percent that isn't

117explained by that. Do we have a process in place to ask somebody? So if somebody is leaving the district, do we have a process in place to ask the reason if they'll tell us? So some people just move and some go to private school and they may go to private school for a specific reason, special education, religious reasons, whatever it is. Do we have a process in place to get a sense that? Like an exit interview with the family? I mean, we do collect data about where they enroll to the extent they'll tell us. So most of the time we do get the information where they go, because otherwise we can't send the records. So we do send the records on, but we're not like interviewing families to say what made you make that decision.

118Gotcha. I mean, this graph is really helpful. And obviously just looking at year to year fluctuations, can't really look at, but looking at sort of the past eight years or so versus the current toots, something that to keep in mind cause we have lots of decisions to make that get inflated by enrollment. Absolutely. Thanks. Anything else? Any other questions? Just as a followup to Ron's point, is it possible for us to get data that would show, for example the percentage of non returning students who were going to a school outside of the area versus the number that are simply going to private school in the area? Yeah, we can look at our departures and see where they're going. Yeah, we can do that. I think that would help inform. Yeah, we do report on that

119periodically. And in the demographic report, and you can see last year's on BoardDocs it does show our private school enrollments of Scarsdale residents as well. Those aren't just the, those aren't departures, but there could be-- And I am not talking about specifically are departures-- Like leaving the residential area of Scarsdale? Departures, sorry, departures from the school system of children who would be expected to continue, that is the K through 11. So they're still residents, but they... Yeah, that's in the demographic report every year. But the departure you you're on your, I guess you would just look. We look year over year at the change in the overall number of school age eligible students who are attending private schools. Any other questions? Thank you very much, Drew. Now we'll move to agenda item seven, written communications,

120Amber. Item 7.01 is the preamble for written communications. Please know that the Board of Education email is also viewed by the superintendent and the district clerk. Open meetings law requires all board deliberations, which may lead to action or policy changes to occur in public. Therefore, your written communications and emails will be reported at an upcoming public board meeting. A board member will respond at their earliest convenience and then item 7.02 is the written communications. And these were the emails sent to the Board of Ed between August 16th and September 16th. There were 33 emails sent to the Board of Ed. All emails received replies, either written or verbal from the board, a district staff member, or in some cases, both the board, a board member and district staff. 23 emails were related to district matters.

121Topics included COVID protocols, quarantine, cleaning, elementary lunch, testing and athletics. There were also DEI emails and questions about snacks and hot lunch and appreciation for the district's efforts after Hurricane Ida. There were five emails related to board meetings, three were about remote public comments, one was regarding a student presentation to the board, and one was appreciation for the summer board meeting. And there were five emails with invitations or publications for the board to read, to inform the board's thinking. That's it. Thank you very much. Item 8.0 the consent agenda. I'll read the preamble. The board may conduct some of its business using a consent agenda in an effort to achieve greater efficiency at board meetings. The consent agenda condenses some of the routine business of the Board of Education into a single motion, items are

122selected for the consent agenda when the officers of the board and the superintendent believe there is no controversy regarding them. The items on the consent agenda will have the same background material as ordinary items on the board agenda. If any member of the board feels that an item on the consent agenda requires discussion prior to action, that board member may remove that item from the consent agenda by merely requesting same at the meeting. And I we'll move to item 8.0 to the consent agenda, Jim. I'm sorry, nine the consent agenda. Thank you, Karen. There are 15 items on the consent agenda for this evening's meeting, not counting item 16, which is the recommendation to accept the consent agenda, which we will get to at the end. But taking through the 15 items. Item 9.01, has

123to do with approving and accepting the minutes of business meeting of the board on August 19th, 2021. Item 9.02, has to do with approving the appointment and assignment of a certified personnel in the district. Item 9.03, has to deal with the proving, the appointment and assignment and acknowledging retirement of certain non-certified personnel in the district. Item 9.04, relates to the acceptance of the July and August, 2021 claims audit report. Item 9.05, relates to the acceptance of the central treasurer's report for the high school and middle school for the classroom activity fund for the period, April 1st through June 30th, 2021. Item 9.06, relates to the acceptance of certain grant applications, state and federal. Item 9.07, relates to the adoption of a settlement with respect to the tax certiorari for 31 Paddington Road. Item 9.08, relates

124to the acceptance of a settlement for tax certiorari for 47 Montrose Road. Item 9.09, relates to the acceptance of a contract proposal for the 2021-2022 ice hockey season regarding ice time. Item 9.10, relates to acceptance of a varsity girls ice hockey merger among schools within Westchester, including Scarsdale. Item 9.11, relates to the authorization of the assistant superintendent for special education and student services to enter into certain contracts relating to out of district student placements for special education. Item 9.12, leads to the authorization of the assistant superintendent for special education and student services to execute certain contracts for consultants in the area of special education. Item 9.13, relates to the acceptance of certain stipulations of settlement in connection with special education services. Item 9.14, relates to the approval of attendance of students for the 2021-2022 school

