BOE Business Meeting 2021-5-24

001Good evening everyone, thank you for joining us here tonight and welcome to those of you joining us later On-Demand. All board members are present as our members of cabinet. I'll note that before this business meeting, the board held an executive session to discuss the employment of a particular person and current litigation. Also, almost a week ago the school budget passed by a vote of 1,524 yes votes and 264 no votes which is an 85.2% yes, thank you so much to our residents for your continued support of our schools and our students and your participation in budget development. This budget funds many important programs including increased mental health and wellness services and curriculum alongside an anticipated return to full in-person learning in the fall. Thank you to Thomas Stewart and Jeff again for your diligent leadership

002through this very extensive process. Jessica Resnick-Ault and James Dugan were elected to the Board of education and I offer hearty congratulations to them both and welcome them to this rewarding work on behalf of our school community. Tonight is our fourth education report of the year and it's titled re-engineering our educational goals aligned to Scarsdale's strategic plan. Typically we spread four education reports per year across our agendas, while the board understands its responsibility to oversee district operations, it is as critically important to ensure that teaching and learning are aligned to our strategic plan, are assessed regularly, are revised as necessary and are reported onto the board and the community, this work is extremely rewarding and essential. All past education reports are posted on the Board of Education webpage and there's a link to that page on

003the district's homepage under site shortcuts. Reports since 2019 have included, assessment support and looking ahead. A culturally responsive education in Scarsdale schools, hybrid and virtual only feedback and technology implications. Technology, entrepreneurship and innovation, student assessment and next generation standards and then also ongoing strategic planning reports. And that's really all I have to say so I'll give it over to Thomas please. Great. Good evening and welcome, can you guys hear me okay? Yeah, great. Let me find my notes here, first of all good evening and welcome to everyone it's nice to see folks finally filling out our audience again. So we appreciate you joining us both in person and virtually at tonight's business and education report meetings to become more informed about some of our most significant work as a district. Tonight's presentation as Pam mentioned

004re-energizing our educational goals aligned to Scarsdale's strategic plan will be the last report of this school year but it will also be a significant one. As we've discussed emerging from the cocoon of COVID related restrictions, we've placed a strong emphasis on operational changes that will functionally return us to a sense of normalcy. Somewhat missing from our conversations as of late are the instructional and pedagogical emphasis that we were focusing on just over a year ago with the implementation of a new strategic plan, next generation standards and other district initiatives. Tonight's presentation by Edgar and his co presenters will provide an overview and reminder of this work and help us to bring these priorities back into focus as we continue to plan for the year ahead. Also on this evening's agenda, we'll be providing an update

005on the incident that occurred at the high school last Friday, Eric Rauschenbach assistant superintendent for safety, security and emergency management and I will be reviewing highlights of the situation and our emergency and high alert protocols. We will also answer board questions at that time. To shift gears a moment I'd like to talk about Marianne Madoff. Marianne Madoff began her career in Scarsdale as a third grade teacher at Heathcote Elementary in 2006, and eventually became a teacher in charge. Marianne moved to Scarsdale Middle School in 2013 to teach mathematics in Fountain House. In all of these positions Marianne ignited learning at her students while also inspiring them with her dedication, creativity and compassion. Marianne unabashedly lived her values and children, her own and her students were always at the center of everything that she did. Marianne's

006memorial service was held this past Saturday from limited live audience and a more extensive virtual one. The resounding message from the ceremony was the impact and legacy that Marianne will leave behind. Samantha Wachs a senior at Scarsdale High school aptly described many of our feelings "Throughout both elementary and middle school, Mrs. Madoff was always a guiding light for me. Her kindness, openness and passion for teaching will forever be remembered by both her students and the surrounding community" and I would ask you all to join me in a moment of silence for Marianne please. Thank you all for doing that, appreciate it. Also speaking of memories, we know that Memorial day is coming up on May 31st. In a few short days we'll have a three-day weekend, and while this is often recognized as the beginning

007of summer, it's also Memorial Day, a holiday worth our recognition and respect. As a reminder Memorial Day is the day of remembrance for everyone who has died serving in the American armed forces. The holiday originally known as Decoration Day started after the Civil War to honor all the fallen soldiers, whether from the north or south. It's unclear exactly where the holiday originated and many towns have laid claim to origin stories. In the years following the Civil War, Memorial day celebrations were scattered throughout the U.S. taking routes somewhat differently in the north and south. It wasn't until after World War Two that the holiday gained a strong following a national identity, and it wasn't officially named Memorial Day until 1967. The final event that cemented the modern culture of Memorial Day in America was in 1968

008when Congress passed the Uniform Holiday Act designating Memorial Day as the last Monday in May, rather than May 30th which had been previously observed. This insured a three-day weekend along with some dedicated time to visit and clean up cemeteries, visit deceased family members and pay our respects to other slain military personnel so I hope you all have a good Memorial Day weekend ahead. Thank you again for being here. Thanks Thomas. Do any board members have opening reports? Bob you do, right? Yeah. This past Thursday, it was May 19th, Alison and I attended the first board coffee which was held at the picnic tables in front of the high school on Brewster Road. It was scheduled for seven to eight, we had three people attend. Two of those three had children within the school system, one

009was an empty nester and the topics ranged from one person's concern or querying some of the ground rules for house rentals and sending kids to the school and we chatted about some of the background and our understanding of that to help him understand that a bit more. The second person was there just to express her appreciation for the opportunity to come and communicate and meet other parents and the board and then the third person, the empty nester, just real briefly got into expressing some concern about the potential relationship of the DEI policy, to what he referred to as the CRT or the critical race theory, we're not here to, you know, to debate that, but it was interesting of course just to hear his perspective and we duly noted it and I guess the last

010thing I wanna say is I think, it's just a wonderful way to and a very casual way interact and look at people eye to eye and actually have a back and forth conversation, I would really encourage people to attend if I could express only one disappointment that was that only three people showed up. So I know communication is key here among the community so I'm hoping people will take advantage of the next coffees and please attend, thank you. Thank you Bob, we could note the next, do you guys know it on the top of her head? I know there's one June. June 10th is the next one, maybe we will do it during the communication. Karen I'll have you look it up and then you can announce it and then I think Amber has a

011report. I do, thanks Pam. This past weekend I had the pleasure of attending the Scarsdale Middle School musical streaming I guess online, I can't really describe how it was done, but it was streaming. It was You're a Good Man, Charlie Brown and it was wonderful to see the efforts from the students. They worked hard to learn their lines and songs and choreography and while the cast was small, their effort was large. And I wanna say thank you to the staff involved in putting on that production, Dan Boniello, Celia Cuk, Kerry Hensel and Nicholas Lieto. Thanks Amber. Karen, you have the dates of the? Yeah, June 9th from 4:30 to 5:30. And there's one more. We have two more board coffees. June 17th from six to 7:00 p.m. here. Yes 'cause we had to change that

012because of the middle-school movie nights so. Okay, two more this year and then next year's board will go about scheduling it's calendar with board coffees as they choose. Any other opening reports from board members? I should just mention I attended the Edgewood PTA meeting Friday evening and we had a discussion about the budget and some other issues and it was a Zoom meeting and following my attendance they apparently had a mental list so I don't know how that worked over Zoom, but if anybody is listening I hope you'll let me know. Thanks Carl. Any other opening reports from board members? All right, then we'll move into the next item, item four or I guess three personnel report Drew. Thank you very much Pam. So tonight we are welcoming to the Scarsdale community, seven new faculty

013appointments and I see some of them in the audience there, I'm gonna take a moment to introduce you to them. First, Jennifer Bellis will be joining us in the area of school counseling at Scarsdale Middle School, welcome. (members clapping) John Katonah will be joining us here in the high school in the arts department. (members clapping) Dr. Alex Fong will be joining us at Scarsdale Middle School in the music department. (members clapping) Sean Magnan will also join us at the Middle School in the English department. (members clapping) Familiar face, our own Joy Yang will move into a probationary position next year in the high school mathematics department, we're delighted to Joy. (members clapping) Eliana Brody will be joining us for the year as a lever placement social studies teacher. And Brittany Vella will be joining us

014for the full year as a leave replacement mathematics teacher. (members clapping) Welcome to you all, thank you so much for being here tonight and you will be officially appointed during the consent agenda later in the meeting, but you don't have to stay. Unless you'd like to of course. You can if you want but you're welcome to leave. Welcome to all of you, we look forward to seeing your development and your growth and your impact on our students it's always wonderful to have you here to see your faces and to welcome you personally so congratulations. We look forward to working with all of you and please don't be shy about going. Yeah. We know that some of you have jobs tomorrow and things like that, we appreciate you guys being here thank you so much. And

015the next agenda item is item four, the safety, security and emergency management update from Thomas and Eric. Great, Eric is actually going to kick us off, we wanted to take an opportunity to debrief the situation that happened at the High School on Friday. Again, we've been clear there are limits to what we are able to discuss in the public setting because of legal and security parameters but we will, you know, we are committed to sharing information to the extent that we can and having folks feel confident in the processes that are in place. And so we are going to just to give you an outline, Eric's gonna do a timeline of the events, we're gonna talk a little bit about our communication protocols on multiple agency interactions and work. And we will also open it

016up for, sorry, we'll be also addressing our drills and preparation and training and then open it up for some board questions. So with that, Eric. Thank you Thomas and thank you to the board for the opportunity. So I'm really just gonna take us through a timeline to start off with so everyone has kind of the same set of facts that we can report. So a possible threat was reported late in the morning on Friday to a member of the High School staff, the threat assessment team which is an established team within the high school was immediately assembled, our threat assessment team includes mental health professionals, the administration, teacher representatives and Scarsdale's police department representatives most specifically our liaison officer detective Bronstein. On Friday morning we also had another detective and officer from Scarsdale PD join

017us for that threat assessment team. As we discussed the situation and the perceived threat that was there, the determination to call a lockout was made at approximately 11:05, while the SPD went to determine the veracity of the threat and followed up with the reported source so at that point we made the determination. The lockout was instituted by a PA announcement and a physical suite by our staff of the outside of the building bringing everyone indoors. Following the initial lockout order, the termination was made to both allow students to enter the building due to the specific information we had about the source of the threat. In a situation of a lockout, often what that protocol is used for is a generalized threat outside of the school. That could be an animal, that could be a crime

018being committed somewhere outside of the school, that could be the police tracking down someone, or any other generalized threat, that was not the situation here. This was a verbal threat that was reported, there was time in between the reporting to us of the threat and the threat being made. So given all of those pieces of information, we determined a lockout was the most prudent course of action, we also determined that allowing students to come into the building if they were on campus or came back to campus was the right thing to do given we knew exactly who the source of the threat was. We also made the determination that if students had finished their day and were immediately leaving campus, they could leave through one of our marked entrances. As we went through our lockout

019SPD enacted there response protocols to the threat and set up a perimeter around the school. The investigation was ongoing and SPD was doing their best with other State and local agencies to locate the source of the threat and ultimately interview that person. Given the information we had at approximately 12:45, the determination in collaboration with SPD was made to have a dismissal of school early at 1:05 and that was when we stopped allowing any students to enter or leave the building, and then at 1:05 everyone was dismissed on mass with a police presence on campus. During the entire process, SPD investigated the source of the threat with other apical agencies and were able to contact the source later in the afternoon after students were dismissed. And we are continuing to collaborate with SPD to assure the

020safety of the school and follow up on the source of the threat including initiating appropriate next steps both administratively and cooperating with SPD on any of their efforts to take next steps. So that is really the base timeline of events that happened Friday afternoon, Thomas is gonna take a moment and talk about communications during that. Great. Thank you Eric. Just to kind of run through our communication log on the announcement, I'm gonna specifically talk to written texts that went out in the form of email and written communications rather than the form of email and texts, but just would like to say that there was also PA announcements that happened which is a standard part of our lockout or lockdown procedures whenever those are called so that we notify students wherever they are in the building,

021there've been questions or concerns raised about if kids are outside, or in bathrooms or hallways or other places, if they're able to hear those announcements and we do do regular testing to ensure that the PA systems are accessible to students in a wide variety of places including out outdoors to the extent possible. They're pretty loud outdoor speakers to make sure that we access on that. So having said that, we did have two PA announcements to students and to faculty on that initiated the lockout and also to announce the early release. We also sent out one, two, three, four, five, six emails over the course of about the six hour span starting at 11:15 which was an email that went out to high school parents. And then we sent out a faculty text at 11:32 that

022was to be shared both with the faculty and then that information to be shared with students as well. We had another parent email that went out at 12:50, that talked about the lockout order. There was concern that some parents did not get that very quickly and so we re sent that same email at 12:54 to ensure there was a broad blanket of that information. That was followed by a text at 1:12 to the high school community that talked about again, the lockout order that it was done in an abundance of caution to a perceived threat and that we would also be doing an early dismissal at 1:05. Sent out a 1:48 email as an internal document to ensure that folks knew what was going on, that was followed up by 1:58 p.m. email that went

023out to the broad Scarsdale community on what happened and then followed up with a more extensive communication on Friday afternoon at 5:05 and then again on Sunday after we had heard from the police department about sort of them coming to some initial findings in their investigation we we're able to send out some more information on Sunday as well. So that was sort of the log of communications that did go out as we debriefed on our communications we had also intended to send two texts, one to our high school students at 11:36 and one to our high school parents at 11:38, unfortunately that did not happen according to plan, it didn't work for our Blackboard Connect emergency broadcast system and so we are aware of that issue and are certainly prepared to correct that in case

024there's another kind of incident in the future similar to that. A couple of other comments that I wanted to make relative to communications. And there were certainly some frustration we acknowledged that in the community about the amount of information that we can share and the type of information, I know that parents with children in our schools care deeply about the health and safety of their students and wanna know what happened and want to know if they should intervene and how they should intervene and all those kinds of things so those are very natural responses that we expect parents to have whenever we call, you know, these kinds of emergency drills or emergency actions into place. There are some limits to what we can share as we've talked about there are legal parameters and there are

025also security parameters. One of the things that the police had indicated in their report and I just wanna reiterate is that when we think about folks who are potentially posing threats to school, they're typically either students, faculty, or family members, very rarely do you have an incident where you have a complete random person coming to a school and it does happen absolutely, but typically it tends to be those three groups. And so folks need to acknowledge that when we are sending out communications to our school community and using texts and emails and those kinds of things, there's a very high chance that a potential assailant or a person who's making a threat is also receiving those communications and so that is one of the reasons that we obviously are very careful about the kinds of

026information that we're sharing, releasing information, which doors are open, the kind of threat, all of those kinds of things because obviously sending out that information could give somebody additional information to do harm to our students or to our faculty and that's something we wanna avoid at all costs. As we've also mentioned, the police, you know, we worked very collaboratively with them and we wanna make sure that they can conduct their investigations to the best of their ability and so when we send out communications whenever possible we also try to run that language by, in this case, Scarsdale Police Department to make sure that they feel okay with it, that we're not disclosing anything that might impede their ability to do the job that they need to do. And so, you know, all the cases of