125year in connection with various foreign exchange domestic student programs. Item 9.15, relates to the appointment of relate to the board accepting the appointment of a District Safety Team Committee for the 2021-2022 school year. And as noted item 9.16, is the recommendation that the board accept the consent agenda as presented. Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Opposed? The consent agenda is approved. Our next item is a 10.10 information items discussion led by the superintendent we've been sitting for almost two hours. So I wonder if before we begin that if we should take our wellness break now, or do you want to start. No, let's take a six and a half minute break. Thank you. Bring us back at 8:30. As folks are getting back, settled into their spots and get finding their place in the

126agenda, we are reminding everyone that we are at item 10.0, which is information items that are led by the superintendent. We have a number of items in fact, eight to get through in this section, each of them requiring some discussion. So we're gonna begin that process now with 10.01, which is a facilities update from Stuart. All right. Thank you very much, Thomas, to lead the board and community through an update on different projects across the district, focusing first on the 2018 Bond Projects, as you recall, these projects were approved as part of the bond that was voted on in February of 2018. This summer, we had roofing projects at Quaker Ridge Edgewood and the middle school, they are finishing up and should be a hundred percent complete within the next few weeks. They are now

127just finishing up the flashing and gutter work at those locations. The security camera work at the middle school and high school, they are completely installed and only punch list items remain. And that was really the only bond work this summer. Next summer is planned work, we'll close out the bond scope. This work included, we'll be finishing up the unit ventilator installation and replacement at four buildings, Heathcote, Quaker Ridge, middle school and high school and electrical panel upgrades at middle-school Heathcote and Quaker Ridge. Plant improvement projects, the high school foreign language wing elevator project here in the high school is now complete. And we are just awaiting final inspection prior to it being open for use, hopefully by the end of this week or early next week, which is great. That was actually a plan that

128project from a couple of years ago was very difficult to schedule and get the parts in for that. The high school auditorium work, which was approved as part of the 2020-21 budget we'll commence in the upcoming weeks as schedules are being coordinated. This is a little bit later than what was hoped for primarily due to delays in materials. This work, if you recall, was focused on improving safety aspects with a focus on the stage rigging upgrades. The work approved in this year's budget we'll soon go to SED for approval, with a plan for that work to occur later this school year or summer of 2022. In the meantime, we're beginning to schedule initial internal meetings to discuss the work remaining for the auditorium, with a plan to broaden those discussions to other stakeholders later in

129the fall in time for budget discussions. That might be it. Few more here. Dean Field, as Ray mentioned earlier, there's only a few punch list items remaining on that, but we're excited about hosting our initial spring athletic events here in, I guess, in the spring time. And then finally, again as Ray already mentioned, unfortunately we are having some issues with the Butler Field's drainage, which was further exasperated by Hurricane Ida's heavy rains. The field itself isn't draining properly and there appears to be most likely damaged to some underlining drainage pipes, which resulted in based stone washing away or moving to other parts of the field, which in turn has caused some low spots in the field and some of the turf to pull away from the boundary areas. So we are working with the architect

130and the original contractors to make temporary fixes. As Ray mentioned, there'll be out at the end of this week to get the field in playable condition for soccer. And then once the season is complete to make those permanent repairs, which we do believe will require them pulling the turf back so they can get in for inspections and then execute the necessary work, that will be done by those original contractors. And then just a reminder as is the case, every October, I'll do a more formal update with pictures and some financials for you as well. So that will actually be in a couple of weeks. Thank you, Stuart, do we have any questions about these facility updates? I have a quick one. Yeah, please. Stuart, because of the supply chain issues for the auditorium, should the

131parents expect any impact on some of the music and drama programs within the high school, in terms of performances that perhaps were not anticipated, through no one's fault, but just because of the supply chain issue for materials. Not positive about that, there were some meetings middle of last week with the architect and our new theater coordinator and Lisa Forte, the department chair about all the interplay. I'm not sure of the outcome of that. We're hopeful that that wasn't the case because we understand that that would be an issue. With the issue with the turf field, is there any thought as to who's financially responsible for that, if you can talk about it here? Yeah, it's still looking into that, whether it is part, I guess there's sort of three things at play within the time

132period, if there was something that occurred that was not built properly, then that was sort of go back on the contractor. If not, we had the insurance adjuster out already to take a look at that that would cover it due to the Hurricane Ida and the storm itself. And then the other part of it, that's always there is that we do have the warranty on the turf that goes for eight years itself. Although right now there's no real damage to the turf itself. Right, right. That was my impression. So the question is they have to finish the investigation, see if there's anywhere we can get help and then if not, we just have to deal with that? Yeah, and at worse it goes to the insurance and the insurance will pay above and beyond or

133deductible due to the storm, we would guess. So we feel confident that at least the insurance coverage is-- Correct. Okay. That wasn't clear to me. Sorry, yes. Was there any damage to the track or was it just to the field? I don't think there was any damage to the truck itself. There was some crumb rubber, but the EPDs pallets that went on that was cleared out. I don't think there was any... No damage to the track. The was a wooden nailer that got pulled away from the curb, but that affects the turf not to track. Jessica, did you have a question? No, Amber asked it, thank you. Stuart, thank you very much. Appreciate that. Very welcome. We're gonna move on to item 10.02, which is safety, security and emergency management. And Eric is gonna speak

134to us about this. Thank you, Thomas. Really three things to speak about tonight, a relatively short report. I just wanted to acknowledge the tragic event at Arlington. Our condolences go out to the student who died and the entire Arlington community. I wanted to thank Ray and the coaches for their excellent handling of the situation. And our students were following all the directions given to them. And I wanna say further thanks to Mike and (indistinct) who were able to give us a number of details prior to the staff on the scene, actually knowing the extent of the situation. So we had a communication from the very beginning of the event, which enabled us to stay in communication throughout the evening. So big, thank you to all who were involved. Our team, as you heard, was reasonably

135far away from the events and was not aware of what was happening at the moment until later in the evening, as they were leaving Arlington, where they were directed away from any of the incident. As a matter of course, we'll review this incident with the (indistinct) and safety committee to review communications, to look at procedures at this point, it was handled reasonably well and all of our students were safe and sound and on their way home, we did have counselors standing by the next day in case anyone needed that, there was no one took us up on that offer. So that was a positive for our students in this situation. Again, you know, our condolences go out to Arlington and for the situation there. I'd like to talk a little bit about coordination with the

136Village. We've spent the summer coordinating with the mayor and the Village trustees, especially trustee Lewis. I'd like to thank trustee Lewis and Village Manager Cole for the meeting we had a few weeks ago to discuss how we will collaborate on safety, security and emergency management, moving into the future with the main focus, really on memorializing and standardizing that communication and the interaction that has developed over the last few years, I think. The Village SPD, the Village ourselves Scarsdale Edgemont Family Counseling, have done a lot of work in the last four to five years on communication on standardizing practices on working together, bringing them into our communication systems and bringing us into their training. So really the focus is going to be on, how do we make sure that gets standardized into policy and procedures so

137that it outlives the relationships that have been built over the last four or five years, which I think is an excellent step. We do have a follow-up meeting with the Village later this week, just to report out on that discussion. And finally, our integration project where we're looking to integrate both our integrate our lockdown procedures and our camera systems. We have received all the quotes for that work and determining a vendor over the next few weeks. And the initial work of exploring an MOU with the Village has begun. This will be an important part of our integration with the Village in that our camera systems will be integrated in a way that will allow SPD to take live control or have a live access to them in the case of an emergency. Now, obviously that

138needs to be done with a very strict MOU as to when police can gain access to those cameras. Both the SPD and the school district are absolutely of the same mind that there are very narrow windows for when that when that control can be taken, that include really just natural disaster and violence on a campus. So we'll be working through that over the next months and as we identify the vendor, working that through our District Attorney and through the Village's Attorney. But other than that, we're moving right along and have had a pretty good start to the year. Our first safety committee is upcoming next month, I believe. Thank you, Eric. Questions? Moving on to item 10.03, we have our STI courses for the fall and winter as Ann Marie makes her way up here.

139We typically try to, as folks know, as part of the normal protocols of board work, introduce a topic through, discussion item and then have a follow-up as the action item. Unfortunately, because of the timeliness of getting these classes started, we have compressed that timeline for tonight, but we're gonna start with Ann Marie, walking us through courses. Thank you. So I just wanted to provide some insight into how this list of courses was generated, especially for the new board members, welcome. First of all, we do a continuous needs assessment, which includes a survey of teachers and the kinds of professional development they would like to see offered. They have suggested topics such as wellness for teachers and students, maker classes, technology, curriculum improvements and of course, DEI. Then using special education for tomorrow as a guide,

140I have discussions with district administrators, elementary subject area coordinators, department chairs and principals about what their goals for the year are. A formal request for proposals is made. And that invites teachers with expertise in these areas to offer classes or farm their professional networks for guest speakers for everyone's benefit. Once I get that list of proposed classes and match it with Scarsdale education for tomorrow's district goals, I'm the first layer of vetting, and I discuss each class with the coordinator to determine how it might run and who might sign up. And then I present the new and repeat courses to an accreditation committee, that gives further feedback and approves or disapproves the classes. And that committee includes our assistant superintendents of curriculum and personnel, middle school principal, and teachers from each level that are on