027sending our communications out to the larger parent group, we do run those or our community, we do run those by the Scarsdale Police Department to make sure that they sort of comport with the things that they would want us to be sharing out there. And then, you know we're also dealing with, you know, the timeframe I know it's really frustrating in between things, if you can sort of visualize we have the district emergency response team down in the central office completely assembled in one room, we're all there together for the full amount of time, we have the police officers present for much of the time, we had the police chief here with us talking to us. At the high school they have the district emergency response team going on and we're all engaged in similar

028but somewhat different work. So in this particular case we were also working with local court systems, the Scarsdale PD we said, and even the New York State Police department so all of these communications and interactions are going on with multiple agencies and obviously as you can imagine, that does take some time to work through those details and that we get a consistent, you know, set of information that we should be following up on as a school district in those situations. We're gonna open this up in just a second, Eric did you wanna add something? Yeah, I wanna do just to add that as with all emergency protocols that need to be enacted or incidents that happen that involve our DERT, BERT and threat assessment teams. The implementation and the action that happens on the day

029like on Friday is the first half of the piece, the second half is what we do to debrief that situation then ultimately use that information to adjust, implement and improve all of our next actions. So over the next weeks, the BERT team at the high school will be debriefing with each other, Ken has offered to debrief with the PTC and take parent feedback there, we will be meeting, we meaning myself, members of the DERT team Ken will be meeting with the village and the police department to go over our communications and our response to this and then the DERT team will reassemble with Ken present to debrief the entire action, that will take the next two or three weeks to get all of those meetings done and move through, Mike Spedaliere our chief of security

030will be an integral part in that, Altaris will help us use frameworks to debrief that, that will ultimately lend information to how we practice, how we drill and see if there are any needed changes in our protocols. Thanks. We wanted to focus primarily on this situation that happened on Friday but as Eric is speaking is reminding me that, you know, in the past we've done tabletop exercises with the Scarsdale police in conjunction with Altaris, with you know, Mike and others leading us through so that we have the opportunity to engage in exercises and to imagine all sorts of possibilities and to be able to work through these so that we can think about a lot of different potential emergency situations in which we might find ourselves that are not normal because there's no such thing

031as a typical emergency at a school, at some point you could have it in the middle of a school day, you could have something happen at lunch or after school or a football game or at a prom and we have to be prepared for all those different kinds of unique situations so the variables are always changing and it's important for us to sort of be grounded in our root protocols so that we know to go to those immediately on so that's something that we're always thinking about and something that we're always attentive to. And then we've got, you know, quite a bit of feedback from parents I would say, a lot of constructive ideas for us to think about those will be folded in as Eric said into our debrief sessions, it gives us an

032opportunity to reflect further and refine our practices. One of the questions I just wanted to be clear about with this group also is there was a question of course with COVID and our mindsets being so locked into just thinking about COVID protocols. Like did we have an opportunity to practice our drills this year? Have we done lockdown drills? Have we done lockdown and lockout drills, bus evacuations and things like that so the kids and faculty are reminded of what those protocols are? And in fact we have, there've been some COVID related changes to how we can practice those drills, but we actually we're up on all of those, those are logged by school in terms of when those drills are performed, there are set numbers that are required by the State, that was not something

033that was waived, you know, through the COVID time that we were sort of out of school or certainly since we've been back in and particularly the high school we've been doing lots of drills over the last couple of weeks as students have come back to prepare them for all those different types of potential scenarios that we might face. So I just wanted to be clear that those drills have been in place and students are aware of those and we're reminded that parents don't live in the school world and that sometimes our terminology like lockdown and lockout can be confusing. We tried to clarify that in our communications but understand we could probably do a better job of that moving forward as well to give a little more background when we send those communications out. So

034I think that's sort of the basic facts and open up the floor to questions please. Can I just comment on the last thing you said, and then I have a question I'll ask later? Stewart had put together a really wonderful guide for parents, I believe it's on the district website. And I'm just wondering if that is something that maybe the PTAs could help us recirculate to our parents, I believe you know, provide a definition for the various drills. I mean not drills, I'm sorry, the type of different types of emergency situations, what parents should do. So I just wanted to throw that out as a reminder to the community that that is on the school's website. Thanks. And to just further that, you know, that was something that I know we had engaged with the

035PTCs about over a year ago at this point, but talking about having like a refrigerator magnet version of that or something that was an easy access at home, so that you could open up your mail drawer or whatever and be able to pull that out and remind yourself of kind of what, and you're right Karen, part of that was not only the appropriate nomenclature to be used but also what parents specifically can do in those situations which I think would be very helpful. So can I also ask a question about communication protocol? I know when it's a snow day that parents are alerted also by telephone, so I just wanted to inquire as to the protocols for emergency notification. I know it's by text, email but will it also or does it also include phone

036call? Often the phone calls in an emergency situation are harder to set up and take longer to go out so text and email. Excuse me, text and email are the main ways but in certain circumstances we would use the phone as well, especially when it's an of the moment type of situation. Can I ask a follow-up? Can I just ask you, what does that mean in the moment? Like what I'm sorry. I mean some of these are judgment calls in the moment and depending on what other stuff is going on in order to get we used texting especially for the dismissal piece because that was the quickest way to get that information out along with an email. So those are pieces where the phone call would have taken longer to set up just given the

037process of having to set up a phone call, they also take longer to go out. So it's easier when you batch the phone calls, they go out slower than when you batch the text. I would add to that as well that all families have different preferences of how you like to receive communication, some have very young children and we've gotten information that they don't want phone calls too late at night 'cause their kids are in bed or too early in the morning. We are shifting from doing more phone calls especially in those kinds of different times of day to moving to more of a text base but that is a relatively new part of our emergency procedure, I think we just started putting that into place last year. Okay. But we are trying to make

038that shift a little bit more so it's a little less intrusive. So and I know that there will be follow up with the BERT and DERT teams but I was wondering if there will be a test perhaps run as part of that followup? Will a test be run of the texting system just to make sure it is? Yeah, it's not an issue of whether it works or not. It does work and we have used it and continue to use it, I don't know the technology term but it's a universal enterprise system in which they all work together and get batched up together so it's not a function that it didn't work, it was just not applied correctly. Okay. So can I ask, so when you do the drills like not an actual event but drills,

039do you use the texting system then? Like so if you're doing a lockdown or lockout drill at the high school, do you actually execute a text to the high school students and say, "We're executing a drill right now?" We don't. We can discuss that with our terrorists in the past 'cause many people are absent parents, you know, if we were to do it the way we would do it during an actual emergency we would broadcast it, that can cause panic if people don't read the text well, but we can re-look at that as we do this debrief to make sure that those processes are in place and working well. And then can I just ask a question? I think you said the threat assessment team decided that it would be a lockout, is that correct?

040So the threat assessment team does exactly what the name implies, it assesses any threat and that could be a threat to self of a student, that could be from a student threat to another student so the term is used for really any type of threat. The members of the threat assessment team also overlap with BERT team so as we assess the threat, we discuss with Scarsdale PD in the room if there is a reaction that has to come to that threat and in this case yes, there was a decision to make a lockout call. But because of the nature of the threat and what you knew you were permitting students in and out of the building? Correct. Well, after we did the initial then we made that determination that if kids were exiting, well, first

041off allowing kids in because we did know the specific source of the threat so it wasn't that there was some unidentified threat out there, we could discern at our manned entrances, whether the person coming in the door was the threat or not. That being said, we also made the determination that kids leaving campus could leave campus, there wasn't a wider threat to the community, it was a very school specific. Okay. Situation. So, yeah I guess I was just trying to understand why kids were permitted to go in and out if it was actually a lockout which seems like that would be. Correct, that that was a determination made because of the specific situation and the specific nature of the threat. Okay, thank you. Sorry, I just wanna go back one second to the texting question.

042I just wanna be, you know, it's hard to think of every possible examples where answering your questions, but it brings up a lot of different things. I wanna be really clear that there are certain kinds of situations where we would not ever text. So if we were in a lockdown and we were really wanting the rooms to be quiet and there was somebody in the building and the doors were locked we would not be sending texts to kids because we would not want them on their phones and doing that so again, these things are situational, I think we'll try to be clear as we, you know, continue to share out our plans and develop our plans and providing flowcharts or some things like that to provide a little bit more clarity, but I just wanna

043be careful that we're not saying in every circumstance will we find ourselves texting kids about things because there might be circumstances where we absolutely do not wanna do that. That's a very good point. Sorry Alison go ahead. Other than the issue with the texting, do we have a sense yet of how the procedures that were implemented on Friday matched our standard written protocols or is that a topic for the debrief with the DERT and the BERT? That's certainly a topic for the debrief that being said, from a timing standpoint moving kids into the building once we instituted a lockout happened very effectively and I'd like to give a huge shout out to not only the administration and the BERT team of the high school, but all of the faculty and staff who were all hands

044on deck pulling kids in from outside. We did deviate from the lockout with allowing some entrance and exit to the building but that was a conscious decision, not a lapse in protocol. So on its face including the dismissal, dismissal was very smooth as far as timing goes, all of those things on their face worked well but we do need to debrief with each of the groups to understand the details that we may not have from a 20,000 foot view. I would also say that, you know, when you're doing an inter agency sort of cooperative enterprise like this, the police have a set of protocols that they follow that are very linear and we also have a set of protocols. And in some cases we've met together and we've talked about how those line up, in

045real life though those don't often match up and I do have to say that again, because of the configuration of the DERT and the BERT, the folks that were there that we had the police officers in the rooms with us for multiple hours, kind of working through those, that actually went I thought extremely well was that coordination of what we needed to do with the district and what they needed to do as part of their investigation, that's something that we haven't always had that experience so that was a little bit new for us and I was pleased with the outcome of how that particular aspect of it. I think that's a really good point and I think over the past three to four years we have a very different culture of communication in the these

046situations where all of the main administrators in buildings and the district and all of the main officers in the command structure of SPD can get in touch with each other very easily, are willing to take those calls and work together in a way that we didn't prior to really our focus on SEM, you know, a few years ago. This was not the first incident we've had but the first major incident we had in quite a while that, you know, reinforce that communication was happening. And I wanna big shout out to the Scarsdale Police Department for their swift and professional response. Before we move on, could you just remind me who's on the BERT team and the DERT teams and are there students on those teams? No. So the BERT and the DERT team our emergency

047response teams are different from like the safety committee which talks about policies, they are the actual teams that come together in the midst of an emergency to essentially take the command structure of the school. All the administration is on there, there's teacher representative, there's a mental health representative each school is a little bit different given the personnel, the DERT team is made up of the cabinet, public affairs officer, director of facilities I'm gonna miss a few just talking to you, but transportation. And they're all outlined in our district safety plan on who are on those, but please don't test me to get all of them. I won't, I won't, but in terms of debrief, will you talk to students at all about their experiences? That's a great point I think that is part of what

048we should do, we hadn't set up a structure for that yet. Ken is nodding yes in the audience. Ken is nodding yes. Great, thank you. Pam. I know that in the update you'd noted that our youth outreach workers and deans were available to speak and counselors were able to speak with students today. Yup. Do you have a sense. I'm gonna turn to Ken to get. Any sense of whether. Understanding of it. I spoke to some of the counselors and psychologists today and they said there were a few students who seem to still be jittery about what happened but that overall there was a sense of calm and they're keeping their eye on those specific students and talking to them as necessary. Okay. Go ahead. Okay. First of all, just to follow up on Karen's point

049so people aren't searching endlessly there's a tab on the district webpage called district information and under that tab, there's a safety, security and emergency management option which has both the school emergency guide for parents and the slightly longer, but equally interesting district wide safety and emergency management plan which we also update annually. So it's actually not that long it's like maybe 35 pages or something so for the folks that are curious about why things happened the way they did, it's actually pretty helpful on it, it gives a lot of what happened a little bit of context. I had a couple of questions which I'm gonna throw out there for I think pretty short answers but Dr. Hagerman when you mentioned that the police review the messages before they get sent out but do you have

050from even before you write the messages from your meetings and preparations that have a sense of the type of information that the police are comfortable putting out and not putting out? Sure. You know, and just to be clear we don't have them read every one in this particular case we were because they were on site the entire time and that was a luxury we don't always get, but we do try to run things by them whenever possible. But yeah, we have a pretty good sense in working, you know, I've been now for seven years working with the SPD, you know, other people have for many, many years as well so we have a generally pretty good sense to the extent that we understand where they are in any particular investigation and again, that becomes sort

051of the limit of, you know, it's just the beginning of an investigation or are we sort of midway through or are we concluding it? And that really depends on the amount of information, the type of information that can be shared. And in incidents such as this, some of the information that's disclosed or not disclosed is based on feedback from the police staff on-site or available to consult, right? Absolutely. So, I mean, in this case we've had a lot of questions, not unreasonably so about you know, who the threat was from, what the threat was, all kinds of you know, people looking for more details and even asking I think myself and some of the board members on Friday and what was going on and I explained I wanted the staff to be focused on the

052emergency, not on I making sure that I was completely 100% up to speed because obviously that's the more important thing but I think that the long-winded way of saying that again, the police are sort of guiding and their input is guiding the release of the who, the where the what, the details that some people are asking for is that an accurate statement? I mean of course I wanna say you're accurate. But the real answer is partially. Okay. Because actually the police have a much greater ability to release information that we cannot. So going back to my three buckets of most circumstances I'm not disclosing anything about this particular circumstance but in most circumstances if a threat comes from a student, a staff member, or a family member, we are obliged to protect privacy however frustrating

053that is to the community and we completely understand that it is, but by law we still have to protect the identity of those individuals and there's limited amount that we can ever say about that. If there's a bank robbery in progress on Central Avenue and it's completely removed from the district then we can say to you there's a bank robbery happening on you know, Central Avenue and so we'll be able to disclose that level of information outside of those two scenarios and again, the police can say things that we can't because it's an employer, because of student protections, family protections, there are things that we just simply cannot disclose to the community. It's a deeply regrettable because we understand the passion that parents feel about the desire to know, but we just simply cannot because

054we are obligated as school officials to protect the privacy of individuals who might be involved. The police also have kind of separate restrictions that they want because they're concerned sometimes I would imagine with kind of the progress of their investigation, the methods of investigation, the tools that they use alerting people out there to what we kind of know and don't know which may allow the person or people to avoid detection or apprehension and so I think it was shared it came to us that those are also considerations for the police, which don't directly affect us except obviously we want the safest situation possible. Absolutely right but you know, these are very tense moments for everyone that's involved and certainly the release of certain kinds of information can heighten, you know, that sort of tenseness which

055can lead to all sorts of really bad outcomes and I think the police understand that and they want to work to deescalate, the school district understands that and we always try to deescalate and again, sharing information out there prematurely, unfortunately can have some unintended, you know, outcomes that we really want to try to avoid. Right. Yes and I think that's kinda point and some of those intended outcomes can be the things that I was describing. I hope I've made it kind of clear for people who are listening but there is a desire on the part of everybody around this table to put people at ease but ultimately the administration is working with the police in determining whether to say open on Monday as we did today, we're doing that based on information that's available, but