141the STI policy board. We also have representatives from Edgemont as well because Edgemont also gives salary credits for our courses. And so up to that point, we've now finished the accreditation stage. And at this point we present our courses to the Board of Education. With your blessing, teachers will soon start to sign up for classes. Each class needs at least eight participants to run or it's canceled or postponed. And during, and after a course, the teachers must complete a project that relates to their specific curriculum. They also complete a course evaluation and together the project and evaluations are used to determine if a course should run again. And so you have a list of a fuller list of classes here are 50 plus repeat courses that give new teachers a chance to take courses previously

142offered and certain courses that are a follow-up to courses already offered, so that our courses are not a one and done experience, but teachers can try things in the classroom and then come back and share their findings and grow even more. We serve primarily 600 teachers in Scarsdale and Edgemont school districts, but occasionally administrator, secretaries and aides have audited our classes. And we have individual teachers from Ameritech, Bronxville and Rye that have taken our classes, some for salary credit and some for personal growth. Our funding comes from four sources, the Board of Education of Scarsdale through our contract with the STA, thank you very much for your support. The Board of Education from Edgemont, teacher tuition, teachers pay $75 per credit for taking a course and a grant from New York State Department of Education.

143So I'm happy to answer any of your questions about the STI or about any of the classes in this list. So thank you. Just have a few things to add and just highlight to provide a little bit more texture to the conversation. So all the courses new and recurring have been reviewed and will support teachers teaching and learning. But I wanna highlight three new ones and their explicit connection to next generation standards in Math, DEI and Student Centered Learning. Nancy Pavia, our math coordinator is facilitating an elementary math pilot course with teacher leadership. 52 teachers critically exploring three rigorously chosen curriculum resources, meeting mostly after school in some Saturdays to make informed recommendations for next year as fully next generation aligned product. Very thankful for this level of engagement, which grew out of a dedicated

144math committee made up of teacher research experts. At the middle school level, the new course with a long title, encouraging civically engaged classrooms while embracing practices that promote equity and inclusion. This course will be led by two middle school English teachers Trent DeBerry and Meaghan Molloy, and we'll focus on strategies for building student capacity to engage in complex and difficult conversations with multiple perspectives and viewpoints comes opportunities for sorted, a supported and respectful written debate, and discussion. Also insights for innovation, is a course that will focus on design thinking and physical making something that our students are craving. A great example of student centered learning our high school teacher, Brian McDonald will be using the wonderful Designlab as this classroom. I also wanna just briefly pull attention to the content of two upcoming recurring current

145courses, which reflect our educators, meaningful engagement and student centered learning. Enthusiasm for SPARK is being resparked through a recurring course called action research and curriculum and lesson study. These teachers will be working with staff developers at CPET who helped shepherd the good project based work for the SPARK's summer program and our Global Learning Alliance Partner. This course will be led by building administrators and two of our co-directors of SPARK. One who's sitting in the audience tonight, Trish Iasiello and also William... Yang. Yang, sorry. As well, we will continue on with the student centered model of learner active tech infused classrooms next step. This course will be taught again by science teacher, Ben Turner and ELL coordinator, Sue Luft. This has generated a great deal of excitement for teachers and creating engaging environments for students and

146also helping to support all students in executive functioning skills. Great, thanks to both of you for that comprehensive overview. Do you have any questions from board members? I just wanted to thank you again-- Can you use your mic. I wanted to thank you for giving such a clear overview of the STI for us just now and also for your work and that the STI is so responsive to changing standards to innovation and to the needs of our teachers and our students. So thank you so much that work. I just wanted to also comment that when people look at, if they do the, it's always interesting how the, I think Edgar and Thomas touched on it, but how the cloth of course offers the course offerings, match up with the other things that we're hearing about

147and working on. And there's a consistency that flows through from the strategic plan to DEI. And I know that the teachers are heavily involved in determining what courses are offered. So it's nice to see that things are everybody's aligned and things are aligned and I think that's really great. And I kind of wish I was taking some of these courses myself. I didn't know what the story path role-play and storytelling in elementary school studies sounded interesting and I was thinking that maybe someday we'll have a more story hour at schools. Thanks, Carl. I think it's important to note I was meeting with Eric and I actually had the opportunity to go and meet with the PTC today and we were talking about DEI specifically and talking about how we have folks in different on different

148levels of that trajectory of understanding and I've experienced, how do they better understand the work? And we got to highlight the fact that the STI does a terrific job at that. And just looking through these courses, as you said, even something as simple as unpacking the New York State Education framework of like, there are people who've been doing this for a long time and understand that, but everyone's new to this particular framework. And so the partnering with the STI around that, providing coursework that's specific to this and helping teachers not only understand what it means, but also to give them really practical experience and applying it to potentially lessons or ways to integrate it into their classroom is just highly, highly useful and provides a level of professional development that we just couldn't offer on

149our own with all the other many competing interests. So also my personal thank you to you Ann Marie and all the folks who are involved in policy work as well. Thank you. And I just also wanted to highlight, there's been a lot of synergy between different organizations like the Interdependence Institute, the Scarsdale Adult School, the PTC. We actually have two events coming up along the lines of DEI that are co-sponsored with the Scarsdale Adult School. One is a talk it's an author visit online with Ken Liu who wrote a short story called "Paper Menagerie". And that's gonna be over Zoom on September 28th from seven to 8:15, sorry, seven to 8:15. The entire community as welcome and students and teachers will be able to attend that free of charge. We also have Joy Harjo who

150is a Native American Poet Laureate on October 12th, the day after Columbus Day slash Indigenous People's Day. So hopefully teachers will be able to make connections with their students in classes and invite their students and the entire community to have those discussions. I have a quick question about the elementary math pilot class. I'm not sure if it's for Marie for Edgar, you just talked about how this relates to the work of the 51 teachers doing the pilot, is this something all the teachers take, is this sort of part of that pilot, or is this an add on to that? How do the two relate? Only the teachers who are doing the piloting in the classroom are taking this course. So it's not all of the teachers taking the course. All the teachers that are doing

151the pilot, because correct me if I'm wrong usually an STI course, somebody just chooses to take based on interest or what they're working on, this is one where if you're doing the pilot, you're taking the class? Yes. Gotcha. Part of the commitment that the teacher makes is that they're gonna be checking in and doing analysis of it and meeting with their peers to discuss it so that we can come out with strong recommendations for the best match for Scarsdale. Gotcha. Thank you. Ann Marie, thank you again, really appreciate you being here tonight. Thank you, Board, thank you for your time. I would propose a week go out of order for an item, which allows Edgar to finish out his section here and then go back to Stuart to do his second two items. So if

152you don't mind, I'd like to jump to 10.05 for a moment and ask Edgar to go ahead and finish out with the proposed news textbooks for middle and high school. Cool. Okay, great. Thank you. So I have several books and some digital language resources to preview tonight. Instead of summaries of the books, which are easily Google-able. I have received feedback that people may be more interested in how the books will be used in the classrooms, and the rationale for their use. So seventh grade ELA and Science Departments dedicated summer work towards reading across the curriculum. They have coordinated the genetics unit on science to line up with fiction on cloning, which is "The House of the Scorpion" and genetic engineering, which is "Double Helix. Through this collaboration, they will be using these engaging works of

153fiction to both analyze the literary elements and critique the science represented in both. "Ancestor Approved" is a text that supports an interdisciplinary approach between the ELA and social studies department at the middle school. This text will enrich the social studies curriculum by highlighting Native American voices while studying relevant points in history. This is particularly important while we preview textbooks that describe multiple perspectives, and that's essential to our textbooks, the authors of these textbooks, don't always reflect the diverse points of view, and this an example of how it does. "The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind" represents an exciting collaboration between ELA, science, social studies and math, and we'll proceed the middle school's Human Rights Day. The focus of this year is on world hunger. This is a middle-school adaptation of a popular picture book about a

154young student from Malawi who uses a library to find a book in order to learn how to build a windmill. This book has everything, student agency sustainability, and a great quote, "there are many things that are reusable, "where others see garbage I see opportunity." The next book is Emmanuel Acho's, "Uncomfortable Conversations with a Black Boy" this was also the subject of thoughtful summer work between the middle school ELA and social studies teacher. This book will not be read straight through, but rather the teachers will use specifically curated chapters and related multimedia at various points with their seventh and eighth grade students. They'll use it to start discussions and actually make connections with the students at meaningful points throughout. "Everything I Never Told You" by Celeste, where is it by Celeste Ng, is being recommended for

155ninth grade English teachers. This text comes from a new voice in fiction, and also I challenge you to read the first three sentences of this mystery and not finish the book. "Night Flying Woman" by Ignatia Broker is being recommended for 11th grade American study class. It's a retelling of her grandmother's account of the history of the Ojibway people, like "Ancestor Approved" an important indigenous voice to enrich our understanding of American history. "Predictably Irrational" is being recommended for 80 psychology. This book reflects our teacher's best practice of integrating, engaging and well-researched trade books into their curriculum. And finally, "Notre Histoire" digital resources for French three to three 80 Spanish and French 80 French are being recommended to add an important digital component to these classes. Thank you, Edgar, was a lot of information in a short