056that we can't always comfortably share with everybody and so there is an element of trust, of trust in the administration, trust in the Scarsdale Police Department that the police department evaluates the situation properly and gives us the proper feedback. And that feedback is taken into account when you decide what the next steps are like opening up on Monday. Absolutely, I mean that's a great point and I'm glad you raised it Carl like, you know, we use the language that we're very prudent in our decision-making and we are to the point that some people think we're way too conservative sometimes in the choices that we make but as we've talked about as a group, we're gonna air it on the side of caution every single time and be more conservative and you can count on one

057thing that we will never say things are okay, or we're gonna open up if there's hesitation in our minds and I know that about the police department in Scarsdale as well. You know, we will say we're unsure or we'll share more information with you but we will not get out in front of ourselves and say, we're ready to open if we don't feel 100% that we're ready to do that I know that, you know, I come from the perspective I think that every single person around this table comes from the perspective that we think about all the kids in Scarsdale just like we do our own kids and we're not willing to take any risks with any of the Scarsdale children that we wouldn't be willing to do with our own. Thank you. I also

058just you know, to piggyback off of what Carl is saying and knowing that there's limitations of what can be communicated because of SPD investigation or also limitations that we might have legally and responsibilities. We also you know, we have to be cautious about what's discussed at this table generally around safety because some of our safety protocols and procedures and our emergency management process needs to be kept confidential because it protects our students and our staff because that information should not be known by the general community. So the details of this eventual debrief will not be discussed at this board table, because we don't necessarily want people to know well what, what didn't happen well, or where's a gap, we don't want gaps announced publicly they will be resolved internally they will be taken care of

059all that things will be addressed, but this will not necessarily come before the public so that we're not advertising what we're doing in certain places to protect our students and our staff and where we're looking to improve that so I just want to also be sure for everyone to know that safety is something that we protect in terms of protocols and procedures as well. I think that's all good but I do think it's worth at least noting when that sort of work is done maybe to us and to the community that, you know, we spent some time, here are the steps we took to evaluate not the specific items of evaluation, here's the process we went through to evaluate and you know, we've made some improvements or we've made some changes. I guess I would

060think it would still be helpful to at least confirm when that work has been done. Yeah, that's something Mike typically does or Eric would do in the SSCM updates going forward. I think to Carl's point we can get an update in executive session, one of the abilities of this board to meet an executive session is any item that would imperil the safety of others so I do believe that this board could get that update it would just be an executive session. Right, I think we're talking about public here. I understand I'm just saying we would be able to tell the public that at least this board, which is made up of seven community members has received a detailed update. One of the phrases that I think you used frequently was when you said in an

061abundance of caution I believe that's correct and I think you sort of started to touch on it, but I think I had the sense that there was a little ambiguity by the community on what that means so I think it might be helpful for you just to just real briefly kind of articulate when you add that phrase on in an abundance of caution because I think it could be misinterpreted as perhaps not wanting to say something that perhaps was of concern or what? So I think, you know, just to help people kind of get on the same page if you could. Just kind of briefly comment on that. Sure, so I think we try to be as clear as we can when we say we have a reported threat or a perceived threat, it's been

062reported to us that and so I think we tried to provide that kind of direct communication whenever we have the confidence to be able to support on making that sort of acclaim in public and to our community. In an abundance of caution goes to the prudence piece that I was speaking to a few minutes ago where we are obligated and even if we weren't obligated I think we would want to follow up on any issue that comes to us that could potentially be a health, or social emotional threat to our students, or our faculty, our buildings, or others in our community. And so, you know, we do follow up on things that come to us and sometimes we take short term actions and sometimes mid-term actions and sometimes longer term actions based on our ability

063to get comfortable with whatever that information was that was reported to us and so in an abundance of caution has become a bit of a catch phrase for us that says, you know, while we're not comfortable saying this is a thing, this is a threat, this is something that we're concerned about, we are saying that there's something that we are aware of in which we feel that we need to gather more information and we're taking the time to do that because we believe it's in the best interest of our students and our faculty and our schools. I think it's also probably a good way to think about us using the term in an abundance of caution is that the group of professionals whether they be law enforcement, administration, sitting around the table are trying to

064assess what's happening in the situation and we all believe that the threat is either mitigated or in a place where we can resume our normal activities that being said, people can be wrong people can, you know, there is always a small chance of risk and in an abundance of caution we're going to take these extra steps at least for the time being to assure that our decision making is mitigated by a little bit of extra precautions. I think for me in particular and I know some people had commented on this there's this balance between an abundance of caution and perhaps maybe this isn't quite the right way to put it but scaring people meaning in an abundance of caution we're going to have a police officer outside so yes, that is an abundance of caution

065but you could see where someone might interpret that as well wow, that's like a pretty strong thing to do you know, like someone's taking their time out of their day to stand there. If you're saying you think you need police officer to be there, what does that mean? You know, what are you trying to communicate? Because you know, police officers communicate, I would say it may be a serious threat. I actually do get what you're trying to do but I can see how there could be a mixed message you know, you're trying to balance being safe, but not scaring people, you want people to go to school and not say, well, I'm not gonna send my kid if there's a police officer there, they must have a reason they're not telling me, I don't think

066that's not necessarily the case, but it's in an abundance of caution, right? So you're sort of like extra. You're acknowledging I think a misalignment of kind of understandings from sometimes and I think this is where some of the conflict, really the significant conflict come from which is when the police suggest that they have a police officer here and we support that it's with the idea that this is gonna bring calm and confidence to our students and faculty that we're prepared, we're ready for anything to happen, we want people to understand that it's very safe to be here, but as you described, you know, from a parent perspective it can be seen quite differently, which is oh, my goodness there must be something to be worried about if a police officer is here and so I

067think there is sometimes very much a misalignment between our intentions whether in an abundance of caution or sort of generally with our actions and the way that that might be perceived. And I think a lot of the reactions that we get during these kind of emergency or high alert situations I think really reveals that tension that you're speaking to and you know, certainly love to think more about how we can be on the same page around those things so that people don't necessarily jump to a place of fear when in fact we want it to be a note of confidence and reassurance. I think that kind of for me anyway raises you know, a long-term topic of conversation which has to do with community reaction to law enforcement in general which is certainly a topic

068within the culture today that we all see on the news and you know, it's even maybe somewhat even generational you know, to me seeing a police officer may make me feel comfortable, to another person seeing a police officer may set off an alarm so I think it's to your point, just complicated and I think we just need to understand that you know, you're hoping the police officer creates a sense of calm, yet it may in fact be doing completely the opposite meaning it's setting off an alarm, which is the challenge of a lot of what we do in communication that people hear and read that information quite differently even though you wouldn't think so, right? You think well, of course we all are on the same page but perhaps we're not. Thanks, Bob. Can we

069talk about feedback for a second? Who specifically should parents and community members be sending their feedback and input to in the district? I would say anyone an administrative level that they feel comfortable I mean, depending on the issue, if it was a classroom announcement issue of course the teacher as always, but if it's general feedback about this general safety district protocols, either Ken, Eric, myself, the Board of Education which several folks have all that information tends to get circulated among the same folks so whatever people feel most comfortable with or if they have a personal connection we ask them to use those. Okay, I mean it may be, you know, something I've heard often from the community members is there's many that are very involved in, you know, thank you for watching these meetings all

070the time and attending there's many that I don't think they necessarily know who to reach out to so it might be something we wanna put out in a communication as a call for input with direct options on how they could do that. Just on that part I'm assuming there's no parents on BERT and DERT dirt for parent confidentiality so I do think that's an important perspective and also the student is there faculty on BERT and DERT? Yes. There are right. So there's not parent and student. I'm sorry, there's not faculty on DERT. On BERT though. On BERT yes. Sorry the building team. Building Emergency Response Team. You know, so the question I think to myself is how do we get that parent student perspective? I mean, let me give an example so I think we

071talked earlier Karen mentioned about the document about you know, lockout versus lockdown and that that's all contained in there, but we also have to just recognize that's not gonna be on the top of mind for a parent and that even if they had a magnet or other item which is a great idea, they might be at work, they might be in the car, you know, what are they thinking a parent or a student that they need to hear in these communications? One way to get that is obviously we solicit feedback, I'll put this out there another way is that, you know, we do have seven community members who are the board members that can receive confidential information. So I think it's something that we should consider whether a board members should sit on the district

072response team to provide that perspective. Thanks, Ron. We had brought that up before and because it has to assemble instantaneously. It has to assemble instantaneously and so it was kind of in terms of the response team, it wasn't appropriate for a board member to be there because they get going, they shut down into their things and go but I think as you mentioned, board members are regularly informed and certainly can, you know, provide input on all aspects of the protocols, the response effort and the team. I agree they shouldn't be part of the response. Yeah. But also remember the safety team and the building safety teams have those representation on them which is the groups that talk about policy piece and response piece outside of an actual response team. I hear ya, it's a lot

073of committees is all I'm saying and at the end of the day wanna make sure the perspectives get there that you know, I'm a parent, there's an emergency, you know, the way I think or the way another parent thinks that that information is gonna communicate which is, you know, many of you are parents as well so you obviously you have that perspective, but I just think it's valuable in the institution. I agree with you and I applaud Ken for immediately setting up the PTC debrief for the situation, I think that will help get parental opinion and feedback into the loop. Yeah, I agree and thank you Ken. From the feedback I heard was very much appreciated from parents knowing that, you know, I'm talking about getting down to that nitty gritty detail and that's just

074my perspective, I do think there's value in having a community member since it's confidential, it would basically need to be a board member on the DERT team. And then just last question, I know there was a communication on Sunday night that went to the school community, was there a separate communication specifically that went out to students and to faculty and staff? Sunday night? Sorry Sunday morning. Fine, it went out to all the high school students as well as the broader school community. Okay. We may wanna consider going forward, I think each of us experience this event very differently, I wouldn't say that I could experience it as a student or as a faculty member that was helping our students and just going forward it may be something we wanna consider to have discrete messages, you

075know, for each of those groups. Any other questions? Okay, thank you very much, we appreciate all the feedback and we'll take it to heart as we continue our debriefing processes, thanks. Thank you so much for that update. Moving on to item five, hearing from those present, this is the first opportunity for members of the public to speak on agenda items or other non personnel related matters per the adopted resolution by the board policy 1230 has been amended to allow each individual three minutes to speak with a 90 minute cap during this public comment period and this is for the duration of the executive order issued by the governor. First, we'll hear from members in the audience live and then we would do the Zoom for any of those and I haven't even opened that. I

076have it. So Alison's ready, I keep forgetting that part. Anyone from the audience like to speak at the podium tonight? Okay, seeing none Alison would you see if there are any hands raised in Zoom? Right now no hands are raised on Zoom, but we'll give it a few minutes since people have to switch over from watching on Scarsdale TV to activating their Zoom in order to give public comment. So I will try to fill the time here by I don't know. Oh, Michelle Sterling has raised her hand, thank you Michelle Sterling. I think Rachel or Jerry will promote, should I do it? I'm not doing it obviously, I didn't even go into the link. Thanks Jerry. Great so Michelle, Jerry is going to promote you to panelist. If you could please unmute. You're set to

077go. Michelle Sterling, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead please. Thanks, Jerry. All right so Michelle, Jerry is going to promote you to panelist. Okay. Okay, great. I am on mute, can you hear me? Yes, go ahead please. Michelle Sterling Bretton road just a couple of things. I'm getting some sort of like echo or playback. Yeah, okay. Oh, okay sorry about that. So sorry, okay, can you hear me now? Michelle, can you unmute yourself? There you go, okay. I just came back, can you hear me now? Perfect, yes. Sorry. Hello. You can go ahead. Okay, yeah. So just one thought and I don't know if this was discussed 'cause I got into the meeting a little bit late, but the cell service reception at the high school, is, you know, it's very difficult to get

078a signal, it's very difficult for the kids to make calls, receive calls, get texts, send texts. It's been like that for awhile but I think, you know, this situation last Friday really highlighted the issue and so a request I have is, you know, please take care of that technological issue, it makes it difficult on a day to day basis and of course in emergency situations, you know, it's just critical really that we have that line of communication so that's one request. And then just reflecting on the incident on Friday, you know, one of the things that we teach our children is that, you know, you don't always do everything right, sometimes people make mistakes, everybody makes mistakes, it's normal and one important thing to do when you make a mistake is to own up to

079it and you learn from it and you make assessments. And, you know, consistently when I hear, you know, when there were mistakes made, you know, in these communications by Dr. Hagerman, it's just so painful because you know, we have the same poor communication two years ago when we had a similar incident at the middle school from our superintendent same mess. And once again now two years later, you know, where was, you know, the debrief, the protocols, the updates, everything put in place and we had the same thing. And, you know, I mean, you could call it, you know, a misalignment of understanding or whatever name, you know, semantics you wanna give to it, but, you know, it's very painful to never hear a mea culpa from our superintendent, it's just painful. And mistakes are made

080and it's okay, but I think it's important to say yup, this is what happened, we're gonna do better next time, this is what happened that's good, this is what's happened that wasn't good. We certainly all understand there are limits to what can be shared, I know that, you know, we don't need to be explained at nauseum as to all the limits and the parameters and why everything can't we get it. I think really there was just a pure, not just lack of information shared 'cause we understand that for safety reasons it can be, but just zero empathy. I really think that there just needs to be some editing, some review of these communications that go out so that they can express empathy. If you read the police submission that went out to the community, you

081could hear the tone of empathy, I think that's important to understand, you know, what parents are feeling and going through even if you cannot and we understand that you cannot reveal what is going on. I wanna give that feedback really honestly in a constructive way. I really think it's important to take ownership and for really to try and improve and see how these things could be done on better instead of just constantly explaining a way why, you know, and somehow putting it on other people that you just don't understand, you know, we're not like a bunch of, you know, dummies out here, we understand the situation we're just asking for better communication. And, you know, to Bob's point, I really appreciate Bob's point, I felt it was, you know, he said it in a very

082nice gentle way and I think that I really hope that you guys can understand that kids did not get a text, they did not get an announcement, okay there was some sort of technical. Let's finish up Michelle. That the kids didn't get a text, but can you imagine if you're a kid and you walk outside, you have no idea what's going on, you know, you're being released and you walk outside and there's police officers in helmets and, you know, chest protection and rifles and you walk outside and you see that I mean, it is pretty scary. I mean, I think anybody would be and so I think just to sit and, and sort of explain it away, I mean, that's just ridiculous, I really wish that, you know, our superintendent could just sort of own

083us. Nothing personnel Michelle, thank you. At least once, it would make me feel better. It would really make me feel like, you know what? We can trust you because you can empathize and you get it. And just please, you know, take that into consideration, we understand there are limits, but we need better communication, thank you. Okay, right now there are no additional hands raised, we'll give it another few seconds. There are still no additional hands raised. Okay. Good? Yeah, there's actually no attendees now on Zoom. Okay so I will close public comment and move on to the next agenda item which is follow up to public comment. And I just will remind everyone who calls to speak, please do not discuss individual personnel. Is there any follow up to this? I'll just follow up on