156period of time. I'd like to see if there's any board questions relative to these proposed texts. Edgar, it sounds like that's a really interesting cross section. And obviously we had the opportunity to look through them this weekend. I guess I am curious about how specifically some of the interdisciplinary work will be done. So if you are introducing science fiction, how are we gonna do that? Will it be in the science classroom or the English classroom? I just feel like we're at a point, and societaly where there are a lot of questions about what is real science. Absolutely. How are we gonna tackle that in a way that is sophisticated and smart. Yeah, that's a great question, Jessica. And it is something, these are books that will be introduced in time to be introduced in the

157ELA classroom while genetics and science is being discussed, there'll be a cross-reference and you bring up a really important point and one of the key essential questions that's gonna come out of this when I was talking to the chair of the Science Department, one of the things that they're gonna be asking is from what we know of science, what is fiction and this what's possible, and what is based on actual science? So a critical analysis of what is actually plausible so that they develop the critical thinking skills as they're reading through this fantasy so that they can sift out, sift between the two. Great, thank you. I just wasn't clear on where in the curriculum they were gonna fall, so that's very helpful. Thank you. Is this is the assessment then of the students' work,

158is that predominantly in the ELA in the English classroom? Or is that in the, like how is understanding, at first it sounds like it's more written in the... Yeah, so part of what the collaboration over the summer was is how they articulate how they're gonna be assessing in the various areas. So they're not gonna be giving necessarily an English test or assessment in the science class, but there's gonna be a connection between the two. So while literary elements are gonna be described, and they're gonna be looking at pieces of the books for their literary merit and how they can teach into that, in science, they're gonna be looking at the science of it, but the two teachers, and this is really one of the beauties of the middle school model and the middle school philosophy

159is that built into the structure of it are opportunities for them to collaborate. So there are possibilities for them to build an assessment together in which they go through the, they present these complex ideas and it's very powerful because it's meaningful. Just as a point of follow up, will that be introduced across all four houses. At this point this is-- At this point, these are being piloted in one of the houses and they're looking at how they're gonna build it, but part of what's great about this too, is one of the pilot members of the Department Chair of Science. So she's going to be overseeing it and through that connection, every single one of these pilots has a department chair that's connected to it. There's an opportunity to take the best practices and build and

160expand them. Thank you, Edgar. We appreciate your work on this. And now I'd like to backtrack for a moment, go back to 10.04, the budget calendar, Stuart. Yep, absolutely. So what you have on the agenda tonight is a draft of the budget calendar for 2022-23. It sounds crazy when you leap another year ahead, but the plan for the development of the 2022-23 budget, pretty much mirrors what we've done over the last number of years now, it seems to work well internally, and there's been positive feedback from the community and Board of Education as well. Some of the highlights I'll note for you is the public forum on November 17th, which we have on Wednesday morning, where we listen to any listening to community members on their budget priorities that they would want us to focus

161on for the upcoming school year, during the course of all of this fall, we're developing that budget internally through meetings with directors and our principals and cabinet members, and even feedback from the teachers up through those throws chains in the buildings, all to get to a point to present the budget to the Board of Education community, starting on January 10th. I will note one difference where we push things back a little bit is the 21-22 financial projections, just because of the timing of the calendar won't happen until that January meeting. So at that first January meeting, or not only will it be the projections for this current school year, we'll also put forth any of our staffing recommendations for the board as well at that point. Continue with our budget sessions, we do have the

162budget book released in February early February, which is what we've done in the last few years, budget sessions throughout the spring, leading up to the board adoption of the budget at the April 4th meeting, followed by the community vote on May 17th. Thank you, Stuart. Do we have any questions about this process? As Stuart said, this his first few years in the district, we sort of refine this process down, we've gotten it down to a place that seems to be the right sort of tempo for this work gives plenty of opportunity for community feedback, for iteration of the budget, for board input, and to put together a final budget that gives the community ample time to consider it in advance of voting. I had a question the November seven team meeting, which is for community

163input, is that typically held, I can't recall live or can it be done over Zoom to get a broader? Typically, I mean, last year, not withstanding, these were all in person meetings. I think we can certainly think about options for those, particularly because as we said earlier, we do wanna limit non-mission critical meetings, although one might argue that the budget is mission critical because we wouldn't be able to do anything without the budget. I mean, I'm only asking because as a 9:00 AM meeting, it obviously might be challenging for anyone who's working to necessarily juggle their schedule. I mean, not impossible, but you could imagine. So I'm just thinking if we get, maybe have both not unlike the board meetings that might be, feel more open to comments. Absolutely. Not hearing any other questions. So