084one point from Mr. Lang that there was a PA announcement, it did indicate to all students leaving the school that there would be a police presence, that's not to say it's not jarring when you see leaving but I do wanna be clear that that kids knew that they were gonna be dismissed, they knew that there was going to be a Scottsdale Police Department there, and they were being as discreet as possible and staff was around the entirety of the perimeter, comforting kids, telling them where to go, telling them to be calm so I don't want it to seem like kids walked out of the building with no understanding of anything, that's just not the case. Should we discuss cell reception? Is there something? Yeah, we could say that we've been working with the village on

085that. Well, actually, you know, this is something that comes up quite frequently that we don't have cell service but students who are on WiFi should have no issues both within the building and outside of the building into the fields, that has been upgrades that we have we have made to our facility, Rachel and her team test this regularly and I can attest to it because I've gone to her personally with issues of my WiFi dropping and I know that there's extensive testing that's done all the time. If students aren't on WiFi then your absolutely right, the point could be taken that it is very difficult, this is a bit of a dead zone particularly between sort of Brewster and downtown that does make it difficult to make calls so that does make it challenging if

086students happen to be off campus, but it is something that we have been aware of and been working on and have done a number of upgrades over time on. Rachel did you wanna comment on something else? Students should be on the BYOD not on the guest network and they need to have WiFi calling enabled on their phone, that's not something we can control from our end. Can I ask a question, is that communicated to our students? Are they aware? Okay. Yeah, I mean most students have to use devices in the course of their daily learning all the time. And so students are very aware of how to access, you know, the WiFi and different places in the building and what to do and, you know, in terms of troubleshooting when they need to. Am I

087allowed to ask another question? I know we had discussed this I think two years ago now, about having visitors be alerted to logging in to the building. So if you're a visitor, that you are also receiving a text or you're aware. I don't know what happened with that. Well, sorry, it's very loud. It has gone by the wayside a bit with COVID 'cause we've not had very many visitors in our building who are not students or faculty, but it is an important reminder for us to come back to and be thinking about when we have visitors here. We had talked about having information at the front when you sign in so that people had availability. Of security monitoring. So yeah, that's just something we'll have to go back and make sure that we're instituting when

088we start having people back in the building on a regular basis. You know, I would just address the empathy question, you know, certainly it is our goal to be empathic in these situations. I believe that we tried to express both what we felt like went well and areas that we would continue to grow and improve upon. As we've spoken to multiple times throughout this presentation, that we go through a very active process of debriefing, that every situation is slightly different and that they'll likely never be a repeat of the same exact circumstances and therefore we do have to be flexible and adaptive and we have to learn from issues as we move along. And, you know, I don't know how more clearly to say that that is something that we think about and certainly our

089communications try to share that empathy with the broader community when we are reaching out to them as well. Sorry, a lot of common responses but also, you know, I understand that Michelle was very aware of limitations as she mentioned on information that can be disclosed and that's certainly appreciated but that unfortunately I don't believe that that perspective is shared by everybody, I think we got a number of questions asking for by email and otherwise asking for that information so I hope that people don't think that she took it in some negative way that we had that discussion, but I think it was worthwhile for those who maybe they're just new to the community, maybe they're just not aware but we definitely got, you know, questions about that so I felt it was important that those

090questions be answered and hopefully those who already knew it could just, you know, ignore it and ignore me and et cetera. All right, we'll move on to the consent agenda. Just quickly before we get to that I just wanna let the community know that the superintendent and the officers meet on the Thursday before to set the agenda after receiving input from board members and cabinet, and the items put in a consent agenda are placed there when the board officers and superintendent believe that there's no need to discussion and no controversy regarding them. However, at this point any board member may remove an item from the consent agenda if he or she would like to bring it to discussion. All right, we'll move into the consent agenda. Amber, thanks. There are seven items on the consent

091agenda tonight. Item 8.01 are the minutes of our business meeting from May 10th. Item 8.02 are the minutes of our special meeting executive session from May 17th. Item 8.03 are the minutes from our special meeting May 18th. Item 8.04 is the personnel certified report. Item 8.05 is the personnel non-certified report. Item 8.06 is the abolition of cleaner positions. And item 8.07 is accepting the consent agenda, I move that we accept the consent agenda as presented. Thank you Amber, do I have a second? Second. All in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstention? The motion passes and the consent agenda is approved, thank you everyone. To our information discussion items the first one, our education report. Great, we gave a little bit of a runway for that in opening comments and so without any further ado

092we would like to introduce Edgar and Edgar will introduce his co presenters on tonight's presentation, Scarsdale school re-energizing our goals. Thank you, Thomas. Welcome everyone, it's my pleasure to have some of my esteemed colleagues alongside me to present the educational report this evening. I am joined by some of the wonderful educational leaders and thought partners in the district, Nancy Pavia, Jenn Kiley, Meghan Troy, Ken Bonamo and Thomas Hagerman. I wanna thank them for their participation tonight and their collaboration through the last three years. While she isn't printed presenting tonight, I appreciate having another valued administrator collaborator in the audience tonight. Shout out to Maria Stile right there on the back row. Middle row. In previous presentations, I've discussed the adaptations we've made to support student learning throughout this pandemic year. I've highlighted the nimble, flexible

093and tireless work of our district teachers, administrators, facilities, and entire staffs, and how we've shifted, iterated, built and in some cases invented ways to meet our students' evolving needs through online, hybrid and fully in-person but mitigated learning environments. Along with Dr. Hagerman, I have presented on the ongoing and anticipated work in the area of diversity, equity and inclusion, rich complex work that places at its center and acknowledgement of the strengths of our diverse community, the development of critical thinking skills across multiple sources and a deep dedication to preparing our students to be civically engaged, problem posers and solvers in a diverse, connected and pluralistic society. Tonight, we're highlighting some of the goals related to our strategic plan that have been either paused or slowed in the last year because of logistical challenges or the need

094to pivot our energies to respond to COVID related needs. We are re-energizing some key goals that relate directly to our collaboratively designed strategic plan. We could title this next slide, a lot is on our minds. As we look forward, there are essential areas that have impacted us, that we will respond to and because of the year, will remain energized. For example, vertical academic articulation will remain key to our student success, end of year assessments will inform adaptations and adjustments that will provide our students with the essential skills and knowledge as they move through the grades and department sequences. Technology of course will never be the same, our research responsibility is to take the best of what we learned and leave the rest behind, identifying when to switch off technology and emphasize the power of hands-on

095activities. Dr. Elliot Cohen discussed this at our last meeting, it will be important for us to monitor the yet unforeseen impacts of the last school year and the area of social, emotional health and wellness on our school community. We appreciate that we have a skilled and robust team of experts to lead us. It will be all of our responsibilities to monitor our students' mental and emotional states, we know their mental health is foundational to their academic and intellectual growth. Sustainability and all the areas that fall within it have remained important. We celebrated the national Green Ribbon at the middle school and students are back with their hands in the garden, but wider definitions of sustainability, we are looking at schools, cultures and our planet as a functioning system and thus it relates to the work

096we are doing through facilities, collaborative and project-based learning and DEI through a deeper understanding of the structures and systems that impact equity and inclusion. Diversity, inclusion and equity is not one we consider a standalone goal but one that connects to many of our strategic plan goals beyond sustainability including wellness, student centered learning and student support. Tonight, we will be focusing on the following areas, these areas are connected directly to our goals and the strategic plan. We'll discuss the goals involving the spiraling up of the next generation standards and math and science. I will be joined by Nancy Pavia, our elementary math coordinator to discuss the rigorous and thoughtful years long process involved in updating and better matching student learning, next gen outcomes with the best possible tools and curriculum resources. This upcoming year, we will

097be piloting new math programs in several classrooms throughout the K-5 grades. Afterward our elementary science coordinator, Dr. Jenn Kiley will be discussing the movement up of our science program paused last year and now resuming to include fourth grade students and pilots in the fifth grade level. Under student centered learning middle school principal, Meghan Troy will join me in discussing some exciting market, the middle school and expanding classroom libraries and targeted professional learning and student choice and book groups. Ken Bonamo high school principal will discuss both how the high school will resume the process of reviewing and advanced topic curriculum through the thoughtfully posed essential questions and analysis of data from classroom teachers, students and alumni. In addition, he will be sharing the exploration of a student centered shift to more responsive and authentic assessments through

098a high school assessment review. In the area of wellness Ms. Troy will discuss the movement forward and plans ahead to enrich middle school social, emotional learning in the area of student support I will discuss improvements to the system of student support and differentiation in classrooms through our work on MTSS and RTI. Finally, Dr. Hagerman and I will discuss an update on our ongoing work in diversity, equity and inclusion. We will now start with our youngest students. So speaking on behalf of our elementary math program, I wanna welcome up Nancy Pavia. Good evening Board of Education members and the Scarsdale community. I appreciate this opportunity to briefly share the thoughtful work the elementary math committee has been involved with for the past several years, as well as the committee's intentions moving forward. The math committee consists

099of a broad representation of faculty from the five elementary schools and all grade levels along with building administrators. Members volunteer their time, can you hear me? Members volunteer their time to participate on curriculum committees as an opportunity to collaborate and share their expertise in order to enrich our elementary programs. After taking a hiatus this year due to the pandemic, the math committee is re-energized and poised to pilot three new programs this fall with the intent of adopting and implementing one in the '22/'23 school year. The three math programs we'll be piloting are, Investigations 3, Bridges in Mathematics and Illustrative Math K-5. Allow me to back up and briefly share some highlights from our journey that have brought us to this point. "Primary Math" has been our elementary program for the past 13 years. It has

100served the district well, building students' number sense, numeracy skills and problem solving abilities. Despite the district's success with "Primary Math," the committee realized it was time to re-examine our philosophy, curriculum and practices. Our five-year plan began by reflecting on these focus questions. We spent several meetings analyzing and discussing where we were currently, what was needed to maintain the very best practices and what changes and steps were necessary to put us in a position of continued growth. As a culmination of our review and research, the committee created a document and titled it What We Value. The document is divided into three categories, classroom culture and philosophy, content in mathematical practices and pedagogy and resources. The full document which you don't see here, lists the elements under each category believed to be the necessary components of a

10121st century math classroom, curriculum and instructional practices. The What We Value document is the heart of our work, it is the common lens from which we have reviewed each program and we'll continue to use as we pilot the final three programs next year. In an attempt to keep our process as inclusive, collaborative and transparent as possible, we shared the document at faculty meetings in all five buildings. Teachers were asked to take each bulleted statement from the document and paste it on a T-Chart. Deciding whether our current program "Primary Math" does or does not address each element. Our overwhelming conclusion was "Primary Math" is strong in its content meeting and exceeding the common core content standards however, aspects of a student-centered problem-based program that highlights the math practice standards were lacking. So what are the practice

102standards? In essence they are the habits of mind that nurture and develop critical thinking and problem-solving. The practices are the ways students engage with math content. They also guide teachers in their classroom and instructional approach encouraging them to teach in a way that develops more advanced mathematical understanding, creating more problem-based student centered lessons. You can think of the practice standards as a guide to creating more complex and engaging learning experience. The practices demand the kind of thinking that is required in the 21st century. The committee spent one year reviewing and evaluating six potential math programs using the What We Value document as our common lens after publisher presentations and plenty of conversation, members took a one question survey to share their position on each program. They were asked to respond either yes, no, or not

103sure to whether a program was a contender to pilot district-wide. As you can see on this slide, just keep your eye on blue, Bridges in Mathematics an illustrative math clearly rose to the top. And two others "Think Mathematics" and "Into Math" clearly fell to the bottom. With further conversation, the committee was able to come to consensus on eliminating ready math and including investigations three. 51 teachers, just over 40% of the faculty along with a handful of administrators have volunteered to be a part of the pilot process next year. The majority of preparation and professional development for the pilot will take place through a year long STI course where teachers will have the opportunity to collaboratively unpack, discuss, plan and reflect on each program. Teachers will pilot one unit from each of the programs from September

104through March. Our intent is to reach consensus by early April. In an attempt to build internal capacity and support this summer, 12 teachers, two from each grade level will be trained in each program. These teachers will then turn key their knowledge and guide their grade level colleagues throughout the pilot process. The success of any new initiative especially the implementation of a new program hinges on the quality and consistency of professional development. Upon adoption, teachers will receive the necessary ongoing professional development needed to utilize the new program as a tool to further hone their instructional practices. This will ultimately advance our students' knowledge, skills and dispositions to become successful mathematicians. I hope I'm leaving you with a broad sense of the work the elementary math committee has accomplished in the past few years and our plans

105for the near future. I look forward to sharing with all of you the outcome of our pilot and how our new math program will positively impact learning in Scarsdale, thank you. Thank you so much Nancy, I have to say when you told me the number of teachers who had volunteered to pilot, it's a huge testament to your leadership and also to the excitement, sense of urgency and dedication of our Scarsdale teachers. I would now like to invite Jenn Kylie up to talk on behalf of our young scientists and the educators who facilitate their learning. Thank you. Good evening, members of the board and community. Tonight I will walk you through the steps we have taken as a district to transition to New York State's version of the next generation science standards. In order to better

106support your understanding of the new standards and our aligned curricula, I will share several photos of our youngest learners carrying out the practices of science and engineering as described in the New York State science learning standards. Finally, I will discuss our professional development program as without opportunities for ongoing adults learning, student learning can not be optimized. Although New York State to not adopt their version of the next generation science standards until December of '16, Scarsdale was proactive and had already begun the process of transitioning to the new standards during the '16/'17 school year with a pilot of engineering is elementary curriculum in grades one, three and five. In the fall of '17, these grades fully adopted those units while kindergarten classrooms began to pilot curriculum called Science 21. This was created by Putnam/Northern Westchester BOCES.

107Each of the subsequent years, another grade level entered our multi-year transition plan. Last year, the fourth grade was involved in a regional pilot of newly written fourth grade Science 21 curriculum. Unfortunately, due to the pandemic, the pilot was interrupted about three quarters of the way through, hence BOCES did not roll out the new fourth grade science curriculum to schools this year. In the interim, Smithsonian Science released their new fourth grade curriculum and our fourth grade teachers unanimously decided to utilize this curriculum beginning in the fall of '21. Also during the next school year, several fifth grade teachers will engage in a simultaneous pilot, a Smithsonian Science and Science 21, and roll out the program that best suits our needs during the '22/'23 school year. Based on this multi-year transition plan, when our current third graders

108reached fifth grade, they will be prepared to take the first administration of the newly formatted fifth grade New York State science exam in the spring of '24. Many people wonder how the next generation science standards look different from the old standards. The biggest difference is that students will no longer be expected to memorize scientific facts in isolation. According to a framework for K-12 science education, which the next generation science standards are based upon, students cannot fully understand scientific and engineering ideas without engaging in the practices of inquiry. At the same time, they can not learn or show competence in practices, except in the context of the specific content. This graphic is designed to help members of the community, visualize the components of three dimensional learning. As students are learning about a disciplinary core idea, they're

109engaging in the practices of science and engineering while making sense of their interdisciplinary learning through cost-cutting concepts such as cause and effect, patterns and matter and energy. I think it is easiest to form an appreciation for the three-dimensional learning environment the Scarsdale teachers are learning to create through their professional development experiences through the viewing of our youngest learners in action. For example, in a kindergarten unit weather and climate, it is no longer enough to tell students that black paper absorbs the sun's energy and white paper reflects it. Now, students learn this concept by applying the investigative practices of scientists to see and feel it for themselves. Students are given multiple opportunities to experience this disciplinary core idea. In this example, they set up a fair test by putting equal size ice cubes on black and

110white paper and place them in the sun so they can see which one melts first. Together, these lessons help students to form an understanding of the cause and effect relationship of the sun's energy striking different colored surfaces. A wonderful way for students to demonstrate their understanding of a core idea, it was to apply their content knowledge to solve problems using the engineering design process. In this instance, students had to build a device that would protect their ice cube from melting when placed in the sun. While students work, the teacher circulates around the room listening to students discourse about their rationale for choosing one type of material over another. Following the design and build process, students test out their designs and record results. In most instances, they have the opportunity to improve their designs and retest.

111Developing and using models is a key practice of science that is often utilized to aid in the communication of understanding. Through professional development, our teachers are on their way to learning how to support their students in the creation of models which not only include drawings but also arrows to communicate action and labels to add clarity and demonstrate appropriate use of new terminology. This model is obviously created by a kindergartener. It's impressive. I hope you could see from the few photos I have shared that the new science standards are all about students engaging in the practices of science and engineering in order to make sense of the world around them. In the interest of time, I will now move on to discussing our science professional development program. The adoption of the new science standards and the

112looming assessment that will measure students' understanding of scientific principles in a three-dimensional matter, established a need for teachers to have ongoing learning opportunities to develop their knowledge and pedagogy related to integrating the science and engineering practices, disciplinary core ideas and the associated crosscutting concepts into their instructional approach. Research shows that effective professional development must have a robust content focus, be collaborative and aligned with relevant curricula, incorporate active learning, provide coaching and expert support, use models of effective practice, provide learning opportunities over a sustained duration and offer feedback and reflection opportunities. This summer, our fourth grade teachers are invited to attend a full day of summer work so they can begin to learn about the new science standards through the lens of the Smithsonian Science curriculum. Teachers will have the opportunity to mentally unpack the first

113unit, how does motion energy change in a collision and create artifacts needed to meet the needs of all student learners. This opportunity will repeat throughout the year for the additional three units. A small amount of time out of the classroom, translates into a more effective and efficient practice when teaching the lessons, this leads to an increase in positive student engagement and learning outcomes. On a final note, as my colleague Ms. Pavia likes to say, I'm sure I'm ad-libbing a little here. A carpenter can only do her best work if she has the best tools. However, even the best tools in the world will not lead to a masterpiece unless the carpenter has the opportunity to hone her skills via an apprenticeship, or an ongoing training program. I tell this story because the curriculum programs we

114select are just that, tools. Our teachers have shown that they truly thrive when engaging in the available multifaceted science professional development program. It has been a genuine pleasure working with each and every one of my elementary colleagues, as they are keenly aware that the work they do with elementary students provides the necessary foundation to create a generation of scientifically literate adults. Some of whom will become the analytical thinkers, innovators and leaders who will solve our world's most pressing challenges, thank you. Thank you so much Jenn. And again, another incredibly dedicated and energized person who has created deep relationships with the teachers. Again, when you told me every single fourth grade teacher is on and they're ready to pivot to the best possible product to look at and engage in, speaks to the fact that you

115have really made connections with them. In fact, it's sometimes a problem because we sometimes have to send other people to go get professional development in other places and I got a few phone calls saying, no, we want Jenn so until we get cloning and we can apply that to you Nancy as well then we're going to have to continue to utilize some outside sources. Now shifting up to the middle school, I welcome Meghan Troy to join me in a discussion of the introduction of middle school classroom libraries and discuss the progress and plans for supporting students' social, emotional learning. Excitement for the middle school classroom libraries grew through conversations with Meghan Troy in Houston at the National Council for the Teachers in English. We attended together workshops that underline the powerful connection between student choice,

116reading volume, text matching, easy text access and student reading achievement and the development of students as lifelong learners. Working with Denise Del Balzo, the English department chair and all the middle school English teachers we distributed an extensive reading survey to students in the middle school grade to discover students' attitudes, habits and influences as readers. No surprise, there was a strong correlation between reading volume and achievement which we see at national measures over and over again. But interestingly, despite the fact that they were not widespread classroom libraries at the point, students reported that teachers were the biggest influencers of what students are reading and this was way beyond the assigned texts, but the book students were choosing to read for pleasure beyond school. So here's Meghan to share a little bit more of that. Thank you

117Edgar. And I reminisce about trips that we could take professionally to different conferences so someday soon. So good evening and thank you for giving me the opportunity to share some of the work that the middle school has been engaged in and is looking forward to engaging in the future. I'd like to start off by acknowledging the leadership of Denise Del Balzo, the English department chair and all the members of the English department as we build our classroom libraries. They have continued to focus on this important work and engage in professional development with people like Kate Roberts. I'd also like to thank Edgar Mclntosh for the support of the classroom libraries at the middle school, he has been both a cheerleader and champion of this effort. And one of his monthly visits to the middle school

118I remember an early conversation that we had with Denise, myself and Edgar about libraries. And that informal conversation was really just one of the seeds that led to where we are now and has turned into a goal of the English department and the middle school. So the importance of being with people, it's a good reminder. The research has shown that when students have access to classroom libraries, they read 50 to 60% more than their peers who do not have the same access. Giving students that fingertip access encourages them to read more. It is also necessary to think critically about the books we share with students in those classroom libraries. Students need to see themselves and others in the books that they are reading, the books selected need to represent a wide range of characters and

119experiences of diverse backgrounds. A professor of education, Rudine Sims Bishop wrote, "Literature, transforms human experience and reflects it back to us. And in that reflection we can see our own lives and experiences as part of the larger human experience." Our class in libraries help us to provide that literature to our students so that they can look in a window or in a mirror and see their connection to the rest of the world. Recently, I've been in a number of English classrooms where classroom libraries have developed and book clubs are taking place. It is clear that those students have choice in their book selection and are therefore more invested in what they're reading. In addition, the books they are choosing from represent a wide range of characters and experiences. Our teachers have learned how to support

120focused and meaningful conversations around books. It is extremely powerful to see our students leading the way in the conversation and building off each other's ideas. In a recent class one teacher asked the students if they liked the book they chose and the students of course like typical middle school students shared their views both good and bad. Giving them that space helps them figure out their own interests and also helps them figure out who they are as learners. As we move ahead, we'll continue to expand our libraries and offer ongoing professional development for our faculty. We are now in a place where teachers are learning from each other and sharing best practices. It is our goal to build in the necessary time and space for those learning opportunities to take place. Recently a teacher who is

121using book clubs shared that she was excited to return to her colleagues to ask for advice on an assessment question she had unanswered. It is through this type of collaborative approach that we'll continue to expand our classroom libraries across the building and incorporate new and engaging texts. I look forward to continuing this work with Edgar, Denise, the English department and all of our students. It really is exciting and energizing. This past year has reminded us that schools do so much more than provide instruction in academic areas. While academic instruction is critically important, schools are also places where children learn what it means to be a part of a larger community and how they should interact in that community. In reflection this was more challenging to support this past year as we had students working between

122virtual and in-person instruction and some students fully virtual. I'm proud to say that through the creativity of our faculty and staff, we were able to continue to foster a sense of community and support students wellbeing. For example, earlier this year we held a virtual wellness day for students, student appreciation week and instituted a new morning news program. These are things we'd like to continue to build upon next year. Four years ago, we began core our advisory program. In this program a small group of students was paired with a faculty advisor and met weekly. We used this time to build a sense of community within a larger school and also incorporate important character education and social emotional learning. Due to some of the constraints of COVID this past year, we did not hold our traditional advisory

123period. However, we did incorporate many of the key components including building community and social emotional learning into other areas of our life. During the second half of the year, we have been starting our day with a morning news program, NEWSMS. The idea began with a book, "The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse" by Charlie Mackesy. This book follows characters, friendships and shares many life lessons. Many of these lessons or topics that we would have explored if we were having our traditional core groups. For example, "Being kind to yourself is one of the greatest kindnesses," said the Mole. At the time we were in the hybrid model and we were looking for a way to bring our school community together, all it took was for me to mention the book to a few teachers,

124Meghan Lahey, Dan Banielow and Michael Pincus and they took off with the new show. The program starts all of our days off in the same way, shares important announcements, a page from the book and other fun challenges. Faculty, staff and students have all hosted the show and brought their own talents to the program. Edgar himself recently hosted and shared his background with students. And going forward this is a program we will continue and look forward to exploring new opportunities. We also hope to move our newsroom to the great hall so that students can see the inner workings and we plan on training students so that they can take over and run the behind the scenes. As we move through the school year I heard from faculty that they were looking for additional professional development opportunities

125and how they could support students wellbeing and mental health. At the same time we were looking to plan our return to our former core structure and class period. This led us to a partnership with Character Strong, an organization that provides curriculum to support SEL competencies and character development. Our recent faculty meetings have all been dedicated to learning more about these resources and how we can utilize them best with students next year. As is always the case, we never taken outside curriculum in its entirety, instead we take the curriculum, we adjust it and enhance it to meet the needs of our students. This year these adjustments will take place and they're especially important that students return to us in different places. In terms of next steps we'll be continuing our work with Character Strong and providing

126professional development for our faculty. Thanks to the support of the district and the Board of Education, we'll be able to provide summer improvement days dedicated to this work. A team of teachers from each grade level will be working over the next year to develop a consistent program across the building. Building community and relationships is really the key to engaging students in their learning lives, this begins with our youngest learners as they enter the middle school from their elementary schools. We want those connections and sense of belonging to be felt before the first day of school on September 1st. To help with this goal we'll begin a PenPal program between students in our incoming sixth grade. In addition, we'll be holding virtual bootcamps for our incoming sixth graders to help them become more familiar with the

127middle school, this will largely focus on developing their executive functioning skills. And then finally, we'll hold an in-person orientation which is a shift for the middle school on August 31st. We believe that this will ease some of the anxiety that students feel leading up to the first day of class. Sixth grade students will have the opportunity to be in the building on their own, get to know their teachers and tackle the always challenging locker combination all before the first bell rings. And it's nice to have lockers. Our hope is that these early contacts will make the transition easier after a unique fifth grade year. And we will welcome them to our community. Classroom libraries and character education are just two areas we're looking to re-energize after the 2020/2021 school year. However, the faculty has managed

128to continue to keep growing these programs, I wanna thank them for their commitment and effort this past year, I know that we're all looking forward to returning to a more normal school year and shifting more of our focus to these areas. Thank you for the time tonight. Thank you so much, Meghan. And now I'm going to invite up another educational leader and collaborator Ken Bonamo. He's going to talk to us about advanced topics, curriculum review, and upcoming presentation related to the student college preparation and access and a review of the high school student assessment. Thank you Edgar and thank you to the board for this opportunity to present to you this evening on some of the work we are doing and we'll be doing at the high school. One area of focus this year and

129next year will be to conduct a review of our advanced topics program. Our AT program was created in 2007 to give teachers more latitude in designing college level curriculum that engage students more effectively, and that promote critical and creative thinking. And the time that has passed, the AT program has evolved to include new courses such as AT entrepreneurship and AT constitutional law and new teachers have joined the program. We began working on this program review in 2019 by interviewing teachers who helped create the program 14 years ago and by interviewing alumni on their experiences in high school and in college connected to the AT program. Our goal in this program review is to evaluate the AT program using a few essential questions, such as to what extent are there clear and consistent expectations for success

130in AT courses? To what extent do our AT courses promote critical thinking, creativity and deep learning? To what extent is our AT approach preparing our students for post-secondary education? And to what extent does their AT curriculum prepare our students for AP exams? We will be helped in this work by the Tri-state Consortium which will include a visit in the winter by educators from other schools to interview members of our community on their experiences with the AT program. Inevitably connected to this work, will be a comparison over AT courses with advanced placement or AP courses and the advantages and disadvantages of having an independent program. Since most of the visiting educators will likely be well versed in the AP program, we look forward to hearing from them on these essential questions about our AT program as

131well as questions of comparison with the advanced placement courses. One area of our student's world where the effects of the pandemic may last well into the future is in the process of college admissions. I'm sure you are aware that many colleges and universities made standardized test scores optional during the pandemic and some are continuing with this practice moving forward, in other words they are moving away from them permanently. Throughout this time, our high school deans have been in contact with their counterparts in college admissions offices to determine the impact on our students and to help our families make informed decisions. Now that we have nearly two years of data to compliment those conversations, a small team from our counseling department led by our director of counseling Oren Iosepovici will present to you in the fall

132about the changing landscape of college admissions in light of these and other significant changes. Another important component of our work has been on assessment practices. The high school assessment committee led by assistant principal Chris Welsh is working to look at our school-wide structures for assessment and grading such as testing days and marking periods, as well as deeper questions about the form and content of assessments to ensure that students have multiple optimal opportunities to demonstrate their learning. For example, next school year we will be piloting a quarter without designated testing days to see if granting teachers flexibility in this area improves student experience. Further, we have a subcommittee that is essentially a study group looking at the benefits and drawbacks of a rolling grade book where quarterly grades are snapshots of the course grade in real

133time, as opposed to our current system of quarter grades that stand alone and comprise the final course grade exclusively. Finally and perhaps most important, we are taking stock of the multiple platforms that teachers use to modify and enlarge their assessment practices during the pandemic to see which ones represent a significant improvement in assessment and how we might integrate these opportunities going forward permanently. We're also looking at increasing opportunities for students to engage in performance-based assessments across the subject areas. I want to be clear about this term performance-based assessments because it means different things to different people. An essay in English for example, is in fact a performance based assessment, as the act of writing is what is taught in that subject. In science, a performance assessment might be a lab report or designing an experiment.