164at this point, I'll ask Stuart to move on to 10.06, which is 2021-22 stop-loss insurance renewal. Actually, I'll take that. Sorry, Drew, my bad. Stuart can weigh in as needed. We do traditionally purchase stop-loss insurance as part of our self-insured health plan as a backstop against unusually high claims. This year, we had two different stop-loss insurance carriers provide a total of six quotes. We've claimed more than we've spent in stop-loss in two of the recent years, and thus have some significant increases at the same deductible level. But looking at the slightly higher, the middle level of $275,000, there's a much more reasonable cost and a good balance of our risk and that is what our Pat Cowburn our consultant with KBM Management has recommended. And I think both I can speak for Stuart, we both

165concur that that seems like a good value for the protection that we get against the plan. So we are asking you to later on in the action items, once we've discussed this, consider approving the renewal with our current carrier Sun Life. Thank you, Drew. Any questions? Drew, you did good job. Thank you. So the last two items are actually, again, these are typically led by the superintendent, but these are board matters. And so I'm gonna turn this back to Karen to talk about 10.07, which is the Board of Education goals and evaluation template and process. And then we will finalize or finish out this category with the 10.08, which is the board committee on community engagement. So a 10.07 and 10.08 are sort of go together as we discuss or begin our discussion of our

166goals for this coming year. So each year establishing goals is an important opportunity for a board to reflect upon its current work, its needs potential areas for growth and development. Last year, the board identified the goal of supporting the district's mission and beliefs during the pandemic while keeping our staff and students safe, it then identified the responsibilities in line with this goal, which included advocacy, budgeting, collective bargaining, community engagement communication, evaluation, ongoing district work and teaching and learning. So I wanted to bring this up tonight so that we start thinking about what our goals will be for this coming year. We'll we keep some of the things that are on this list. I didn't know if anybody here today had any initial thoughts on our goals. Or we'll can discuss this more at length at

167our next meeting. So any initial thoughts tonight with more robust discussion next time? I'll speak up to that. I think the general topics are good. I'd like to maybe next time dive in a little bit more. I also think collective bargaining can probably go away for this years, but yeah, generally I like to start with-- I think we still have how many units, how many... We have one outstanding contract from that's expired, that's the Mazda. And then we'll we had a one-year push on the custodian, so we'll be engaging with them. I think it's something for the board to consider keeping on, you actually maybe wanna have an opportunity to discuss philosophy and sort of foundational beliefs around collective bargaining in a time where you're not also engaged in major collective bargaining. I think periodically

168over time on boards have come up with philosophies around compensation, around where we wanna be relative to other places benchmarking of our district. And I think with two new board members and several people who will have just gone through this maybe one time, I might encourage us to think about keeping that on the table and use it as an opportunity growth. I think that we just have to change what we're talking about, that collective bargaining and the goal. But yes, I mean, we should always be focusing on some of that. Maybe we think about pulling, I know DEI isn't here, which clearly we'll need to add, but anyway, again, I wanted to just bring it up as something that is that we will need to be discussing and introducing the topic. And with that, that

169brings us to the next-- Can I say one thing, sorry, Karen. Go ahead. The board did task itself with doing some very specific work relative to policy 0105. So I would encourage all board members, as you're thinking about this, to go back and see what we've tasked the administrative team to do and what we've tasked the board to do, because that certainly should be reflected probably in this as well. And that there was some professional learning and growth specifically that went along with that goal. So just making sure, I mean, I'm gonna push that onto you over the course of this year, next year, but I think it's probably important to reflect those values in this as well. Okay, great. And then of course attached here also was the board self evaluation tool, which we

170will affirm and revise according to the goals that we develop. The next item, relates to this in that once we determine our goals, we also need to decide what methods or structures we will need to meet them. For example, the ad hoc board committee on community engagement was formed with the charge that was in line with the boards community engagement communication goals, last year, the BCCE created a board community engagement plan and effectively completed its charge. But we need to think about what that community engagement communications goal will look like. And do we have another communication committee? How does the board community engagement plan fit here? Is management of the plan part of a responsibility? Should the management be done in a new committee that has a new charge or specific charge which has maybe

171the management of the plan? Maybe the engagement plan is overseen by one person, a delicate who report. I don't know what we'll call a delegate, maybe who reports to the board and the way we have board delegates who oversee advocacy efforts? Or maybe we want to do this work at the table? So those are some things also to think about. I know Ron sat with me on that committee. I don't know Ron, if you had any thoughts tonight or you wanted to. I would just add, I agree with everything you said. And I would just add, I think this community does a lot of work. We also did it during a time of COVID when us in the community had a lot of focuses. And for example, with the plan, I think there's an opportunity

172for a committee to really get that out into the community and say, this is the board created plan, do you have feedback on this plan? Are there other things, other aspects? So I feel like we got a lot of great work done, and it's also a great launching point for even more the-- (noise drowns the speech) So again, as we formulate our goals and that may be one particular goal, we need to think about what is the structure that best fits with that particular goal. So again, food for thought for our next meeting, if anyone has any questions or other points they wish to discuss now. Okay, thank you very much. So that concludes our information items, 10.01 through 10.08. And at this point we'll be moving on to 11.0 our action items, and that's

173led by the board precedent this case, Karen. So I'm gonna turn it back over to you, Karen. To me. It's actually to Carl. I move that we approve the fall winter 2021, 2022 STI courses as presented with thanks to everybody that was involved in organizing selecting the courses. Is there a second? Second. Any discussion? All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay. Next item, 11.02, and that is... That's I think that's me. I recommend that we approve that the board accept the Sun Life bid for stop-loss insurance at $275,000 specific deductible level effective September 1st, two to one as described by Stuart previously. Second. Any discussion? Presented by Drew. Sorry, I made that mistake as-- Sorry, Drew. All in favor. Aye. Any opposed? It's approved and the next... I'm the next one. Item 11.03 is the

174proposed new textbooks for the middle school and high school. These were the books presented by Edgar at the July 7th meeting, as Thomas mentioned, we talk about them in the prior meeting and approved things at the next meeting. So the books that you're talking about tonight will be on a following meeting. I move that the board approve the proposed textbooks for the middle school and high school as presented. Second. Any discussion? Thanks for that clarification Ron. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? And that is approved, thank you. At this time, we'll move to item 12 response or questions from those present. The second opportunity for public comment. Does anyone from the audience wish to come to the microphone. And Jerry, do we have any remote participants? Zero attendees. So now we'll move to item 14, wrap

175up items. What we heard from Stuart has said, he's gonna provide a more extensive facilities update with pictures and an itemized list of pieces, under safety, security and emergency management we're gonna continue to work with the Village in collaboration and partnership and we'll be reporting out on that information. As Ron rightfully corrected me in our STI courses for the next time will, sorry, the textbooks will be approved at the next meeting, excuse me. We're gonna proceed with a budget calendar as presented, but continue to welcome any feedback that folks may have. And the board has given a little bit of homework around board goals to look at the information that was both provided as well as commitments that we've made through board policies relative to DEI and other other issues, and be prepared to engage

176in conversation around, proposed goals for this year. And then, I would also encourage folks to just look over that template to make sure it matches. Karen talked to us about the importance of making sure that the metrics that we choose line up with the goals and the community, the community engagement was a great endeavor. It really worked for last year, but we'll wanna look at the metrics that match up against the goals for this year and see if that is still aligned with one of them or not. But that would be part of it is thinking about the metrics that actually measure the goals that we set out. And as an adjunct, we didn't talk about it tonight, but I've also been working on my goals and we'll be presenting those to the Board of

177Education, also, I put an initial draft in front of the board officers. I need to now also work on metrics and we'll be putting that in front of the board at the next meeting as well. Next business meeting, I should say. I think I captured most of that. Enrollment information (indistinct) request to? Did we do make a commitment? The capturing why the request that I, I thought that you... I would like see that. I would like to have a better understanding of that dataset. Sorry, could you restate the specific request? I just wanna make sure I capture it. It was a while ago. Drew, do you recall? No, but basically bottom line, I'd like to see among the returning K through 11 students of those who did not return, if we have a breakdown of

178the number that were leaving due to relocation to another district versus the number that are still residing here, but attending alternative schools, private or otherwise. (muttering) I should have like there. Thank you both. To the extent that we're able to provide that information we certainly will. Thank you in advance both, potentially. Sorry, I think that's a recap of the items. Anything else on the list? And now we'll move to item 15, meeting dates for the coming month, Amber. Yes. This Friday, are you called the policy subcommittee or are you the remote public comment? I think they're called the Remote Public Comment Policy Subcommittee. The Remote Public Comment Policy Subcommittee will meet 12 o'clock in this room. And then there, that will be live stream for the public. And then the board development retreats will be

179from one to four in this room, and that is not open to the public. And then on Monday, October 4th, there's a board meeting with the STA at 5:15 in the high school learning comments and a business meeting at 6:30 here in this room when 170-172. Monday, October 18th, there's a board meeting with the Village Board of Trustees at 5:15 in the high school learning commons and a business meeting and education report at 6:30 in this room, 171-172. Thank you, Amber. And at this time I will entertain a motion to adjourn this business meeting. Motion to adjourn. Second? Second. All in favor? Aye. Thank you very much.