134During the pandemic, traditional secure paper and pencil tests were obviously difficult to administer and teachers relied more on these performance assessments to measure student performance. We will investigate the extent to which these experiences can continue to be incorporated in our work and share these practices among the faculty. We will also be studying the work of the Mastery Transcript Consortium which looks at how the high school transcript can be reworked to focus on students' unique strengths, abilities, interests, and histories in place of letter grades and individual courses. At this point, our work in this area is aspirational and I look forward to the learning journey to come with the faculty. As Megan did, I wish to think that you're in the board for the support of our summer improvement days many of which are focused on

135these areas of work, as well as the leadership team at the highest one, the cabinet and the entire faculty, their continued engagement in these and in our other efforts, thank you. And thank you Ken for taking every opportunity to iterate and improve and look carefully and thoughtfully at your programs. I now wanna pivot to an update on RTI or response to intervention and MTSS, multi-tiered systems of support. Some may remember that before schools were disrupted we had undergone an extensive review by our accreditation organization, the Tri-State Consortium. There were two key recommendations that resonated with our committee. One related to classroom shifts to decrease student referrals through vertical alignment of programs and phonemic awareness K2 and systematic Word Study: Three, Five. The second important recommendation had to do with alignment of best practices through child

136study teams at all elementary schools. This was begun but will be further energized through Scarsdale targeted training by nationally recognized RTI/MTSS expert Jim Wright, who will be working with our elementary leadership teams and key members of our child study team for a three-day retreat in order to set structures, norms, and reinforce systems of collaboration to improve classroom practice and our RTI/MTSS systems. A revisit of our Tri-state team is scheduled for November 8th of this year in which we will review our updates and receive additional feedback. I now want to invite Thomas to join me to discuss what is happening most recently with our districts work on diversity, equity and inclusion. Thanks, we've provided a somewhat extensive review of this work at our last meeting and so this is just intended to be sort of a

137quick update with regards to what's been going on over the last two weeks specifically. So the board members will certainly remember and those of you in the audience as well, that the compact committee was tasked with being a district committee to sort of oversee this work and had an immediate charge of doing a couple of things. One was to do what it's been doing which is to become a, or be a repository for best practices so that when we came together, we first grounded ourselves again and why this work is important, we did sort of a rip from the headlines exercise in which we looked at ongoing on bias and oppression that's going on every day right now across the world and why it's so important for us to be engaged and even more so

138why it's important to have our students engaged and understanding this work. So we sort of used that as sort of a framework for continuing the ongoing work we also looked back sort of where we were a year ago in this work in terms of trying to create awareness around this and then some of the best practices that were being shared at the building level. Additionally, we were given a couple of charges through the new board policy and part of that was to identify a framework in which to bring forward to guide this work and so we reviewed the New York State culturally responsive sustaining framework, as folks recall from our presentation there are only four main principles and are fairly easy and straightforward but even with that we focused on two, which was welcoming and

139affirming environments and rigorous standards. And as we talked about that document in our last presentation, we talked about the fact that although it's about 64 pages, the reason it's so long is because it takes those four principles and cycles us through what is it that students do, what is it that teachers do, what is it that building administrators do and so we looked at that with an eye of I'm looking at the work that's currently ongoing within our schools and how those might actually fit into those two areas of work that we're already doing. So we had a great conversation and a springboard for conversations to occur at the building level in which we began to have conversations about the commonality of work that's happening across the district created at 12, but maybe some of

140the discrete work that's happening at elementary, middle and high school and we are prepared to be bringing those goals back to the board in a formal recommendation for adoption for next year as we described at our next board meeting. In addition to that, the policy asks us to think about appropriate metrics for those goals so that's continuing part of our ongoing discussions as well, we wanna be clear that there's an accountability piece here that this just isn't sort of an organic process but in fact we have very specific goals with some specific outcomes in mind. We also reviewed our district's new policy and noted the alignment between the policy and the State framework and again, talked about why that made it the likely choice for our recommendation to the board for our formal adoption for

141the district so that was a good conversation and people were excite I think, to think that this wasn't something that we were adding on, but something that already there was a natural nexus between the work that was existing and the framework from the State. And then finally we discussed shorter and longer-term planning processes just as a reminder, we talked about using next year as a planning year and to continue to respect and appreciate the work that's going on at each school level and at the same time use the gear as more macro level planning for the district as a whole so that we would be using facilitators to help guide that work but also have programming that's available to again continue the initiatives that have been started this year and that ultimately after next year

142we would hope to have a couple of year plan two or three years that would naturally integrate seamlessly with our strategic plan at that time understanding that there'll be some updates to that. So it was a big meeting, we covered a lot of territory I think it was a good meeting to sort of get us grounded back in this work and excited to meet again next week to follow up and to make our final selections for board approval at the next board meeting. In addition to that, I met with the PTC and set up meetings for the PTA leadership, we walked through the same presentation that the board observed at the last meeting with much more obviously informal feeling to it where there was a lot more exchange of questions, question asking and answers by

143me about sort of where we are with this work, our intention with it and how the PTAs and PTC leadership particularly can be involved in that, how can we create a synergy between the work that's going on between our different organizations and also how we can partner to bring in especially around high quality programming. We made a commitment that when we arrived at consultants, that we've made those available to our apparent leadership whenever possible when we were doing student presentations and faculty presentations as well. And then finally, the administrators although they're designated as sort of a siloed group here, the administrators are sort of moving in and out of all these other groups all the time. And so they do have individual work that they're leading and supporting and bolstering at the building level but

144we're also talking as cabinet groups and as administrative councils about our responsibilities and obligations related to this work as well. Again, we reviewed the cultural responsive sustaining framework, we've talked about the role of consultants and admin council, a subset of that is helping to go through the process of vetting consultants and choosing consultants, we're also looking at anchoring texts that we might be reading as an administrative team and that in turn we could ask our parents to read, the Board of Education to read because remember one of the key stakeholders in that policy of the board of education to be learning right alongside us as educators. And then again, to understand each other's ongoing work so that we can support it across schools, even if we're doing slightly different work what we found is that

145much of it reinforces the work that's going on in other places and we find that there are great resources that are being exchanged as part of those rich conversations and dialogue. Moving on to the next slide. I've already alluded to the consultant process, we started off with a list of about 15 different groups or individuals some are already known quantities to Scarsdale in other words, people who've already been here and spoken and have worked with our faculty and staff, others came from recommendations that people have gone through to workshops or other presentations, some of them are references through colleagues so we put together a multi-point rubric in which to evaluate these folks. We asked our subcommittee to take notes on them, we went through an extensive vetting process, we are now setting up initial screening

146phone interviews which is apparently how this consulting piece works, you don't get to talk with consultants right away you have to be approved by their screeners and vice versa, they have to be approved by ours so we're in that process right now and then we will be using again, small committees to ultimately do a more formal screening process to see if there's a fit there. And just a reminder on the consultants, we're looking at potentially more than one individual or groups, we definitely are looking for folks who are outward facing facilitators to help us navigate conversations like implicit bias to build off some of the programming that's already been put into place here, thinking about our own thinking, thinking about our own biases, providing some historical context especially as our policy calls for access to

147educational opportunities. So we're definitely looking for folks who can continue some of that work we already have Dr. Reverend Marks who was here did a great presentation in the spring and coming back and working with the high school so we hope to leverage that opportunity and again, create some further programming that students can have access to and that our parents can have access to and so on. This work will likely carry through the summer, I don't think we're going to get this wrapped up by June just at the rate in which it's proving to be a little bit more difficult particularly in COVID time and people aren't traveling and doing some of the normal things that consultants do to sort of expedite these processes. But we are looking for the outward facing as well as

148potentially someone to work with us through our planning stages of next year to have put together again, a longer-term plan for the district. And committee interviews I've already mentioned that piece. The last piece which for me builds beautifully off of the presentation that you heard tonight, it's actually pretty exciting to be here tonight to talk about learning and goals and pilots and reviews and you know, AT and like all of the things that we got into education to talk about I know right it makes your heart sing again that we're here and doing the things that we love and care about. And you know, we've had a great opportunity, we had a conversation with Ann Marie Nee to talk about a partnership with the STI and how we can, you know, can line up either

149anchor texts or courses and we're really delighted to learn that there's so much work that's underway already, that there are already anchor texts that really do exist in the district that have been central to STI courses that have been going on so that really helped us to sort of think about narrowing down when we were looking at resources for ourselves for that work. And then you know, just again, focusing on identifying opportunities for curricular enrichment through multiple voices and perspectives and even though we talk about things like math pilots or a curriculum work that's happening at the middle school or high school I think we're all coming into it now with a different lens of equity. And multiculturalism and pluralism in terms of, you know, what Edgar was talking about that we want broad representation

150in our curriculum, we understand that it's important not just for our teachers, but particularly for our students to understand you know, the richness of the world by all the different perspectives and individuals that make it up. So we are excited about continuing this work for us it feels like it's gonna be just a sort of seamless enterprise that's gonna carry on from this spring through the summer into next year. And we don't get to say that in about all parts of our work necessarily so that's a really exciting part of this for me. And with that, I would just like to echo my thank yous, heartfelt gratitude to all of our presenters here tonight and even more so to those folks who are not presenting tonight but who are also really responsible for a lot

151of the work that's going on in the background here. You know, this is really the hallmark of a Scarsdale education, all of the pieces that you talked about, this commitment to continuous improvement, this commitment to professional development, this commitment to partnerships beyond ourselves, this commitment to evaluation and review. These are all things that have been something that has continued to push us towards excellence over time and you know, to an excellent level of professionalism and so I'm really grateful for everyone who was involved in this and particularly shout out to Edgar for his leadership and providing this you know, at the end of the year, people are really looking at winding down and a lot of this presentation looked like winding up. And that can cause a little bit of anxiety for people, but it's

152being managed in a way really that I think it's building excitement rather than anxiety so thank you Edgar. Thank you. (members clapping) So I guess we can take questions. Awesome. So let me add my thanks to you Edgar and to all of the faculty members who presented tonight, that was a truly a thorough and comprehensive and illustrative presentation and again, my thanks. My question is about the elementary school math program, in the past elementary school math programs that have had a heavy reliance on word problems have been a challenge for students with special needs who may also be facing challenges with reading, which then is compounded if the math program is language dense they then also have difficulty accessing the math program so could you talk about with regard to the math programs that you're

153piloting, where they fall with regard to language density and how children with special needs may be able to access that curriculum. We will be looking even further into all of the programs the three that we have narrowed it down but at this point the programs that we have chosen are what we consider problem-based programs so there's not a lot of language put on all the pages, it's a problem that is presented to the class, it's a question, the overarching question that would engage students and then the students work collaboratively to tease out the mathematics that is embedded in the problem and then they come back and there's a lot of discourse and conversation so all of the programs that we're looking at are not text heavy word problem-based types of programs. The pedagogy has really

154taken a shift in the last handful of years, we've been doing some parallel work in addition to the pilot we've been working with a consultancy through Metamorphosis a woman named Carrie Orgera and a good percentage of the staff have been working on this kind of pedagogy even prior to the adoption of this type of program so it's really a shift in pedagogy I think that you will see and we do have special ed teachers that are on the committee so their lens will be very, very important. Okay, good evening thank you that was really a great presentation by everybody I mean, especially, you know, the four of you not to take anything away from Edgar and Thomas but I really, really appreciate it, you know, I don't have a specifically educational background so anybody could

155see not just what you're thinking about but the fact that the teachers are so directly involved and that this starts you know, with the teachers I think is really both important, I think it leads to successful programming and I think most importantly it's an indication of the dedication of you and the other teachers because I know that you're not just stepping aside from teaching in the class for a few minutes to figure this all out, this is all happening, you know, after, before lunch, whatever so I really appreciate it, I hope it shows that the administration and principals and the faculty working together to come up with a program that is really gonna be exceptional. I saw that "Primary Mathematics" textbook up there and I remember, you know, when my daughter brought that home and

156I think she was in third grade and it was the first year so it was kindergarten, first grade, second grade she had had whatever was, I don't want to say normal, the traditional math for me I understood it. Then she came home with the "Primary Math" and she was showing it to me and I was like, you know, I don't understand. It was third grade math and I couldn't and I went to the teacher and the teacher said, oh, you know, it's gonna be great and he loves math and all this stuff and he was a great teacher, Mr. Brodsky, both my girls had him, loved him. And I said, "Well, isn't there like a manual or like something for the parents?" And he said, "Well, I can loan you this textbook or whatever" so

157I took the textbook home and I looked at it and I still didn't, you know, really understand it. You know, we went by the year, you know, she got it. My younger daughter started with that and I saw from the beginning it just made so much more sense, it was making more sense for me, you know, obviously it's making more sense for her. And I'm sure you've given the two questions I'm about to ask some thought, but I guess one question I think, or one thing just to think about really is that transition, you know, I don't know how it will be, and I don't really know but I just think for my older daughter, I think that was where, and she recovered and everything else but it did cause, you know, maybe a little

158bit of frustration. And the other thing is which I don't have a solution for this at all but as a parent, you know, I kinda knew it was coming, I'd heard about it a little bit, I was around, but like I had no clue at all and I wonder if some outreach, you know, before you fully adopted to give people some of the information, maybe a little more than what you gave tonight for the people that don't happen to be watching the Board of Ed meetings. I mean, I'm sure most of the community is watching right now, but there might be a few who aren't. So just something to think about. Thank you, first let me thank you for recognizing the work of all the faculty members and the time and dedication that goes into

159these projects, but certainly not just the people who are presenting. You asked a question about the transition to a new program, the transition from "Trailblazers" to "Primary Math" was a very drastic change. It was drastic in that when we went from "Trailblazers" to "Primary Math," we increased the amount of content by a year and a half so there was a lot of back-filling to move forward, also was a lot of different numeracy strategies and methods that hadn't been used before. Like how many ways can you show the number 18 and decompose it and a lot of mental, the program itself is very strong in numeracy and I can see where if you're starting in third or fourth grade, third grade really took a leap and assumed a lot of numerical understanding and problem solving. There'll

160be a much more graceful transition I believe because of our work that we have done with "Primary Math" into the next program. Number one the common core, our content will be the same, the shift truthfully is in the pedagogy and the way the teacher is going to be engaging with the students, the structure of a lesson will change. A lot of the thinking in the power for the heavy lifting is gonna be done by the students, not necessarily the teacher. It's a real artful way of teaching and it's a newer way in the last handful of years. Teacher more as a facilitator, I don't think you'll see that big leap in terms of the content at all, it'll be much more graceful. And you mentioned something, the third thing you talked about, I apologize. Oh,

161parent education, yes, thank you. There will most definitely be information sessions for parents, we had them when we adopted "Primary Math" and we'll do the same, there's usually some evening ones and some daytime ones, usually within each elementary building and then the district one, obviously there will be some that we will talk about that further. It is important that the parents understand. Thanks and I apologize for not doing science specific recollections note or middle and high school but the other thing I just wanted to touch on is I also think it speaks very loudly towards the teachers and staff and everybody that, you know, to me, "Primary Mathematics" just was yesterday, right? I mean, it was recent, not that long in the evolution of teaching and the fact that it seems like less than, you

162know, probably sounds like maybe eight years after it started, you started doing a very serious evaluation and I'm sure it's the same in science and I know constantly with AT, sorry Meghan I can't think of anything off the top of my head. But, you know, I think that constant critique, that constant thought about what we're doing here is one of the things that keeps us ahead of the curve, that keeps the kids learning, that keeps it interesting and just makes it a really good educational experience for everybody and I just wanna point that out because it just seems to be a constant work in progress and I don't know if folks who aren't watching, you know, the few that aren't watching these meetings are appreciating that so I wanted to call that out as well.

163Thank you very much everybody. Okay. You go ahead. Go ahead. No, go ahead. Go ahead. Okay. You don't wanna go ahead? You go first. Okay. I wanna echo my colleagues comments, thank you everyone for your presentations tonight. My question is for Ken and it's about the AT topic review. So you mentioned that the Tri-states were gonna come in and I think you mentioned a previous review you had contacted alumni to get their feedback, are alumni gonna be involved in the Tri-state's review process and how are you gonna reach them? Sort of how's that gonna work? Yeah, thank you for the question. Yeah. I should clarify that the alumni were contacted at the beginning of our review which we suspended once the pandemic hit. So we're actually resuming it, I view it as one continuous review.

164The alumni were surveyed if my memory is right in the summer of 2019. So those data are fresh and there were three different classes of students who were contacted and we've used our alumni survey firm, I forget the name that we've used for years in contacting. Usually it's a triennial process and we added AT specific questions to the general alumni survey so we will incorporate that data in their review. I don't think there'll be another content that we have discussed preliminarily with the Tri-state's leaders about whether we would assemble a focus group of alumni if that is possible and of course now with Zoom location is not as germane as it used to be so we may think about that moving forward. The data you have from alumni won't necessarily be the questions that you

165shared tonight? Correct. I would say that the questions we had some alumni were questioned that got up those themes, but were more specific to the student experience in college. Okay, thank you. That was exactly my question. But I was actually curious the response rate of the alumni especially more recent alumni, was it a decent response rate? I don't know, I can get that to you. Okay. Edgar and I have the copies of the survey, I don't remember it was different each class, but I believe that it was significant, the data person who was working with us, the firm said that as far as these things go we had a pretty good sample size, but I don't have an actual percentage of response. Ken while you're up here can I just add a follow up on

166AT? Are you seeing a similar shift or in thinking about AP tests as you are with college board tests for administration admissions, things like that? So, I think what we're seeing at a very preliminary way is that for example, big news I think rhe week or two ago is University of California is going to abandon standardized tests completely in their admissions procedures. And I think colleges are evaluating the role of these tests and, you know, I think that there is a rationale that says this is an outmoded way of evaluating students, those tests are normalized exams. The sole function of which is to rank students, someone to get an 800 on the verbal, there has to be another one who gets a 200 in order for the bell curve to take hold. People feel that

167that way of measuring intelligence is something that is 100 years old and has a whole host of cultural implications that we are trying to avoid from. I think the AP exams, they have evolved over time, many of our original criticisms of them were reflected in the evolution of APA exam so for example, the one I like to bring up is the AP U.S. history, used to be a very content heavy exam, of course it still is in many ways but now I believe all of the questions are stimulus based response questions where you're given a document or a stimulus of some artifact with which you have to evaluate, you know, your own historical knowledge but it's more of an analytical question rather than a recall question. So we would do well to look at those

168exams to see, but I'm sorry to the point about normalized exams, AP exams are standards based exams so in theory, everyone who took an AP exam was prepared well enough, everyone could get a five, no one has to get a one in order for them to get a five so it is a more, I would say, humane or humanistic approach such as the State exams, they moved away from percentiles years ago and are one, two, three, four in theory. So there may be more of an emphasis on AP exams maybe moving away from the standardized, the normalized test of ACT and SAT and the subject tests had been completely eliminated. But I would urge you to consider very, very few colleges still use the subject test, they used to be called achievement tests back in

169the day, SAT 2, they have a whole host of names. The number of students taking them it's really dwindled over time I think we were down to six or seven schools that even wanted them. They were really almost irrelevant, you'll hear that but that's really not gonna be a big impact. I think the question is, are colleges going to use AP as a defacto nationwide curriculum? And then as a result, do we have to think about that? I'm not sure that we're headed there, because there are serious questions about access and I think whenever we get the questions about the ranking, there are serious questions about what a focus on AP encourages educators to do. Having worked in a school where that was a focus and the ranking was very much on our minds, what

170will end up happening is driving AP down to earlier and earlier grades and expanding participation at the expense of what is best for students at that moment and their development. So I really look with a very cautionary eye at that type of focus but I think we have to be cognizant of the changes in the exams as well as the landscape of college admissions so those two pieces are connected of course. Go ahead. Thank you also for this presentation, I wanted to mention to Ms. Kylie that the example of your female carpenter was not lost upon me so thank you for having her be female. Ms. Troy, I wanted to ask you about the middle school, if we could turn it to reading for a minute. You know, it's great that you engaged the students

171in the reading survey, think that's so great and I know a lot of students are unengaged readers, especially with the appeal of video not video, sorry, computer games, and that can really grab certain students in middle school. So I was wondering how the libraries are set up to engage that reluctant reader, especially that reluctant reader who has difficulty with choice, who may look at the library and be lost in it. Yeah. First I would say, you know, thanks to Edgar for that reading survey that we used with students a number of years ago. I think what we've seen in the classrooms and even just recently when I was in a teacher's class with a group of sixth graders, I think with the opportunity for choice, there's always a genre or an access point for our

172students. So, you know, in this particular class that I was observing, there was a historical fiction piece, there were different level texts for students and I think what Edgar spoke to earlier, students are really listening to their teacher's recommendations, you know, I live with that at home as well, right? And if a teacher puts a book in a child's hand and there's that level of respect in that relationship there, the students are really willing to engage and I think our teachers because of the work and the professional development they've really become well-versed in helping to match texts to students. And because there's so much access that, you know, really for every child, there's an opportunity and a way in and I don't know Edgar if you wanted to add to any more of that. Yeah,

173I would agree with that. I think that, you know, what's really important I think is when we look across our collections if we look across our classroom libraries or our school libraries that we're thinking about the diversity of texts, the stories and different genres that it's very rich but at the same time, it's also really important that we have what are called high-interest accessible books. Meaning that books that whatever your reading level is, you wanna get to them, whether they have, you know, pictures of gross things, I mean whatever it is, it's something that everybody wants that book and everybody can engage in that regardless of the level. But it makes room for students who are not necessarily at the middle or the highest level of reading. And I think that that's one of the

174things that we continue to audit and make sure that we're attending to. Doing an initial audit of some elementary libraries a couple of years ago, we saw that a lot of our collections were skewing high, which means we have a lot of high readers, but it also means that we need to be judicious about our collections and make sure that we have that range. So if we have students who are disengaged when they go into a library, it could be that there's not something either on a genre that they're interested in or there not something that's accessible to them so that's something we have to be careful about. Yeah and I think even just the way the teachers are running book clubs in their classrooms, there's a level of responsibility that even those reluctant readers

175they know they're accountable in some way with the group and there is gonna be a conversation and I think that's also, you know, in a positive way, it's a positive piece of accountability for the students. Can I ask you a quick question before we sit down? Thanks. I think I heard this correctly that this year there wasn't an advisory period because of all the COVID scheduling changes so instead you sort of wove it throughout the day in other ways, I would just love to hear the benefits of having a discreet period versus just finding ways to weave it in throughout the days where it can meet students where they are. Yeah, I think that's a really good question. You know, I think some ways that we were creatively able to incorporate it like the new

176show and having these daily lessons or daily moments I think was powerful as a school community to be together. I think what you miss from that is that small, intimate relationship with a particular teacher, you know, that trusted adult, that's another piece that we're always trying to incorporate at the middle school that we want every child to have a trusted adult. And so you are missing that relationship building when you don't have an advisory period, but I think what we've also seen even, you know, this year is that teachers are taking whatever we do in core whether it's a standalone advisory period or the daily message and they're weaving it into their own, you know, their own instruction, our health classes which I know you've been a part of at times. They're incorporating that into

177their courses as well and I think, you know, for our students, the more they hear, even if it's from one's from a health teacher and one's from a science teacher or an English teacher, it resonates with them and so I think we've we learned this is a silver lining, right? That we had this opportunity to come together as a community and something we're gonna look forward to incorporating but I still feel like that relationship building and that small group, the relationship between the teacher and the students but also among the students in some ways because of cohorting we wound up, you know, sort of having that established but I think that meaningful and that intentional community building is really important and something that we're looking forward to next year. Yeah. So my question is more

178logistical but I do wanna echo the words of appreciation to each of you and make sure they get back to your colleagues and your teams just excellent work and thank you for taking the time this late hour to be here with us and allow the board to enjoy this work that you're doing in re-energizing of the strategic plan. But my logistical question has to do really with the strategic plan and the pillars and how it's presented on our website and how you're gonna monitor and present it and address it going further, because I think our community really needs to know how these really specifically connect to our pillars. I know we have this chart that's on our strategic plan page which I really like the 2019 24th strategic planning progress update chart, but I'm wondering

179if, you know, you can take this work which each of it is connected to multiple pillars and goals and somehow make sure that in the progress update and tracking it, it references the specific presentations, the specific work, so that we really can see how that plan, defined goals, you know, all that long planning process brought in so much involvement from our staff. And they defined the goals and pillars together and now here's the work that they're doing that completely aligns with that and I just was wondering if a visual could be further enhanced to connect these specific projects, this specific work with the goals so the community can kind of connect it even better moving forward something to what you're thinking on that. Yeah, no I appreciate that. You know, it is interesting to think

180in terms of, you know, clean charts and metaphors, it does seem to be a lot of overlap, but I think it's important and Thomas and I have talked about the educational reports really getting back to the original goals, connecting to the pillars so that we make our way through and we're always reminded that this is in service to an essential goal that we're setting out knowing that at times there's gonna be an evaluation as we weave in the DEI, that it's going to be iterative itself but I do still believe that the goals we set in place while some of them paused for a little while are all really important and worthwhile goals. And what you saw here is something that I think was really nicely illustrated by the speakers which is that all of

181the goals that we have that relate to curriculum instruction and assessment have a component that's highly collaborative because in order for it to be transformative, it's gotta be something that's collaborative, in order for it to be transformative, it's gotta be something in which we are connecting what we know to be good with what we're doing and moving our doing to our knowing. But doing it together so it's, you know, it moves and it continues to move in a positive direction. Well, although Edgar and I are very different thinkers, I think we respect each other's styles, I do think we both understand the importance of systems approaches and I think, you know, there's nothing more I love than a good schematic so we'll think about ways of trying to create both, you know, presentations like this

182which provide the appropriate amount of information as well as because you're right visuals for some people are just a really clear and easy way to understand the connections particularly between these what could otherwise seem as disparate elements and really we don't view most of them that way. So it's a good suggestion. Like as I was looking at the strategic plan pillars and as they're speaking, they are, you know, they were just highlighting in my head that they're talking they're adjusting so many of them and so many of the goals within this one effort and it's just nice to have all that alignment moving forward and the fact that, you know, it's a successful plan that's brought everyone together with a really good direction. I'm seeing Ivy growing up those pillars. Color coding, it was terrible.

183Okay, if you want a little quiz you can go through and you can guess where Thomas gave me input on some of the graphics. It's pretty clear. Okay, Thomas this is your information item but I'm gonna close it. Sure, yes. Yeah, I mean, any other questions or comments? All right, well then thank you again for being here. Thank you all. And for such great work. Much appreciated and we will take a five minute wellness break. We're gonna come back to order because we have a lot to discuss ahead, I've lost BoardDocs but we'll just move on to the next information item, Thomas. Sure, thank you. I'll get it again. We have four remaining items under information discussion items, the next one is the journey forward update and this has been a presentation that can take

184a little more significant amount of time, tonight we're gonna keep it fairly short. I always have a few things to report out. This evening I'm gonna start off talking about current numbers and masks and then Eric's gonna talk to us about vaccines, prom and moving up ceremonies and graduation testing and then of course we'll open it up for questions from the board. So in terms of current numbers we are really excited to announce the Westchester County has moved from the substantial spread to moderate spread category. And having said that the names still seem a little bit misguided on these since we're at 1% positivity rate at this point with 38 and a half cases per 100,000 over the last seven days and 11 active cases in Scarsdale proper so those of you who have been

185tracking this particular presentation, that marks a great improvement in terms of the health metrics in our community and of course, across the region as we're seeing the effects of the vaccination campaign really beginning to take hold within our community and in some cases across the nation. So we're very excited about the continued progress in the right direction and we believe that particularly in Scarsdale, we really wanna acknowledge and thank the receptivity of folks to really take the vaccine option very seriously, we had a lot of interest in that both our district and other places have announced opportunities for that and certainly people will seem to be availing themselves of those opportunities. We do know that there was some updated guidance from the CDC in terms of mask wearing which really eliminated the need for that

186both indoor and outdoor in most cases with the vaccination, you know, proof of vaccination for folks. Of course, we do wanna remind folks because we always get questions when the CDC makes those announcements, that why haven't we quickly enacted that updated guidance. And just a reminder again, that although the CDC provides public health guidance to the community at large, we take our specific guidance in public schools from the New York State Department of Health and at this point, masks are required in schools both indoors and outdoors and so we are compelled to continue to follow this guidance. Today is actually much more comfortable, but in the very, very warm weather days about mask tolerance for students particularly maybe those who are in activities where they're exerting, you have a lot of physical exertion or outside

187and the mass guidance does allow students to be able to remove the mask for short periods of time if they are having difficult tolerating those in those you know, high stress, high heat environments. So we have been communicating that out to our students particularly so that they're aware of that as an option if they find themselves in those situations. But generally if you get the questions it's because we continue to follow New York State Department of Health guidelines on that. Eric talked to us about vaccines please. Great. As you may know, between our last board meeting and this, there have been three opportunities specifically for Scarsdale students, staff and their respective families. Happy to say that over those three opportunities, about 250 students have been vaccinated. We had about 55, 16 to 18 year old

188students vaccinated in the original opportunity given to us by Scottsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps and then there were two additional opportunities the following week as Pfizer was opened up from 16 to 18 to 12 to 15 year olds. And each one of those evenings had about 100 students signed up for vaccines. So with that being said, a huge thank you to White Plains Hospital, a huge thank you to Scarsdale Volunteer Ambulance Corps for putting these together and allowing our students and staff and their families to have priority on those three nights. As we move forward right now, there are constant appointments available at White Plains County Center, so at this point the need for additional restricted time for Scarsdale students I don't think is needed, that being said, as we move into September, knock on wood

189according to the early data, we may have the opportunity to provide some vaccination times for two to 10 year old or two to 11 year olds so we hope that that comes as the data allows and provides an extra level of protection. So moving on from that, just wanted to take a moment to talk about prom and moving up plans for elementary have remained the same as my report last time, prom the location has changed from the school based prom to Glen Island, which is great 'cause we have been able to use that venue and keep to the required end of year celebration guidance from New York State. The one thing I do want to address is there will be a requirement for either proof of vaccine or testing, there are two ways to be

190tested. The first is having a PCR within 72 hours of the event, and the second is having a rapid antigen test so a non PCR test within six hours of the event. So we would expect that the vast majority of students, hopefully all students will be able to get that PCR test and SVAC has agreed to put together specific times for our students to come in and get that although we have also worked with SVAC and we thank them greatly to do a pop-up tent at Glen Island just in case someone couldn't get their results back, whatever the case may be, that we don't wanna turn anyone away at the door so they would have the opportunity to take the 15 minute antigen kind of right out of getting out of the car which would

191ultimately allow them into the venue. So we thank them for that. And similarly for graduation, there's a vaccine or testing requirement for graduation. SVAC is going to work with us again, we expect guests and students to get that PCR test 72 hours in advance, if there happens to be an issue with not being able to get that SVAC we'll open up a pop-up antigen testing site probably in the courtyard here six hours before the event and close it one hour before the event so there'll be five available hours for guests and or students to come down there and get tested. If that is the case and the student does need to get tested, they must have a parent or guardian with them in order to do that if they're under 18. So really just taking

192some steps to make sure nobody has a last minute denial at the door who's following the procedures and can't get a test for whatever the case may be. Eric, can you discuss or share with us if students are vaccinated, the requirements for testing? So there are no requirements testing students or vaccinated, they just need to show proof of vaccine which would be the little white card you get, or the Excelsior Pass when you get your vaccine. Thank you. Okay. That is all we have for this update, happy to take question. Okay, thank you. So good news all in all and again, moving in the right direction so we're excited about that as we continue in our journey towards normalcy. I don't know if folks are following the news, we did have the Mayor opine a

193little bit on remote only, Mayor De Blasio had talked about for New York City schools that they were not planning a virtual only a remote option next year, the governor seemed to suggest that he understood that position although I'm stopped short of making any formal declaration about the direction in which the State might take as a whole. Moving on to item 9.03 recommendation for attendance by a non-resident student. We did make a policy change a couple of years ago to policy 5152, which does allow a staff member's child who passes away while in the employment of the district to continue on a tuition-free basis through their studies in the Scarsdale school district and tonight we would like to avail ourselves of this opportunity for a family that has been affected by a death in their

194family and would like the students to be able to continue as the only school that student has known in their schooling experience. So this is an information item obviously to protect the privacy of the student, we're not gonna say more about the identity, but the board has the information and executive content. I don't know if there are any questions? And this is coming as an action item later? Correct, that's why it's on here tonight as an information action. As a reminder and to Pam's point we typically like to provide information than have a month, but time is of some urgency and letting the family know the outcome of this decision. Moving on to item 9.04 board committee on community engagement presentation of the draft community engagement plan and this is actually gonna be presented by

195a couple of board members. And Pam has you on here but also Karen and Ron. Yeah, I mean as everyone knows we talked about this draft community engagement plan that you gave us, the board gave a consensus to go ahead and formulate and Karen and Ron were tasked with that so they presented it to the full committee which is really just me and Thomas, Andre and Michelle, and any public watching I guess it was May 13th, and so the committee agreed to have it brought to you for presentation and yeah so take it away Ron and Karen. So a draft of the plan is attached. So when putting together the plan, Ron and I felt it was important to include a section called background, that would provide context for the work of the BCCE and

196the plan itself. Essentially this opening section reviews the reason the ad hoc committee was formed, when it was formed and its official charge. This opening section provide summary of the committee's work, especially the process that was involved in our review of existing community engagement methods and identification of new ones which were then brought to the board for approval or discussion. Ron and I also felt that the opening to the document should provide some sort of overview of the plan and its purpose which we identified as cloudifying existing methods for engagement. Again, this plan is to help foster greater transparency by providing information in a clear and accessible way. The structure we utilized has three different charts, Ron will go through the charts. The first chart just as an overview categorizes in details existing community engagement

197methods and the second one is a month by month timeline of opportunities to provide ease of use. And the third contains a template that we could use to track and assess the efficacy of certain methods such as the board coffees that are taking place right now. Thanks Karen. So I'll briefly go through the three charts that Karen referenced starting on page two is the chart of existing board community engagement methods. And the way that the chart is created is to group these engagement methods by category so for example, categories such as public meetings held by the board, publications, website and written communication, presentation and speeches, liaisons and body assignments and other engagement opportunities. Then within each of those groups are the specific types of board community engagement and for each one is a brief description,

198a frequency of that type of engagement as well as the audience. For most of them you will see a term Scarsdale community capitalized and please note that refers to a broad group Scarsdale community students, faculty, staff, parents and community members. For each one the purpose was to really as Karen mentioned, give a bit of an overview as a framework for the community to understand the different ways this board engages so that if people wanna come to a different type of board meeting they can see all the types of board meetings that this board holds. So often you might hear that we have a board meeting on a certain night and often there'll be several board meetings, there could be a business meeting, there could be like tonight an education report, we may also meet with

199a designated group beforehand so this outlines all of those methods. It also provides a framework for the community to engage with the board on areas they may like to see more engagement or different types of engagement or express what they find is working well or could use some improvement. So starting on page eight, is the community engagement schedule that Karen mentioned is month by month so this is just another form of these engagement methods to allow somebody to look at a certain time of year and say, oh, well, you know, right now it's May, what is upcoming? What are those opportunities that exist? As you'll see at the start of the chart, some of them are throughout the year. And then lastly, especially for new engagement opportunities we wanted a template on how to collect

200some data. So using the example that Bob talked about earlier, the board coffees, we wanted a template to say, how are those going? We have board coffees on different days of the week, we have them at different times and we wanted a way to just track that kind of data. We should note that what you'll see in the community engagement plan is just a template, there'll be whether it's a Google doc or a spreadsheet behind it that collects all of that data and data such as the attendees, the responses, the board members that attended, if it's a subset and any notes about it. I can probably take any questions, if board members have questions. I have a question. So with the appendix where we collect data on some of these engagement opportunities, what are you

201guys envisioning doing with that data? Are you thinking like Bob sort of mentioned, we had three people come to a coffee, are you envisioning a year from now looking at our coffees and saying, okay, this isn't an effective way? I'm kinda curious what you thought. That's precisely the point, you know, that to assess the efficacy of it are people attending? Which time of day is there greater attendance? What time a year is there greater attendance? You know, to help us, you know, continue to evaluate opportunities going forward. Would we share this information? Like is this gonna be a public document that anyone can see how many people are attending or is this something that you envision us tracking in the board and then doing annually? What were you thinking in terms of that? Let's just

202say this one thing which would be the board committee on community engagement has concluded its charge so that committee which was an ad hoc committee is no longer in existence. However, this board has community engagement as a goal and it has been a goal for the board for maybe three years, a specified goal. And it would be up to next year's board to really determine how to utilize this and it would be something you'd have to discuss during your board retreat in the summer, but certainly in the same way we have advocacy point people and advocacy is a goal and you know, Alison was our Nisbett and Ron was our west advocate, it's likely that the board could designate a board member to be the community engagement representative and then that person could do the

203tracking and the thought from the committee was that it would come before the board just like advocacy does as an information item as necessary or four times a year or something to capture that work within that period. But the board itself, you would wanna discuss what to do next with this. I mean, it's almost makes most sense to do it with a new board as opposed to making too much decisions now but. Thank you. Not to stop the conversation but just you might wanna wait til your new board members are on to go through that too. Is someone gonna go through and finalize these final comments that are still kind of open-ended in the document? I think Bob just typed into the document, updating the stuff on. To be clear this is just a template

204of what the data collection will look like. There may be other engagement methods, these were just examples we put in here. I mean, it's a small point, but I did actually record the names of who attended, but I felt that it wasn't necessarily appropriate to share that because I don't think it was meant to be publicly shared with the community what people are saying so I tried to be a little bit up to us about who was who so I'm not sure we wanna put the names down, I don't think it's necessary. You know, maybe what is it? Demographics might be helpful, you know, in this school, that's the way I kind of thought about it. People with children or not, you know, that sort of thing but I think we should stay away from,

205you know, too much detail on that regard. And it's important to note that the community engagement web page has been fully pulled out to be its own, you know, webpage under board, the Board of Education just like advocacy is so it remains as it's been a goal for a few years and if next year board continues it it's a good tab to have, it has all the minutes, all the videos, all the documents and this plan would then be posted at the very top of that webpage so that all community members could benefit from all the work that Ron and Karen did to be clear and to provide the clarity and transparency and we certainly are always willing to take feedback on this plan in particular from the community so I wanted to put that

206out there too. That's where we are. So I know Amber's comments are still on there, so we can go ahead and just accept them. I'm noticing that there are two anonymous people on it as well. That's 'cause it's in the agenda. Whoever's the owner of the document should check the settings just to make sure that people are viewing and not necessarily being able to edit so that the integrity of the document it gets preserved in case somebody makes a mistake. So whenever it's ready just give it to honorary she'll post it. All right. We'll something else I do just wanna thank Ron and Karen again for all their time on this committee, their thoughtfulness, the community for coming to the listing sessions and for submitting so many great ideas via public comment and also via

207email. Again, this is a goal of the board through June 30th and hopefully next years board will continue this focus and hearing from the community on committee engagement makes a big difference so thank you to everyone and thank you especially to Ron and Karen for their work on that committee. Thanks to both of you. And Pam was also there throughout the process so. Moving onto the last then item for information discussion is 9.05 which is the district wide safety and emergency plan, this is a document that gets reviewed annually through the Board of Education and Eric is gonna walk us through this draft version. The board may be feeling a bit of deja vu as they just went through a 30 day comment period and approval of the district safety plan about a month ago,

208because there was a legislation in New York that required the communicable disease and pandemic annex to be added. This start of a 30 day comment period on this plan is specifically for the entire plan and is our annual review. This year given the work we did on it throughout the year there is really only one substantive change on the plan which is adding under the part that describes our safety monitors, adding the addition of roving safety monitors which was something that was added in last budget year, just brings our plan into alignment with what our current practice is. Previously it had only described the safety monitors at the manned doorways. Other than that, there were a couple of grammatical changes but the plan remains the same from the one you saw last month so today

209is really just to open up 30 day comment period for the public, we will then have this posted on our reorganization meeting in July for approval for the next '21/'22 school year. And Eric can you clarify, who do people make public comment to? They would make public comment at the board meeting or in writing to the Board of Education or myself. Great, thank you. Questions? Okay, thank you. All right, that concludes our information discussion items in the education report again, thanks to all of our presenters for that. And at this point I'll turn it back to Pam for item number 10, action items. All right, item 10.1 is proposed textbooks, Bob. Yeah. One of our responsibilities is to approve textbooks, and two textbooks are listed for this meeting to recommend approval. One is for the

210middle school home economics course, it's called "How to Turn $100 Into $1,000,000," sounds like a good book to own by James McKenna, Jeannine Glista and Matt Fontaine. And the second one is for the high school, it's an English textbook and the book is called "Interior Chinatown" by Charles Yu. So I make a motion to approve these textbooks. Second. Thank you, Carl any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Opposed? Abstention? All right, the motion passes, thank you. 10.02, the tuition matter and that's Carl. Thank you. This is a motion to pursue unpaid tuition and I guess I move that we authorize our attorneys, Thomas, Drohan, Waxman, Petigrow & Mayle to commence the legal action as indicated in the resolution. Thanks Carl, may I have a second? Second. Thanks Alison, any discussion? Okay, all those

211in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? All right, the motion passes, thank you. And the third action item, the recommendation for attendance by non-resident student, Karen. I recommend that the board adopt the resolution as presented. Thanks Karen, may I have a second? Second. Thanks Ron. Any discussion? All those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? Okay, the motion passes. And those are actions items. We move into the second opportunity for public comment tonight again, members are invited to speak on agenda items or other non-personnel related matters, you are still allowed three minutes to speak but it's not capped at nine minutes. We'll just go to the live audience first, so did anyone in the audience like to speak? I see none, we will go to Zoom and Alison will let us know if

212there's any hands raised. Right now there are no hands raised but we should give it a few minutes. Okay, there's one hand raise, Susie Hon. Okay Susie so Jerry's going to promote you and then he will speak to you about when you speak and you're unmuted and all that so listen for Jerry. All right Susie you can unmute and begin speaking. Thank you, Jerry. Good evening, my name is Susie Hon I live at 7 Cornell Street and I'm here tonight as the school portfolio chair of the League of Women Voters. Thank you for inviting the public to attend in-person and observe the board committee on engagement meeting held on May 13th. It is wonderful that the board is considering new opportunities for engagement and for soliciting feedback from the community such as the board coffees

213that are being held this spring. Creating a chart of engagement methods and a schedule of the boards engagement activities will also be very helpful to those who want to connect with the board. Communicating ways to engage and collaborate with parents on advocacy issues also sounded potentially promising. One community engagement related question I'd like to pose is whether the board foresees being able to continue utilizing Zoom for public comment sessions in the future? Zoom has proved to be an invaluable tool for all of us during this past year and allowed for many to participate in board meetings when we could not meet in person. Though we all look forward to life returning to normal after this pandemic and meeting in person again, Zoom can hopefully still be preserved as an alternate way to participate in public

214comment, engage with the board. I understand that board meetings must be in person without a waiver or executive order from the governor, but is the board exploring ways that the public can continue to participate in meetings through Zoom or other electronic means? There are many people who cannot attend meetings in person whether it's for work, childcare or disability reasons and I do urge the board to proactively explore all avenues on this issue to be able to continue this inclusive method of participation, thank you for your time. Are there any other hands raised? Members of the public like to speak via Zoom? Right now there are no attendees on Zoom. All right so then I think we'll close this opportunity for public comment, thank you, Jerry. Oh, sorry, next item would be follow up to public

215comment and yes I mean Susie, we have been proactive on that, we have talked to our lawyer, do you wanna give clarity or should I give clarity Thomas? We understand how Zoom has been so helpful this year in so many ways particularly with public comment and we did reach out to our lawyer in the winter to look into this opportunity going forward. And it is our lawyer's guidance at this point that because the board meets in public and is required to meet in public, that all board work, all agenda work including hearing from those present and public comment does need to happen in person because it's part of the board agenda, it's part of board work. So we have been advised that that opportunity is not something that is consistent with law that requires board

216work to occur in-person and that would be part of it not occurring in person. So that's where we've been guided at the, you know, through the winter and preparing us for the fall. It's unfortunate But it is the guidance according to board meeting in person. Any other thoughts or follow up for that? Okay, and we will move on to wrap up items. I don't have any. Pam you had requested that we think about a schematic or some way to provide a visual representation for reporting out as part of our regular education reports in the future so that's something that we'll look at. Well, thanks just one board member though, not a directive but it was certainly, I think it's just such exciting work that the more you can connect everything to the strategic plan, the

217better. It makes sense, I mean when we talked about that work, we really emphasize the importance of keeping that as a priority and not allowing too many other distractions to happen, we also acknowledged at the same time that there would be annual goals that would crop up as a matter of the normal course of our work and we have to acknowledge that that takes place but when we're talking about undoing such a major overlay of DEI, I think it is really important to find out where those nexus exists so that people do understand and make those sort of explicit connections and not just see it as more and more and more being added to the plate and I think that's particularly important for our teachers to be able to see those connections. So I think

218we're committed to making that happen. Okay, is there anything else? All right, then we'll move on to meeting dates for the coming month. So our next meeting will be Monday, June 7th, we'll begin at five o'clock with the special meetings in executive session and right here in room 170. Then at six o'clock we have our retirement recognition ceremony followed by our business meeting and executive session if necessary. on June 9th, we have our next board coffee, it'll be at 4:30 at the high school tent. And then the final board coffee of the year will be on June 17th, six o'clock at the high school tent. And then on Monday, June 21st, we have our next board meeting which we'll start with executive session at five o'clock here in room 170, followed by a business meeting

219at 5:30. Thanks, Alison. And now I will entertain a motion to adjourn the meeting. So moved. Thank you Carl. Do I have second? Second. Any discussion? Thanks, Alison. All right all those in favor say aye. Aye. Any opposed? Abstentions? All right. Motion passes, meeting adjourned, thank you. Making fun of me.